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+*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13631 ***
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+VOL. XII.--SEPTEMBER, 1863.--NO. LXXI.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE PURITAN MINISTER.
+
+
+It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen
+hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest
+settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness
+recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an
+ever remoter distance,--not yet so far but that a stout wooden gate at
+each end of the village street indicates that there is something outside
+which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
+thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness
+which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the
+smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these
+abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock
+yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
+Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the
+consummation of the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In
+which settlement of the Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to
+pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, the warning drum is
+beating its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem
+village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag
+is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
+auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without
+money and beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham
+Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour, a service
+for which Abraham, each year, receives a half-pound of pork from every
+family in town.
+
+Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to
+this important building, the centre of the village, the one public
+edifice,--meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in
+one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a
+half-mile from it. And yet the people ride to meeting, short though the
+distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her
+husband;--and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine
+of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern
+ones, young gentlemen.
+
+We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is
+the pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a
+terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house
+is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their
+horses, provided it be not done too near the passage-way. For at that
+opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted
+black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears
+also a heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the
+ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his
+bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin
+cartridge-boxes.
+
+The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself,
+the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat
+roof and battlements,"--a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel
+down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned
+pounds, and carefully expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside
+with clay, and finished with clay-boards, larger than our clapboards,
+outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet square, with a chimney half
+the width of the building, and projecting four feet above the thatched
+roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
+hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on
+each of the two sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with
+oiled paper only, part glazed in numerous small panes. And between the
+windows, on the outside, hang the heads of all the wolves that have been
+killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers think that the
+wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's clothing.
+
+The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four
+vergers bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who
+have just arrived from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and
+left to stay quietly in the Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines,
+and the liberty of a private walk in the garden. The sexton has just
+called for the minister, as is his duty twice every Sunday, and,
+removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
+minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black
+skull-cap, and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better
+handling of his manuscript. He looks round upon his congregation, a few
+hundred, recently _seated_ anew for the year, arranged according to rank
+and age. There are the old men in the pews beneath the pulpit. There are
+the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with ruffs, showy belts,
+gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots. There
+are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs,"
+"embroidered or needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut
+works,"--a mystery,--"slash apparel,"--another mystery,--"immoderate
+great vayles, long wings," etc.,--mystery on mystery, but all recorded
+in the statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate.
+There are the wives of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the
+grammar-school master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the
+mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still
+too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also;
+for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
+presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday
+meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and
+gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements
+of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the shrinking form of some
+humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the principal aisle,
+bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to the
+garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.
+
+Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets
+in! "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one
+writer, triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be
+short," which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no
+authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one
+thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will
+sometimes pray an hour each,--one with confession, one with private
+petitions, a third with petitions for church and kingdom, and a fourth
+with thanksgiving,--neither part of the quartette being for an instant
+confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
+hour-glass, may say,--but that he will not anticipate the levity to be
+born in a later century with Mather Byles,--"Now, my hearers, we will
+take another glass."
+
+In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe
+to any one who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the
+statute, "If any one interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of
+worship, they shall be reproved by the magistrate, and on repetition
+shall pay £5, or stand two hours on a block four feet high, with this
+inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone, but the
+law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It
+is but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely
+whipped for declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H----'s
+preaching,--since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes
+for declaring that Mr. H---- preached lies, and that his instruction was
+the doctrine of devils,--since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was
+sentenced to pay five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same
+Mr. H---- sent abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and
+lambs. Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
+reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
+there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
+unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
+stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.
+
+But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
+congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
+Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
+backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
+famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
+Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
+be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
+some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
+and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
+Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
+thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
+separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
+Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
+Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
+glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
+tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
+is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
+lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
+audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
+irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
+by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
+full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
+emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
+magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
+were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
+to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
+sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
+why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
+he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
+undoubtedly the larger share.
+
+The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose
+sleepy eyes have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand
+of the constables,--the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is
+kept for the smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,--look up thoroughly
+awakened now. Bright eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for
+a little interlude is coming. Many things may happen in this pause after
+the sermon. Questions may be asked of the elders now, which the elders
+may answer,--if they can. Some lay brother may "exercise" on a text of
+Scripture,--rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns out. Candidates
+for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be the
+proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The
+last town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage
+may be published. Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending
+magistrate may be required to stand upon a bench, in his worst garments,
+with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes, and acknowledge his sins
+before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.
+
+These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is
+time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely
+offer." Then the people in the galleries come down and march two
+abreast, "up one ile and down the other," passing before the desk, where
+in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of these holds a
+moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
+varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and
+good-will. Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other
+valuables, such as "a fair gilt cup, with a cover," for the
+communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some
+one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
+These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten
+tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the
+words, "Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and
+then the benediction.
+
+And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the
+aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom
+stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses,
+each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance,
+and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.
+
+Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two
+centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing
+prove wearisome in the delineation now. It needed all this accumulation
+of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England
+church-going have changed since those early days. But what must have
+been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
+service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious
+and painful preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old
+Watertown graveyard;--"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He
+relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding
+his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on
+Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.
+He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned
+as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when
+he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
+this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly
+had three sermons a day,--one after every meal. He was "an universal
+scholar and a walking library,"--he studied twelve hours a day, and
+said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went
+to sleep.
+
+A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous
+life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have
+survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the
+Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at
+thirty,--especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge
+to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr.
+Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture,
+"wherein he largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most
+entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis."
+
+For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to
+have for each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable
+duty for each. He must visit families during several afternoons in every
+week, sending previous notice, so that children and domestics might be
+ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for counsel" in his own
+home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of conscience,
+ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
+unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring
+towns, a kind of religious dissipation which increased so fast that the
+Legislature at last interfered to restrict it. He must have five or six
+separate seasons for private prayer daily, devoting each day in the week
+to special meditations and intercessions,--as Monday to his family,
+Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to other
+societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He
+must have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and
+whole nights prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself
+starved," unless he fasted once a month at farthest, while he often did
+it twice in a week. Then there were public fasts quite frequently,
+"because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought, grasshoppers,
+caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
+Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the
+neighborhood, and the minister must expound it as "symbolizing the
+conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor people," the latter being the
+mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military expedition, the minister
+might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a muster, he
+must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
+officiate instead.
+
+One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on
+weddings and funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make
+a usage seem ancestral, or to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now
+remembers that our progenitors for more than a century disused religious
+services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates alone could perform
+the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the monopoly
+quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
+Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin
+at Geneva, by John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the
+Westminster Assembly, and by the French Huguenots. The bell might ring,
+the friends might walk, two and two, to the grave; but there must be no
+prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions of the English and
+Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said King
+James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear
+shoes and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit
+of eating salt fish on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that
+Roman Catholics eat it on Friday.
+
+But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were
+sermons. Mr. John Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral
+sermon in immortal verse:--
+
+  "On Sabbath day he went his way,
+      As he was used to do,
+  God's house unto, that they might know
+      What he had for to show;
+
+  God's holy will he must fulfil,
+      For it was his desire
+  For to declare a sermon rare
+      Concerning Madam Fryer."
+
+The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
+century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
+startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
+to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
+have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
+father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
+sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
+which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
+pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
+certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
+not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
+came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
+devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
+lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
+another.
+
+The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
+a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
+enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
+themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
+controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
+vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
+malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
+imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
+permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
+orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
+democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
+government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
+first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
+is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
+afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
+government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
+by theological controversy.
+
+In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
+late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
+on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
+the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
+state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
+the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
+of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
+his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
+among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
+still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
+block among its branches now.
+
+One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
+would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
+consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
+severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational
+provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and
+retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a
+day. Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger
+Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no
+such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But
+the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to
+death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after the age of
+sixteen;--not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
+statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with
+murder,--though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and
+the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service,
+at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in
+Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
+the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel"
+punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a
+ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running
+water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced
+with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in 1649, was
+sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
+shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes
+offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to
+the elders." And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young
+female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the
+County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology
+for the word "courting."
+
+An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the
+ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and
+powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave
+Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil
+authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty,
+they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally
+referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him
+in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated,
+and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard,
+was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his
+head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and
+one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and
+one said that they had _prayed_ the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it
+seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they came
+out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought
+in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,"
+in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which
+certainly gives a singular impression of the style of gospel prevailing
+inside the meeting-house that day. But it is good to know, on the other
+side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared
+an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become afterwards
+convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
+already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the
+order from being rescinded.
+
+These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives
+without relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have
+little to joy in in this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think
+so, to read the dismal diaries, printed or manuscript, of those days. "I
+can compare with any man living for fears," said Hooker. "I have sinned
+myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay
+down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the
+suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
+introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who
+drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of
+white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the
+Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to
+the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge," in 1644? Did the famous
+Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew cosmology, upon
+the waters,--strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians who
+would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is
+startling to remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public
+funeral, that "some person be appointed to look after the burning of the
+wine and the heating of the cider," and to hear that on this occasion
+there were thirty-two gallons of wine and still more of cider, with one
+hundred and four pounds of that ensnaring accessory, sugar. Francis
+Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
+England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave
+convincing proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the
+very relaxations of the Puritan minister were more spiritual than
+spirituous, and to send forth a good Nineteenthly from his own lips was
+more relishing than to have the best Double X go in.
+
+In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only
+Elders for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days.
+The commonalty bore the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of
+Roger William's offences was his wishing to limit these terms to those
+who gave some signs of deserving them. The name "Mr." was allowed to
+those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and also to
+professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of
+vessels, and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs."
+Mr. Josiah Plastow, when he had stolen four baskets of corn from the
+Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah. "Mr." seems to have meant
+simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir" merely, a title
+given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to the
+time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the
+idolatry of saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes
+designated as Sir Paul, Sir Peter, and Sir James.
+
+In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is
+humiliating to find that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin.
+The highest compensation I can find recorded is that of John Higginson
+in 1671, who had £160 voted him "in country produce," which he was glad,
+however, to exchange for £120 in solid cash. Solid cash included
+beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and musket-balls, value one
+farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had £60, and Mr.
+Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in money and
+half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap
+in New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather
+says, most salaries were less than £100, which he thinks "might account
+for the scanty harvests enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton
+both tell the story of a town where "two very eminent ministers were
+only allowed £30 per annum" and "the God who will not be mocked made
+them lose £300 worth of cattle that year." The latter also complains
+that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
+rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the
+stars, would shine without earthly contributions.
+
+He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words,
+"Synecdotical Pay,"--in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a
+part is used for the whole. And apparently various causes might produce
+this Synecdoche. For I have seen an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the
+Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young ministers have often
+occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of the
+wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
+considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
+entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
+path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
+period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
+own sins.
+
+However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
+rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
+could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
+likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
+sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
+trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
+1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
+are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
+different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
+day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
+are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
+at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
+monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
+the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
+was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
+beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
+was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
+the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
+Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
+the minister's grounds in order.
+
+Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
+Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I
+have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
+family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
+brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
+Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
+have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
+bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
+for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
+the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
+gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
+love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
+"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
+a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
+prayer to wean him at last.
+
+He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
+strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
+at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
+general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
+delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
+wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
+manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
+of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
+She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
+his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
+formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
+theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
+infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
+hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
+he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
+heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart
+and "Thine forever."
+
+Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
+First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
+followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
+separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
+doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
+penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
+Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
+open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
+to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
+for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
+third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
+through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
+They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
+town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
+miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
+was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
+fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
+among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
+and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
+be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
+should find rest there.
+
+Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
+and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
+must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
+since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
+missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
+in New England might be walking to execution with their male
+companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
+hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
+every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
+hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
+hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
+utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
+now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
+with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
+when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
+that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
+last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.
+
+It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat
+of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
+wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
+the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
+just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
+days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
+asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
+be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
+the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
+legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
+doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
+the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
+persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
+therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
+professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
+intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
+blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
+largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
+of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
+death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
+alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
+their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
+were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
+death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.
+
+Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
+theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
+Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
+no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
+possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
+modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
+approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
+Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
+would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
+Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
+dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
+feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
+fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
+vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
+Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
+so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
+the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
+Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
+Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
+imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
+persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
+
+Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the
+majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as
+these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and
+grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal
+but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou
+whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion!
+thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth!
+thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine
+epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton
+Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even
+Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and
+Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be
+tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so
+comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major
+Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
+
+There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the
+Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends
+wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his
+marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying
+into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break
+from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou
+shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
+England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the
+resolution, the Puritan historian says, _so far_ as going into the
+Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the
+ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
+
+With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the
+astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It
+must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or
+peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval
+laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
+England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
+Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
+Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
+judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
+this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
+thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
+Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
+was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
+wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
+in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
+were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
+added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
+
+John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
+a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
+evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
+the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
+which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
+Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
+conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
+list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
+that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
+vindication of their strong measures.
+
+It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
+other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
+authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
+precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When
+Goody E---- testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a
+witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was
+still lame from it,--when her daughter testified that she rode on the
+same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,--when the
+grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another
+stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,--when W. B----, aged
+forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem
+Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried
+round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the
+minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and
+"then all would be well,"--when one woman summoned her three children
+and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that
+she was a witch and so were they all,--what could be done for such
+prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty?
+It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the
+convictions.
+
+One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
+us,--though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not
+yet unfolded,--was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it.
+Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and
+labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of
+their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand
+fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent
+sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
+thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed
+discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears
+start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"--or worse yet,
+"Parson, your sermon is too long,"--or most embarrassing of all,
+"There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit."
+But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
+stern discipline in such cases made and provided.
+
+But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female
+tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the
+unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders,
+naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous
+ribbons,"--these were the things which tried men's souls in those days,
+and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
+inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel"
+seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one
+slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited
+from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and
+"immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty,
+part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
+condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each
+and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another
+for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a
+silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds,
+escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged
+with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was
+fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.
+
+The question of veils seems to have rocked the Massachusetts Colony to
+its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th,
+1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils,
+regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural
+degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural
+extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
+Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such
+cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr.
+Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his
+chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a
+custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting
+without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding
+visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.
+
+Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what
+was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done
+much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with
+something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the
+time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair
+like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
+made into periwigs;--and by some women wearing borders of hair, and
+their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does
+this hint at puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially
+among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,--"divers of the
+elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in
+this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy,
+was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they
+usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the
+tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused
+communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought
+they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous
+Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them
+resemble the Locusts that came out of y'e Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,
+8,--and as an eminent Divine calls them, _Horrid Bushes of Vanity_; such
+strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord
+to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."
+
+Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a
+community where every man was expected to have a current supply of
+religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain
+hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much
+trouble; and E.F.,--for they mostly appear by initials,--who, coming to
+New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken
+for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane,
+and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh,"
+Cotton Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally
+stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher,--less
+innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one
+bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath
+appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,--though,
+indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship
+among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
+this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who
+knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly
+asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in
+one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied
+his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--"Sam the
+Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them. Finally, "this eminent
+worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his
+parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting
+this among other fire at them:--'I see, no longer pipe, no longer
+dance,'--so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had
+never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly
+neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and
+Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been
+the worst penalty the man suffered.
+
+It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan
+ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and
+have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the
+regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a
+sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent
+heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say
+one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept
+Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to
+crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened
+to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some
+village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists;
+thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that
+extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by
+her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and
+converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
+Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who
+proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and
+hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the
+ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and
+chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that
+the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these,
+and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans,--who
+claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is
+the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to
+be at anchor?
+
+Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with
+the leadership of the New-England colonies,--Cotton, Hooker, Norton,
+Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an
+obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the
+"Magnalia":--Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than
+snow";--Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an
+eagle";--Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
+children might pluck";--Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a
+very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family
+and he taught his family as if it had been his church";--Warham, the
+first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt
+respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
+stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
+hour.
+
+These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
+than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
+most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
+disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
+successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
+family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
+might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
+so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
+and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
+another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
+right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
+as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
+God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
+formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
+blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
+Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
+in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
+testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?
+
+These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
+evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
+negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
+women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
+behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
+chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
+Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
+the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
+the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
+"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
+of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
+"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
+body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
+him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
+came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,"
+and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"--"I
+know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently
+added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once
+reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a
+passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts all
+one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man,
+finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to
+apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.
+
+What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness
+and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their
+shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since
+supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he
+was "a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in
+his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
+a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
+flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
+Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
+and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
+hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
+one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
+others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
+with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
+do, and not African tribes alone.
+
+There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
+every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
+habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
+who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
+even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
+victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
+democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
+thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
+separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
+his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
+minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
+slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
+theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
+the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
+recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
+men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
+asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
+leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
+little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan
+ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
+discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and
+musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the
+heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their
+grape-shot:--"My fathers and brethren," said John Higginson, "this is
+never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation
+of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as
+are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over
+since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end
+and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man
+among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a
+man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet
+of a sincere Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THOREAU'S FLUTE.
+
+
+  We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
+    His pipe hands mute beside the river;--
+    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+  But Music's airy voice is fled.
+  Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
+    The bluebird chants a requiem;
+    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
+  The Genius of the wood is lost."
+
+  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+    There came a low, harmonious breath:
+    "For such as he there is no death;--
+  His life the eternal life commands;
+  Above man's aims his nature rose:
+    The wisdom of a just content
+    Made one small spot a continent,
+  And tuned to poetry Life's prose.
+
+  "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
+    Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
+    To him grew human or divine,--
+  Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
+  Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
+    And yearly on the coverlid
+    'Neath which her darling lieth hid
+  Will write his name in violets.
+
+  "To him no vain regrets belong,
+    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+    Gave to the world no poor lament,
+  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+  O lonely friend! he still will be
+    A potent presence, though unseen,--
+    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
+  Seek not for him,--he is with thee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.
+
+
+The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of
+acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their
+nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque.
+Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from
+the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a smile
+rather than a sigh.
+
+Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it
+became necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon
+S----.
+
+Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had
+lingered about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many
+sweet memories of Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in
+the neighborhood of Gramley Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels,
+and the plenty of a country tea-table,--not averse to strawberry
+short-cake, or the snowy delights of cottage-cheese.
+
+It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful
+welcome, a bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled
+me with curiosity and amazement.
+
+  "Was it a man?
+  A devil infernal?
+  An angel supernal?"
+
+Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and,
+as I cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in
+the singular form,--stooping, squatting, and groping before me.
+
+The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics
+upon the ground,--smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy,
+too silent to be mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at
+nightfall with a maniac, and I was not sorry when my nearer approach
+resolved these strange phenomena into a well-dressed pedestrian on
+all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.
+
+He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride
+his handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly
+bewildered. I looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay
+shining at me from the very spot where he had been so industriously
+peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him, fitted his treasure
+into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle said,--
+
+"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
+circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"So do I."
+
+We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,--I
+too tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again;
+but when, at last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's
+door-step, he turned suddenly to me and asked,--
+
+"Are you fond of the country?"
+
+"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.
+
+"Ah, you are an artist!"
+
+"I hope to be one."
+
+"Its a bad business," said he, testily,--"a very bad business. If I were
+you, I would give it up."
+
+"Have you ever tried it?"
+
+"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,--"yes, and
+everything else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I
+would give you the benefit of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and
+make a good story of it to your wife."
+
+"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."
+
+"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true
+artist, who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite
+relations, who penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the
+silent sanctuaries of the mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man.
+He must be a happy man,--happy in a sweet and natural way. A man whose
+life is passed in a daily delight that gently stirs without feverish
+excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He _ought_ to
+marry."
+
+"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.
+
+"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
+commencing,--
+
+  'O thou earthly sea,
+  Every person thinks of thee,--
+  The sailor, and the busy bee,
+  And the Chinese drinking tea!'
+
+I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they
+seemed good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they
+struck others."
+
+He smiled pleasantly.
+
+"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding
+your history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with
+your experience."
+
+"Take warning, then, if need be.
+
+"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of
+a ready writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a
+young miss of her first conquest.
+
+"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just
+rising into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my
+condescension. It was a charity, indeed, to give my support to this
+fledgling, and I sent to it a long article, entitled, 'The Cultivated,
+as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts were returned, with
+this quiet bit of advice:--'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other
+reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from
+having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I
+determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to
+despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of
+the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent
+periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
+almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for
+publication.
+
+"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now
+Mrs. Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings
+in ten melancholy stanzas, beginning,--
+
+  'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'
+
+These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
+'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'
+
+"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the
+plot of which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left
+to my hero, who forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but,
+fearful lest the beloved object should worship his money more than his
+merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor
+to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her
+acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and,
+in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin,
+Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science,
+and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into
+the surf, where both are drowned.
+
+"This, you see, was quite new."
+
+"Quite," I replied, laughing.
+
+"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive
+the first remittance for this truly original work.
+
+"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable
+'Märchen,' and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's
+Legacies,' a series of children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of
+poetry, pleasantry, and information. I sent them to 'The Juvenile
+Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted with a profusion
+of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
+expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.
+
+"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a
+small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He
+seemed the personification of _nonchalance_, impudence, and conceit. As
+I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a
+woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on
+my mentioning my name, he rose and extended a very dirty hand.
+
+"'Glad to see you, Sir,--hope you'll continue your contributions,--Uncle
+Job,--good idea, Sir,--love the little ones? So do we, Sir,--work very
+hard for them,--don't pay at all,--poor business,--pure charity,--that's
+all.'
+
+"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are
+expected to work from charity?'
+
+"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,--more
+contributions than we can use,--best authors in the country write for
+us,--pure love for the little ones, I assure you.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to
+bestow my time and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer
+them to others who do.'
+
+"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he
+growled. 'We don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most
+of the articles ourselves.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end
+to the interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.
+
+"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'
+
+"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than
+the first, emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'
+
+"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall
+take measures that you will not at all relish. If you will not _give_ me
+my manuscripts, I shall _take_ them'; and, suiting the action to the
+word, I snatched them from a shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and
+carried them off without further parley.
+
+"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet
+spirit within me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote
+a sentimental tale, full of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft
+epithets. It was accepted by a well-known monthly, then supposed to be
+in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of comfort, and I
+looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and renown,
+when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my
+story, and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the
+magazine had been sold to pay her debts.
+
+"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it
+to 'The Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it
+was published, praised, and further contributions requested. Several
+weeks passed away. I indited a poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or,
+Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in print, and my thirst for
+fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note reached me from
+'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to pay
+me in _back numbers of the magazine_. I wrote no more."
+
+"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"
+
+"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist,
+and was thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I
+took for my motto; and, hiring a small studio in ---- Street, I bought a
+large canvas, on which I sketched out a picture which cost me much
+money, more time, and many anxious thoughts.
+
+"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a
+marriage was being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people,
+in anomalous costumes, was gathered round a youth supposed to be a
+rejected and despairing lover, who had fallen on the ground in a swoon.
+It was very affecting, I thought.--it would be very effective. Were
+_she_ to see it, she would be stung with remorse,--she would behold the
+probable effects of her present indifference,--she would relent.
+
+"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it
+was a complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio,
+draping before a cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing
+for my men, until the last touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was
+all ready for the Spring Exhibition. Then came doubts and speculations.
+Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all? Would Ellen like it? How
+would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to look at it?
+Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?
+
+"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name
+sent my picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it,
+by some strange chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington.
+The juxtaposition gave me a new idea. I saw at once what a villanous
+daub mine was, and went away oppressed with shame and a new-found
+modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the Exhibition, in
+the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
+coming out.
+
+"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I _must_
+turn back, and show you the _funniest_ picture! So theatrical! So
+distorted!'
+
+"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'
+
+"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are
+such a good critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art
+you ever saw?'
+
+"Can you imagine my feelings?"
+
+"I think I can."
+
+"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken
+studio, previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully
+packing my materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and
+an elderly, shrewd-looking man walked into the room.
+
+"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.
+
+"'I am a friend of his.'
+
+"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number ----?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'How much does he ask for it?'
+
+"'How much are you willing to give?'
+
+"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'
+
+"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'
+
+"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio.
+Twenty-five dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture?
+I looked at the card:--
+
+    'PARKER J. SPERRY,
+    '_Yankee Pie Depot_,
+    '126 ---- Street.'"
+
+"Did you ever paint again?"
+
+"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in
+a gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning,
+when she was out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the
+wall. I turned it round. Directly across the mouth was pasted a white
+label, on which I saw neatly printed in India-ink,--'Queen of the
+Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in my library as a
+lesson to me for all future time.
+
+"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard
+my experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing
+business, and make a handsome income for my wife and two children.
+To-morrow I go to New York, to bring them into these wilds for change of
+air. And now, good night."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.
+
+FLORESTAN'S STORY.
+
+
+I.
+
+In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are
+sacred persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you,
+staining the pane through which their light shone with their own images,
+but who became perfectly transparent to the word they uttered, the song
+they sang, or the work they did. Such a sacred person to me is the
+gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's Albums. Many years
+ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in the
+half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
+rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had
+been awaiting its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was
+a listener, and, hastily brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a
+far corner of the room, away from his _répertoire_. She confessed, that,
+afterward, when he was not present, she had looked on that which he
+evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in pencil, upon it,
+"Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but no
+"Sternenkranz" was found,--the word was evidently her master's own
+fancy; so she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto
+complained of her indifference to the pieces he set before her, and
+informed him that she should perish at his feet, unless he would give
+her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr Otto, in
+a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
+treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to
+which he had given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to
+each soul that could receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower
+of Lilies to another. It was the same as with that white stone which the
+Seer of Patmos saw,--within it "a name written which no man knoweth,
+saving he that receiveth it."
+
+This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was
+known among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day,
+next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert
+Schumann's works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not
+as universal, it is just as fervent. Many silent and holy hours have I
+sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their
+Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of
+romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his
+sorrow, and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to
+know of him,--of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I
+came to know, in the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to
+relate.
+
+A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to
+accommodate a certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold
+winds from over the Lakes made me wish that the Modern Athens had kept
+its lecture-system at home; for it has always seemed to me, that,
+wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it. Such ugly
+thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from
+the face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed
+out of me by the glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which
+animated the coziest of rooms. Why has not some poet celebrated the
+experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of the thawee responds
+to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release until
+all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from
+the Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet
+nothing-at-all thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to
+life.
+
+Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into
+the room, soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls.
+Confused, I started up; and it was some moments before I understood that
+the music proceeded from the room adjoining mine in the hotel. Not
+altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess of whom I have spoken
+had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was appointed to
+stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"
+
+As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave.
+Whether the musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a
+terrible termination was in the music, I knew not: the latter was quite
+probable, for, alas! such fearful Icarus-falls are not rare in poor
+Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long, but, rising quickly,
+passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next room.
+
+"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.
+
+Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was
+so swart that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once
+imagined that a stream of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from
+some more Oriental race. I stammered out an apology for my intrusion,
+but told him how irresistible were such subtile threads as Schumann's
+"Carnival" had projected through the walls which separated our rooms.
+
+"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."
+
+Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which,
+having for bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the
+ice-dragon coiled about him, is suddenly filled with the warm spread of
+the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he said,--
+
+"In me, wanderer that I am,--in me, with the _Heimweh_ in my heart never
+to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,--you see
+Florestan."
+
+"Louis Boehner!"
+
+Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little
+piece of paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand.
+On it these words were written:--
+
+
+     "_Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never
+     want for such a friend as thou hast been to_
+
+     ROBERT SCHUMANN."
+
+I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when,
+at this moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a
+living halo.
+
+Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before
+them the fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention
+some facts connected with Schumann's "Carnival, or _Scènes Mignonnes_,
+on Four Notes." Not by any means representing the pure depths of
+Schumann's soul, this strange medley is yet pregnant with historic
+associations. The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing
+twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a
+town of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts
+frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there
+interesting to his sensitive soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must
+be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or
+_es_ for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" was begun and
+for ten years edited by Schumann,--in what spirit we may gather from his
+own words:--"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very
+encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
+Hünten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since
+Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star
+was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole,
+Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One
+day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,--Let us not
+idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art
+shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of
+music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at
+which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the _Philistines_,
+which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc.,
+for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.
+"Young Germany" was making itself felt in all coördinate directions:
+forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,--a sharp and
+spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and
+Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
+revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality
+brought together in Kühne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who
+talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz
+Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the
+friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was
+the _Davidsbund_, or League of David (the last of the "Scènes Mignonnes"
+is named "Marche des _Davidsbündler_ contre les Philistines"). An
+agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a fine
+sketch of this company, which we will quote.
+
+"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle
+age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty
+remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians
+around him, who all listened to his observations with profound
+attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and
+suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly
+promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain
+consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl
+of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole
+world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her
+native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of
+twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg,
+he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and
+was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
+liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be
+melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote
+himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been
+obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as
+uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for
+the career of a _virtuoso_, and was pursuing the study of the piano with
+an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
+consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career
+forever. He did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate
+for him in the end, by directing him to his true vocation, composition.
+Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of love, in the garb of admiration
+for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and
+dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric
+Louis Boehner,[A] who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
+Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession,
+but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the
+indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,--now, in his capacity
+of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just
+returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true
+secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master
+is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and
+industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as many more
+young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."[B]
+
+[Footnote A: The "Florestan" of the "Scènes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is
+Clara herself; "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.]
+
+[Footnote B: See Dwight's _Journal of Music_, Vol. VIII. No. 3.]
+
+Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood
+that sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of
+so many future sorrows and glories.
+
+"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys
+together at Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day,
+which since has blessed hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone;
+this breast held his sorrows and his hopes, when he was struggling to
+reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his madness he cast
+himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
+eyelids when they were closed in death."
+
+Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.
+
+At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out,
+and was informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had
+been waiting nearly fifteen minutes!
+
+
+II.
+
+Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room,
+listening to that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And
+first he told me the story of Schumann's love.
+
+The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously
+than judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have
+survived the tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no
+childhood: at the piano she was kept through all the bright days, roving
+only from scale to scale, when she should have been roving from flower
+to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she entered into
+her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
+and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which
+were mosses beneath them. From this training she came before the best
+audience in Germany, and stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen
+summers, and by acclamation was crowned the Queen of the Piano. Franz
+Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and many years afterward
+wrote in his extravagant way,--"When we heard Clara Wieck in Vienna,
+fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
+to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks
+and lifted by delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets."
+At her performance of Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was
+inspired to write the following verses:--
+
+  "A weird magician, weary of the world,
+  In sullen humor locked his charms all up
+  Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
+  And threw the key into the sea, and died.
+  The manikins here tried with all their might;
+  In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
+  His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
+  A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
+  Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
+  Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
+  She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
+  And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
+  Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
+  The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
+  The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
+  All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
+  To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
+  Who with white fingers guides them in her play."
+
+The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child
+was the young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first
+appearance, he wrote,--"Others make poetry,--she is a poem." And soon
+afterward,--"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
+up,--the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."
+
+From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young
+composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one
+caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask,
+"Whither?" he poured out before this child the half-revealed hopes
+striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her ingenuous and
+earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
+due time they were to be rather _clenched_, through pain. It was under
+this baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first
+sonata,--"Florestan and Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all
+from whom fame was graceful.
+
+In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those
+wonderful little "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without
+it their meaning is as strange as their names. Often did he say,--"I can
+write only where my life is in unison with my works." "Listen now to
+these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and struck the piano;
+"these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with song, "My
+peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
+written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged
+aspirant released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But
+faster than planets through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased,
+and there was a long silence; and then he told the unspeakable portion
+of his story by performing these two: "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has
+ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed the pathos of the
+latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath that
+crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts
+with the terrible questioning, _Wherefore?_
+
+Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each
+other, the shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was
+coming to pass. He had educated this girl to be an artist to bring _him_
+fame; alas, it must be confessed that he thought also of certain
+prospective thalers. Willing as he was that all Leipsic should admire
+his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the "Zeitschrift." He
+then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who, when
+he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally
+the poor soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst
+have known that it is Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!
+
+The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all
+acquaintance, forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating
+at once Clara's career as a _virtuoso_, he took her to Vienna.
+
+No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess
+of Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up
+to Beethoven. Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the
+"Schwärmibriefe of Eusebius to Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the
+general reader of the "Zeitschrift," who, doubtless, fancied that its
+editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
+Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.
+
+"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out
+an angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou
+not with us? (_Warum!_) And how thou wilt have thought of us last
+night, from the 'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major
+symphony! I also thought of thee then, Chiara, pure one, bright one,
+whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither thy longing draws thee,
+but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."
+
+At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's
+"Myrthen," whose dedication, _Seiner geliebten Braut_, breaks forth in
+the passionate and beautiful song,--"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"
+
+But this word _Braut_ means Bride in the German sense of "affianced";
+and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the
+breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his
+glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of
+Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two
+passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of bitter Marahs.
+"But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the right
+to know, from these,"--his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."
+
+Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces
+when they ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.
+
+
+III.
+
+But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to
+have revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I
+sought Boehner, and asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded
+to the one subject that bound us together, I requested him to tell me,
+what had not yet been given to the world, the details of Schumann's
+insanity and death.
+
+Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:--
+
+"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings
+so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in
+extremes, was as if you gave an Æolian harp to be swept now by a cold
+north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines
+of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled. Under
+his grief he seemed stronger; but when his joy came, when Clara was his
+own, and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices
+within, which, to him, had been unutterable,--then we saw that the
+emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
+gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
+devastating torrent.
+
+"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or
+six years before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times
+he imagined himself again cruelly separated from the patient and tender
+being who never left his side; and he would write pieces full of
+distractions, in the midst of each of which, however, some touchingly
+beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through seething
+seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
+which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a
+wearing persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice
+aside gently, saying,--'A long life is before me; but it must be lived
+in a few years.' And, indeed, the works which have reached farthest into
+hearts that loved him most deeply date from these times. I remember,
+that, when he sat down to compose his last symphony, he said,--'It is
+almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion needs another chamber.'
+
+"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word:
+'Hasten.' I left all my affairs, and came to watch for many months
+beside this beloved one. It was not a wild delirium which had taken
+possession of him; the only fit of that kind was that in which he tried
+to drown himself in the Rhine,--at the time when the papers got hold of
+the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his conviction that
+he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
+manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
+power,--would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest
+discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till
+night,--during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance.
+Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories
+of his earlier works.
+
+"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
+own:--'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be
+understood here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.'
+Then, turning to me, he said,--'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my
+last prayer for you,'--handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and
+now leave us, to come again and kiss me when I am cold.'
+
+"Then I left him alone with his Clara.
+
+"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis
+Boehner, and said, as my voice would let me.--"Take this paper, and when
+you would have a friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come
+and help me to be that friend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.
+
+
+Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is,
+Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is,
+Will they fight for their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must
+be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent
+security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the theses of philosophers
+or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not
+likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
+paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have
+not industry sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present
+development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities
+likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from
+disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure,
+because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
+lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like
+all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full
+recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to
+be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world
+as we find it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent
+to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art,
+literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to
+glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes.
+No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight
+to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers
+like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may
+have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these
+fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the
+world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
+appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like
+the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree
+with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to
+ordinary humanity.
+
+It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise
+it, to make a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but
+it can do little either in directing or deterring. There is nothing in
+the gloomy vaticinations of Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is,
+which should be permitted to darken our future. The mediæval antagonisms
+of races, when Christianity threw but a partial light over mankind, and
+before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests among people of
+diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
+richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results
+of emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they
+may be, afford any measure of the progress which opens before our
+enfranchised masses. The insular and contracted life of the colonies,
+cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism, has no parallel in
+the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through the
+continent on which our problem is to be solved.
+
+In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report
+truthfully upon the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the
+name. Civilization, in its career, may often be traced in the
+nomenclatures of successive periods. These people were first called
+contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were next
+introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally
+referred to as freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and
+they are yet to be lost in the better and more comprehensive designation
+of citizens, or, when discrimination is convenient, citizens of African
+descent.
+
+The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at
+Port Royal has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of
+Europe, as well as the best friends of the United States, like Cairnes
+and Gasparin, have testified much interest in its progress. An English
+periodical of considerable merit noticed at some length "Mr. Pierce's
+Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in its
+incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in
+American affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number,
+characterizes the colony as "that small pacific army, far more important
+in the history of civilization than all the military expeditions
+despatched from time to time since the commencement of the civil war."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No little historical interest covers the region to which this account
+belongs. Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas,
+Georgia, and Florida, involving the rival pretensions of Spain and
+France, were made in the first half of the sixteenth century. They were
+conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and Soto, in search of
+the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
+discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was
+attempted until 1562.
+
+In that year,--the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and
+ten years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the
+most illustrious victim,--Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief,
+anxious to found beyond the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots,
+fitted out the expedition of Jean Ribault, which, after a voyage of over
+three months across the ocean and northward along the coast, cast anchor
+on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the name which it
+retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for another
+and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark
+and perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John Hawkins
+sailed for Africa in quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to
+the New World. The expedition of Ribault was the first visit of
+Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South Carolina, and the
+garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices ever
+made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to
+detail here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their
+abandonment of the post, the terrible voyage homeward, or the
+perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose. Nor is it within the
+compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
+garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins
+in 1565 with timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his
+sad fate, the ferocity of Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and
+the avenging chivalry of Dominic de Gourges. The student is baffled in
+attempts to fix localities for the deeds and explorations of this
+period, even with the help of the several accounts and the drawings of
+Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
+permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been
+abandoned by the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for
+trade or adventure.
+
+Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other
+commissioners to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the
+country with reference to an emigration thither. Hilton's Narration,
+published in London the year after, mentions St. Ellens as one of the
+points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including the Sea
+Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish
+words, and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be
+alarmed by it. The commissioners, whose explorations were evidently
+prompted by motives of gain, close a somewhat glowing description of the
+country by saying, "And we could wish that all they that want a happy
+settlement of our English nation were well transported thither."
+
+Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But,
+relieved of her civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek
+colonial empire on the southern coast of North America. In 1663, Charles
+II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk, Shaftsbury,--each famous in
+the conflicts of those times,--and to their associates, as proprietors
+of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for philosophy than
+affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,--an idle work, as it
+proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle,
+arrived at Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed
+probably with apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they
+removed to the banks of the Ashley, and, after another change of site,
+founded Charleston.
+
+In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port
+Royal, but was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent
+settlement of the Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until
+1700. This district is divided into four parishes, St. Peter's, St.
+Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being fifty-eight miles long and
+thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St. Helena parish
+includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a few
+smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district
+occupied by our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands
+is St. Helena, being fifteen miles long and six or seven broad,
+containing fifty plantations and three thousand negroes, and perhaps
+more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is two-thirds or
+three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
+Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and
+Coosaw, Morgan, Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort
+is the largest town in the district of that name, and the only one at
+Port Royal in our possession. Its population, black and white, in time
+of peace may have been between two and three thousand. The first lots
+were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in 1720. Its
+library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
+hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about
+thirty-five hundred.
+
+The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since
+to an island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to
+a sound, a parish, and an island, originated probably with the
+Spaniards, and was given by them in tribute to Saint Helena, the mother
+of Constantine the Great, whose day in the calendar is August 18th.
+Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given by Ribault.
+Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
+Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely
+to have been so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord
+proprietors, while Carolina was a province of Great Britain.
+
+The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable
+Revolutionary romance. In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent
+two hundred troops with a howitzer and two field-pieces to Beaufort.
+Four companies of militia from Charleston with two field-pieces,
+reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
+off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and
+are said to have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port
+Royal Islands.
+
+There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands.
+One of these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is
+claimed by some antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault.
+There are the well-preserved walls of one upon the plantation of John J.
+Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles south of Beaufort, now called
+Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel Higginson's regiment. It
+is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to it as a
+Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site
+of Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and
+other points.
+
+The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of
+the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present
+a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of
+French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points,
+affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the
+buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy
+mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen
+bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of
+ginned cotton to the acre,--quite different from the plantations in
+Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred
+pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one
+finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks,
+furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton peculiar
+to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the
+action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks
+which permeate the land in all directions. The seed of this cotton,
+planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser
+texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a
+like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department secured
+eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
+including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in
+storehouses, when our military occupation began.
+
+The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
+lignum-vitæ, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in
+diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the
+long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,--and the palmetto,
+shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by
+vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the
+summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
+coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and
+white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil
+is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These
+interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which the cassena is
+the most distinguished variety, and faced with ditches, make the
+prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in March
+and April with the yellow jessamine, (_jelseminum_,)--the cross-vine
+(_bignonia_,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,--the Cherokee rose,
+(_loevigata_,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,--and, two
+months later, the palmetto royal, (_yucca gloriosa_,) which protects the
+fence with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its
+pyramid-like clusters of white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs
+serve a utilitarian end in art and medicine. The live-oak is famous in
+shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto, as it is called,
+resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
+employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British
+fleet; and the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The
+moss (_tillandsia usneoides_) served to calk the rude vessel of the
+first French colonists, longing for home. It may be used for bedding
+after its life has been killed by boiling water, and for the subsistence
+of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a powerful
+diuretic.
+
+The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and
+to the pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described
+in Eliot's book. Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to
+fishing for devil and drum.
+
+The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first
+and second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a
+free circulation of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built
+under the supervision of a professional architect. Those on the
+plantations, designed for the planters or overseers, were, with a few
+exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving mechanic in New
+England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards are
+without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of
+orange-trees. One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed,
+they are not well enough built to last long. The estates upon Edisto
+Island are of a more patrician character, and are occasionally
+surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees fancifully
+trimmed.
+
+The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although
+some may be traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from
+the religious persecutions of France.
+
+The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious
+periodicals, mainly Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern
+life has been elsewhere observed in the progress of our army.
+Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal and ruinous was
+found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
+South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's
+collection. Another was Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and
+tribute to its distinguished examples, translated by Warden in 1810.
+These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to see the infinite
+wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
+sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the
+moral basis of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who
+distrusts the rightfulness of his daily conduct, has resolved to persist
+in it, and therefore hates most of all the prophet who comes to confront
+him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them to mankind.
+
+Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice
+without being sought for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out,
+still showing the place where it was worn by the rope which bound the
+sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own quarters were was a woman
+who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of maternity as to
+crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
+daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the
+unwilling witness. She declared to her parents and sisters that it was
+hell to live in such a place. She was accustomed to advise the negroes
+how best to avoid being whipped. When the war began, she assured them
+that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to send them
+to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
+girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds
+which marriage and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell
+on these painful scenes of the past, constant and authentic as they are;
+and they hardly concern the practical question which now presses for a
+solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need of injustice or
+exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
+persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are
+fortunate slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides,
+there was less labor exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely
+managed plantations of the Sea Islands than in other districts where
+slave-labor was better and more profitably organized and directed.
+
+The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th,
+1861, was followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea
+Islands. In the latter part of December, the Secretary of the Treasury,
+Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman and humane disposition
+naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a special agent to
+visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition of
+the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of
+suggesting some plan for the organization of their labor and the
+promotion of their general well-being. The agent, leaving New York
+January 13th, 1862, reached that city again on his way to Washington on
+the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a large number of
+the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their cabins.
+The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the
+people, their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the
+best mode of administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a
+report. The plan proposed by him recommended the appointment of
+superintendents to act as guides of the negroes and as local
+magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
+Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the
+same agent. The agent presented the subject to several members of
+Congress, with whom he had a personal acquaintance, but, though they
+listened respectfully, they seemed either to dread the magnitude of the
+social question, or to feel that it was not one with which they as
+legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself,
+and Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone
+seemed to grasp it, and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is
+doubtful if any member of the Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any
+interest in the enterprise, though it has since been fostered by the
+Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the President
+appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
+under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then
+said, somewhat impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be
+troubled with such details,--that there seemed to be an itching to get
+negroes into our lines; to which the agent replied, that these negroes
+were within them by the invitation of no one, being domiciled there
+before we commenced occupation. The President then wrote and handed to
+the agent the following card:--
+
+"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion
+give Mr. Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as
+may seem judicious.
+
+"A. LINCOLN.
+
+"Feb. 15, 1862."
+
+The President, so history must write it, approached the great question
+slowly and reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the
+proclamations he was to issue in the September and January following.
+Perhaps that slowness and reluctance were well, for thereby it was given
+to this people to work out their own salvation, rather than to be saved
+by any chief or prophet.
+
+Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no
+funds wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission,"
+organized in Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief
+Association," organized in New York on the 20th of the same month,
+gallantly volunteered to pay both superintendents and teachers, and did
+so until July 1st, when the Government, having derived a fund from the
+sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the Rebels,
+undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies,
+together with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and
+called the "Port Royal Relief Committee," providing for the support of
+the teachers.
+
+When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an
+enterprise which otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance
+had been given as to the legal condition of the negroes. The Secretary,
+in a letter to the agent, had said, that, after being received into our
+service, they could not, without great injustice, be restored to their
+masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
+citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private,
+that negroes who were within our lines, and had been employed by the
+Government, should be protected in their freedom. No official assurance
+of this had, however, been given; and its absence disturbed the
+societies in their formation. At one meeting of the Boston society
+action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
+gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people,
+when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A
+public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken
+up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a
+regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the
+probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do
+what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in
+the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be
+found base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it
+should be stated, have been managed by persons of much consideration in
+their respective communities, of unostentatious philanthropy, but of
+energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one of whom has ever filled
+or been a candidate for a political office.
+
+There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be
+mentioned. The venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first
+year, hearing of the enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of
+it. I went to his chamber, where he had been confined to his bed for
+many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a patriot who read the
+hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not been
+given to protect the enterprise,--said that but for his disability he
+should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the
+postscript of his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty
+benediction to the work and to myself. Restored in a measure to
+activity, he is still spared to the generation which fondly cherishes
+his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
+read to his fellow-citizens, gathering close about him and hanging on
+his speech, words of counsel and encouragement.
+
+On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of
+superintendents and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were
+women, left the harbor of New York, on board the United States
+steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on the 9th. It was a
+voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange, and it
+was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store
+for us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal
+to our responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South
+Carolina, they were addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the
+little he had learned of their duties, enjoined patience and humanity,
+impressed on them the greatness of their work, the results of which were
+to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps, one way or the
+other, the social problem of the age,--assuring them that never did a
+vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when
+she conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written
+history which should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful
+to their trust, there would come to them the highest of all recognitions
+ever accorded to angels or to men, in this life or the next,--"Inasmuch
+as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."
+
+This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed
+during the first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its
+close they had all reached their appointed posts. They took their
+quarters in the deserted houses of the planters. These had all left on
+the arrival of our army, only four white men, citizens of South
+Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except one,
+who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not
+interfered with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be
+so. The negroes had, in the mean time, been without persons to guide and
+care for them, and had been exposed to the careless and conflicting talk
+of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were also brought in
+connection with some _employés_ of the Government, engaged in the
+collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were doing
+anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing
+the plantations and the negroes upon them as _adscripti gleboe_ looking
+forward to their restoration to their masters at the close of the war.
+They were uncertain as to the intentions of the Yankees, and were
+wondering at the confusion, as they called it. They were beginning to
+plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant cotton,
+regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except
+one at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one
+bearing the name of John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr.
+Peck. This is not the place to detail the obstacles we met with, one
+after another overcome,--the calumnies and even personal violence to
+which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early period of our
+struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
+likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they
+deserve, and let others of better natures, who were then blind, but now
+see, not be taunted with their inconsiderate acts. The nickname of
+Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may, however, be fitly remembered.
+It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of Puritan and
+Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
+disposed to coöperation. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our
+most important operations were in the district under the command of
+Brigadier-General Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were
+not supposed to be favorable to the enterprise, and who, during the
+political contest of 1860, had been the chairman of the National
+Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and his
+sense of the duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government,
+that his personal courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He
+received his mortal wound at Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of
+September following, and a braver and abler officer has not fallen in
+the service.
+
+Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other
+hindrances occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some
+eight thousand acres of esculents,--a fair supply of food,--and some
+four thousand five hundred acres of cotton (after a deduction for
+over-estimates) were planted. This was done upon one hundred and
+eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty people,
+of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands,
+made up of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual
+classification and estimate of the productive capacity of laborers, to
+three thousand eight hundred and five and one-half full hands. The
+cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand pounds of
+ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred
+thousand pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod,
+resulting from the lateness of the planting, exposed it to the ravages
+of the frost and the worm. Troops being ordered North, after the
+disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated in the middle
+of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
+hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished,
+were abandoned. In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty
+tons of corn-fodder and seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the
+ear, for army-forage. These are but some of the adverse influences to
+which the agricultural operations were subjected.
+
+It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the
+superintendents and teachers commissioned by the associations. There was
+as high a purpose and devotion among them as in any colony that ever
+went forth to bear the evangel of civilization. Among them were some of
+the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard, Yale, and
+Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,--men of
+practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was
+scarce worthy, and to whom, whether they are among the living or the
+dead, I delight to pay the tribute of my respect and admiration.
+
+Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at
+Boston, April 25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work,
+which he was obliged to leave six months before his death. He was a
+faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so many months had passed
+since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he dwelt
+fondly upon them in his last days.
+
+The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St.
+Helena Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,--and
+though not fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of
+a superintendent, yet even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He
+was an evangelist, also, and he preached with more unction than any
+other the gospel of freedom,--always, however, enforcing the duties of
+industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but always buoyant and
+trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
+company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to
+Beaufort,--being assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a
+month, and was a remote and exposed point; but he went fearlessly and
+without question. The evacuation of Edisto in July, the heat, and the
+labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at the village
+on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where
+were some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive
+exertions brought on malarious fever. This produced an unnatural
+excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot sun, he rode about to attend to
+his people. He died,--men, women, and children, for whom he had toiled,
+filling the house with their sobs during his departing hours. His
+funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers which they
+and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
+native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church
+of Dorchester. Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth
+can live fourscore years in a little more than one score. One high
+privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear of the immortal edict of
+the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his people was
+to be secured for all time to come.
+
+Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he
+never advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the
+Episcopal Church. He was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the
+quality as well as adding to it by self-discipline. He had good
+business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences, was humane, yet
+not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
+unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was
+recently asking the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who
+first taught them their letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr.
+Phillips." He was at home in the autumn for a vacation, was at the
+funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time in imperfect
+health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
+Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate
+return necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,--but his health
+never came back to him. His quarters were in the same house where
+Barnard had died, and in a few days, on the 5th of December, he followed
+him. He was tended in his sickness by the negroes, and one day, having
+asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the words, "Thank
+God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the same
+funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North
+to bereaved relatives.
+
+Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
+Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his
+professional studies at the summons of Christian duty. He labored
+faithfully as a superintendent, looking after the physical, moral, and
+educational interests of his people. He had a difficult post, was
+overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of taking as
+good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came
+home in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the
+citizens and students of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill,
+and, again coming North, died October 30th, a few days after reaching
+New York. The young woman who was betrothed to him, but whom he did not
+live to wed, has since his death sought this field of labor; and on my
+recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
+teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had
+guided to freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed
+away!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal
+having been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the
+charge of the freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus
+Saxton, a native of Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the
+free air of the valley of the Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane
+nature; and under his wise and benevolent care they still remain. The
+Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in Florida, are
+within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
+eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.
+
+The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject
+race, more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The
+native African was of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and
+untamable. The master was obliged to abate something of the usual rigor
+in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner, now at Port
+Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
+African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would
+perpetually insist on doing his work in his own way, and being asked the
+threatening question, "A'n't you going to mind?" would answer, with
+spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master desisted! Severe discipline
+drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a mutilation of person
+which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816, eight
+hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades
+of Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the
+early part of the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on
+farms, and raising cattle. They had two hundred and fifty men fit to
+bear arms, led by chiefs brave and skilful. The story of the Exiles of
+Florida is one of painful interest. The testimony of officers of the
+army who served against them is, that they were more dangerous enemies
+than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the longest.
+The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of
+Charleston during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark
+Vesey, relates that one of the native Africans, when called to answer to
+the charge against him, haughtily responded,--"_I was a prince in my
+country, and have as much right to be free as you!_" The Carolinians
+were so awe-struck by his defiance that they transported him. Another,
+at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade about to speak, and
+said, "_Die silent, as I do!_" and the man hushed. The early newspapers
+of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned by
+these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the
+third generation reduced to obedient slaves.
+
+Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood
+been carried so far as on these Sea Islands,--a deterioration due to
+their isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the
+constant surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with
+each other, involving a physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature
+punishes disobedience to her laws. The population with its natural
+increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the soil under existing
+modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is found
+pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
+Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had
+been carried so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration,
+in January, 1862, was obliged to confess the existence of a general
+disinclination to military service on the part of the negroes; though it
+is true that even then instances of courage and adventure appeared,
+which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to be
+developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it
+has been. You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a
+subject race; but in vain will you attempt to study it until the burden
+is lifted. The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while the
+bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She soothes us with her
+deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing in pain,
+is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the
+spirit the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not
+even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the
+capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
+transmuted to a man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It
+was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their
+posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen,
+and to note the progress they had made. There were interesting scenes to
+fill the days. I saw an aged negro, Cæsar by name, not less than one
+hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.
+The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,--a free savage in the
+wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long
+years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the
+President,--his life covering an historic century. A faithful and
+industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival,
+rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of
+pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don Carlos,
+whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon
+Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last
+hours,--now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a
+slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the
+daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston. He talked
+intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
+known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and
+accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion
+of their preparatory studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C.
+Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private
+tutor.
+
+Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,--an old woman, with much
+power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had
+formerly been. The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If
+you're as long beating Secesh everywhere as you have been in taking the
+town, guess it'll take you some time!" Indeed, the negroes had somewhat
+less confidence in our power than at first, on account of our not having
+followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The same quaint
+old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
+of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"
+
+I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of
+Trescot, formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom
+Russell describes in his "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when
+Russell saw it. Its large library is deposited in the Smithsonian
+Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the first and second
+stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families of
+negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see
+a cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the
+plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name,
+linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.
+
+The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are
+usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees,
+perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred
+graves, marked only by sticks eighteen inches or two feet high and about
+as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones in a negro graveyard
+at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather illiterate
+inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
+not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and
+that was in a burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the
+head of the grave, shaped something like an ordinary gravestone, about
+three feet high and six inches wide. The inscription was as follows:--
+
+  OLd Jiw
+  de PArt his
+  Life on the
+  2 of WAY
+  Re st frow
+  LAuer
+
+On the foot-board were these words:--
+
+  We ll
+  d OW N.
+
+The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also
+write a little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He
+said that he used to carry his father in his arms in his old age,--that
+the old man had no pain, and, as the son expressed it, "sunk in years."
+I inquired of Kit concerning several of the graves; and I found, by his
+intelligent answers, that their tenants were disposed in families and
+were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing,
+are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a
+faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned
+with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.
+
+There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African
+origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as
+evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can
+cure. They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a
+sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking,
+until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
+They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and
+they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby
+be brought on.
+
+But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing
+directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most
+consideration.
+
+And, first, as to _education_. There are more than thirty schools in the
+territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are
+commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and
+Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association. They have an
+average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less
+frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range in
+the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their
+letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being
+taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to, which had
+been going on for a few weeks. Very many did not have the opportunity
+for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the spring and
+summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
+much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times
+some of the teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a
+brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home,
+leaving the schools to be broken up. It was not until October or
+November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and
+they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is as
+yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds
+wherewith to provide one.
+
+I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.
+There were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the
+town of Beaufort,--ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of
+sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the
+plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in
+some cases but two or three, and in others none.
+
+The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages
+in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader,
+Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had
+enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or
+learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on
+an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness
+for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
+had not abated.
+
+On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on
+St. Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with
+the long, pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading
+branches, and surrounded by the gravestones of the former proprietors,
+which bear the ever-recurring names of Fripp and Chaplin. This school
+was opened in September last, but many of the pupils had received some
+instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were present on
+my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
+few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened
+at noon and closed at three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the
+children to work in the field or perform other service in which they
+could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page 70th in
+Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before,
+and they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had
+recited the first thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the
+multiplication-table as high as fives, and were commencing the sixes. A
+few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come latest to the
+school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
+recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring
+prompting at the beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much
+spirit hymns which had been taught them by the teachers, as,--
+
+  "My country, 'tis of thee,
+  Sweet land of liberty";
+
+also,--
+
+  "Sound the loud timbrel";
+
+also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the
+closing stanzas of which are,--
+
+  "The very oaks are greener clad,
+    The waters brighter smile;
+  Oh, never shone a day so glad
+    On sweet St. Helen's Isle!
+
+  "For none in all the world before
+    Were ever glad as we,--
+  We're free on Carolina's shore,
+    We're all at home and free!"
+
+Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the
+highest beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service
+than to write the songs of praise for these little children, chattels no
+longer, whom the Saviour, were he now to walk on earth, would bless as
+his own.
+
+The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by
+the way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white
+soldiers, particularly when the singers roll out,--
+
+  "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"
+
+The children also sang their own songs, as,--
+
+  "In de morning' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?[A]
+  In de mornin' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.
+
+[Footnote A: How d' y' do?]
+
+Also,--
+
+  "I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go,
+  I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go.
+
+  "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+    Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
+  Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "Dere's room enough," etc.
+
+Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down
+in the lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my
+home." Russell's "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard
+them in his evening row over Broad River, on his way to Trescot's
+estate.
+
+One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from
+Philadelphia. Another is from Newport, Rhode Island, where she had
+prepared herself for this work by benevolent labors in teaching poor
+children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of olive
+complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of
+gentle address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with
+an overwrought consciousness of her race. She had read the best books,
+and naturally and gracefully enriched her conversation with them. She
+had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had been a pupil in the
+Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that city,
+then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had
+received only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their
+parents,--and let this be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She
+had refused a residence in Europe, where a better social life and less
+unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she would not dissever
+herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a superficial
+sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
+elevation.
+
+At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a
+young woman from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of
+parents passed into the skies," whose lives have both been written for
+the edification of the Christian world. She teaches two schools, at
+different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars in each.
+One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on
+a review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being
+questioned as to the subjects of the lessons, they answered
+intelligently. They recited the twos of the multiplication-table,
+explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard, and wrote
+letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining
+district, a graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian
+clergyman of Providence, Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which
+a class of three pupils was about finishing Ellsworth's First
+Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had just finished
+Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
+Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two
+schools. He exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence
+to be repeated with different tones and inflections, and one could not
+but remark the excellent imitations.
+
+In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto
+refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were
+engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had
+picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave. One
+class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St.
+John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They stumbled a little
+on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they got
+along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July,
+1862, Ned, who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus,
+a man of seventy, who also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty
+children into two schools, and taught them as best they could for five
+months until teachers were provided by the societies. Ned has since
+received a donation from one of the societies, and is now regularly
+employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this
+school for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to
+bed. She had become interested in learning by hearing her younger sister
+read when she came home from school; and when she asked to be taught,
+she had learned from this sister the alphabet and some words of one
+syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are, however, learning.
+
+On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a
+small church on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from
+Kingston, Massachusetts. She had manifested much persistence in going to
+this field, went with the first delegation, and still keeps the school
+which she opened in March, 1862. She taught the pupils their letters.
+Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of ten pupils
+read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
+Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read
+so rapidly that she had to be checked,--the only case of such fast
+reading that I found. She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners
+to a corner of the room and exercising them upon an alphabet card,
+requiring them to give the names of letters taken out of their regular
+order, and with the letters making words, which they were expected to
+repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
+Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states,
+lakes, and large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the
+different continents on the map of the world, as they were called. I saw
+the teacher of this school at her residence, late in the afternoon,
+giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and girls, all but two
+being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the Book
+of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St.
+John. Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly
+at the teacher, and whispered,--"he's putting me in the book"; and as
+Elsie guessed, so I do. The teacher was instructing her pupils in some
+dates and facts which have had much to do with our history. The
+questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were these:--
+
+"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"
+
+"Virginia."
+
+"When?"
+
+"1620."
+
+"Who brought them?"
+
+"Dutchmen."
+
+"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"
+
+"Pilgrims."
+
+"Did they bring slaves?"
+
+"No."
+
+A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given
+in a loud tone by the whole school:--
+
+"What country do you live in?"
+
+"United States."
+
+"What State?"
+
+"South Carolina."
+
+"What island?"
+
+"Port Royal."
+
+"What town?"
+
+"Beaufort."
+
+"Who is your Governor?"
+
+"General Saxton."
+
+"Who is your President?"
+
+"Abraham Lincoln."
+
+"What has he done for you?"
+
+"He's freed us."
+
+There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited,
+each having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and
+each provided with two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But
+it is unnecessary to describe them, as they were very much like the
+others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an industrial school, which meets
+two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with
+some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I
+visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
+age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others
+with aprons, pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.
+
+Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations
+to address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the
+pupils with questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I
+have rarely heard children answer with more readiness and spirit. We had
+a dialogue substantially as follows:--
+
+"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"
+
+"Going to work, Sir."
+
+"On what?"
+
+"Cotton and corn, Sir."
+
+"What are you going to do with the corn?"
+
+"Eat it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the cotton?"
+
+"Sell it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"
+
+One boy answered in advance of the rest,--
+
+"Put it in my pocket, Sir."
+
+"That won't do. What's better than that?"
+
+"Buy clothes, Sir."
+
+"What else will you buy?"
+
+"Shoes, Sir."
+
+"What else are you going to do with your money?"
+
+There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,--
+
+"What are you going to do Sundays?"
+
+"Going to meeting."
+
+"What are you going to do there?"
+
+"Going to sing."
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Hear the parson."
+
+"Who's going to pay him?"
+
+One boy said,--"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,--
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people
+do, and you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with
+them?"
+
+There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,--
+
+"Send 'em to school, Sir."
+
+"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any
+natural incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years
+the ideas and habits of good citizens.
+
+The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved,
+except that it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking.
+They are joyous, and you can see the boys after school playing the
+soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory is very susceptible in
+them,--too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the reasoning faculty.
+
+The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the
+parents being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and
+cultivating their crops, and it not being thought best to allow the
+teaching to interfere in any way with industrious habits.
+
+A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading,
+have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially
+detracts from their usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have
+already been mentioned. The latter, a man of earnest piety, has died
+since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on Hilton Head Island last
+summer and autumn, being paid at first by the superintendents, and
+afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he enlisted in the
+negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
+Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were
+brought to St. Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to
+the school at the Baptist Church, saying to the teachers there that she
+could carry them no farther. They could read their letters and words of
+one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on Wadmelaw Island, a
+kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only citizen
+of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South
+Carolina, stood up boldly for his official and personal protection.
+Hettie had been taught to read by his daughter; and let this be
+remembered to the honor of the young woman.
+
+Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The
+most advanced classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can
+read simple stories and the plainer passages of Scripture; and they
+could even pursue self-instruction, if the schools were to be suspended.
+The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated. They could
+read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and
+adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not
+bounded north by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and
+east by the sea, with dim visions of New York on this planet or some
+other,--about their conception of geography when we found them. They are
+acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of
+life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their schools;
+remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a
+letter, and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their
+race; then contemplate what is now transpiring, and you have a scene
+which prophets and sages would have delighted to witness. It will be
+difficult to find equal progress in an equal period since the morning
+rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I have
+never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel
+Angelo has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor
+souls struggling in darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the
+upper and better light transcends in moral grandeur anything that has
+ever come from mortal hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to _industry_. The laborers, during their first year under the
+new system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of
+wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same
+thing. The notion that they were to raise no more cotton has passed
+away, since work upon it is found to be remunerative, and connected with
+the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were at first
+particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
+collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of
+their masters, the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and
+ginned the cotton on the promise of wages. Except upon plantations in
+the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more immediately
+remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
+disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the
+only penalty for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for
+the tenement and land adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not
+exceeding two dollars per month. Both the Government and private
+individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land by the
+recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which
+may, by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by
+noon; and the same was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on
+very many of the plantations. As I was riding through one of Mr.
+Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty persons at work who
+belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the first
+delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent
+contributions for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the
+tax-sales, and combining a fine humanity with honest sagacity and close
+calculation, no man is so well fitted to try the experiment. He bought
+thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and cultivated eight
+hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and ninety-nine
+and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,--a larger
+increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due
+mainly to prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal
+Wand said to me,--"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the
+negroes to take land for cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton
+Head Island said, that on that island the negroes had, besides adequate
+corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four acres of cotton to a
+hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it, except near
+the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
+going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had
+charge of the refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena
+village, and who had cleared and fenced patches for gardens, felling the
+trees for that purpose.
+
+The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might
+do; but they do about as much as he himself would do, after a residence
+of a few years in the same climate, and when he had ceased to work under
+the influence of Northern habits. Northern men have sometimes been
+unjust to the South, when comparing the results of labor in the
+different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
+tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing
+latitude. There has been less complaint this year than last of "a pain
+in the small of the back," or of "a fever in the head,"--in other words,
+less _shamming_. The work has been greatly deranged by the draft, some
+features of which have not been very skilfully arranged, and by the
+fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the military
+authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by
+the women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that
+field-work does not become women in the new condition; and so it may
+seem to some persons of just sympathies who have not yet learned that no
+honest work is dishonorable in man or woman. But this matter may be left
+to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation, may not be consistent
+with the finest feminine culture or the most complete womanliness; but
+it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
+development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country
+of Europe; and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this
+generation, when the American negroes become the peers of the Swiss
+peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than without it, when she is not
+yet fitted for the needle or the book.
+
+The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply
+capital to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my
+faithful guide and attendant, who had done for me more service than any
+white man could render," with funds of his own, and some borrowed money,
+bought at the recent tax-sales a small farm of three hundred and
+thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was to plant
+sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one
+and a half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my
+last day in the territory, and one-third of his crop was then in.
+Besides some servant's duty to an officer, for which he is well paid, he
+does the work of a full hand on his place. He hires one woman and two
+men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters hand. He has
+two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
+likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he
+said, "She's the best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with
+her hoe as I know her to be with her tongue, Harry's estimate must be
+right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and blind in both eyes, whom
+he guides with a rope,--carrying on farming, I thought, somewhat under
+difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
+delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor.
+He has promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an
+account of the progress of his crop. He has had much charge of
+Government property, and when Captain Hooper, of General Saxton's staff,
+was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany him; but at
+last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
+all two to leave together."
+
+Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The
+Government is building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen
+feet by fourteen, with two rooms, each provided with a swinging
+board-window, and the roof projecting a little as a protection from
+rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have fifty
+cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the
+direction of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a
+month. Rarely have I talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was
+my great regret that I had not time to visit the village of improved
+houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
+extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of
+his last days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to the _development of manhood_. This has been shown, in the
+first place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not
+appear upon our first introduction to these people, and they did not
+seem to understand us when we used to tell them that we wanted them to
+own land. But it is now an active desire. At the recent tax-sales, six
+out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them, comprising two
+thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one hundred
+and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
+superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United
+States. One of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The
+other five were made by the negroes on the plantations combining the
+funds they had saved from the sale of their pigs, chickens, and eggs,
+and from the payments made to them for work,--they then dividing off the
+tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit, before
+mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands,
+who are equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are
+cultivating sixty-three acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes,
+with as many more to be planted, four and a half of cow-peas, three of
+pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These facts are most significant.
+The instinct for land--to have one spot on earth where a man may stand,
+and whence no human being can of right drive him--is one of the most
+conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any
+fair degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.
+
+This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness
+of rights, and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed
+by white men. The former slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a
+resident of New York when the war broke out, have generally left the
+plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying that they will not be his
+bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if they remain
+on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
+during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to
+Coosaw Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken
+belonging to a negro. The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from
+the corporal, to whom the soldier had handed it, thinking that the
+negroes would not take it from an officer. They then carried it to the
+superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was given
+for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but
+these are sufficient.
+
+Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the
+comforts and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society,
+for the purpose of maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St.
+Helena Island, which is under the charge of Friend Hunn, of the good
+fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in Delaware three thousand
+dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he now harbors
+and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
+which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of
+the world's people. In this store alone--and there are others on the
+island, carried on by private enterprise--two thousand dollars' worth of
+goods are sold monthly. To be sure, a rather large proportion of these
+consists of molasses and sugar, "sweetening," as the negroes call it,
+being in great demand, and four barrels of molasses having been sold the
+day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for plates, knives,
+forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
+Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,--in
+short, the distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform
+allowance,--are very generally rejected. But there is no article of
+household-furniture or wearing apparel, used by persons of moderate
+means among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the
+opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South would
+open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops
+astir. Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the
+various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few
+coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters.
+Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The indisposition
+to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
+superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed
+and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future,
+the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children, and the
+convictions of duty. These all exist in the negro, in a state of greater
+or less development. To give one or two examples. One man brought
+Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
+obtained from selling pigs and chickens,--thus providing for the future.
+Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same
+officer, intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred
+dollars, to be transmitted by him to their wives, and this besides what
+they had sent home in other ways,--showing the family-feeling to be
+active and strong in them. They have also the social and religious
+inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of Hilton Head,
+they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
+for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the
+Government longer to provide them. The result was a contribution of two
+dollars and forty-eight cents. They had just fled from their masters,
+and had received only a small pittance of wages, and this little sum was
+not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the treasury. Another
+collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena Island,
+upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses
+of worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,--not a bad collection for
+some of our Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are
+said to be lowest, and sad indeed are some features of their lot, yet
+with all earnestness and confidence I enter my protest against the
+wicked satire of Carlyle.
+
+Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste
+which has troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer
+be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of
+them as freemen. Your Irishman, who now works as a day-laborer, honestly
+thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have
+no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
+household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or
+to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our
+prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system,
+readily accommodate themselves to our interests, even without much aid
+from the moral sentiments.
+
+Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public
+trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive
+in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must
+be addressed. All the elements of human nature must be appealed to,
+physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious. Imperfect indeed
+is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers wages, but does
+not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars or
+thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to
+bind both parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.
+
+There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them,
+and truth requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good
+deal of petty pilfering among them, although they are faithful to
+trusts. This is the natural growth of the old system, and is quite
+likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present
+disturbed and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the
+rigid virtues. But inferences from this must not be pressed too far.
+When I was a private soldier in Virginia, as one of a three-months'
+regiment, we used to bide from each other our little comforts and
+delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
+disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
+characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom
+to the conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And
+what inferences might not one draw, discreditable to all traders and
+manufacturers, from the universal adulteration of articles of food!
+These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood in order to get
+rations and small benefits,--a natural vice which comes with slavery,
+and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
+demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed,
+hypocritical, but satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and
+indulgence in emotion,--psychological manifestations which one may find
+in more advanced communities. They show no special gratitude to us for
+liberating them from bonds. Nor do they ordinarily display much
+exhilaration over their new condition,--being quite unlike the Italian
+revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the forum, and
+personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
+chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their
+excitement when an attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while
+the assault on Charleston was going on, and in their desire to get their
+friends and relatives away from the Rebels,--an appreciation of freedom,
+if not ostentatious, at least sensible.
+
+But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races
+to self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and
+conceited, Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of
+one other nation are sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these
+therefore be slaves? And where is that model race which shall sway them
+all? A people may have grave defects, but it may not therefore be
+rightfully disabled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different
+occasions, to note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment,
+known as the First Regiment of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General
+Hunter's first regiment was mainly made up of conscripts, drafted May
+12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months afterwards, there
+being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going home
+to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On
+the 10th of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent
+authority to raise five thousand colored troops, began to recruit a
+regiment. His authority from the War Department bore date August 25th,
+and the order conferring it states the object to be "to guard the
+plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
+This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise
+a negro regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words
+in the instructions of Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the
+original expedition went to Port Royal, authorizing him to organize the
+negroes into companies and squads for such services as they might be
+fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for military service.
+Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to General
+Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
+payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General
+Saxton, numbered four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson
+took command of it on the 1st of December; and on the 19th of January,
+1863, it had increased to eight hundred and forty-nine. It has made
+three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,--one before Colonel Higginson
+assumed the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the women of
+England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in
+January up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which
+it occupied for a few days until an evacuation was ordered from
+head-quarters. The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty
+to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies.
+Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
+themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white
+regiments in skirmishing. In _morale_ they seemed very much like white
+men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent
+soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal, like Robert Sutton, whom
+Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of the whole
+expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
+capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said,
+addressing a meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights,
+thinking of the war and of his people,--that, when he heard of the
+regiment being formed, he felt that his time to act had come, and that
+it was his duty to enlist,--that he did not fight for his rations and
+pay, but for wife, children, and people.
+
+These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily
+depressed, and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have
+been reluctant to engage in military service,--their imagination
+investing it with the terrors of instant and certain death. But this
+reluctance has passed away with participation in active service, with
+the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the latent
+manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was
+of the first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,--a truthful man,
+and not given to rose-colored views,--"I did not have faith in arming
+negroes, when I visited the North last autumn, but I have now. They will
+be not mere machines, but real tigers, when aroused; and I should not
+wish to face them." One amusing incident may be mentioned. A man
+deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in the
+district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
+Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes,
+became excited with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a
+furlough on his return, went to the plantation where he had hid, and
+said he would not take five thousand dollars for his place.
+
+But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the
+change of feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a
+change due in part to the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the
+President's Proclamation of January 1st, which has done much to clear
+the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines, but more than all to
+the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
+expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the
+6th of April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty
+on Port Royal Island,--the first active duty it had performed on the Sea
+Islands,--and was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a
+march of ten miles, it reached the advanced picket-station, there were
+about two hundred soldiers of the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting
+orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a careless tone, to one of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's regiment as it
+stood in line,--
+
+"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"
+
+"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as
+I have to fight for them."
+
+A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting
+him as their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a
+soldier,--
+
+"What do you think of that regiment?"
+
+The answer was,--
+
+"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot the Rebels than have the Rebels
+shoot me"; and none of the by-standers dissented.
+
+As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station
+at the Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, just formed into line preparatory to marching to
+Beaufort. The countenances of the latter, which I watched, exhibited no
+expression of disgust, dislike, or disapprobation, only of curiosity.
+Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the hominy left from the
+morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command of the
+relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
+stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid
+desired. This was, it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways
+than one in which to perform even an official duty. I rode back to
+Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a captain of the First
+Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said "he
+wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our
+fighting." He pronounced the word as spelled with two _g_s; but I prefer
+to retain the good English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled
+regiment, most of whom were conscripts, said that on his return from
+Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men ashore in charge of some
+prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them approach from
+the wharf, one said,--
+
+"What are those coming?"
+
+"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the
+answer.
+
+"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.
+
+But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was
+inquired.
+
+"Why, some Secesh prisoners."
+
+"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then
+the response from all.
+
+So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had
+demonstrated their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember
+that such an unreasonable and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time
+existed; but it is never worth while to suppress the truth of history.
+This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free States; and one
+of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston, on
+the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the
+Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of
+negro soldiers which the Free States have sent to the war. On the day
+previous, May 27th, a far different scene transpired on the banks of the
+Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months before in
+Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and
+one with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge
+on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass,
+the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks
+and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and
+duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and
+leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves and their
+race.
+
+I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson.
+Devoting himself heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties,
+and bearing his oppressive responsibility as the leader of a regiment in
+which to a great extent are now involved the fortunes of a race, he adds
+another honorable name to the true chivalry of our time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again
+among the familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that
+Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the
+Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly
+pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished
+women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
+every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two
+good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing
+the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with
+implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had furnished.
+Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
+ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war,
+had been for a brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to
+one whom they remembered as the first to point them to freedom and cheer
+them with its prospect could hardly be received without emotion. But
+there is no time to linger over these scenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
+particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in
+doubt, is no longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a
+consummation. The negroes will work for a living. They will fight for
+their freedom. They are adapted to civil society. As a people, they are
+not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity, nor from the vices
+which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said to
+take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it
+may not be possible in a single generation to restore the pristine
+manhood. One who expects to find in emancipated slaves perfect men and
+women, or to realize in them some fair dream of an ideal race, will meet
+disappointment; but there is nothing in their nature or condition to
+daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to cheer and
+fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
+industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly
+fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and
+aspirations; and these qualities, when stirred and sustained by the
+incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the
+currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a
+benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them a
+constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the
+calamity of another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity
+of being again their oppressors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NO AND YES.
+
+
+  I watched her at her spinning;
+  And this was my beginning
+  Of wooing and of winning.
+
+  But when a maid opposes,
+  And throws away your roses,
+  You say the case forecloses.
+
+  Yet sorry wit one uses,
+  Who loves and thinks he loses
+  Because a maid refuses.
+
+  For by her once denying
+  She only means complying
+  Upon a second trying.
+
+  When first I said, in pleading,
+  "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
+  She heard me half unheeding.
+
+  When afterward I told her,
+  And blamed her growing colder,--
+  She dropped upon my shoulder.
+
+  Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
+  Her very look dispelled it,
+  I caught her hand, and held it.
+
+  Along the lane I led her,
+  And while her cheeks grew redder,
+  I sued outright to wed her.
+
+  Good end from bad beginning!
+  My wooing came to winning,--
+  And still I watch her spinning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MATHER SAFE.
+
+
+The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
+----College in New England procured me access to the library belonging
+to that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had
+previously enjoyed the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning
+for money to buy books for interment in this choice literary catacomb;
+nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction of an annual stare at them
+through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the effect that
+nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
+occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more
+to the select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the
+shelves, could really use the library, I demanded this favor of the
+gentleman who desired to recompense me for what I had done for him. The
+Librarian, who valued books as things capable of being locked up in
+cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion of
+rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my
+credentials. The authority, however, was not to be questioned;--I was to
+be admitted to the library at any hour of the day; and I took care to
+drop a civil expression to imply my estimation of the privilege and my
+purpose of enjoying it.
+
+Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a
+course of reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon
+Saturday afternoons, and finally to establish myself, with whatever
+authors I had selected, in a certain retired alcove devoted to the
+metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind Crawford's bust
+of the late President T----, and is nearly opposite the famous Mather
+Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
+of ---- College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
+word of the history of the spacious and ancient coffer to which
+allusion is made.
+
+The Mather Safe--which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily
+bound with that metal--is said to have been among the possessions of the
+author of the "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral
+descendant of the Mathers, an eccentric character, popularly known as
+Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor, and had the reputation of being
+enormously rich, the College authorities of his day were accustomed to
+treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I believe,
+as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic
+blandishments may have had upon their object cannot at present be
+determined. For when the day came for the long-expected will to be
+opened, it was found that the old gentleman had bequeathed to the
+College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let into the
+wood-work in one corner of the same,--which papers were not to be
+removed or opened for a hundred years.
+
+It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with
+the best grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for
+considerable expense necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in
+the library. Yet, not satisfied with this culpable negligence, Mr.
+Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the acceptance of his gift.
+He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather Safe, of which
+he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
+President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could
+have access to its contents except in the presence of the other.
+Moreover, he required that the Safe should be used only as a receptacle
+for packages which the depositors desired to keep from the world for at
+least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would have
+endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers
+left in the Safe,--these being considered instruments whereby immense
+possessions would finally come to the College. But, as their worthy
+friend, however niggardly in other respects, had taken care to save
+nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of disregarding his
+wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so, many
+years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the
+conditions already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so
+many persons appeared to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular
+legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had been consigned to various
+periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women. These were
+numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
+severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living
+person, perhaps to the future occupant of some professor's chair or
+metropolitan pulpit.
+
+It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite
+alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight
+thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I
+would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by
+this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was
+said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
+history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the
+world. There were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church
+and State, which their perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before
+their fellows, but which, in the bitterness of remorse, they had
+recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to future
+times,--thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
+should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was
+vague talk, also, of funds which had been deposited to found some
+professorship in the College, to furnish some instruction which the age
+was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too, there were intimations of
+endowments to establish scholarships for women, who,--so it was
+argued,--after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of years,
+would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In
+short, there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the
+blood, as this tough old ark, buffeting slowly through the years,
+entered its familiar night. If there was deficiency in the testimony
+which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there was, doubtless,
+sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
+interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.
+
+During the latter part of a certain August--my family being established
+at the seaside--I determined to devote a long day to the College
+Library. The fact was, that a trifling domestic incident--no other than
+the smoking of a kitchen-chimney--had turned my attention to the
+conditions of atmospheric changes. Certain phenomena I had observed
+seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in popular text-books. Indeed,
+as it appeared to me, modifications of a received theory--which might be
+determined by a diligent comparison of existing authorities--would
+suggest a household economy of great practical importance. Certain
+facts, which must have been noted by all the great voyagers of the
+world, might give me data from which to establish the suspected
+conclusion. I accordingly repaired to the library at a very early hour,
+and labored through the day in collecting and committing to writing what
+had been observed by many eminent navigators upon the point in question.
+Four o'clock in the afternoon found me too tired to apply any process of
+analysis to the observations obtained. I therefore retired to my
+accustomed seat, took down almost the first book which came to hand, and
+resigned myself to the impressions of a favorite author. I had passed
+about an hour in a delicious state of dreamy tranquillity, sometimes
+reading, sometimes pausing to color the faded page with the brilliant
+hues of more modern thought, when my attention was attracted by a
+familiar voice proceeding from the neighborhood of the Mather Safe.
+
+"The President and Treasurer were to have been here at five o'clock."
+
+"I have heard nothing of it," said the Librarian. "I am sure that the
+President is out of town for the day."
+
+"Strange! strange!" exclaimed the Reverend Mr. Clifton, in a very
+excited tone. "I wish to make a deposit of great importance in the
+Mather Safe. I had the assurance that the Safe should be opened at five
+this afternoon. Here, read the solemn promise upon which I have come
+from Foxden!"
+
+The Librarian glanced at an open letter which Clifton held out to him,
+and said, in a quiet manner,--
+
+"The President promises to meet you in the College Library on the
+afternoon of Thursday, the twenty-fourth instant; to-day is Wednesday,
+the twenty-third."
+
+"Is it possible?" muttered the clergyman, with a look of startled
+despair. "Pardon my disturbance. I have been hardly myself for these
+last weeks. Yet I can wait."
+
+I spoke to Mr. Clifton as he was about to leave the library. He blenched
+at hearing my voice, and strove to conceal the package beneath his arm.
+
+"How do my good friends in Foxden?" said I, inviting him into my alcove.
+"Is it true that Dr. Dastick has presented his cabinet of curiosities to
+the town?"
+
+"What are you reading?" said the clergyman, in a tone of curt authority
+very foreign to the mild persuasiveness of his usual professional
+accents.
+
+I exhibited the title of the book: it was the "Meditations of
+Descartes."
+
+"And do you follow those who vainly seek for truth through the inner
+world of man, not conforming themselves to the necessities of the
+outward world and the teachings of Revelation?"
+
+I defended the usefulness of some acquaintance with the original and
+powerful thinker, whose apologies are certainly profuse enough to
+satisfy the most orthodox.
+
+"Yes; I suppose you read Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, the Atheism of
+D'Holbach, Utilitarianism Systematized by Auguste Comte! Did you ever go
+fishing in a dory when the wind was off shore?"
+
+There was an alarm in the eye and manner of Mr. Clifton, a tremulous
+restlessness in his speech, which warned me to avoid discussion, and
+endeavor to soothe his agitation. It was only to the last interrogatory,
+therefore, that I made some light reply.
+
+"The sea sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an
+extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations
+some illustration which presents itself,--"the boat tosses on from wave
+to wave, for dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from
+shore, and throw the anchor. What auspicious expansion of soul and body!
+How we slide up and down the backs of great billows, and cast our lines
+with ever-varying success! But the night comes, and with it the
+necessity of rowing back against wind and tide. Ah, then how long the
+lonely ocean-leagues! How distant the time when we may hope to stand
+confused and giddy upon solid earth! Some never see the land again, but
+are swept out into the storm and darkness, and are lost,--_lost_!"
+
+"I presume I understand the significance of your similitude," I replied,
+a little annoyed at this inopportune indulgence of the pastoral
+privilege. "You would imply the dangerous tendency of a certain sort of
+philosophical speculation; and so far we doubtless agree. Yet I ought to
+say, that, in cases where personal investigation is possible, I would
+take neither popular clamor nor learned dogmatism as conclusive evidence
+against any writer's honesty and usefulness. With the vulgar, genius has
+always seemed a sort of madness; and should a man rise preeminent above
+the teachers of his generation, his wisdom would appear to them as
+foolishness."
+
+A change came over the face of Clifton as I said these words. It was as
+if a mask had fallen. Perchance he had wished to appear to me in that
+character of instructor which he desired some competent person to assume
+to him. Now, the relaxed muscles and averted eye only asked the sympathy
+of an equal. He spoke with forced, and almost grating, utterance.
+
+"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may
+bear into the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general
+perception, too pure for even exceptional recognition."
+
+"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says
+true, holds many mystic signals which the past and present could address
+only to the future,--signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but
+which the freemasonry of higher intelligence shall render plain in the
+time hereafter."
+
+"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,--"what if I had
+come to add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may
+be for other times? What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we
+common men, who find a life full of active duties presented to our
+acceptance,--should such as we, I say, receive this world as a pageant
+before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The conceit of
+external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
+element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind
+only an awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now
+tolerated, but an extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether
+wanting the perception, that, rising from the gross symbols of language,
+can know the subtile and precious emotion which in a more advanced state
+of being those symbols might suggest."
+
+As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous
+excitability, I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what
+he said, or even demand that it be made intelligible by further
+explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied in striving to identify
+this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance, the pastor
+of the First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had
+once been said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality
+popularly known as "The Transcendentalists." But this was many years
+ago; and the world always supposed that he had outgrown his early
+errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England, a more
+genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
+remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to
+resist the social influences into which they may be thrown. This was
+probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from
+the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life
+seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to
+contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which
+should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some moments,
+Clifton again addressed me.
+
+"Recollections of moments, months of excitement, of intense power, have
+returned! They may not fade again unspoken. You shall know my
+long-cherished secret. Younger in years, you may scarcely advise; but,
+at least, you may give sympathy that shall confirm my decision. I have
+engaged rooms at the neighboring hotel. Come and pass the evening--nay,
+the night--with me; for much must be read and thought and spoken before
+the black veil of personality can be lifted between us."
+
+It has already been observed that my family were at the seaside. This
+circumstance left me sole disposer of my time and localities. How, then,
+resist the inclination to see out the adventure upon which I had
+stumbled? Let me credit myself also with a worthier motive: I saw that
+my companion was in no state to be left to himself,--and, really, there
+was no mutual friend to whom I could consign him. Accordingly I offered
+my arm in a manner to imply acquiescence in his proposal.
+
+We soon reached the hotel, and ascended to a room in the remote corner
+of a spacious wing. Clifton at once turned the key, placed his package
+upon the table, and proceeded to employ a stray bit of carpet in
+stopping a ventilator which communicated with the entry. Having
+satisfied himself that this passage was rendered impervious to sound, he
+drew two chairs up to the table, motioned me into one, and planted
+himself in the other with the air of a man, in popular phrase, about to
+make a night of it.
+
+"Did you ever hear of Herbert Vannelle?" he asked, abruptly.
+
+It can hardly be necessary to say that a substitute is here placed for
+the name really mentioned.
+
+I replied in the negative, and asked where the gentleman lived.
+
+"He lives nowhere on earth; he is dead,--just dead."
+
+"A friend of yours?"
+
+"A master once; now a presence eluding, haunting, torturing. He left me
+this manuscript; it is a 'Philosophy of the Absolute.'" (Here Clifton
+drew from a curiously contrived case of parchment a cluster of pages.)
+"It has now twenty-two hours to appear in the present century. You shall
+devote the night to reading it, and tell me that I have acted well."
+
+A sultry August evening, a smoky boarding-house lamp, much skirmishing
+of mosquitoes, and--a manuscript system of philosophy! The prospect was
+not inviting. The reading of other people's manuscripts is surely the
+crucial test of a devoted benevolence. There are few ways in which I am
+so little ready to oblige my fellow-men. I had, indeed, at times, been
+induced to inspect sundry romances in blotted embryo; but, as yet,
+nobody had called upon me with a system of philosophy. _Printed_
+philosophy is none too easy reading. But to sit there, under the
+guardianship of Clifton, and spell out the dim dogmatism of some
+nebulous fanatic,--of course it was not to be thought of for a moment.
+With a _suave_ periphrasis of speech I questioned the expediency of the
+proposition.
+
+"I shall ring for candles that will burn during the night," said Mr.
+Clifton, heedless of my expostulation. "Also some refreshment. You take
+tea, I suppose? You shall read the first ten pages of Vannelle's
+writing. It is possible you may exercise self-control enough to abandon
+it unfinished. But you will not sleep tonight."
+
+There was a confidence in the minister's tone which gave rather
+unpleasant emphasis to this final prophecy. Still, I believed myself
+capable of the ten pages without establishing a hopelessly wakeful
+condition,--indeed, it was something to be guarantied against the
+opposite infirmity. The tea, accompanied by a few thin shavings of
+toast, presently arrived. The means of procuring light were also
+furnished us. Clifton's hand lay heavily upon the manuscript until the
+attendant had disappeared for the last time, and the door was locked
+behind him. He then opened the papers before me, and signified that the
+time had come. I braced myself as for a serious undertaking.
+
+Thus I accepted the task. How give words to the singular emotions which
+soon possessed me? As if some charm, some spell of magnetism, had been
+given to the paper, my whole consciousness was riveted upon it. I know
+not how to represent this bold, this startling attempt to establish a
+positive basis for metaphysical philosophy, an exact science of all
+things human and divine. Here was a man, perchance of more courage and
+conscience, perchance of more devilish recklessness, than any of his
+contemporaries. But how deal with what came to me from that wondrous
+writing in the ambiguities of common language? All thought--even
+supposing it embodied in a perfect form of speech--is subject to the
+limitations of the recipient mind. My own glimpses of the writer's
+meaning were necessarily most indistinct. I cannot attempt to transfer
+them. I was controlled by a force not my own. The shadow of a mysterious
+power was over me. The mists of sentimental pantheism were left far
+below the clear-cut summits whither the reader was invited to ascend.
+There was an interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the
+apparent letter than that of Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for
+a widely different purpose) what the Romish Church has ever
+declared,--that the Scriptures, recording spiritual truth, cannot be
+comprehensible to the natural understanding,--that, while the Sacred
+Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual
+verity only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was
+an idealism, it nevertheless manifested itself through the plainest
+realities. The solution of the problem seemed to come not from one
+point, but from all points. Certainly there was a tendency towards the
+supersensible; but this direction was taken through stern grappling with
+the actual. At one time I struggled against the august spirit that was
+borne in upon me; at another, I was utterly subdued by the lofty
+enthusiasm of the writer,--something within me capable of absolute
+cognition seemed responding to his appeals. But the pith and vitality of
+this marvel could be recognized only by long experience. And here the
+student was required to stake his soul upon a perilous cast. For, if not
+pursued and fathomed to full satisfaction, this view of things would be
+disturbing, paralyzing. With any half-acceptance a man might scarcely
+live. It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals
+into a musical instrument, and then every event in time might touch it
+to exquisite harmony. But the more ravishing the beauty which seemed
+offered through perfect realization of this knowledge, the more
+blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a
+selfish dilettanteism. For in certain passages were breathed faint
+suggestions, that moral codes held sacred by the people could not bind
+the initiated,--nay, that what seemed most evil might be so explained as
+to become wholly legitimate to the elect.
+
+It was far into the night. I had gone over about a third of the
+manuscript. Sharp questions assailed my ears. Was I bound to jeopard
+all the common good of life for the chance of--just failing to know
+existence from a higher plane? Could I ascend so far above the frailties
+of average men as to receive in purity and innocence the license which
+acceptance of this strange scheme would surely give? Dim-sighted as I
+was, it was necessary to rise and dispel this splendid phantasm. I
+shuddered in sudden alarm at the danger which threatened me. By a
+spasmodic movement, in which I failed to recognize any presence of my
+will, the manuscript was closed and handed to Clifton. Welcome existence
+under coarsest and harshest terms, rather than tamper with such fearful
+possibilities!
+
+For hours the minister had gazed into my face, partaking the excitement
+to which he had subjected me. He had lighted and trimmed the candles, as
+was necessary, but had never broken silence. And now there came from him
+the deep sigh of relief from an absorbing interest; he sighed as a
+little child when the fairytale is ended and the tense strain of
+attention may be relaxed.
+
+"What was this man?" I demanded, hurriedly.
+
+"What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be
+found out at all. What he was is not for me nor for you to know. It is
+possible that he may meet with competent judges hereafter, even among
+men. Look at this address."
+
+Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate
+disposition of the manuscript. It was to remain for eighty years in the
+Mather Safe, and was then to be consigned to the occupant of the Chair
+of Moral Philosophy in the College.
+
+"Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!" I
+exclaimed. "I doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession
+will feel disposed to abandon the market-worth of conventional
+acquirements, and set forth as a humble student of unpopular truth."
+
+The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration
+I had indicated.
+
+The darkest hour of the night had come. Every sound of human activity
+had long ago ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily
+probe an intense experience. I felt that more was to be
+known,--something which the minister longed to tell,--something to which
+what he had caused me to read was to serve as a prelude. I suspected how
+powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence of the Idea
+which he had carried. Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it
+might prevent all harmonious action,--it might ever goad the intellect,
+and crush the heart. As the confession trembled upon the lips of
+Clifton, I signified my profound sympathy. It is an awful moment, when a
+mature man tries to put off the solitariness of his life.
+
+What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person. The
+pathetic earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very
+phrases that he used; there can be few verbal changes as they now flow
+from the pen.
+
+
+II.
+
+NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.
+
+I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great
+bereavement, received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at
+that time about twelve years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome
+annuity, which he spent with the utmost liberality. As I was rather a
+thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was determined that I
+should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my
+seventeenth birthday,--an age somewhat later than the average at that
+time.
+
+Two years before me in college was the class of 18--. Upon the roll of
+its fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an
+orphan, inclined to thought and study beyond the limited academic range
+of those days, endowed with personal fascinations of a very rare and
+peculiar kind,--there seemed only one possible shadow to darken his
+career. In his family there had been said to exist a tendency to
+eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed
+for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college,
+had given much uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle
+with which he was socially connected. Upon the death of his wife he had
+retired to the Vannelle homestead in the northwestern part of
+Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he insisted
+upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and
+companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended
+his studies with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to
+accomplish him in the grace of physical power, at that time little
+recognized as a part of education.
+
+So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the
+young men of the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he
+left America on the day his class graduated. His connections with the
+other students had been very slight. He had never cared to acquire that
+fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon which college-rank
+depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value in his
+connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with
+the openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the
+bewildering sophistries of the school-philosophies, and their aimless
+wrangling over verbal conceits.
+
+At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting
+rounds upon the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often
+encountered Vannelle in search of some volume of which I had just
+possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I was soon fascinated by
+a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and persuaded by
+a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no
+other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that
+which the mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an
+interest in directing my inquiries along the paths to which they
+naturally tended, he never communicated the results of his own studies,
+or offered me the slightest assistance in generalizing my random
+observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he was
+influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the
+writings of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest
+notoriety, yet never for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights
+where those earnest spirits soared.
+
+Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the
+time that my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him
+during his absence was from the scattered notices of
+newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert possessed the
+privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for
+knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter
+dated from X----, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed
+almost a command, to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert
+had returned, and thus abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until
+the autumn the study of a profession, I promised to come to him for a
+few weeks,--a visit which might be extended, were it mutually agreeable.
+
+There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars,
+before arriving in the village of X----; there were also six rough miles
+of carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house
+by the damp river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there,
+Vannelle stood at the door to greet me.
+
+"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering
+himself of some studied speech,--"we have six months' concern together;
+then we may stand at the parting of the ways,--we may cleave to one
+another, or separate forever."
+
+A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and
+cedars. The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into
+dusty ridges. The wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the
+pine-trees without. Little oval mirrors distorting the human countenance
+within. In the living-room (so called by those able to live in it)
+loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral proportion,--a ghastly altar
+which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel fully justified in
+protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the house,
+had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused
+mass of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical
+apparatus about the floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to
+the ceiling;--at first I supposed them to be made of painted wood;
+afterwards I discovered they were of iron, and filled with rare books
+and manuscripts.
+
+"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He
+wished to get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is
+no escape in a New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our
+farmer, could never resist the feminine itch to put things to rights.
+She was always contriving to arrange papers and books in symmetrical
+piles where nothing could be found. My father could never turn his back
+but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were
+lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom
+of dust that hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this
+room, and kept the key of it, there was no more trouble."
+
+I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which
+I hardly dare to put into words must accompany them. All these
+surroundings, seen by me for the first time, had a fearful familiarity.
+In some occult state of spiritual existence I seemed to have known them
+all. I have learned that the soul may enter into communion with other
+minds otherwise than through the senses,--nay, more, it may thus take an
+inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had such
+proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this
+startling suspicion for the first time.
+
+"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the
+house. "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber
+projecting over the porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he
+wore at city club-houses and family-dinners,--but the man as you knew
+him _here_, how little does it resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet
+which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it
+is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be
+interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as
+corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious
+subjects and execrable drawing always put me."
+
+The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and
+said, slowly,--
+
+"Have you been here before?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned
+purity. It is as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."
+
+The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the
+study. I glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which
+seemed in strange contrast with the exquisitely neat and even
+fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of proud pity touched the
+lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as if I had
+read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:--
+
+"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of
+mankind, fret our souls at trifles,--we, who are to be instruments in
+marshalling the race from slavery and folly to wisdom and freedom?
+Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth shall be alike,
+and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as the
+highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to
+declare!"
+
+These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into
+my consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been
+uttered. It was with awe that this mystic correspondence between mind
+and mind was made plain to me. One man out of this myriad-bodied
+humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was never more to be
+alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in the
+potter's hands!
+
+At length Herbert spoke.
+
+"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to
+me,--not by my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till
+I go to join my father, with his great work more nearly completed than
+when it came to my hands. At that table he died, with some glimpses of
+the promised land whither he tended,--where he prayed that I might
+enter."
+
+There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,--no utterance of the heart,
+but rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered
+in the memory.
+
+"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,--you, whose career might
+be such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must
+know, the wonderful gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be
+ignorant of the fascination you might exercise over man and woman."
+
+"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise,"
+exclaimed Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,--if not through spiritual
+grace, then by some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you
+certain qualities of mind that may serve to regulate the equipoise of
+mine. I have the means to provide for us both during the high
+speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in this
+undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural
+from the spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of
+obtaining an absolute ground for the philosophy which should include all
+things human and divine. He passed onward before the inestimable gift he
+seemed to have won could be set forth in the symbols of the world. To
+see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular adaptation through
+which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express the
+truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such
+colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man
+has found out the knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos:
+shall he not perfect that knowledge in the Law which includes the divine
+element by which the universe is informed? How can we love with our
+whole heart what we do not know with our whole mind? Clifton, I declare
+to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and acts is
+possible to man!"
+
+I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been
+moved by utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the
+words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring
+courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was
+produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of
+some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst of the
+garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes
+shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
+
+I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly
+lores, that I at length came to think it possible he might be the
+appointed instrument of communicating the singular intelligence that he
+sought. He proposed to review the different systems built by human
+thought before applying himself to the problem of finding a system of
+philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from the
+extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position--when that
+position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious
+thinker--some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking
+from the conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after
+the inaccessible, but a definite effort so to place the soul and
+discipline the understanding that wisdom could be realized without
+process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for
+the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as
+finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He
+declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of
+speculative deism. Let me also say this for my friend,--that his
+directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but
+what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have
+called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow
+wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest
+self-culture only as a state of more passionate yearning for
+regeneration.
+
+What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble
+companionship? how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the
+feasibility of the object he strove to attain? We read together certain
+manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in which, wrapt in a gorgeous
+symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which, at times,
+could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints,
+apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored
+to grasp them, vanished like a vision.
+
+Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with
+Vannelle in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I
+knew an intellectual intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of
+spirit wholly delivered from the burden of the flesh. Vannelle talked
+like one inspired upon the higher problems of metaphysical research,
+showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations of the
+philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to
+have cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it
+from a position whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable
+oppressions marked the rhythm in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries
+of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of blessedness, were equally
+wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed impossible that any
+words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the thought
+which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding
+to what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of
+opinion man had known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and
+despair analogous to those which succeed physical intoxication. The
+grosser systems of antiquity were not only considered, but actually
+personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us to penetrate
+into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how
+nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how
+the noblest virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we
+learned to welcome these convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly
+bearing us onward towards our destined goal.
+
+--But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was
+the delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?)
+which has overhung my earthly life.
+
+Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,--partially
+broken. During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from
+friends once dear to me had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly
+valueless. On the eleventh of November I started,--as a black seal was
+to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last instalment of his
+annuity had been paid, and my little sister, an orphan and penniless,
+was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then
+hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put
+the letter into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him
+forever. Let me forget the bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged
+to provide for my sister from his own ample means, and even offered her
+an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient sanity to perceive
+the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither
+removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a
+condition to be sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would
+be confused, and finally petrified. Had this refined probing and
+questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was this the end of my Absolute
+Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of the conscience
+and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such
+questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have
+bantered aside. I seemed to realize the torture described in the dream
+of Dante,--two souls struggling together in one frail body. I had been
+applauding good and condemning evil when it cost me nothing but the
+sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose cracked and
+shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the
+victory have ached through my life.
+
+There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my
+bread; for how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and
+huckster through the world,--_I_, who had thought to condition the
+Spirit of the Universe? But there were metaphors faintly shadowing
+divine things, symbols adapted to the limitations of the popular mind,
+and with these I might do an honest work for the souls of men. _Honest?_
+Yes,--unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he declared that he spoke
+of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something than not
+to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the
+clergy this is the daily cross,--the necessity of maintaining a fixed
+position, and ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever
+yearning upward to be taught.
+
+It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by
+school-teaching, I achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to
+qualify for enrolment among the liberal clergy of New England. Until the
+time when my sister left me by marriage I was settled at N----, on the
+Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old Dr. P---- of Foxden, and I
+received a call to his vacant parish. I knew that the sort of society to
+be found in that place would minister to my most urgent need. I craved
+some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal
+spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might
+speak freely, and from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the
+years had led us! Sometimes there came a whisper that I had been
+snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls; sometimes my only
+opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead. I
+could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever
+was I controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant
+power. No occupation was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading
+presence of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary
+of the day that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a
+written sermon on those solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not
+of faith is sin." For the first time I shrank from the consciousness
+that the words uttered were true to me in a very different sense from
+that in which the congregation received them. I found it difficult to
+poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available
+representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously
+in the afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could
+perceive that my pulse and breathing were accelerated. A certain
+numbness of the brain seemed pierced with convulsive, fugitive shocks.
+An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral sympathy, seemed
+beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but could
+find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come
+incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:--
+
+"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and
+boisterous objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too
+nearly acquainteth us. More of these no man hath known than myself;
+which I confess I conquered, not in martial attitude, but on my knees."
+
+An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have
+said that I spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before.
+Indeed, I was conscious of a capacity to receive and convey such
+portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to their needs. To speak in
+figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued my soul.
+
+Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw
+myself upon a sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state
+where one far distant may make himself perceived and known. The occult
+power of foreknowing events, the delicate perception of forbidden
+things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the brain. I became
+conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I
+knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the
+night. One by one went out the scattered village-lights. Another
+consciousness of twenty years seemed compressed into those brilliant,
+bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort and supplied oil; it
+would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew that
+Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.
+
+A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul
+burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the
+face,--it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper: it was
+spectral,--blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted
+vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph! The old
+idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon my
+visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of
+time. His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself--and
+wait. At length the silence was broken.
+
+"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught!
+For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense.
+The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me.
+Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality. I
+have struggled fiercely. I have also conquered."
+
+The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some
+voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had
+cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would
+kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that
+chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand
+Vannelle had interpreted literally.
+
+"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction
+seized by effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity,
+and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me
+round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to
+anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of
+skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
+affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men?
+How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it
+alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you
+from this haze of thought and feeling,--I, who have even now discarded
+Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."
+
+"I hope to be pardoned," I said,--"the current of this life sets so in
+favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with
+sentiment,--why try to give them ideas?"
+
+"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties,"
+exclaimed Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the
+pardonable weakness of one who has done his best. You may be guiltless
+in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction."
+
+"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.
+
+"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in
+this manuscript the result of my life,--the result of two lives. Here is
+written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human
+language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the
+System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon
+Law."
+
+I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.
+
+"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
+manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may
+be brought to you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with
+the pride of inventing arguments and detecting analogies, if they have
+only given you the petty skill of a petty scholar, why then dally on
+with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments, and give others the
+blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."
+
+"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may
+have found, it is for your honor to promulgate."
+
+"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual
+manhood is indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters
+towards earth. My responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will
+now begin."
+
+A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid
+as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that
+Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble
+growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate
+excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I
+might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle
+seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable
+thirst that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the
+manuscript, and devoured page after page. Then I felt the approaches of
+a supreme despotism that might annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to
+be,--that might compel me to denounce all that I had taught, to hear all
+that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer at me as an impostor,
+an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited to come
+above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and
+encouraged by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself
+where the most earnest souls--unless a second birth could be granted
+them--would scoff with the ignorance and intolerance of the mass.
+
+At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.
+
+One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A
+physical emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the
+influence of the night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I
+closed the manuscript forever. Hereditary imperfections of body and mind
+confine me to a sphere of reputable usefulness. If I have sinned in the
+past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes suspect, I have thrust
+from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss through
+all eternity will be mine.
+
+In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+
+III.
+
+As the last words of his strange narration fell from Clifton's lips, he
+bowed his head and was greatly agitated. The vast theologic conception
+over which he had so long brooded, instead of lifting him on high, had
+crushed him to the earth. His moral consciousness had demanded a
+satisfaction which he lacked integrity of purpose to pursue and
+challenge. A fixed conviction of the dreariest pessimism would have been
+better for this man than the lofty uncertainty which had tortured his
+days; for in the belief that one may neither struggle nor aspire there
+is a certain practical drift. But how shall he do any good who bears
+about him a quick conscience, a skeptical understanding, sensitive
+religious affections, and a feeble will? Charles Clifton had neither the
+leisure, nor possibly the application, to follow the creeping advances
+of systematic knowledge. He had listened to a fatal persuasion, and at
+the same time had sought to satisfy contradictory principles of the
+human mind. The kindest thing I could do for him was soon perceived.
+
+"Reverend Sir," I said, "you must permit me to advise you. It is now six
+o'clock. In an hour the early train leaves for Foxden. You must take it
+and return home. Any further vacuum in your daily employment will
+produce a crushing pressure from without that might endanger reason
+itself. I solemnly promise to deposit this manuscript in the Mather
+Safe,--nay, I will not leave town until the President and Treasurer have
+met me this afternoon according to your agreement. I pledge you my honor
+that the parchment shall be consigned to its resting-place with every
+necessary formality."
+
+My companion gazed long upon vacancy before returning any answer. He
+strove to dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in
+shapeless beauty. He walked up and down the chamber, paused, threw open
+the window, and looked upon the street below. I felt that every petty
+detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful vividness upon
+the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he spoke to this
+effect: --
+
+"A grief has been lessened in giving it words. My deepest and most
+solitary moments have been revealed to human sympathy, and the relief is
+great. It may be that I have been created to some wholesome end,--that
+some truth may shine before the world through what seems the failure of
+my life. I will return at once to the sphere of the senses: it is, as
+you say, all that is left me. Let who will inquire into the significance
+and purpose of the Universe; it is for me to work in the bondage of the
+flesh, to be the humble tool of the age in which my lot is cast."
+
+Yet it was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the
+conclusion of the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar
+nervous temperament foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the
+precious legacy of his friend. It was only by addressing his reason in
+repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating my entire fidelity,
+that I induced him to yield.
+
+It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.
+
+I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding.
+Without acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by
+what I had read and heard. As Clifton emerged from the magical influence
+of Vannelle, was it not concentrated upon me? The impulse to return to
+the perusal of the manuscript was almost irresistible. Yet it was
+evident, that, failing to receive as my very life what was there
+written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and
+contradictions. A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my
+only safety.
+
+It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries
+tending to modify the received understanding of a certain natural law.
+During my morning in the College Library I had collected the records of
+many facts, which, laboriously compared, might confirm the hypothesis I
+had conceived. I now braced myself to the task of tracing an order in
+these random observations. I was soon stimulated by perceiving that my
+statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at
+first roused my suspicion. More and more plainly did man's experience
+respond to the results I had dared to predict. Trivial circumstances,
+noted in remote times and disconnected places, pointed in one direction,
+and there beat the regular pulse of Nature.
+
+It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards
+discovered, that the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been
+already conceived and passed upon by a not very eminent scientist in one
+of the Western States. But at that time absorption in the search for
+attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with very brief
+intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the
+afternoon-hour for visiting the library.
+
+The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o'clock.
+
+For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather
+Safe, wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular
+than the consignment about to be made to its keeping.
+
+"Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?" inquired the President.
+
+"I am here to represent him," I replied. "He made a strange mistake in
+the day of appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning.
+The package which he wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my
+hand."
+
+"_Lex Universalis Naturæ_; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE," exclaimed
+the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment. "Poh,
+poh! I thought that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to
+the limbo of fallacies."
+
+"By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for
+anything not transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has," I rejoined,
+somewhat tartly.
+
+"Come, come!" said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones;
+"since the days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians
+have generally been broken-down poets, and should be treated with the
+greatest tenderness. Some flighty minds will prefer dangerous trips to
+dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of figures; but the mass of our
+graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that only the
+mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers
+only natural philosophers are competent instructors."
+
+"Yet, Sir," I said, "you will remember that the time was when your
+natural philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State.
+Even the mathematician is defined by an old lexicographer to be '_Magus
+dæmonum invocator_'; and I cannot forget that all that is of honor and
+respect to-day is but the actual of a once despised ideal."
+
+I really marvelled at my own audacity in presuming to question the words
+of this distinguished and excellent gentleman. Indeed, it was
+particularly surprising, because (if I knew myself) I precisely agreed
+with him. But there is a certain waywardness in my composition, which
+loves to puncture an inflated conventionality, even when I myself am
+most conventional.
+
+In the mean time the Treasurer, taking the President's key with his own,
+had opened the Safe. I looked in and beheld coffers of lead and oak,
+nooks and pigeon-holes covered and sealed with the College seal, little
+cells of glass which appeared to hold documents of the utmost
+importance, and, in short, whatever might best defy the injuries of
+time. The weighty book which registered the contents of the Safe was
+opened before me. I was told to write the number assigned to the
+manuscript, to describe its present condition, and to indicate its
+destination. This I carefully did, and was about to confide my charge to
+its long oblivion.
+
+"Stay!" said the President. "You have forgotten the mottoes! Here is
+only one; and it is our rule that every deposit in the Mather Safe be
+distinguished by three, in as many languages.
+
+  '_Alteri Sæculo_.'
+
+The selection is good, though it has already been adopted by a
+Massachusetts statesman. It is now for you to supply two others."
+
+Singular as it may appear, this sudden call to perform a trifling office
+which I had not anticipated, filled me with a conflict of emotions. In
+choosing another's words, I seemed to indorse or repudiate the strange
+matter with which they were to be associated. I thought of Vannelle's
+wondrous language, of Clifton's exhilaration, and of the vivid buoyancy
+with which my spirit had striven to rise. I even groped for some phrase
+which might hint what delicate aërial impressions had tended to condense
+the soul on the supreme point of spiritual ecstasy. But memory was a
+blank when I demanded words for this seeming-glorious fact in the
+experience of humanity. Success was made impossible by the very
+intensity of the effort to summon an appropriate message to be dropped
+over the abyss of Time. I was confident that there were many apt things
+which might be said, if I could come at them, as it were, sideways. In
+order that I might take them at this advantage, I snatched a letter from
+my pocket, and began to read. My eye was soon caught by the impression
+of a seal that I had once given my wife. It was a good [woman's] motto,
+I jestingly told her; and now it was returned to me at my sorest need.
+Six little words of the good Pascal,--
+
+  "_Le plus sûr est de croire_."
+
+Something compelled me to write them, and a new freedom was with me when
+I had done so.
+
+"Make haste, make haste, for the prayer-bell is ringing!" cried the
+President "See, here is a copy of Plato's 'Phædrus,'--a work which our
+vapory brethren are fond of quoting, generally at second-hand; perhaps
+you may pick out a sentence that will prophesy with sufficient
+ambiguity."
+
+But it was not Plato or his "Phædrus" that then claimed my thoughts.
+There loomed a Rock graven with more august instruction than the sage of
+the Academy was privileged to communicate,--a Rock against which the
+heaving surface of human opinion had chafed and broken in vain. Tossed
+to and fro upon the tide of life, who has not sometimes listened to the
+wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical Interpretation," "Absolute
+Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has never been caught
+by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers,
+Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature,
+Clairvoyance, and Magnetic Currents? Happy those who are able to return
+to that one channel through which magnetic currents have indeed
+descended from an unseen sphere, and touched the noblest hearts! For
+there _is_ a certain mediation between the necessities and aspirations
+of man,--an assured deliverance from the gross and sordid surroundings
+of his earthly life. There came before me one simple period from a
+familiar Book. Most direct and confident is the solemn statement. I
+wrote it as the final motto.
+
+
+     "NOW THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTILE THAN ANY BEAST OF THE FIELD WHICH
+     THE LORD GOD HAD MADE."
+
+THE TERTIARY AGE, AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC ANIMALS.
+
+
+In entering upon the Tertiaries, we reach that geological age which,
+next to his own, has the deepest interest for man. The more striking
+scenes of animal life, hitherto confined chiefly to the ocean, are now
+on land; the extensive sheets of fresh water are filled with fishes of a
+comparatively modern character,--with Whitefish, Pickerel, Perch, Eels,
+etc.,--while the larger quadrupeds are introduced upon the continents so
+gradually prepared to receive them. The connection of events throughout
+the Tertiaries, considered as leading up to the coming of man, may be
+traced not only in the physical condition of the earth, and in the
+presence of the large terrestrial Mammalia, but also in the appearance
+of those groups of animals and plants which we naturally associate with
+the domestic and social existence of man. Cattle and Horses are first
+found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the Rosaceæ, with their
+variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the
+shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of
+man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil
+vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this
+point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those
+conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had
+already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn and winter, its
+seed-time and harvest, though neither sower nor reaper was there; the
+forests then, as now, dropped their thick carpet of leaves upon the
+ground in the autumn, and in many localities they remain where they
+originally fell, with a layer of soil between the successive layers of
+leaves,--a leafy chronology, as it were, by which we read the passage of
+the years which divided these deposits from each other. Where the leaves
+have fallen singly on a clayey soil favorable for receiving such
+impressions, they have daguerreotyped themselves with the most wonderful
+accuracy, and the Oaks, Poplars, Willows, Maples, Walnuts, Gum- and
+Cinnamon-trees, etc., of the Tertiaries are as well known to us as are
+those of our own time.
+
+It was an eventful day, not only for science, but for the world, when a
+Siberian fisherman chanced to observe a singular mound lying near the
+mouth of the River Lena, where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. During
+the warmer summer-weather, he noticed, that, as the snow gradually
+melted, this mound assumed a more distinct and prominent outline, and at
+length, on one side of it, where the heat of the sun was greatest, a
+dark body became exposed, which, when completely uncovered, proved to be
+that of an immense elephant, in so perfect a state of preservation that
+the dogs and wolves were attracted to it as by the smell of fresh meat,
+and came to feed upon it at night. The man knew little of the value of
+his discovery, but the story went abroad, and an Englishman travelling
+in Russia, being curious to verify it, visited the spot, and actually
+found the remains where they had been reported to lie, on the frozen
+shore of the Arctic Sea,--strange burial-place enough for an animal
+never known to exist out of tropical climates. Little beside the
+skeleton was left, though parts of the skin remained covered with hair,
+showing how perfect must have been the condition of the body when first
+exposed. The tusks had been sold by the fisherman; but Mr. Adams
+succeeded in recovering them; and collecting all the bones except those
+of one foot, which had been carried off by the wolves, he had them
+removed to St. Petersburg, where the skeleton now stands in the Imperial
+Museum. The inhabitants of Siberia seem to be familiar with this animal,
+which they designate by the name of _Mammoth_, while naturalists call
+it _Elephas primigenius_. The circumstance that they abound in the
+frozen drift of the great northern plain of Asia, and are occasionally
+exposed in consequence of the wearing of the large rivers traversing
+Siberia, has led to the superstition among the Tongouses, that the
+Mammoths live under ground, and die whenever, on coming to the surface,
+the sunlight falls upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Had this been the only creature of the kind found so far from the
+countries to which elephants are now exclusively confined, it might have
+been believed that some strange accident had brought it to the spot
+where it was buried. But it was not long before similar remains were
+found in various parts of Europe,--in Russia, in Germany, in Spain, and
+in Italy. The latter were readily accounted for by the theory that they
+must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the
+armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have
+been swept from India by some great flood, and stranded where they were
+found. It was Cuvier, entitled by his intimate acquaintance with the
+anatomy of living animals to an authoritative opinion in such matters,
+who first dared to assert that these remains belonged to no elephant of
+our period. He rested this belief upon structural evidence, and insisted
+that an Indian elephant, brought upon the waves of a flood to Siberia,
+would be an Indian elephant still, while all these remains differed in
+structure from any species existing at present. This statement aroused
+research in every direction, and the number of fossil Mammalia found
+within the next few years, and proved by comparison to be different from
+any living species, soon demonstrated the truth of his conclusion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Shortly after the discovery of fossil elephants had opened this new path
+of investigation, some curious bones were found by some workmen in the
+quarries of Montmartre, near Paris, and brought to Cuvier for
+examination. Although few in number, and affording but very scanty
+_data_ for such a decision, he at once pronounced them to be the remains
+of some extinct animal preceding the present geological age. Here, then,
+at his very door, as it were, was a settlement of that old creation in
+which he could pursue the inquiry, already become so important in its
+bearings. It was not long before other bones of the same kind were
+found, though nothing as yet approaching an entire skeleton. However,
+with such means as he had, Cuvier began a comparison with all the living
+Mammalia,--with the human skeleton first, with Monkeys, with the larger
+Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the smaller Mammalia, then with
+the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to find some
+resemblance. He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to
+the family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare
+all the living species, till he had collected ample evidence to show
+that the bones in question did not correspond with any species, and
+could not even be referred to any genus, now in existence. At length
+there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same
+animal,--next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole
+head with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with
+Cuvier's vast knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the
+whole skeleton. At about the same time, in the same locality, were found
+other bones and teeth also, differing from those first discovered, and
+yet equally unlike those of any living animal. The first evidently
+belonged to some stout and heavy animal, the others were more slender
+and of lighter build. From these fragments, ample evidence to him of his
+results, he drew the outlines of two animals: one which he called the
+Palæotherium, (old animal,) a figure of which is given in the above
+wood-cut, and the other Anoplotherium, (animal without fangs). He
+presented these figures with an explanatory memoir at the Academy, and
+announced them as belonging to some creation preceding the present,
+since no such animals had ever existed in our own geological period.
+Such a statement was a revelation to the scientific world: some looked
+upon it with suspicion and distrust; others, who knew more of
+comparative anatomy, hailed it as introducing a new era in science; but
+it was not till complete specimens were actually found of animals
+corresponding perfectly to those figured and described by Cuvier, and
+proving beyond a doubt their actual existence in ancient times, that all
+united in wonder and admiration at the result obtained by him with such
+scanty means.
+
+It would seem that the family of Pachyderms was largely represented
+among the early Mammalia; for, since Cuvier named these species, a
+number of closely allied forms have been found in deposits belonging to
+the same epoch. Of course, the complete specimens are rare; but the
+fragments of such skeletons occur in abundance, showing that these
+old-world Pachyderms, resembling the Tapirs more than any other living
+representatives of the family, were very numerous in the lower
+Tertiaries.
+
+There is, however, one animal now in existence, forming one of those
+singular links before alluded to between the present and the past, of
+which I will say a few words here, though its relation is rather with a
+later group of Tertiary Pachyderms than with those described by Cuvier.
+On the coast of Florida there is an animal of very massive, clumsy
+build, long considered to be a Cetacean, but now recognized, by some
+naturalists at least, as belonging to the order of Pachyderms. In form
+it resembles the Cetaceans, though it has a fan-shaped tail, instead of
+the broad flapper of the Whales. It inhabits fresh waters or shoal
+waters, and is not so exclusively aquatic as the oceanic Cetaceans. Its
+most striking feature is the form of the lower jaw, which is bent
+downward, with the front teeth hanging from it. This animal is called
+the Manatee, or Sea-Cow. There are three species known to
+naturalists,--one in Tampa Bay, one in the Amazon, and one in Africa. In
+the Tertiary deposits of Germany there has been found an animal allied
+in some of its features to those described by Cuvier, but it has the
+crown of its teeth folded like the Tapir, while the lower jaw is turned
+down with a long tusk growing from it. This animal has been called the
+Dinotherium. A part of the head, showing the heavy jaws and the
+formidable tusk, is represented in the subjoined wood-cut.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Its hanging lower jaw, with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly
+to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some
+resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison
+with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was
+found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit
+with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its
+position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. The Elephant was now examined;
+and in him also a rudimentary tooth appeared in the lower jaw, not cut
+through, but placed in the same relation to the jaw and the other teeth
+as that of the Mastodon. It would seem, then, that the Manatee makes one
+in this series of Dinotherium, Mastodon, and Elephant, and represents
+the aquatic Pachyderms, occupying the same relation to the terrestrial
+Pachyderms as the Seals bear to the terrestrial Carnivora, and, like
+them, lowest in structure among their kind.
+
+The announcement of Cuvier's results stimulated research, and from this
+time forward Tertiary Mammalia became the subject of extensive and most
+important investigations among naturalists. The attention of collectors
+once drawn to these remains, they were found in such numbers that the
+wonder was how they had been so long hidden from the observation of men.
+They remind us chiefly of tropical animals; indeed, Tigers, Hyenas,
+Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had their home in
+countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the
+climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present.
+Bones of many of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France,
+Italy, and England. Perhaps the story of Kirkdale Cave, where the first
+important discovery of this kind was made on English soil, may not be so
+well known to American readers as to forbid its repetition here.
+
+It was in the summer of 1821 that some workmen, employed in quarrying
+stone upon the slope of a limestone hill at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, came
+accidentally upon the mouth of a cavern. Overgrown with grass and
+bushes, the mouth of this cave in the hill-side had been effectually
+closed against all intruders, and it was not strange that its existence
+had never been suspected. The hole was small, but large enough to admit
+a man on his hands and knees; and the workmen, creeping in through the
+opening, found that it led into a cavern, broad in some parts, but low
+throughout. There were only a few spots where a man could stand upright;
+but it was quite extensive, with branches opening out from it, some of
+which have not yet been explored. The whole floor was strewn, from one
+end to the other, with hundreds of bones, like a huge dog-kennel. The
+workmen wondered a little at their discovery, but, remembering that
+there had been a murrain among the cattle in this region some years
+before, they came to the conclusion that these must be the bones of
+cattle that had died in great numbers at that time; and, having so
+settled the matter to their own satisfaction, they took little heed to
+the bones, but threw many of them out on the road with the common
+limestone. Fortunately, a gentleman, living in the neighborhood, whose
+attention had been attracted to them, preserved them from destruction;
+and a few months after the discovery of the cave, Dr. Buckland, the
+great English geologist, visited Kirkdale, to examine its strange
+contents, which proved indeed stranger than any one had imagined; for
+many of these remains belonged to animals never before found in England.
+The bones of Hyenas, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, and Hippopotamuses
+were mingled with those of Deer, Bears, Wolves, Foxes, and many smaller
+creatures. The bones were gnawed, and many were broken, evidently not by
+natural decay, but seemed to have been snapped violently apart. After
+the most complete investigation of the circumstances, Dr. Buckland
+convinced himself, and proved to the satisfaction of all scientific men,
+that the cave had been a den of Hyenas[A] at a time when they, as well
+as Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., existed in England in as great
+numbers as they now do in the wildest parts of tropical Asia or Africa.
+The narrow entrance to the cave still retained the marks of grease and
+hair, such as one may see on the bars of a cage in a menagerie against
+which the imprisoned animals have been in the habit of rubbing
+themselves constantly, and there were marks of the same kind on the
+floor and walls.
+
+[Footnote A: Among the other facts showing that Kirkdale Cave had been
+the den of these animals, and not tenanted as their home by any of the
+other creatures whose remains occurred there, were the excrements of the
+Hyenas found in considerable quantity by Dr. Buckland, and identified as
+such by the keeper of a menagerie. Any one who may wish to read the
+whole history of Dr. Buckland's investigations of this matter, showing
+the patience and sagacity with which he collected and arranged the
+evidence, will find a full account of Kirkdale Cave and other caverns
+containing fossil bones in his "Reliquiæ Diluvianæ."]
+
+It was evident that the Hyenas were the lords of this ancient cavern,
+and the other animals their unwilling guests; for the remains of the
+latter were those which had been most gnawed, broken, and mangled; and
+the head of an enormous Hyena, with gigantic fangs found complete, bore
+ample evidence to their great size and power. Some of the animals, such
+as the Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., could not have been brought into
+the cave without being first killed and torn to pieces, for it is not
+large enough to admit them. But their gnawed and broken bones attest,
+nevertheless, that they were devoured like the rest; and probably the
+Hyenas then had the same propensity which characterizes those of our own
+time, to tear in pieces the body of any dead animal, and carry it to
+their den to feed upon it apart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other
+caverns in Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a
+gigantic species of Bear. Their remains, mingled with those of the
+animals on which they fed, have been found in great numbers in the
+Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia. The subjoined wood-cut shows the
+head of this formidable beast, which must have exceeded in size any Bear
+now living. Indeed, although there were many smaller kinds, and the
+other types of the Animal Kingdom in the Tertiaries seem to approach
+very nearly both in size and general character their modern
+representatives, yet, on the whole, the earlier Mammalia were giants in
+comparison with those now living. The Mastodon and Mammoth, as compared
+with the modern Elephant, the Megatherium, as compared with the Sloths
+of present times, the Hyenas and Bears of the European caverns, and the
+fossil Elk of Ireland, by the side of which even the Moose of our
+Northern woods is belittled, are remarkable instances in proof of this.
+One cannot but be struck with the fact that this first representation of
+Mammalia, the very impersonation of brute force in power, size, and
+ferocity, immediately preceded the introduction of man, with whose
+creation intelligence and moral strength became the dominant influences
+on earth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the
+North-American continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The
+magnificent specimens preserved in this country are too well known to
+require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros occur also in the
+recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect
+skeletons have been found. The Edentata, now confined to South America
+and the western coast of Africa, were also numerous in the Southern
+States during that time; their remains have been found as far north as
+the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must not judge of the Tertiary
+Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the Armadillos, the
+Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but
+formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the
+Megalonyx, and the Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant,
+and others about the same size of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The
+subjoined wood-cut represents a Mylodon in the act of lifting himself
+against the trunk of a tree.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were clumsy brutes, and though their limbs were evidently built
+with reference to powerful movements, perhaps climbing, or at least
+rising on their hind quarters, the act of climbing with them cannot have
+had anything of the nimbleness or activity generally associated with it.
+On the contrary, they probably were barely able to support their huge
+bodies on their hind limbs, which are exceedingly massive, and on the
+stiff, heavy tail, while they dragged down with their front limbs the
+branches of the trees, and fed upon them at leisure. The Zoölogical
+Museum at Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates
+for a very fine set of casts taken from the Megatherium in the British
+Museum. They are now mounted, and may be seen in one of the
+exhibition-rooms of the building. Large Reptiles, but very unlike those
+of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of
+Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the
+Tertiary epochs. The wood-cut below represents a gigantic Salamander of
+the Tertiary deposits. It is a curious fact, illustrative of the
+ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that, when the
+remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first
+discovered toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were
+described by old Professor Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant
+destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually preserved, not for their
+scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and described in
+a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Homo Diluvii Testis." Among the Tertiary
+Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their
+size as well as by their extensive distribution. Their remains have been
+found both in the far West and in the East. The fossil Turtles of
+Nebraska are well known to American naturalists; but the Oriental one
+exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most gigantic representative
+of the order known thus far. A man could stand under the arch of the
+shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than
+the most cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed,
+they are so well known, and have been so fully represented in
+text-books, that I fear some of my readers may think even now that I
+have dwelt too long upon them. Monkeys were unquestionably introduced
+upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones have been
+found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the
+later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected
+in sufficient number to establish much more than the fact of their
+presence in the animal creation at that time. I do not offer any opinion
+respecting the fossil human bones so much discussed recently, because
+the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any decisive judgment
+concerning them. It becomes, however, daily more probable that facts
+will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far
+beyond any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human
+races, as of animals, have followed one another upon the earth. It may
+be the inestimable privilege of our young naturalists to solve this
+great problem, but the older men of our generation must be content to
+renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision of its fulfilment,
+we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not enter
+in and possess it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The other great types of the Animal Kingdom are very fully represented
+in the Tertiaries, and in their general appearance they approach much
+more closely those of the present creation than of any previous epochs.
+Professor Heer has collected and described the Tertiary Insects in great
+number and variety; and the Butterflies, Bugs, Flies, Grasshoppers,
+Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., described in his volumes, would hardly be
+distinguished from our own, except by a practised entomologist. Among
+Crustacea, the Shrimp-like forms of the earlier geological epochs have
+become much less conspicuous, while Crabs and Lobsters are now the
+prominent representatives of the class. Among Mollusks, the Chambered
+Shells, hitherto so numerous, have become, as they now are, very few in
+comparison with the naked Cephalopods. The Nautili, however, resemble
+those now living in the Pacific Ocean; and some fragments of the
+Paper-Nautilus have been found, showing that this delicate shell was
+already in existence. There is one very peculiar type of this class,
+belonging to the Tertiaries, which should not be passed by unnoticed. It
+partakes of the character both of the Cretaceous Belemnites and of the
+living Cuttle-Fish, and is known as the Spirulirostra. Another very
+characteristic group among the Tertiary Shells is that of the
+Nummulites, formerly placed by naturalists in immediate proximity with
+the Ammonites, on account of their internal partitions. This is now
+admitted to have been an error; their position is not yet fully
+determined, but they certainly stand very low in the scale, and have no
+affinity whatever with the Cephalopods. The subjoined wood-cut
+represents one of these Shells, so numerous in the Tertiaries that large
+masses of rock consist of their remains. The Univalve Shells or
+Gasteropods of the Tertiaries embraced all the families now living,
+including land and fresh-water Shells as well as the marine
+representatives of the type. Some of the latter, as, for instance, the
+Cerithium, are accumulated in vast numbers. The limestone quarries out
+of which Paris is chiefly built consist wholly of these Shells. The
+fresh-water basins were filled with Helices, one of which is represented
+in the following wood-cut, with Planorbis, Limnæus and other Shells
+resembling those now so common in all our lakes and rivers, and
+differing from the living ones only by slight specific characters. The
+Bivalves also have the same resemblance to the present ones, including
+fresh-water Mussels as well as the marine Clams and Oysters. Among
+Radiates, the higher Echini (Sea-Urchins) have become numerous, while
+the other Echinoderms of all families abound. Corals include, for the
+first time, the more highly organized Madrepores.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things,
+not only in the character of the animals and plants, but in the height
+of the mountains and in the distribution of land and sea.
+
+Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been
+following, and see what these more recent geological epochs have done
+for their completion. In Europe they have filled the basin in Central
+France, and converted all that region into dry land: they have filled
+also the channel between France and Spain; they have united Central
+Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
+greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the
+promontories of Italy and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at
+the foot of the Jura into the plain of Switzerland. But this fruitful
+period in the progress of the world, when the character of organic life
+was higher and the physical features of the earth more varied than ever
+before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees, the
+Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and
+Himalayas, were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or
+in the course of the Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant
+passage in her history, Europe acquired all her essential characters.
+There remained, it is true, much to be done in what is called by
+geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet finished
+when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
+stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued
+from the water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her
+soil was clothed with field and forest, processes by which her valleys
+were to be made more fruitful, her gulfs to be filled with the rich
+detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole surface to be
+rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess it.
+
+We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
+geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic,
+and Jurassic epochs little was added to the United States, though here
+and there deposits belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous
+epoch, however, large tracts of land were accumulated, chiefly in the
+South and West; and during the Tertiaries the continent was very nearly
+completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the neighborhood of
+St. Louis to be filled by modern detritus, and the peninsula of Florida
+to be built by the industrious Coral-Workers of our own period. The age
+of the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was
+probably raised at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that
+time, only the Laurentian Hills, the northern side of that mountainous
+triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were, of the United States,
+existed. The upheaval of the Alleghanies added its eastern side, raising
+the central part of the continent so as to form a long slope from the
+base of the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean; but it was not until the
+Tertiary Age that the upheaval of the great chain at the West completed
+the triangle, and transformed that wide westerly slope into the
+Mississippi Valley, bounded on one side by the Alleghanies, and on the
+other by the Rocky Mountains.
+
+It is my belief, founded upon the tropical character of the Fauna, that
+a much milder climate then prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere
+than is now known to it. Some naturalists have supposed that the
+presence of the tropical Mammalia in the Northern Temperate Zone might
+be otherwise accounted for,--that they might have been endowed with
+warmer covering, with thicker hair or fur. But I think the simpler and
+more natural reason for their existence throughout the North is to be
+found in the difference of climate; and I am the more inclined to this
+opinion because the Tertiary animals generally, the Fishes, Shells,
+etc., in the same regions, are more closely allied in character to those
+now living in the Tropics than to those of the Temperate Zones. The
+Tertiary age may be called the geological summer; we shall see,
+hereafter, how abruptly it was brought to a close.
+
+One word more as to the relation of the Tertiary Mammalia to the
+creation which preceded them. I can only repeat here the argument used
+before: the huge quadrupeds characteristic of these epochs make their
+appearance suddenly, and the deposits containing them follow as
+immediately upon those of the Cretaceous epoch, in which no trace of
+them occurs, as do those of the Cretaceous upon those of the Jurassic
+epoch. I would remind the reader that in the central basin of France, in
+which Cuvier found his first Palæotherium, and which afterwards proved
+to have been thickly settled by the early Mammalia, the deposits of the
+Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary epochs follow each other in
+immediate, direct, uninterrupted succession; that the same is true of
+other localities, in Germany, in Southern Europe, in England, where the
+most complete collections have been made from all these deposits; and
+there has never been brought to light a single fact leading us to
+suppose that any intermediate forms have ever existed through which more
+recent types have been developed out of older ones. For thirty years
+Geology has been gradually establishing, by evidence the fulness and
+accuracy of which are truly amazing, the regularity in the sequence of
+the geological formations, and distinguishing, with ever-increasing
+precision, the specific differences of the animals and plants contained
+in these accumulations of past ages. These results bear living testimony
+to the wonderful progress of the kindred sciences of Geology and
+Palæontology in the last half-century; and the development-theory has
+but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to strengthen itself
+by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of which,
+in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument of
+its upholders.
+
+THE NEW SANGREAL.
+
+
+  "Show me the Sangreal, Lord! Show me Thy blood!
+  Thy body and Thy blood! Give me the Quest!
+  Lord, I am faint and tired; my soul is sick
+  Of all the falseness, all the little aims,
+  The weary vanities, the gasping joys,
+  The slow procession of this satiate world!
+  Dear Lord, I burn for Thee! Give me Thy Quest!
+  Down through the old reverberating time,
+  I see Thy knights in wonderful array
+  Go out to victory, like the solemn stars
+  Fighting in courses, with their conquering swords,
+  Their sad, fixed lips of purity and strength,
+  Their living glory, their majestic death.
+  Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  He lay upon a mountain's rocky crest,
+  So high, that all the glittering, misty world,
+  All summer's splendid tempests, lay below,
+  And sudden lightnings quivered at his feet;
+  So still, not any sound of silentness
+  Expressed the silence, nor the pallid sun
+  Burned on his eyelids; all alone and still,
+  Save for the prayer that struggled from his lips,
+  Broken with eager stress. Then he arose.
+  But always, down the hoary mountain-side,
+  Through whispering forests, by soft-rippled streams,
+  In clattering streets, or the great city's roar,
+  Still from his never sated soul went up,
+  "Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Through all the land there poured a trumpet's clang,
+  And when its silvery anger smote the air,
+  Men sprang to arms from every true man's home,
+  And followed to the field. He followed, too,--
+  All the mad blood of manhood in his veins,
+  All the fierce instincts of a warring race
+  Kindled like flame in every tingling limb,
+  And raging in his soul on fire with war.
+  He heard a thousand voices call him on:
+  Lips hot with anguish, shrieking their despair
+  From swamps and forests and the still bayous
+  That hide the wanderer, nor bewray his lair:
+  From fields and marshes where the tropic sun
+  Scorches a million laborers scourged to work;
+  From homes that are not homes; from mother-hearts
+  Torn from the infants lingering at their breasts;
+  From parted lovers, and from shuddering wives;
+  From men grown mad with whips and tyranny;
+  From all a country groaning in its chains.
+  Nor sleep, nor dream beguiled him any more;
+  He leaped to manhood in one torrid hour,
+  And armed, and sped to battle. Now no more
+  He cried or prayed,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  So in the front of deadly strife he stood;
+  The glorious thunder of the roaring guns,
+  The restless hurricane of screaming shells,
+  The quick, sharp singing of the rifle-balls,
+  The sudden clash of sabres, and the beat
+  Of rapid horse-hoofs galloping at charge,
+  Made a great chorus to his valorous soul,
+  The dreadful music of a grappling world,
+  That hurried him to fight. He turned the tide,
+  But fell upon its turning. Over him
+  Fluttered the starry flag, and fluttered on,
+  While he lay helpless on the trampled sward,
+  His hot life running scarlet from its source,
+  And all his soul in sudden quiet spent,
+  As still as on the silent mountain-top;
+  So still that from his quick-remembering heart
+  Burst that old cry,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Then a bright mist descended over him,
+  And in its central glory stood a shape,
+  Wounded, yet smiling. With His bleeding hands
+  Stretched toward that bleeding side, His eyes divine
+  Like a new dawn, thus softly spake the Lord:--
+  "The blood poured out for brothers is my blood;
+  The flesh for brothers broken is my flesh;
+  No more in golden chalices I dwell,
+  No longer in a vision, angel-borne:
+  Here is the Sangreal, here the Holy Quest.
+  Thy prayer is heard, thy soul is satisfied:
+  Come, my belovèd! I am come for thee.
+  As first I broke the bread and poured the wine,
+  So have I broken thee and poured thy life,
+  So do I bless thee and give thanks for thee,
+  So do I bear thee in my wounded hands."
+  Smiling, He stooped, and kissed the tortured brow,
+  And over all its anguish stole a smile;
+  The blood-sealed lips unclosed; the dying breath
+  Sighed, like the rain-sound in a summer wind,
+  Sobbing, but sweet,--"I see the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+In the notice of so memorable a man, even the briefest prelusive
+flourish seems uncalled for; and so indeed it would be, if by such means
+it were meant simply to justify the undertaking. In regard to any of the
+great powers in literature there exists already a prevailing interest,
+which cannot be presumed to slumber for one moment in any thinking
+mind.[A] By way of notification, there is no need of prelude. Yet there
+are occasions, as, for example, the entrances of kings, which absolutely
+demand the inaugural flourish of arms,--which, like the rosy flood of
+dawn, require to be ushered in by a train of twilight glories. And there
+are lives which proceed as by the movements of music,--which, must
+therefore be heralded by overtures: majestic steppings, heard in the
+background, compel us, through mere sympathy with their pomp of
+procession, to sound the note of preparation.
+
+[Footnote A: "_In any thinking mind_." Yet it must be confessed that
+there _does_ exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey
+in quarters from which better things might be expected. Misappreciation
+it cannot be called, where no trouble has been taken to estimate claims
+that needed only to be weighed to be truly valued. Up to this time,
+there has never been published in England a single essay on the life or
+the genius of De Quincey that indicated even a good acquaintance, on the
+part of the writer, with that author's works; and in such a case, of
+course, not much could be looked for in the way of just interpretation.
+Gilfillan did him gross injustice: indeed, from what he condescended to
+say of the man, it would be difficult to conjecture that a greater than
+Gilfillan was there. And, will the reader believe it? in Professor
+Craik's "English Literature"--a work of great excellence--the name of De
+Quincey is not mentioned! "Sam Johnson," says Craik, "was the last king
+that sat upon the throne of English prose literature." Let it be that
+Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De Quincey was
+legitimately his successor. First, in the matter of time: Sam died in
+1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the
+regal line. What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors?
+Was it learning? De Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is
+no writer in the language who in that matter may look down on De
+Quincey.
+
+If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De
+Quincey. Some stupid writer for the London "Athenæum," for instance,
+dared to compliment the poor "opium-chewer" after the following
+style:--"He possessed taste, but _he lacked creative energy_; and his
+subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than
+powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by
+a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable
+genius, but very little taste!]
+
+Else I should plunge _in medias res_ upon a sketch of De Quincey's life;
+were it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the
+important ceremony of prelibation, and that at a banquet to which,
+implicitly, gods are invited. The reader will assuredly unite with me in
+all such courtesies,--
+
+  "Neu desint epulis rosæ";
+
+particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
+incantations,--only the heralding of certain precise claims will this
+monarch listen to as the just _inferiæ_, the fitting sacrifice or
+hecatomb of our homage.
+
+The key-note of preparation, the claim which preëminently should be set
+forth in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of
+hierophants, or of pontifical hierarchs, as regards all those profound
+mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart,
+sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an
+altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the
+shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
+hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as
+concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open
+light the everlasting symbols, universally intelligible when once
+disclosed, which are folded in the involutions of dreams and of those
+meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner of these
+revelations, no Roman _pontifex maximus_, were it even Cæsar himself,
+could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.
+
+The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated.
+It was his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain
+secret recesses of human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along
+that border-line by which the glimmerings of consciousness are, as by
+the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil, separated from the regions
+of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked familiarly and
+with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
+inscribed meanings did he--this Champollion, defying all human enigmas,
+this Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms
+and yawning abysses of human astronomy--resolve into orderly
+constellations, that, once and for all, through his telescopic
+interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and commensurable
+amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
+psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life,
+two of which are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition
+towards meditation, constituting him, in the highest sense of the word,
+a poet. Secondly, the peculiar qualities which this singular mental
+constitution derived from his use of opium,--qualities which, although
+they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power,
+at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and
+creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
+concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a
+degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record.
+Nor is this all. The reader knows how often a secondary interest will
+attach to the mightiest of conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns,
+who is not merely in himself, and through his own deeds, magnificent,
+but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by numerous
+reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
+doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the
+Netherlands, and a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of
+the Turkish Solyman, as by some subtile connection of fate sympathetic
+with his own. A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of
+De Quincey,--a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of
+English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
+unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and
+Keats. His connection with very many of these was not simply that of
+coëxistence, but also of familiar intercourse.
+
+Between De Quincey's life and his writings it is impossible that there
+should be any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two
+interwoven: in this case more so than in that of any known author.
+Particularly is this true of his more impassioned writings, which are a
+faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life. Hierophant we have called
+him,--the prince of hierophants,--having reference to the matter of his
+revelations; but in his _manner_, in his style of composition, he is
+something more than this: here he stands the _monarch_ amongst
+rhapsodists. In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of
+his life and genius.
+
+But, besides these, there is a large section of his works, the aim of
+which is purely intellectual, where feeling is not at all involved; and
+surely there is not, in either ancient or modern literature, a section
+which, in the same amount of space, exhibits the same degree of intense
+activity on the part of the analytic understanding, applied to the
+illustration of truth or to the solution of vexed problems. This latter
+class is the more remarkable from its polar antithesis to the former;
+just as, in his life, it is a most remarkable characteristic of the man,
+that, rising above all other men through the rhapsodies of dreams, he
+should yet be able truly to say of himself that he had devoted a greater
+number of hours to intellectual pursuits than any other man whom he had
+seen, heard of, or read of. A wider range is thus exhibited, not of
+thought merely, but also of the possible modes of expressing thought,
+than is elsewhere to be found, even in writers the most skilled in
+rhetorical subtilty. The distance between these two opposites De Quincey
+does not traverse by violent leaps; he does not by some feat of
+legerdemain evanish from the fields of impassioned eloquence, where he
+is an unrivalled master, to appear forthwith in those of intellectual
+gymnastics, where, at least, he is not surpassed. He is familiar with
+every one of the intervening stages between the rhapsody and the
+demonstration,--between the loftiest reach of aspirant passion, from
+which, with reptile instinct, the understanding slinks downwards to the
+earth, and that fierce antagonism of naked thoughts, where the crested
+serpent "mounts and burns." His alchemy is infinite, combining light
+with warmth in all degrees,--in pathos, in humor,[A] in genial
+illumination. Let the reader, if he can, imagine Rousseau to have
+written "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in
+both of which great erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as
+nothing when compared to the faculty of recombining into novel forms
+what previously had been so grouped as to be misunderstood, or had
+lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To have
+written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or,
+moving into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to
+have been the author of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts":
+that would mount a new plume in Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to
+be reminded of another little paper, numbering about six pages,
+entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give him _that_,
+too. Why, the little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
+consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of
+this nature, which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse,
+that the two writers are often mentioned as on the same level, and with
+no appreciation of that unlimited range of power which belongs to De
+Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one of the trophies which
+we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a single
+volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one
+imperial column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,--alas for
+Rousseau!--two other _spolia opima_ by which the French master is, in
+his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second,--_proximus,
+sed non secundus_,--so wide is the distance between De Quincey and _any_
+other antagonist. These two are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan
+of Arc," and "The English Mail-Coach."
+
+[Footnote A: Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that
+it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without
+any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but
+surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or
+a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he is an elephant.
+So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from _his_
+humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
+you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a
+tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.
+
+There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen
+Aristophaneses. There was something, too, in its order, by which it
+resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will
+illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's
+"Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic
+_Phrontisterium_, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his
+pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the
+moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm
+about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks
+paid, or refused to pay, regularly on the last day of the month,)--and
+here it is that the opportunity is offered for a monstrous stroke of
+humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim, "Some magic is
+it, O Socrates, about the moon? Well! since you are up to that sort of
+thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old
+monster out of her course for a generation or so?" Now for the parallel
+case from De Quincey. It is from his paper on "California," a
+politico-economical treatise. The author's object is to illustrate the
+fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its non-existence, but to the
+difficulty of obtaining it. "Emeralds and sapphires," says he, "are
+lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no policeman
+is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from
+pocketing as many as we please. We are also at perfect liberty to pocket
+the anchors of Her Majesty's ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty
+guns,) and to sell them for old iron. Pocket them by all means, and I
+engage that the magistrate sitting at the Thames police-office will have
+too much respect for your powers to think of detaining you. If he does,
+your course is to pocket the police-office, and all which it inherits.
+The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer, but not a
+customer to be sneezed at." This strikes us as very similar to
+Strepsiades's bagging the moon.]
+
+It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I
+have undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about
+which the thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De
+Quincey's childhood, and his opium-experiences.
+
+Thomas de Quincey--hierophant, rhapsodist, philosopher--was born at
+Greenhay, then a suburb of Manchester, in Lancashire County, England, on
+the 15th of August, 1785. According to his own account, the family of
+the De Quinceys was of Norwegian origin; and after its transfer to
+France, in connection with William the Norman, it received its
+territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in Normandy. Thence,
+at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
+where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not
+merely in connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but
+chiefly on account of valuable services rendered to the State, and
+conferring preeminence in baronial privilege and consideration.
+
+So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the
+point of his descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French
+extraction, that, even into the ears of George III. (that king having,
+in an accidental interview with him at Frogmore, suggested the
+possibility of his family having come to England at the time of the
+Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
+protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon
+his purely Norman blood,--blood that in the baronial wars had helped to
+establish the earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that
+had flowed from knightly veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De
+Quincey came into England with William the Conqueror, uniting with whose
+fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal baron, founding the
+line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
+evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,--that his armorial device
+was inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of
+eminent distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St.
+Paul's.
+
+And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily
+diverted to the American branch of this family, at the head of which
+stands the Hon. Josiah Quincy, (the aristocratic _De_ being omitted,)--a
+branch which fled from England in the early part of the seventeenth
+century, to avoid a strife which had then become too intense and fiery
+to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a few years after their
+withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the inevitableness
+of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
+critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,--as indicating how
+surely the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will
+continue to track our flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of
+ocean, that ought, if anything could, to interpose an effectual barrier
+between us and all pursuers, and, having caught up with us in our
+fancied retreat, will precipitate upon our devoted heads its
+accumulated violence,--as demonstrating thus the melancholy persistence
+with which that ugly Sphinx who impersonates Justice in our human
+affairs doggedly insists on having her questions answered, and, coming
+by a circuitous route upon those who by good luck have escaped her
+direct path, through an incarnation of unusual terror compels her dread
+alternative,--it is interesting to note how this same family, separated
+by over seven generations from one political revolution, the momentous
+crisis of which was by them successfully evaded, are now, after an
+interval of unsound and hollow peace, compelled to witness the precise
+reiteration of that storm, in the very land to which they fled for
+refuge,--a reiteration that repeats, only on a different stage, and
+under an aggravation of horror as to minute details, not merely two
+antagonistic races corresponding on either side to those which met in
+battle on Marston Moor, but also interests far outweighing any that
+could possibly attach to a conflict between royalty and democracy.
+
+But the Earls of Winchester, in England, whatever may have been their
+prosperity during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came
+suddenly to an abrupt termination, abutting at length on some guilty
+traitor in the line, who, like a special Adam for the family, involved
+in his own ruin that prosperity which would else have continued to his
+successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal estate, however,
+remained in possession of separate members of the family, as De Quincey
+tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last
+vestige slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together
+with the name, held also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above
+the diluvial wreck of the Winchester estates there has arisen an estate
+far more royal and magnificent, and beneath a far-reaching bow of
+promise, sealed in magical security against a similar disaster. For just
+here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the family
+freshly grounded upon a second heritage,--one sublime in its order above
+that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever
+imperishable,--namely, the large domain which the gigantic intellect of
+Thomas De Quincey has absolved from aboriginal darkness and brought
+under distinct illumination for all time to come. These are the vast
+acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,--acres that have
+been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into
+the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some
+measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have
+extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey
+himself, in view of that monumental structure which rises above the
+shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above the mummied dust of
+Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought in their
+lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that,
+possibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been
+robbed of an earldom,--or even that, during a life which by some years
+overlapped the average allotment to humanity, and through which were
+daily accumulating the most splendid results in the very highest
+departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations nevertheless went
+on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in all
+Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these
+years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and
+to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of
+such merely _nominal_ titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in
+them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they
+gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and
+without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
+the loving remembrances of human hearts.
+
+But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal
+conditions in the case of De Quincey,--though, assuredly, there was
+never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aërial
+hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more
+consistently fit,--we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward
+conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or
+absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
+earliest tendencies and impulses,--in that season of immature
+preparation when the channels of habit are in the process of formation,
+and while yet a marvellous uncertainty hangs and broods over the
+beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet yet dandled and tended by
+its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain elements which
+rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for
+instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the
+force and swiftness of a torrent,--yet how shifting are the
+mountain-winds, chilling into frosty silence or quickening with Favonian
+warmth, and how shifting the flying clouds, which, whether marshalled in
+mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a real conflict, forever
+sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced childhood, do the
+scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably, to
+determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely
+material, and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in
+conjunction with heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in
+this period, with which above all others we associate influences the
+most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory," those influences which are
+purely material are the most efficiently operative. Against the former,
+adult man, in whom reason is developed, _may_ battle, though ignobly,
+and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he _must_
+struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
+for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields
+him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though,
+because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to
+material circumstance,--a slavery which he cannot escape, and which,
+during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and
+nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on
+the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
+weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and
+fortunate indeed it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our
+first years is thus a gentle dealing with us, fertilizing our powers
+with the rich juices of an earthly prosperity. And in this respect De
+Quincey _was_ eminently fortunate. The powers of heaven and of earth
+and--if we side with Milton and _other_ pagan mythologists in
+attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty--the dark
+powers _under_ the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in
+his behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his
+name they postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him
+the happiest of all childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining
+whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and
+susceptibilities _could_ be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope
+also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this
+distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of
+aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely
+against the assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any
+one in tolerably comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most
+trivial hint of possible want,--against all necessity of limitation or
+retrenchment in any normal line of expenditure.
+
+He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine,
+died, leaving to his family--a wife and six children--an estate yielding
+annually an income of sixteen hundred pounds. And as at his father's
+death De Quincey was seven years old, we may reasonably infer, that,
+during this previous period, while his father was still living, and
+adding to this fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains, (which
+to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the
+family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly
+realization of between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time
+when Napoleon had not as yet meddled with the financial affairs of
+Europe, nor by his intimidations caused even pounds and shillings to
+shrink into less worth and significance than they formerly had,--in view
+of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great (as in a famous
+anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the
+"snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" in the way of crowns and a few
+dozen sceptres, what a heinous charge must be brought against this
+Corsican as universal pickpocket! This pecuniary depreciation De Quincey
+himself realized some years later, when, determining to quit school, he
+thought himself compelled[A] to cut off all communication with his
+guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh
+mountains, wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most
+scanty means of support,--for just then the Allies were in full rig
+against France, and the shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's
+pocket became palpably evident in view of the increased price of his
+dinner.
+
+[Footnote A: But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was
+only by the lack on his part of that frankness which the kindness of his
+guardians deserved that he had brought so much misery upon himself in
+after-life. His younger brother, Richard,--the Pink of the
+"Autobiographic Sketches,"--made the same mistake, a mistake which in
+his case was never rectified, but led to a life of perilous wanderings
+and adventures.]
+
+The time _did_ come at length when the full epos of a remarkable
+prosperity was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the
+unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy
+lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad.
+Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his
+mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the
+sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years of
+luxurious opulence and ease.
+
+I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's
+earliest surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice
+merely as an accident,) because, although not a _potential_ element,
+capable of producing or of adding one single iota to the essential
+character of genius, it is yet a negative condition--a _sine qua
+non_--to the displays of genius in certain directions and under certain
+aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be intensified. So may
+it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of power, there
+still remains a question as to its _kind_. So deep is the sky: but of
+what _hue_, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol
+but what the _mellowness_? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite
+force: but of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister
+to Moloch, or to Apollo? Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa?
+Why, the simple fact that the rich blue sky over-arches this earth of
+ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our veins, is sufficient
+to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the
+question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from
+outward circumstances, but what coloring, what mood. Here it is that a
+Mozart differs from a Mendelssohn. The important difference which
+obtains, in this respect, between great powers in literature, otherwise
+coördinate, will receive illustration from a comparison between De
+Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a degree
+rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should
+say, of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this
+general office they stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal
+purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of
+grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or
+Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
+_modus operandi_, of their architecture, they stand apart _toto coelo_.
+Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or
+humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom,
+for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a
+cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth;
+he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human
+hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
+archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the
+bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have
+originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The
+most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most
+striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in
+"Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
+susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And _how_? Is
+it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the
+movements of destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of
+the ruin itself,--ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under
+conditions of terror the most appalling,--ruin wrought under the
+semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human
+race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains
+toward man, we have the following passage of Æschylian grandeur, but
+also of Æschylian gloom:--
+
+                                "Thou dost arise
+  And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
+  For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
+  Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
+  And send'st him, shivering in thy _playful_ spray,
+  And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
+  His petty hope in some near port or bay,
+  And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"
+
+Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of
+darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such
+lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human
+affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this:--
+
+  "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,--
+  An _unseen_ seraph we believe in thee"?
+
+or the following:--
+
+  "Who loves, raves,--'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?
+
+and again:--
+
+  "Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved,
+  Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
+  Necessity of loving having removed
+  Antipathies"?
+
+This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all
+antipathies! But even these
+
+                     "recur erelong,
+  Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
+  And circumstance--that unspiritual god
+  And miscreator--makes and helps along
+  Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
+  Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."
+
+De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such
+hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity,
+repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal
+human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the
+outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the
+one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on
+the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be
+found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating
+even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or
+with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of
+human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for
+the purposes of scorn.
+
+Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace
+back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives,
+each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert _mirage_, teeming
+with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other--also
+into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an
+unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from
+them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however
+apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels,
+and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their
+overmastering seductions to
+
+  "Allure, or terrify, or undermine."
+
+Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by
+itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with
+which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine
+the main temper and disposition of our lives. For it is underneath the
+multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason,
+and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point,
+seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the
+undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled
+and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice,
+branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims
+among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely
+recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our
+destiny. And in the very word _disposition_ is indicated the finality of
+its arbitraments as contrasted with all _proposition_.
+
+Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but
+it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about
+childhood,--to shelter or imprison,--which, more than all else, gives it
+its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in
+after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its
+opposite,--porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain,--yet will the
+tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost
+uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that
+preside over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial
+temperament,--one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward
+a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of
+strife; secondly, profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence,
+which, although of all three it is the most negative, the most material
+condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree
+in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the
+other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of
+temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to
+tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents'
+hearts, check the free play of domestic love!--and in all cases where
+such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a
+cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and
+everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be sensibly felt the
+absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections of
+home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a
+sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the
+soul.
+
+As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was
+prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came,--mighty changes capable of
+affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the
+inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's
+childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his
+mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the
+desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and
+intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
+outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift
+himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been
+thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his,
+which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been
+rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer's
+day,--for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
+"Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:--
+
+  "From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve--
+  _A summer's day_."
+
+And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all
+his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian
+god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that,
+receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his
+ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been
+benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary,
+a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
+teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest
+hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images
+of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of
+their material substance.
+
+"We,--the children of the house,--" says De Quincey, in his
+"Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier
+in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
+Agur--'Give me neither poverty nor riches'--was realized for us. That
+blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were
+to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity;
+obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished
+with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means of health, of
+intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we
+knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the
+consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by
+privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for
+pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all
+things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of diet,--that we
+fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if
+(after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks
+to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation,
+these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I
+lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my
+infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by
+horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and
+loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."
+
+Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let
+him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of
+seven, and having now at least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his
+peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of
+one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age, (and many such
+could be found,) among those with whom daily the military
+predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable
+conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be
+substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even
+in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of
+human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these
+instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the
+instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that
+men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves.
+Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. The Greeks, on the
+contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,--if we may
+believe the Pindaric odes,--set over them a divine watch, and fed them
+with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.
+
+And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect
+_leisure_. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the
+subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection
+with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure,
+which is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and
+bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open
+heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian
+recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought,
+or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_
+been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss
+of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound,
+that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its
+presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely
+awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of
+sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the
+pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace
+of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
+childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and
+expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in
+abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was
+the felicity of this echoless peace.
+
+In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence
+should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a
+striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have
+seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a
+point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at
+least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
+cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and
+just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life
+itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which
+lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire
+course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of
+any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record,
+that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
+repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,--but with what
+marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed,
+when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No
+longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky,
+but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs
+
+  "Through caverns measureless to man,
+  Down to the sunless sea."
+
+Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and
+the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its
+inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet
+heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be
+seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious
+reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a
+life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity
+of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the
+fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary
+solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails
+above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which
+Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--
+
+                      "There he slept,
+  And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
+  Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
+  Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
+  And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
+  Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
+  Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
+  He saw the prophet also, how he fled
+  Into the desert, and how there he slept
+  Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
+  He found his supper on the coals prepared,
+  And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
+  And eat the second time after repose,
+  The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
+  Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
+  Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."
+
+[Footnote A: _Paradise Regained_, Book II.]
+
+If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe
+necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus
+solicited and baffled even in dreams,--if, by the lowest of mortal
+appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the
+shadowy visions of merely human plenty,--then by how much more must the
+human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of
+dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
+revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands,
+be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy,
+flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!
+
+The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is
+as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral
+antiphonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not
+permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside
+a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the
+poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this _papaverian_ mask it is likely to be
+best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater"
+that he is most generally recognized. It was through his
+Opium-Confessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first
+conciliated and charmed the reading public,--and to such a degree that
+great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he
+might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case
+it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the
+public, without its being aware of the nauseating potion, or
+experiencing any uncomfortable consequences. The flood of popularity
+produced by the Opium-Confessions among that large intellectual class of
+readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet insist upon the
+graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving
+interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of
+heavier freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.
+
+The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey _personally_ is
+also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an
+opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of
+his situation and its hidden mysteries, or "_suspiria de profundis_."
+This interest is partly of that vulgar sort which connects itself with
+all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in the human mind,
+with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied with
+a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a
+philosophical order, inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal
+development. It is rarely the case that human vision is especially or
+deliberately directed to the sun or the moon, except at the marvellous
+season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty of the
+appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual
+nature of the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the
+people inhabiting this globe are excited by something which calls off
+their attention from terrestrial trifles to that which connects them
+with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos, we should, at such
+times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating
+monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best,
+through horrid yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a
+tremendous counter-irritation upon the earth that should tell mightily
+on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the heavens. But since we are
+neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any sort, we take
+defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is
+only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of
+courtesy, to foreign worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come
+within the circle of human knowledge or notice, which is it that may be
+said to enjoy the most continuous round of attentions, and to live in
+excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It is the comet,
+which no sooner gets out of reach of _our_ flying compliments than she
+becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth
+deprecating murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder
+brother, who, from all such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible
+under the paternal wings of the Sun. No one of these erratic visitors
+can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere in the
+universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would
+not have been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict _prima
+donnas_.
+
+Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that
+which we manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or
+the eccentric comet that bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this
+interest, considered in its vulgar aspects, De Quincey would suffer
+gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I am certain
+that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about
+him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his
+long sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever
+description, no tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been
+able to vie with him in the picturesque _déshabillé_ of the whole
+"turnout." Picture to yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and
+patches"--for, to the outward sense, he seems that now--has been "at
+large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been
+unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint
+upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with
+panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain
+impressive recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a
+trifle too uncanny even for them. As to his subsistence during these
+rambles, it would be very difficult to say how he managed that affair,
+at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be that the prophetic
+limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of his
+return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,--that he has made
+plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his
+waistcoat-pocket. Like Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering
+purposely and at his own sweet will, or rather where his feet have taken
+him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever sleep may have chanced
+to find him.
+
+The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the
+matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what
+gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter
+unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they
+appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an Æson-like
+rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that anxiously
+await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in
+the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this
+transformation is effected, let us suppose the case of his being set
+down in the streets of London, somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside.
+What an eddying of stragglers about this new-found focus of attraction!
+what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if, indeed, he be
+find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests,
+some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian
+or not, neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster
+such a rabble at his heels, supposing _him_ to appear on Cheapside!
+
+In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar
+notice as from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of
+him in such situations, except for the purpose of showing that he had
+very much in his outward habit that would readily attract such a notice.
+In the same light we are to regard some illustrations which J. Hill
+Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features in his
+character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for,
+although they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a
+book-form, they are still unpublished to many of my readers.
+
+Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he
+was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who
+entertained novel and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of
+Apuleius. The festivities of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion
+is heard in the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced
+its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival;
+he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
+street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle
+great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to
+the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher
+handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a
+stormy winter night; and the trousers,--some one suggests that they are
+inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius
+never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey,
+led on by the current of his own thoughts,--though he was always too
+courteous to absorb the entire conversation,--talks on "till it is far
+into the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about
+separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of
+civilization, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of
+the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the specials, he
+could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
+other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his
+own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either
+couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having
+taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme
+unpleasantness of such a couch?"
+
+"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore,
+he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing
+on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should
+get a penny and go home,--a proposal which he subjected to some
+philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he
+had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even whether he had
+eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
+articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to
+be refreshed was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the
+hard he could not eat. Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of
+that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it
+might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to
+be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops! nonsense! If
+the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal
+size, there was no risk,--and so the weary is at rest for a time.
+
+"At early morn, a triumphant cry of '_Eureka!_' calls me to his place of
+rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a
+considerable heap of them around him. That one which specially claims
+his attention--my best-bound quarto--is spread upon a piece of
+bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him
+pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of
+attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according
+to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered
+a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a
+very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face
+from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it
+occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch
+paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony."
+
+I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example,
+illustrative of the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered
+merely the immediate and pressing exigencies of the present. "He arrives
+very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission,--a process in
+which he often endured impediments,--he represents, with his usual
+silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being
+then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
+realm,--the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he
+very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
+fancying he discovers, that his eloquence is likely to prove
+unproductive, he is fortunately reminded, that, should there be any
+difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he
+is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to
+deposit with the lender,--a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to
+remove any feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could
+experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which
+develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable,
+possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled
+bit of paper, and spread it out,--a fifty-pound bank-note! All sums of
+money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use;
+and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note,
+might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had
+hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to
+him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded
+in negotiating a loan of two-pence."
+
+These pictures, though true to certain phases of De Quincey's outward
+life, are yet far from personally representing him, even to the eye.
+They satisfy curiosity, and that is about all. As to the real character
+of the man, they are negative and unessential; they represent, indeed,
+his utter carelessness as to all that, like dress, may at pleasure be
+put on or off, but "the human child incarnate" is not thus brought
+before us. For, could we but once look upon his face in rest, then
+should we forget these inferior attributes; just as, looking upon the
+Memnonian statues, one forgets the horrid nicknames of "Shandy" and
+"Andy" which they have received from casual travellers, observing merely
+their grotesque features. Features of this latter sort "dislimn" and
+yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the divine
+countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De
+Quincey's face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as
+with an Homeric antiquity; arid it is, and sallow, as parchment. Through
+a certain Bedouin-like conformation,--which, however, is idealized by
+the lofty, massive forehead, and by the prevailing subtilty of the
+general expression,--it seems fitted to desert solitudes; and in this
+respect it is truly Memnonian. In another respect, also, is it
+Memnonian,--that, whenever should rest upon its features the morning
+sunlight, we should surely await its responsive requiem or its trembling
+_jubilate_. By a sort of instinctive palmistry (applied, not to the
+hands, but to the face) we interpret symbols of ineffable sorrow and of
+ineffable peace. These, too, are Memnonian,--as is also that infinite
+distance which seems to interpose between its subtile meanings and the
+very possibility of interpretation. This air of remoteness, baffling the
+impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which has gathered
+for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply
+sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises
+from that childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle
+undulations of the features,--undulations as of happy wavelets set in
+motion ages since, and that cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born
+of a dream-like, brooding eternity of speculation, which we can trace
+neither to the eye alone, nor to the mouth, but rather to the effect
+which both together produce in the countenance.
+
+This is the face which for more than half a century opium veiled to
+mortal eyes, and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the
+most fugitive and impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of
+mystery from which mere curiosity stands aloof. This is the head which
+we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a triple wreath of glory: the
+laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his impassioned
+dreams, and roses for his most gentle and loving nature.
+
+How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium? Very
+little as to quality, but very much as to the degree and the peculiar
+manner in which original qualities and dispositions are developed, for
+here it is that the only field of influence open to abnormal agencies
+lies. Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only individual worthy of
+notice in the same connection. Had _he_ also confessed, it is uncertain
+what new revelations might have been made. It is certain that opium
+exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his
+dose that his remarkable intellectual displays occurred. These displays
+were mostly confined to his conversations, which were usually
+long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a continued series of
+abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending upon a
+sort of poetic construction. A pity it is that we must content ourselves
+with empty descriptions of this nature. Here, doubtless, if anywhere,
+opium was an auxiliary to Coleridge. For a laudanum negus, whatever
+there may be about it that is pernicious, will, to a mind that is
+metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares of thought which are
+raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead into the
+region of the shadowy. Show us the man who habitually carries pills of
+_any_ sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and
+we can assure you that that man is an _aërobat_,--that somehow, in one
+sense or another, he walks in the air above other men's heads. Whatever
+disturbs the healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to
+metaphysics, because it attracts the mental attention to the organism
+through which thought is carried on. Numerous are the instances of men
+who would never have been heard of as thinkers or as reflective poets,
+if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against their
+teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the
+superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.[A] If Tacitus had
+fared in any sort like his brother,--if there had been anything like an
+equitable division between them of muscle and brain, it is more than
+probable that we should have lost the illustrious historian.
+
+[Footnote A: It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's
+immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind
+exhibits unusual activity. But the argument moves in the opposite
+direction. For of what sort is this unusual activity? That which results
+from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the
+physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has
+impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is
+manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane
+brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who
+occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile
+mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating
+smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it
+may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant
+vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian
+faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary
+glimmerings of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same
+purpose.]
+
+Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was
+increased by opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured
+Coleridge's poetic faculties; which probably was the case, since in
+genuine poetry the mind is prominently realistic, its motions are all
+outward, and therefore excessive indolence must of necessity be fatal.
+
+De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to
+opium: it demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No
+temptation so strong _could_ have been presented to Coleridge. De
+Quincey really craved the drug. His stomach was deranged, and was still
+suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London. It
+seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which
+he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
+gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place
+to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like
+the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the
+last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal
+incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It
+is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact
+of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
+conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion
+of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller,
+just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part
+of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the
+mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of
+Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever
+he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his
+left leg.
+
+No less was De Quincey _psychologically_ preconformed to opium. The
+prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the
+narcotic despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader
+sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of
+opium. De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen
+will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams. Opium originates
+nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain
+direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
+energies and velocities. What was De Quincey _without_ opium? is,
+therefore, the question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in
+him was due to opium. This question has already been answered in the
+remarks made concerning his childhood. His meditative tendencies were
+especially noticed as most characteristic. There was besides this a
+natural leaning toward the mysterious,--the mysterious, I mean, as
+depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which
+excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable
+as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand
+combination of human energies mustered together in secret, and operating
+through invisible agencies for the downfall of Christianity,--an idea
+which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through the Abbé
+Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing throughout
+Europe: this was the sort of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
+thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful
+grandeur in his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great
+cities such as London, which he call the "Nation of London," where even
+Nature is mimicked, both in her strict regularity of results, and in the
+seeming unconsciousness of all her outward phases, hiding all meaning
+under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this effect it was
+absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
+standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance;
+there must have been more than this,--namely, a network of occult
+influences, a vast organization, wheeling in and out upon itself,
+gyrating in mystic cycles and epicycles, repeating over and again its
+dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a never-ending variety of
+shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the most inviting.
+It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
+history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved:
+for the demon that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all
+others had been pronounced undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was
+to his eye that for the first time there seemed to be an unknown element
+that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented by the religious
+sect among the Hebrews entitled the _Essenes_. Admitting the character
+and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it
+no special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey
+that the general assumption was the farthest removed from the
+truth,--than there was an unknown _x_ in the problem, which could be
+satisfied by no such meagre hypothesis,--that, to meet the urgent
+demands of the case, there must be substituted for this Jewish sect an
+organization of no less importance than the Christian Church
+itself,--that this organization, thus suddenly brought to light, was
+one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
+from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very
+name, to itself only in secret recesses of silence:--from the moment
+that all this was revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit
+to his profound interest. Two separate essays he wrote on this
+subject,[A] of which he seemed never to tire.
+
+[Footnote A: Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without
+being distinctly conscious of having written a previous one. It was no
+uncommon thing for him to forget his own writings. In one case it is
+known that for a long time he persisted in disowning his production. His
+American editor--a fact which is little known--selected, from among the
+mass of periodical writings in the various magazines for which De
+Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide him than,
+their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey's pen.
+In one instance,--as to the "Traditions of the Rabbins,"--after
+considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De
+Quincey, to set himself right. The latter disowned the essay: he had
+forgotten it. Mr. F., however, after another examination, concluded,
+that, notwithstanding De Quincey's denial of the fact, he _must_ have
+written it; accordingly, at his own risk, he published it. Afterwards De
+Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all disputed cases of
+this nature to his Boston publishers.]
+
+"Klosterheim" is from beginning to end only the development, through
+regular stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile
+nature. Oftentimes De Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder;
+but the mere fact of a murder, however shocking, was not sufficient to
+arrest him. With the celebrated Williams murders, on the contrary, he
+was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in accordance with designs
+not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the skill of a
+decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony. Here were murders that
+revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and
+that at every stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden
+mysteries of universal human nature. I know of no writer but De Quincey
+who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate
+drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full
+measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.
+
+This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their
+very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material
+limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal
+_proscenium_; their _dramatis personæ_, however familiar nominally, and
+however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their
+motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the
+ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves. We
+should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency
+towards this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his
+"Autobiographic Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of
+seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least
+material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him
+up into aërial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the
+clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were furnished by
+certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
+the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus
+introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they
+were self-sustained and majestic.
+
+The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preëxisting tendencies
+of De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he
+had been indolent,--if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it
+invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it
+as simply dark or obscure,--if his natural subtilty of reflection had
+been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime
+architecture of impassioned expression,--then might he as well have
+smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to
+have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.
+
+The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at
+this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two
+heads: first, the _external_, and, secondly, the _internal_. Properly
+speaking, all the _positive_ effects of opium must be internal; for all
+its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the
+focal centres of life. Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena
+connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the
+heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
+most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very
+reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which
+are purely negative. This latter class of effects Homer has indicated
+with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he
+notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external
+things,--carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by
+question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
+disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more fully
+developed in Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":--
+
+  "Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
+  Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
+  To each; but whoso did receive of them,
+  And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
+  Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
+  On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
+  His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
+  And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
+  And music in his ears his beating heart did make."
+
+By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium
+deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes
+and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if
+new materials were found for a history of the individual
+life,--materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the
+deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.
+Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll
+which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,--symbols
+which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even
+syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has
+hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still
+more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and
+echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
+enlarged.
+
+There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis
+between his every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius.
+In the latter, there is beautiful order, as in a symphony of
+Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from without, all seems
+confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind; but
+here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire
+the _en_centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw
+forth laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same
+agencies which undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked
+the earth with desert sands; and De Quincey's outward life was thus
+masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue heaven in which he revelled
+might be infinitely exalted.
+
+Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with
+transcendent sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the
+generous margins of a splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious
+words, that might perhaps have found some more fit vehicle to the
+composer's eye, could have found no deeper place in our hearts. We look
+at the hatless sleeper among the mountains: his face seems utterly blank
+and meaningless, and to all intents and purposes he seems as good as
+dead; but let us ascend with him in his dreams, and we shall soon forget
+that under God's heavens there exists mortality or the commonplace uses
+of mortality.
+
+As we ascend from grotesque features to such as are more intellectual,
+that peculiarity of his character which most strikes us is his
+inimitable courtesy. Mr. F.,--to whom I am indebted for the most novel
+and interesting portions of this memorial,--from his own personal
+interviews with the man, among many other things, retains this chiefly
+in remembrance,--that De Quincey was the perfectest gentleman he had
+ever seen.
+
+I take the liberty here of particularizing somewhat in regard to one
+visit which this friend of De Quincey's paid him, particularly as it
+introduces us to the man towards the last of his life (1851). Mr. F.,
+curious as it may seem, found but one person in Edinburgh who could
+inform him definitely as to De Quincey's whereabouts. In return to a
+note, giving De Quincey information of his arrival, etc., the latter
+replies in a letter which is very characteristic, and which may well be
+highly prized, so rarely was it that any friend was able to obtain from
+him such a memento. The style, perhaps, is as familiar as it was ever
+his habit to indulge in; and it shows how impossible it was for him,
+even on the most temporary summons, to dispense with his usual
+regularity of expression or with any logical nicety of method. The
+letter runs thus:--
+
+
+     _Thursday evening, August 26, 1851_.
+
+     "My dear Sir,--The acccompanying billet from my daughter, short at
+     any rate under the pressure of instant engagements, has been cut
+     shorter by a sudden and very distressing headache; I, therefore,
+     who (from a peculiar nervousness connected with the act of writing)
+     so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the letter-writing
+     department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say
+     mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for
+     other people's. Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute
+     refusal on the part of the Commissioner to grant me a certificate
+     of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a necessity not to be evaded,
+     I am affecting the large bounties of supererogation. I appear to be
+     vaporing in a spirit of vainglory; and yet it is under the mere
+     coercion of '_salva necessitas_' that I am surprised into this
+     unparalleled instance of activity. Do you walk? That is, do you
+     like walking for four hours '_on end_'--(which is our archaic
+     expression for _continuously_)? If I knew _that_, I would arrange
+     accordingly for meeting you. The case as to distance is this. The
+     Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley station, brings you to Esk
+     Bank. That is its nearest approach,--its _perihelion_, in relation
+     to ourselves; and it is precisely two and three-quarters miles
+     distant from _Mavis Bush_,--the name of our cottage. Close to us,
+     and the most noticeable object for guiding your inquiries, is _Mr.
+     Annandale's Paper-Mills_.
+
+     "Now, then, accordingly as you direct my motions, I will--rain
+     being supposed absent--join you at your hotel in Edinburgh any time
+     after 11 A.M. and walk out the whole distance, (seven miles from
+     the Scott monument,) or else I will meet you at Esk Bank; or, if
+     you prefer coming out in a carriage, I will await your coming here
+     in that state of motionless repose which best befits a philosopher.
+     Excuse my levity; and believe that with sincere pleasure we shall
+     receive your obliging visit.
+
+     "Ever your faithful servant,
+
+     "THOMAS DE QUINCEY."
+
+In order to appreciate the physical powers of him who proposed a walk of
+the distance indicated in the letter, we must remember that he was then
+just sixty-six years _plus_ ten days old. He was now living with his
+daughters, in the utmost simplicity. On his arrival, Mr. F. found De
+Quincey awaiting him at the door of his cottage,--a short man, with
+small head, and eyes that were absolutely indescribable as human
+features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with the most
+urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is
+spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence
+is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of
+Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a
+solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a
+present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend
+of Wilson,--and--what furnishes a more sublime suggestion--this is he
+that knows by heart the mountain-fells and the mysterious recesses of
+hidden valleys for miles around; and we think, if he could convey us
+from the haunts of this Lasswade of his old age to those which glorified
+the Grasmere of his youth, what new chords he might touch,--of human
+love, for there it was that the sweetness of his wedded life had been
+buried and embalmed in a thousand outward memorials of happy hours long
+gone by,--and of human sadness, for there it was that he had experienced
+the reversal of every outward fortune, and the alienations of
+friendships which he most highly valued. But the remembrances of
+Grasmere and of youth seem now to have been removed as into some other
+life: the man of a past generation walks alone, and amid other scenes.
+And yonder is the study in which he spends hours that are most
+holy,--hours consecrated to what specific employments is known to none,
+since across its threshold no feet save his have passed for years. Now
+and then some grand intellectual effort proceeds forth from its sacred
+precincts; but that only happens when pecuniary necessities compel the
+exertion. How is it that the time not thus occupied is spent?--in what
+remembrances, in what hidden thoughts, what passing dreams?
+
+As it grows dark, De Quincey's guest, having spent most precious moments
+which he feels ought never to cease, signifies the necessity of his
+taking his departure. To take leave of this strange man, however, is not
+so easy a matter as one might rashly suppose. There is a genius of
+procrastination about him. Was he ever known to make his appearance at
+any dinner in season, or indeed at any entertainment? Yes, he did
+_once_, at the recital of a Greek tragedy on the Edinburgh stage; but
+that happened through a trick played on him by an acquaintance, who, to
+secure some remote chance of his seeing the performance, told him that
+the doors opened at half-past six, whereas, in fact, they opened at
+seven. How preposterous, then, to suppose that he would let an
+opportunity pass for procrastinating other people, and putting all
+manner of snares about their feet! It is dangerous with such a man to
+hint of late hours; for just that lateness is to him the very jewel of
+the thing. In mentioning the circumstance, you only suggest to him the
+infinite pleasure connected with the circumstance. Perhaps he will
+deliberately set to work to prove that candle-light is the one
+absolutely indispensable condition to genial intercourse,--which would
+doubtless suggest a great contrast, in that respect, between the ancient
+and modern economy,--and where, then, _is_ there to be an end? All
+attempts to extricate yourself by unravelling the net which is being
+woven about you are hopelessly vain; you cannot keep pace with _him_.
+The thought of delay enchants him, and he dallies with it, as a child
+with a pet delicacy. Thus, he is at the house of a friend; it storms,
+and a reasonable excuse is furnished for his favorite experiment. The
+consequence is, that, once started in this direction, the delay is
+continued for a year. Late hours were particularly potent to "draw out"
+De Quincey; and, understanding this, Professor Wilson used to protract
+his dinners almost into the morning, a tribute which De Quincey
+doubtless appreciated.
+
+So that it is better to be on the sly about saying "Good bye" to this
+host of yours. When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De
+Quincey forthwith insisted on accompanying his guest. What, then, was to
+be done? Ominously the sky looked down upon them, momently threatening a
+storm. No resource was there but to give the man his way, and accept his
+offer of companionship for a short distance, painfully conscious though
+you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must, during this
+same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your
+side, who now lacks barely four years of life's average allotment. Thus
+you move on: and the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer
+approaches, warnings of which propagate themselves all around you in
+every sound of the wind and every rustle of the forest-leaves.
+Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of your
+companion: every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for
+conversation. Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and
+your guide stops to tell you that in this house may have been committed
+most strange and horrible murders, that, in spite of the tempestuous
+mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be specially and
+solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a perfect
+stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side,
+takes off his hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her
+passage,--and you, poor astonished mortal that you are, lest you should
+yourself seem scandalously uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise. In
+this incident we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance
+of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and something of the same
+remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who uniformly
+addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every
+one of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.
+
+Onward you proceed,--one,--two,--three miles, and you can endure no
+longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus
+at every step the burden of his journey back. You have, reached the Esk
+bank and the bridge which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened
+begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here
+De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,--to you his last good-bye; and
+as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts,
+together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human
+tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.
+
+But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close.
+It is a source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very
+disagreeable thing to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic
+justice; for assuredly he was in the habit of saying all the malicious
+things _he_ could about his friends. If there was anything in a man's
+face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De Quincey for
+noticing _that_. Even Wordsworth he could not let off without a Parthian
+shot at his awkward legs and round shoulders; Dr. Parr he rated soundly
+on his mean proportions; and one of the most unfortunate things which
+ever happened to the Russian Emperor Alexander was to have been seen in
+London by De Quincey, who, even amid the festivities of national and
+international congratulation on the fall of Napoleon, could not forget
+that this imperial ally was a very commonplace-looking fellow, after
+all. But, in regard to physical superiority, De Quincey lived in a glass
+house too fragile to admit of his throwing many stones at his neighbors.
+The very fact that he valued personal appearance at so low an estimate
+takes away the sting from his remarks on the deformities of other
+people: he could not have meant any detraction, but simply wished to
+present a perfect picture to the eye, preserving the ugly features with
+the faultless, just as we all insist on doing in regard to those we
+love. De Quincey and myself, therefore, are likely to part good friends.
+Surely, if there was anything which vexed the tender heart of this man,
+it was "the little love and the infinite hate" which went to make up the
+sum of life. If morbid in any direction, it was not in that of spite,
+but of love; and as an instance of almost unnatural intensity of
+affection, witness his insane grief over little Kate Wordsworth's
+grave,--a grief which satisfied itself only by reasonless prostrations,
+for whole nights, over the dark mould which covered her from his sight.
+
+It only remains for us to look in upon De Quincey's last hours. We are
+enabled to take almost the position of those who were permitted really
+to watch at his bedside, through a slight unpublished sketch, from the
+hand of his daughter, in a letter to an American friend. I tremble
+almost to use materials that personally are so sacred; but sympathy, and
+the tender interest which is awakened in our hearts by such a life, are
+also sacred, and in privilege stand nearest to grief.
+
+During the few last, days of his life De Quincey wandered much, mixing
+up "real and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things." He complained,
+one night, that his feet were hot and tired. His daughter arranged the
+blankets around them, saying, "Is that better, papa?" when he answered,
+"Yes, my love, I think it is; you know, my dear girl, these are the feet
+that Christ washed."
+
+Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children. He
+aroused one day, and said suddenly,--"You must know, my dear, the
+Edinburgh cabmen are the most brutal set of fellows under the sun. I
+must tell you that I and the little children were all invited to supper
+with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great honor. I thought I
+must buy new dresses for the little ones; and--would you believe it
+possible?--when I went out with the children, these wretches laughed at
+their new dresses."
+
+"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those that
+are alive, as if they were his own brothers. One night he said, when I
+entered the room,--
+
+"'Is that you, Horace?'
+
+"'No, papa.'
+
+"'Oh, I see! I thought you were Horace; for he was talking to me just
+now, and I suppose has just left the room.'"
+
+Speaking of his father, one day, suddenly and without introduction, he
+exclaimed,--"There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know my
+dear father better; for I am sure a better, kinder, or juster man could
+never have existed."
+
+When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that a telegram
+should be sent to the eldest daughter,[A] who resided in Ireland, but he
+forbade any mention of this fact to the patient. De Quincey seemed to
+have a prophetic feeling that she was on her way to him, saying, "Has M.
+got to that town yet, that we stopped at when we went to Ireland? How
+many hours will it be before she can be here? Let me see,--there are
+eight hours before I can see her, and three added to that!" His daughter
+came sooner than the family expected; but the time tallied very nearly
+with the computation he had made. On the morning his daughter arrived
+occurred the first intimation his family had seen that the hand of death
+was laid upon him. He had passed a quiet, but rather sleepless night,
+appearing "much the same, yet more than ordinarily loving." After
+greeting his child, he said, "And how does mamma's little girl like her
+leaving her?" "Oh, they were very glad for me to come to grandpapa, and
+they sent you this kiss,--which they did of their own accord." He seemed
+much pleased. It was evident that M. presented herself to him as the
+mother of children, the constant theme of his wanderings. Once when his
+daughter quitted the room, he said, "They are all leaving me but my
+_dear_ little children." "I heard him call, one day, distinctly,
+'Florence! Florence! Florence!'--again, 'My dear, dear mother!'--and to
+the last he called us 'my love,' and it sounded like no other sound
+ever uttered. I never heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every
+tone of his voice. It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all
+understanding."
+
+[Footnote A: De Quincey, at his death, had two sons and three daughters.
+The, eldest of the daughters became the wife of Robert Craig of Ireland.
+It was this one, and the youngest, who were present during his last
+hours. The second daughter, Florence, was with her husband (a colonel of
+the British army) in India. The two sons were both absent: one in India,
+a captain in the army; the other, a physician, in Brazil.]
+
+During the next night he was thought dying, "but he lingered on and on
+till half past nine the next morning. He told me something about
+'to-morrow morning,' and something about sunshine; but the thought that
+he was talking about what he would never see drove the exact idea out of
+my head, though I am sure it was morning in another world he was talking
+of."
+
+"There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both for some
+time before and after death. He looked more like a boy of fourteen, and
+very beautiful. We did not like to let in the morning light, and the
+candle was burning at nine o'clock, when the post brought the following
+letter, which my sister and myself glanced over by the candle-light,
+just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the moment it did
+not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
+coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did.
+
+
+     "'_Brighton, Dec. 7th, 1859_.
+
+     "'My Dear De Quincey,--Before I quit this world, I most ardently
+     desire to see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than
+     sixty years ago, we were school-fellows together and mutually
+     attached; nay, I remember a boyish paper ("The Observer") in which
+     we were engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career, mine
+     far from brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological
+     student. It seems a pity we should not once more recognize one
+     another before quitting the stage. I have often read your works,
+     and never without remembering the promise of your talents at
+     Winkfield. My life has been almost a domestic tragedy. I have four
+     children in lunatic-asylums. Thank God, it is now drawing to a
+     close; but it would cheer the evening of my days to receive a line
+     from you, for I am, with much sincerity,
+
+     "'Your old and attached friend,
+
+     "'E.H.G.'
+
+"I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward constantly
+recurred in his wanderings.
+
+"Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last
+pathetic sighs, so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor,
+worn-out garment laid aside." Just before he died, he looked around the
+room, and said very tenderly to the nurse, the physician, and his
+daughters, who were present, "Thank you,--thank you all!" Sensible thus
+to the very last of kindness, he breathed out his life in simple thanks,
+swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy that had ruled
+his life.
+
+MRS. LEWIS.
+
+A STORY IN THREE PARTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Here's something Gus Lewis would like to send by you, mother," said my
+hasty boy John, plunging into the room at nine in the evening, and
+stumbling over two trunks, three valises, and bandboxes countless.
+
+The floor was strewn with bundles, and the mantel-piece adorned with
+letters, directed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and New York.
+
+"Oh! ah! yes. Any packages, if not too large," said I, wistfully eying
+the box, (a foot square,) full of fresh maple-sugar, with its card of
+direction to "_Mrs. Lulu L., by the politeness of Mrs. Prince_."
+Boy-like.
+
+"First of all, my John, go you to bed, where Charley has been this
+half-hour, and say good-bye, for we shall be off before you are up."
+
+"See, then, father, if you are!" retorted the wide-awake youth, going
+out of the room in ground and lofty tumbling, and up-stairs in
+somersets.
+
+"I don't see," said I, pettishly, "how I _am_ to get this bundle into my
+trunk, nor where in the world this great box of sugar is to go. See! not
+a direction! but I suppose she is in New York somewhere."
+
+"We shall see her at all events, which is something. I should like to
+know what she is like,--not to look after her boy for two mortal years,"
+said the Dominie.
+
+"I hope not like Gus. He'd make an ugly woman, with his black hair and
+heavy eyebrows, and his big, black eyes always staring. He don't look
+like an American child."
+
+"If we could only say what an American type is. At present, it is a
+little of everything."
+
+"I mean a New-Englander,--an original American."
+
+"Well, he don't.--What do you say to these trunks? Shall we try again to
+compress the gigantic genie into the copper vessel? I thought it was a
+dangerous move, that last one of yours, taking out Tirzah White's
+quilted coat. And what's to be done with these three packages?"
+
+"Well! we can't sit here!" said I, briskly; "half-past nine already, and
+only one trunk packed! Never mind. You can put these three bundles in
+with your clothes."
+
+"Bursting the lock, now."
+
+"How easy 'tis to pack other people's things! But what, then, have you
+in there,--I mean, besides your shirts, etc.?"
+
+"_Imprimis_. Eight volumes of Scott's Commentaries, brought by Deacon
+Boardman. I am to exchange them. They are imperfect. _Item_. A dozen of
+'Sinbad the Sailor,' sent by mistake to the Association, instead of
+Doddridge. These books won't press nor give, more than sound doctrine;
+and I must have room for my gown, without which I am nothing."
+
+The clock struck ten, and we were still struggling with unabated ardor
+to compress Lorana Briggs's shawl, and the flat packages from Burt's,
+into the largest carpet-bag, that there might be room for the seventeen
+letters on top of the minister's luggage, inside the sanctuary of his
+silk gown.
+
+"We can carry a good deal in your coat-pocket, my dear," said I,
+cheerfully; for really we seemed to be coming to daylight, a little.
+
+"Full."
+
+The knocker sounded.
+
+"My galoches at last! Deacon, I can't ask you to come in, we are so
+untidy; but I couldn't pack as I meant to, this afternoon."
+
+How we dreaded his coming in,--half deacon, half shoemaker, and
+two-thirds missionary, with his "Panoplist" sticking out of his
+coat-pocket, and his ears evermore pricked up for the latest news from
+Bombay! and how angry I had been for three weeks because I couldn't get
+those indispensable galoches!
+
+It seemed as if he never would go from the half-open door. He reckoned
+the York folks would stare to see so many patches; he expected ministers
+down to York warn't quite so carfle and troubled about many things, as
+they be to Weston; but he added, with a grim joyfulness,--
+
+"We took up a good collection, though, last Sabbath! eight dollars and
+fifteen cents, clear!"
+
+"Yes, Deacon," responded the minister, with as much heartiness as he
+could muster, between the pushings, puffings, and pressings at the
+carpet-bag; "a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose its reward, we're
+told.--These carpet-bags stretch well!"
+
+"Them poor, dear heathen!" groaned the Deacon.
+
+"Oh, dreadful!" chimed I; "give me that biggest shawl, will you?--no,
+the other,--Ursula Drury's! Shall we ever finish packing?"
+
+"S'pose ye'll see th' A.B.C.F.M.!--Lucina Rand's put in 'the avails of a
+hen,'--and Semela Briggs sold the silver thimble her aunt gin her. 'T
+all helps the good work. I told the Widow Rand she'd ough' to do
+somethin' for the heathen, so she's gone to raisin' mustard. She said
+she hadn't more 'n a grain o' that to spare, she was so poor; but I told
+her 't would be blest, I guessed. Widow Rand's rather worldly-minded,
+I'm afraid."
+
+A minute more and we should have had Hindostan, Harriet Newell, and
+Juggernaut. Happily, somebody came for the Deacon, and we were left to
+our packing again.
+
+
+II.
+
+This was the second week in May, in the year 1830. We were a promising
+country, but had not yet performed. Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor
+cheap postage had been established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked
+their fingers in garrets, waiting for the good time coming; and
+philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain, in
+Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose,
+their fine sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of
+eloquence, and fell flat to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled
+by stage-coaches; and postage for over a hundred miles rose to eighteen
+cents. Not a lover's sigh for a cent less; and it took a fortune for
+persons of sensibility to exchange sentiments.
+
+The consequence to country-people of this last-mentioned fact was, that
+everybody who went anywhere took everybody's letters, and, as there were
+no expresses, added, of course, everybody's packages and messages. And
+the consequence of this was, that everybody made everybody's purchases,
+whether gowns, books, bonnets, or what not. It mattered little who did
+errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one store-keeper bought
+our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods, and
+our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter
+weather. I remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the
+æsthetic conversation at one of our parties, where Art was on the
+_tapis_, made a comical mistake, but one natural enough, too,--stating
+that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes for ten dollars. We were not
+thinking of exactly the same kind of Vandyke that he was.
+
+Many a time have I carried in my trunk more letters than the mail-bag
+did to Boston, and conscientiously finished all the parish's business
+before touching my own.
+
+A certain amount of self-complacency and satisfaction is felt, and
+laudably earned, by being intrusted with commissions; and I flatter
+myself few persons ever set off for New York with such an array of them
+as I did on this occasion.
+
+Looking over my list, I must confess to a flush of real enjoyment at
+finding _carte blanche_ for a scarf. "Now, that is something like!" said
+I. "I can see now how pleasantly an artist feels, or would feel, at an
+order for a picture,--'your own subject,--your own terms.' Miss Patty
+Jones knows what is what, and shall be my patroness."
+
+And did I not vindicate triumphantly Miss Patty's confidence? I knew
+better than to buy her a gray and brown thing, merely because she, too,
+was gray and brown. I wreathed her with lilies and hyacinths and French
+green leaves, and she blossomed under it like a rose. If she were not
+the garland, she wore it, and so borrowed bloom and gay freshness. She
+extolled my taste to all Weston.
+
+Then Mrs. Eben Loring had concluded on the whole that I should buy her a
+hat, in Maiden Lane, at the very tip-top milliner's. The thought of my
+return was somewhat embittered by the prospective necessity of carrying
+two very large bandboxes in my lap, in case of rain. Rain might not
+unreasonably be expected in the course of a three days' journey. Think
+of all the bandboxes that in such a case would be put in at the
+coach-window by the driver, to be held in the hapless laps of the nine
+passengers! Almost I was persuaded to leave my own black satin bonnet,
+and perambulate the streets of New York in my travelling-calash, which
+looked exactly like, and was nearly of the size of, a "bellows-top
+shay."
+
+I was thinking of this last sacrifice, when my husband said, in a
+dreamy, bewildered way,--
+
+"Here are five boxes, mother, two bundles, and the rest of these books.
+I give up!"
+
+"Give up? Not I! Now, where a man's energies are exhausted, a woman's
+just begin to show themselves. First and foremost, lock this trunk, and
+let me put the key in my pocket. That's one thing done, and can't be
+undone."
+
+He stepped back from the trunk.
+
+"What's this? all your clothes on the floor!"
+
+"Well, yes, my dear, most of 'em. You see, I couldn't leave Zipporah
+Haven's shawl out, which she sends to her grandmother; and I must put in
+these bundles of the Burts's, and Mary Skinner's box of linen thread. If
+my own things are lost, why, they must be replaced, you know, my dear;
+that is all."
+
+"And we must keep a good lookout, ourselves, that our bandboxes and
+bundles don't fall off behind," replied the Dominie, faintly.
+
+"Yes; and you can put the small trunk under my feet, and the big basket
+under your own, and you will keep an eye on my red shawl,--and pray
+don't lose the umbrella, nor your great-coat, nor your cane. I will, on
+my part, see to these three small bundles, and my parasol. Doubtless we
+shall go on smoothly as need be, only I am afraid you won't be able to
+think up many sermons on the highway. There! I forgot the jar of
+currant-jelly to go to Ruth Hoyt's aunt! However, we must manage
+somehow. You are sure our names are down at the stage-office?"
+
+But, like Charles XII., "after Pultowa's dreadful day," when the
+tale-teller listened for his sympathy,
+
+  "The king had been an hour asleep."
+
+I am ashamed to say that I must have lost myself after that, though I
+thought I was only thinking of the Day of Judgment. But I must have
+dreamed it, or how should I have thought it the last trumpet, when it
+was only the stage-driver's warning knock?
+
+It was delightful to hear the knock, and the simultaneous clang of pots
+and pans which assured us, that, though night had been no night to us,
+the dark morning would usher in our breakfast with coffee by the
+faithful Polly. The driver coming in again before we had finished, we
+seduced him without scruple into taking a cup of boiling comfort, while
+we guiltily collected the waifs and strays of our multifarious luggage.
+Many a time I have waited, myself, in the coach, while similar orgies
+were going on among the unready, so I know just how vexed and impatient
+the passengers were. But what use to go on without the driver? At last
+we squeezed into the full stage.
+
+
+III.
+
+No sooner in than out, however. I was determined not to die before my
+time, as I was sure to do on the back-seat of an overloaded stage, with
+nine passengers, besides numerous, because gratuitously earned,
+children. "For who," as it was sometimes pertinently asked, "would
+charge anything for a poor little innocent child?" The younger, the more
+innocent, of course, and the more numerous.
+
+"If you'll set up here 'long o' me, Miss Prince, there's a plenty o'
+room,--and for you, too, Parson," said the good-natured driver.
+
+Extricating ourselves from the Black Hole, we delightedly clambered to
+the heights above, regardless of risk, and catching at wheel and step
+like Alpine hunters. How comfortable the seat was, with the fresh, early
+morning air blowing freely in our faces! How small the horses looked in
+the dim light of three o'clock! How oddly the wheel-horses looked, all
+backs and no legs!--and how mysteriously many were the reins that were
+tied round and round the iron lantern-rod!
+
+"Just let me put the mail-bag under your feet, Miss Prince. Here we are,
+now, all right, and nothin' to do but go along!"
+
+"Now, then!"
+
+"Come up! come! come!"
+
+But in vain were caresses; in vain were chirrups, duckings, and kisses,
+wafted to the nigh leader. Like the rebellious South of to-day, he had
+taken his attitude, and stood now on four legs, now on two, pawing only
+the dark air, and regardless of the general welfare behind him.
+
+"Now what will you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally
+afraid of horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence:
+partly in the staid, heavy mass of determination beside me, who looked
+so calm and good-natured; and partly in the queer, elfin look of the
+beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary connection with our
+safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to get on
+with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the
+occasion by plunges, rearings, and kickings.
+
+Still gathering the reins lightly in his large hand, the stable and sure
+intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his
+long whip at the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping
+galled his proud neck! How his black back curved, and his small head
+tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce, but just pawed like a fairy
+horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or to herald in
+the morning.
+
+"He'll start by-'m-by,--he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos
+start," remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness,
+the unerring switch every half minute.
+
+What acted on the capricious thing at last,--whether the Inevitability
+behind him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the
+"beautiful disdain" left his black back and tossing mane in a moment,
+and he buckled down to his work with an energy worthy of the cause, and
+with a good-will that was an example to the other three.
+
+"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin'
+wantin' but the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I
+won't never drive 'em together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He
+says they'd run till they dropped down dead. I guess they would. He's a
+putty critter enough, and well made, but dreadful ugly. Now, I like that
+'ere wheeler!"--he pointed his whip towards the horse below my foot.
+"She's kind,--that mare is; and she's fast enough, and handsome. Broad
+back,--short legs,--goes like a duck!"
+
+In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
+own?--a man of means,--owning his team,--and with more knowledge of his
+district than most members of Congress have? Indeed, I believe he's in
+Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody
+knows a hill by experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green
+Mountains are full of comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns
+their highest and tallest tops; but the hills of New Hampshire are
+Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the roads of old time made
+by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no circuitous,
+soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
+deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the
+shortest air-line between places.
+
+Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a
+steep place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the
+foot of a long hill, of a two-mile stretch, the driver generally
+stopped, to indicate the propriety of the male passengers, at least,
+ascending the hill on foot. And often the whole stage-load gladly
+availed itself of the permission. It was handy for the owners of
+bandboxes, to pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now
+and then; and the four beasts, like those in Revelation, said "Amen" to
+the kindly impulse of humanity that lightened their load, and left them
+to scramble comfortably from one side to the other of the still
+ascending path. When they did get to the top of some of those Walpole
+hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the
+far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!
+
+
+IV.
+
+We had the mails to change at the post-offices, and a seemingly
+inexhaustible store, intrusted to the care and courtesy of the driver,
+and surrounding him like a rampart,--of newspapers, bundles, cans,
+pillow-cases full of dried apples, and often letters.
+
+At the red house near the mill below Surrey, a sweet-looking girl ran
+out, as we passed, holding her hand forward for a letter, which our
+driver pretended to drop half a dozen times, on purpose to tantalize
+her. It was pretty to see her blushing, sparkling face, as the blood
+danced to her brow with hope, and back with the baffled expectancy to
+her heart.
+
+"Neouw, Sil, be still! give to me, yeouw!"
+
+If it hadn't been Yankee, it was soft and melodious enough for an
+Italian peasant. As picturesque, too, was her short, blue woollen
+petticoat, and white short-gown, that "half hid and half revealed" the
+unconstrained grace of healthy mountain-nature; and more modest the
+happy look with which she received the letter at last, and flew with it
+like a bird back to the red nest.
+
+"A love-letter, I suppose," said I, answering the twinkle of the
+driver's good-natured eye.
+
+"Wal, I expect 's likely. They've been sparking now over a year. And
+it's a pity, too, such a real clever girl as that is! She a'n't so
+dreadful bright, but she's real clever, and ough' to hev a better chance
+'n Jim Ruggles."
+
+"A bad match for her?"
+
+"Wal, Jim's a good feller enough, but he drinks. I don't mean to say
+nothin' agin moderate drinkin'. I drink myself moderately. But Jim's a
+real sponge. He'd drink all day hard and never show it, without it is
+bein' cross, maybe, and paler 'n common. Now I say,--and I a'n't no
+'reformed inebriate,' nor Father Matthew sort,--but I do say, and will
+hold to it, such a man at twenty-one makes a poor beginnin'. If he
+lives, he'll be a poor shote, and no mistake. I'm sorry for the gal."
+
+"Somebody ought to tell her. Why not you?"
+
+"Wal, what's the good on 't? She wouldn't hear a word. When a woman's
+once sot her mind, don't do no good to talk. For that matter, talkin'
+never did do much, I'm thinkin',--exceptin' preachin'. We're bound to
+hear that, Parson," he added, laughing, and with a nod which might seem
+respectful.
+
+In three hours we had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this
+of a warm day, and with a full complement of passengers. We had watched
+the sun rise over Walpole hills, and the specks in the distance where
+the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The breaking day, the
+bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the welcoming
+day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are
+all sharp for the ready breakfast, at six o'clock.
+
+Then, as I am talking of the past, and not of the present, there was
+time enough: time enough for the comfortable discussion of breakfast,
+for the changing of raiment among the babies, for chatting in the
+bar-room, for the interchange of news among the men, and even for
+glasses of milk-punch. Tell it not in modern Gath that even the Dominie
+spiced his half-mug of flip with an anecdote, and that every man and
+woman took cider as well as coffee.
+
+How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during
+this journey of three days and a half to New York? Modern travellers,
+who are, or are not, as it happens, run off the track, smashed up, or
+otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed of, have little notion of our
+successive and amusing accidents, and of how they diversified and
+occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the _ennui_ which comes
+from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one
+of accident.
+
+That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,--that one of the leaders
+had fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our
+driver, who was in hopes the critter wouldn't have 'em that day,)--that
+the coach wholly collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into
+a promiscuous heap of unbroken bones,--this, and such as this, will be
+easily believed by any New-England traveller who remembers thirty years
+back. But how we fell so softly that the brains were never damaged,--why
+falling into ditches at night wasn't an unhealthy process,--and, above
+all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps, strings, and nails
+should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully adapted to
+every emergency,--that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
+amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that
+almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted
+his natural tact, expediency, and invention. With string and nail in his
+pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus to get away from a Yankee, or
+his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only been a
+Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered
+with roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own
+powers, knew all about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the
+light of a pine-knot in his father's kitchen. This rude culture is the
+commonest fact among our mountaineers.
+
+We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their
+bright, concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like
+to know who would stop anywhere now to see anything! One might as well
+be put into a gun and fired off to New York as go there now by
+steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not unlike a "resonant
+steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the other.
+
+But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as
+_was_ a journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you
+entered their hearts and took lodgings,--sometimes for life.
+
+Then the country! You saw that, too,--not the poorest part of it,
+scooting round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole
+way flat, and are glad to shut your eyes and listen to the engine,
+rather than have them ache with seeing everything you would never wish
+to look at!
+
+All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we
+leave the Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long,
+dreary reaches of unfertile pastures, and its wealth of stone wall,--so
+abundant that travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it,
+seeing no lack in the road or field,--from the time we enter on trim,
+well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and
+beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
+ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and
+enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of
+fine landscape, maturity. With and under the old oaks and birches rest
+the sad-colored houses that have held life and experience,--birth,
+death, and old historic adventure.
+
+Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and
+Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of
+Indian struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in
+caves, or bursting out like white spirits to lead and avenge. The air is
+peopled with traditions far back from the present, but with which the
+grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems still to sympathize.
+
+In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire
+spring into the exultant richness of the winged butterfly,--into white,
+fragrant fields of blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.
+
+In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in
+ever varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my
+fellow-passengers, and, except in listening to some communicative old
+women, might really, as far as society was concerned, as well have been
+travelling in the style of to-day. Beyond the casual acquaintances I
+made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who interested
+me until we reached Springfield. There, at the top of the first short
+hill outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing
+in the river-mist like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody
+whom my prophetic soul announced as a companion, looking wholly unlike a
+ghost, and very unlike a mist. He raised his hand, just as we were about
+passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver suddenly reined
+in his team.
+
+A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest,
+showed us a traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.
+
+He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for
+himself just above us among the countless boxes.
+
+"Don't let me disturb you, Madam All right. Just room for my bag. Go on,
+driver."
+
+"Fine day," said we.
+
+"A warm morning. I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,--but
+the sun is too hot for me."
+
+He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his
+broad brow with his handkerchief. Then he looked at us with clear blue
+eyes, and tossed back his curling brown hair. He had a gray
+travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but which was then a
+novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson lips,
+and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
+American. So much the better.
+
+
+V.
+
+I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of
+investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once,
+evidently. A country-parson and his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I
+will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to
+myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely
+necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this
+man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the
+next five years. Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with
+my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take
+me into the conversation,--little thought I of the shadow he would one
+day cast over both of our lives!
+
+He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten
+minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's
+cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a
+wonderful convenience.
+
+"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good
+bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often
+walk fifty miles together."
+
+We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the
+world nobody walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if
+not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least
+one horse. Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.
+Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom,
+to be as unlike the British as possible,--as they did of making their
+houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.
+
+This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with
+fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We
+looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit
+limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural
+contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child
+approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics
+he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
+connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops,
+of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath;
+never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing
+or whispering: no, all about him sounded like the free, dashing, rushing
+water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned
+cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly to the
+outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort
+of purposeless activity,--energy for its own sake. While his energies
+harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of
+knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good. But suppose
+his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him
+to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would have the
+same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
+balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
+yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
+have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.
+
+Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
+good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
+and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
+another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
+matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
+enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
+continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
+walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
+bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
+lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
+anything else by any experience.
+
+His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
+said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
+sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
+century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
+bulb, even without being a Dutchman.
+
+His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without
+scruple every other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in
+professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a
+description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of jessamine and
+Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
+azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers,
+and hollyhocks.
+
+"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I
+had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for
+day-lilies or tulips; "promise me that I may show you my tulips, and I
+will promise you that you shall like botany hereafter."
+
+We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which
+I said I would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs
+he gave me on the top of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in
+the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house
+afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old
+glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which
+happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine
+clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were
+extinguished forever.
+
+I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not
+matter at all. He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for
+introduction. We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us
+to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest. He had
+travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that
+he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.
+
+Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,--
+
+"Halloo, old boy, get up here!"
+
+He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so
+attenuated that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean
+against, and removed a cane and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his
+bones.
+
+It was about half an hour before I saw that the new man was not at all
+an invalid, but of the natural gaunt frame and pallid complexion of my
+countrymen. My eyes had become so full of the fresh, rosy life of the
+Englishman's face, that the new man's face was bleached and unhealthy to
+me. I happened to glance back from him to the Dominie, and saw, that,
+allowing for green spectacles, they were both of a color. We were so
+arranged on the top of the coach, that with reasonable twisting of necks
+we were able to maintain an animated conversation, and soon found our
+account in the new element.
+
+"Well, Remington!"
+
+"Well, Lewis!"
+
+"Where from now?"
+
+"From Niagara, and home by the White Hills."
+
+"And what of the last, or of both?"
+
+"Miss Rugg has fallen into the one, and Miss Somebody has been to the
+top of the other. Had to be brought down, though. Women shouldn't climb
+mountains."
+
+"There has been some talk of a road, or practicable path at least, to
+the top of Mount Washington."
+
+"Never'll be done. Impossible on the face of the thing."
+
+"Nothing is impossible to Yankees, Remington."
+
+"This is. And now, Lewis, whence come you, and whither go?"
+
+"From Weston, and to New York."
+
+Here was a _denouement!_ We looked at him with new interest, and saw at
+once, such was the force of imagination, the very eyes and eyebrows of
+Gus Lewis. However, it proved afterwards to be only imagination. When we
+told him we came from Weston only two days and a half before, the
+conversation assumed the native style of New England, and for the next
+quarter of an hour we talked of each other and each other's affairs.'
+Mr. Lewis was delighted to see us, had stayed only an hour in Weston,
+and there heard of our trip from Auguste,--profanely called Gus,--took
+the box of maple-sugar in charge at once, laughed at the boy-like
+direction without even a surname, and ended with recommending us to go
+at once to Miss Post's, on Broadway, where himself and his wife were at
+present boarding. All the particulars of life, character, and relative
+interests were discussed between ourselves and Mr. Lewis with the
+relish and zest of compatriots. I had forgotten how close a tie was that
+of Yankee birth, and how like an unknown tongue our talk was to the
+Englishman, till we stopped and turned to him to say something, and
+found him fast asleep. Then I was glad that he hadn't heard my satirical
+description of "donation-parties" at Weston, nor the account I gave of
+our two boys, our salary of five hundred dollars, and the various
+comical shifts we had to make to live comfortably on that sum and
+support aged parents and graceless relations. Little touches told Mr.
+Lewis the whole story. I knew very well that Mr. Remington would be
+entirely abroad about such a social existence as ours in Weston, travel
+he ever so long or widely.
+
+Mr. Lewis had black eyes and hair, and bent like an habitual student. He
+had a scar on his right eyebrow, which he had got by a fall, and by
+which he had saved the life of Mr. Remington, who was a connection of
+his wife's. This he told us, afterwards, and I amused myself with
+drawing parallels between his face and his mind. One side was gentle,
+sweet-humored, sentimental, with a touch of melancholy. The other,
+disfigured with the scar, seemed to have been turned harsh, suspicious,
+proud, reserved, and unrelenting. These were many qualities, all to
+depend on a scar, to be sure; but they generally herd together, and he
+might be one man or another, as life presented its dark or sunny side to
+him. To me, he was very interesting, from the first; and my husband was
+delighted with him. The Dominie starved in Weston for congenial
+intellectual nutriment. Nobody but myself could tell what a drain it was
+on him always to impart, always to simplify, to descend, to walk on the
+ground with wings folded flat to his back, and the angel in him
+habitually kept out of view. The most he could do was to insinuate now
+and then a thought above the farming interest, and in a direction aside
+from Bombay. More than that exposed him to suspicion, and hindered his
+usefulness in Coös County.
+
+Somehow, we got talking of Mr. Remington, which we might well do, seeing
+him there before us, sleeping like a baby.
+
+"That he could always do, like Napoleon," said Mr. Lewis, "and so can
+accomplish much without fatigue."
+
+"Is he married?" said I.
+
+"Yes. His wife is in delicate health."
+
+I was surprised to hear that he was married.
+
+"He hasn't a married look, has he?"
+
+"You are talking about me," said Remington, waking up. "I felt it
+mesmerically. And, to give you a good opportunity, I will walk a mile or
+two. Give me a good character, Lewis. Hold up, driver!"
+
+Springing down, he went on, laughing, before us, now and then calling
+back to ask if we were nearly through?
+
+"He has not the 'subdued domestic smile upon his features mild', that
+marks the man who has a wife at home," said I.
+
+"No. He is a man, however, born under a lucky star, and his cup filled
+with good-fortune to the brim. His self-lordship has been to him no
+heritage of woe, thus far."
+
+"A certain happiness, but necessarily of a poor quality, comes from
+being able to gratify our wishes. If he has no more, it is poor enough."
+
+"Do you mean that pleasure must be an outgrowth of pain to be properly
+appreciated?" said Mr. Lewis.
+
+"Somewhat,--mostly," said the minister; "since the insensibility that
+protects one from pain prevents also delicate picture. I think, indeed,
+a rational being must suffer in order to enjoy, after infancy."
+
+"His eyes don't look as if they had been in training of any sort," said
+I, without knowing what my words implied, till I saw the harsh
+expression on Mr. Lewis's face.'
+
+"I mean that they have a sort of undisciplined expression, as if he had
+never been tamed by suffering or sorrow of any sort," said I.
+
+"That sadness is the true human look," said the minister, "the look that
+redeems us from the mere animal expression of enjoyment. It is the
+stamp God puts on those He loves. He chastens them; after that, they are
+no more servants, but sons of the house."
+
+I saw by Mr. Lewis's eyes that he understood and felt this. Also, that
+from his nature he bought his enjoyments every step of the way of life.
+How differently his cousin laid hold on the cornucopia of enjoyment, and
+covered himself with bountiful beauty, drinking in at every sense
+pleasure! The former, as could be seen too, held his title to happiness
+by the most uncertain tenure; the nervous quiver betraying, and the
+sensitive blood witnessing, how keenly he felt and how dearly he paid
+for every passing pleasure. I remember, as I saw his purple, thrilling
+face, that I hoped his home-life was happy, feeling that to such a man
+it must be everything. Yet I was sure, from what he did not say, with
+eye or lips, that he had not learned religious trust. Still, he did not
+listen to the mere minister, but to the friend; and there sprang up
+between the two the corresponding interest and respect belonging to
+natures kindred in depth and sensibility, though of widely differing
+experience. In after-years, he who had already attained was able
+frequently to hold out a helping hand to his younger brother; but now,
+only a smile and a look told much. This acquaintance of the soul is very
+fascinating. In the two or three steps we take together, with cognizance
+and measure of each other, what a long path opens before us of alternate
+shade and sunshine, and how imagination borders every step of the way
+with richest heart-blossoms! In friendship, all is glowing and
+enriching. As it has not the depth of love, it neither anticipates nor
+requires sacrifice. We do not think of doing or suffering for a friend;
+but the friend ministers to our weakness, and exalts our strength. He
+sympathizes gently with our self-love, he magnifies every excellence. He
+is perpetually charmed, alike with the novelty and the similarity of our
+experience, and unwearied in comparing thoughts and balancing opinions.
+All, and more, that he gives us, he receives; and so an incipient
+friendship is one of the most intoxicating delights of life. What long
+leaps in acquaintance we took during our first hour, and while Mr.
+Remington still walked up-hill before us!
+
+"You will probably have an opportunity to see and judge for yourselves
+of Mr. Remington, as we are together a great deal, and he is a cousin of
+Mrs. Lewis's. This will be better than for me to attempt a description,
+I think, and, on the whole, more satisfactory. He annoys me, and offends
+me frequently; and then I am not just to him, of course. But he is a
+fine fellow, honorable and agreeable; and with a love of natural science
+that leads him, for the time, like a dog. Just now, he is wild with
+floriculture. Last year, it was geology. You will see."
+
+And then, as if he feared to trust himself with his cousin's character,
+or that it was a distasteful subject for some reason, he turned to the
+minister, and began talking about Cherry Mountain and the scenery in
+Coös.
+
+Mr. Remington called out, at the top of the hill,--
+
+"Now it is my turn! Let me ride, and I will give your character!"
+
+"Oh! we don't need it, I assure you," said I; "we understand him
+entirely."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said he, shaking his brown curls; "I am the
+transparent one."
+
+He stepped up on the wheel-hub to get his bag, and to say he should
+strike off for Middleton on foot. He would see us very soon in New York,
+and claim our promise to visit him.
+
+Being relieved from the fascination of personal beauty and presence,
+with only the impression of character remaining, I was a little ashamed
+to find how much I had liked, without being at all able to esteem him.
+It was with a very different feeling that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose
+ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually transfigured with
+emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he impressed
+one as a living soul; and this inward light gave a translucent beauty
+to the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal
+advantages of form and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes
+of un-sounded depth, and a voice whose rich cadences had an answering
+rhythm in the inward man, showed what his attractions might be, or were,
+to a woman. We became curious to see Mrs. Lewis, of whom we gained no
+idea from his casual references to her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LYRICS OF THE STREET.
+
+
+  VI.
+
+  PLAY.
+
+  From yon den of double-dealing,
+      With its Devil's host,
+  Come I, maddened out of healing:
+             All is lost!
+
+  So the false wine cannot blind me,
+      Nor the braggart toast;
+  But I know that Hell doth bind me:
+             All is lost!
+
+  Where the lavish gain attracts us,
+      And the easy cost,
+  While the damning dicer backs us,
+             All is lost!
+
+  Blest the rustic in his furrows,
+      Toil- and sweat-embossed;
+  Blest are honest souls in sorrows.
+             All is lost!
+
+  Wifely love, the closer clinging
+      When men need thee most,
+  Shall I come, dishonor bringing?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Babe in silken cradle lying,
+      To low music tossed,
+  Will they wake thee for my dying?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Yonder where the river grimly
+      Whitens, like a ghost,
+  Must I plunge and perish dimly;
+             All is lost!
+
+INTERESTING MANUSCRIPTS OF EDMUND BURKE.
+
+
+Macaulay opens his most remarkable article on Milton by saying, "The
+dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a
+saint, till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors
+by exhibiting some relic of him,--a thread of his garment, a lock of his
+hair, or a drop of his blood." If we were in the mood, we might take
+advantage of interesting manuscripts of Edmund Burke, which are now
+before us, to say something of this remarkable character. But we shall
+confine ourselves for the present to a passing glance at the manuscripts
+which have strayed across the Atlantic.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Hon.
+Charles Sumner, who is also the fortunate owner of the _Album Amicorum_
+containing the autograph of John Milton.--ED.]
+
+The authentic manuscripts of Burke have passed through several hands. On
+his death, they were intrusted to the eminent civilian, Dr. French
+Lawrence, of Doctors' Commons, and to Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of
+Rochester. To these two gentlemen we are indebted for the first eight
+volumes of the London octavo edition of Burke's Works. The career of Dr.
+Lawrence was cut short by death in 1809. His associate had the exclusive
+charge of the papers till 1812, when the venerable widow of Burke died
+at Beaconsfield, and by her last will gave to Earl Fitzwilliam, the
+Bishop of Rochester, and the Right Honorable William Elliott the entire
+direction of the printing and publishing of such parts of the works of
+her late husband as were not published before her decease,--bequeathing
+to them all the printed and manuscript papers for this purpose. Eight
+more volumes were published by the Bishop, who died in 1828, a few
+months after the publication of the fifteenth and sixteenth volumes. Mr.
+Elliott had already died in 1818. The papers now came into the sole
+possession of Earl Fitzwilliam, the distinguished nobleman associated
+with the latter portion of Burke's life, from whom they descended to his
+son, the late Earl Fitzwilliam, who, in conjunction with Sir Richard
+Bourke, published, in 1844, the four volumes of correspondence, with a
+few notes of unpublished speeches.
+
+We have personal reason to know that there are yet other unpublished
+manuscripts of Burke in the hands of Lord Fitzwilliam, some of which it
+was our fortune many years ago to inspect. Mr. Macknight, it appears,
+applied to the present Earl for permission to publish some of those
+which are preserved in the archives of Wentworth House, but, "out of
+obedience to the expressed wish of his father, who published all he
+thought necessary, he declined to sanction any further publication of
+these documents."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight's _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 737.]
+
+There are also letters of Burke which from time to time have seen the
+light, as they were communicated by their possessors. Among these none
+equals in interest that addressed to Pitt with regard to his pension,
+which has been printed recently by Lord Stanhope, in his small, but rich
+and rare collection, entitled "Miscellanies." This important letter came
+to light among the papers of Pitt, and has been described by Macaulay as
+"interesting and very characteristic."
+
+The manuscripts now before us are none of these. They have a history of
+their own.
+
+They constitute a thin volume in folio, neatly bound, having a
+book-mark, and arms with the name of _Fillingham_. Here are four
+familiar autograph-letters from Burke to his amanuensis, Swift, all of
+them written from Margate, on the sea-shore, and bearing Burke's frank
+as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a
+member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the
+superscription, while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower
+corner. But English law, while the privilege of franking existed,
+required also that the name of the place where the letter was pasted,
+and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should appear in
+the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in
+this collection:--
+
+  "Margate July seventeenth, 1791
+  "Mr Swift,
+  "Mr Burke's Chambers
+  "4 Stone Buildings
+  "Lincoln's Inn
+  "London.
+
+  "Edm. Burke."
+
+These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of
+them that "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest
+dependants with whom he was thrown into any human relationship"; they
+also "show the statesman, when at the height of literary fame, as busy
+and anxious in sending his sheets through the press, and making
+corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs";
+and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as
+illustrations of Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to
+the Nagles in former years." It seems that the amanuensis to whom they
+were addressed had at his death other similar letters in his possession;
+but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately committed them to
+the names, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr.
+Macknight adds, in a note,--"These letters I owe to the kindness of John
+Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the
+originals."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 410.]
+
+Of one of these letters there is an accurate _fac-simile_, which will be
+found in the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of
+Burke.
+
+But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript
+of the "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the
+_identical copy_ from which the surreptitious publication was made which
+disturbed the last hours of Burke. The body of it is in the handwriting
+of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters were addressed; but it
+shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute and
+elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of
+these pages there is an accurate _fac-simile_ in the third volume of Mr.
+Macknight, who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister,
+after his death, to the gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect
+it." [A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Lifo of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 700.]
+
+These manuscripts--both the letters and the Observations--all concern
+the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between
+himself and Fox, to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate
+their value, we must glance at the scene by which the memorable
+friendship of these men was closed.
+
+Few political events in English history are read with more interest than
+the separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but
+the French Revolution, which separated so many persons in France,
+reached across the Channel to separate them. They differed so radically
+with regard to this portentous, undeveloped movement, that their
+relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed. Burke, in
+the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most
+earnestly inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet
+in me at my time of life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to
+friends to desert me." Fox whispered, "There is no loss of friends."
+Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes, there is a loss of
+friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the
+expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished,
+Burke walked across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between
+Pitt and Dundas on the Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears
+streamed down his face. In the course of his remarks he intimated that
+Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious terms. Burke at once said
+that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox replied, "My right
+honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of his
+mind. Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish
+a recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and
+forgotten."
+
+But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth
+again. "I complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my
+defence by the right honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was
+brought to me and evinced the most promising talents, which I used my
+best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has arrived at the
+maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever
+existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of
+my principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend",
+but as "the right honorable gentleman", and said, in a taunting style,
+that "all he had to do was to repent, and his friends would be ready to
+receive him back and love him as they had previously done". Burke was
+indignant. He said,--"I have gone through my youth without encountering
+any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so unfortunate as
+to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's friendship,
+nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the
+other." [A] This most important and historic friendship was at an end.
+
+[Footnote A:_Parliamentary History_ Vol. XXIX. p. 426.]
+
+The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke
+turned away from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly
+productions of his pen, entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old
+Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in the collection before us,
+addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last corrections of
+this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is the
+letter of which a _fac-simile_ is given by Mr. Macknight.
+
+Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed
+and intense. The Whig Club declared, "that their confidence in Mr. Fox
+was confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against
+him." Burke and some forty-five noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the
+club. It was then that Burke, in justification of himself and his
+friends, took the pen, and drew up what his biographer Prior calls the
+"famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority,
+particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke of
+Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third
+volume of Bonn's edition of his Works.
+
+This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections
+to the course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of
+that distinguished gentleman. But it was not intended for publication,
+at least at that time. It was transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with
+a letter, asking that it might not even be read at once, but that the
+Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his library-table, and when a
+day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn to it.
+Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if
+not always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the
+amanuensis whom Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This
+was none other than Swift, to whom the familiar letters were addressed.
+Unknown to his employer, he had appropriated to himself a copy in his
+own handwriting, with corrections and additions by Burke, which seems to
+have come between the original rough draught and the final copy
+transmitted to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke
+was in his last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless
+scrivener communicated this copy to an equally faithless publisher, by
+whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment against
+the Eight Honorable C.J. Fox." When this was seen by Mrs. Burke, she
+felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband,
+that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was
+relieved so far as it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by
+the affidavit of Mr. Rivington, succeeded in obtaining an injunction
+against the publisher on the very day when the tract appeared. But two
+thousand copies had already stolen abroad.
+
+It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to
+her husband, learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two
+o'clock in the afternoon of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to
+him his newspapers and correspondence for the past week. He was less
+disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does vex me," he said;
+"but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at
+anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more
+exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have
+been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He
+was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed
+that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to
+know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke
+of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and
+incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr.
+Lawrence, about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to
+deliver back. He had forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and
+corrected by himself.
+
+This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated
+to attract attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his
+last words. Pitt read it with delight, and declared it to be a model in
+that style of composition. But his latest biographer says of it, that
+"it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever wrote the 'Observations
+on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least pleasing of
+all his compositions."[A] In style, it is direct, terse, and compact,
+beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended
+for the public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the
+manuscript now before us exhibits the minute care with which it was
+executed. Here also may be traced varieties of expression, constituting
+the different forms which a thought assumed, not unlike the various
+drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.]
+
+But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now
+dealing with this relic.
+
+HARVARD'S HEROES.
+
+
+The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London
+cannot fail to notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the
+choir. It is composed of rare and costly marbles and other precious
+stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it is, its greatest value lies in
+the circumstance which placed it there. It is a memorial, the tribute of
+affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms to a noble
+officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a [Greek: ktêma
+es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller
+in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches,
+in stately cathedrals,--wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be
+arrested, whereever the pride of country is most deeply stirred,
+wherever the sentiment of loyalty is consecrated by religion,--the
+Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names of his honored dead.
+There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense local
+pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the
+scenes of their early lives.
+
+"It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo;
+"think what they will say of us at home!"--and this simple sentence went
+straight to the heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home
+is the prevailing thought in each young soldier's heart as he goes into
+his first fight. And "home" does not mean for him so much broad England
+as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the school where he was
+trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in times gone
+by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory!
+whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after
+the morning service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be
+for him the memorial window through whose blazoned panes the sunlight
+will fall softly across the "squire's pew," where as a boy he knelt and
+worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the marble effigies
+of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a place
+among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the
+school-room at Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,--that future boys,
+playing where he played, shall talk of him whom they never knew as "one
+of ours." For he is well aware that he is making fame not for himself
+alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most loved and
+happiest.
+
+We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the
+intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local
+association and sentiment are ingrained. We are but just beginning where
+Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago. Hence our glorifying of
+the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to
+commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years have
+taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated
+energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the
+water-sheds of history. The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the
+same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child. Life is measured by
+action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion
+was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and
+"fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look
+back upon a past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be
+but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those
+elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national
+character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet it may be
+undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole
+country cannot participate, which will not for the remainder of this
+century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of
+face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and
+hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the
+fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon the
+slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is
+ended, and the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of
+the returning citizens to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to
+level the earthworks of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. In the city where
+mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law, no one cares to
+keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade, though
+they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for
+they witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly
+forget. The only memorial that a wise and high-souled nation _can_ erect
+after this war will be the single monument which shall commemorate the
+hour of peace restored.
+
+But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting
+than brass the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we
+are doubly bound in gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who
+have deserved well of their country in the hour of utmost need. We ought
+to do this also in that temper which shall look most singly to the noble
+end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future land. I
+know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in
+New-England's foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself,
+the starry roll of its heroes links it with all the fortunes of our
+history. Men who sat in the Long Parliament, and who may have seen the
+Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their early degrees upon Harvard's
+first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King Philip, were
+colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of
+Wolfe and Amherst, and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight
+years' struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence.
+Alumni still survive who did military duty in the second war with
+England. The men of Harvard were with Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped
+Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec capital. Of these the only
+record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of the
+"Triennial."
+
+For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid
+aside the gown for the sash and shoulder-strap, who, first in the
+bloodless triumphs of the regatta and in "capital training" for the
+great race of life where literary and professional fame are the prizes,
+went forth to venture all for honor and country, the Alma Mater surely
+should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because of her
+high responsibility in the education of "ingenuous youth," she can do no
+less. I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal
+thousands of her surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as
+he reads the story of her children amid their "baptism of fire." There
+is a notable peculiarity about this the most purely New-England of our
+colleges,--the continual recurrence of familiar patronymics. I take up
+the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five hundred names I
+can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots,
+Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells,--they come with every
+Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a
+hundred and fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent
+of nobility in this, such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the
+coronet which marks the union of birth and worth. We cannot, we, the
+Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep unhonored. Those who shall
+come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old Harvard, shall
+occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and
+Holworthy, have a right not only to count the academic wreaths which
+have been won in past days by their namesakes, but also to be taught the
+inspiring lesson of holy love of country, of highest courage and truth
+and soldierly virtue.
+
+And how shall this be done? Let these few remaining lines suggest at
+least one plan. Harvard's chief want is a hall for her Alumni, one
+worthy, in architecture and convenience, of her children's fame, which
+Harvard Hall is not. That long, awkward room, very hot and cramped to
+dine in at midsummer, hotter and more cramped still for the Class-day
+dances, is just fit for one purpose,--the declamation-exercises of the
+Sophomore year. Let us have a hall fit for Commencements, for Alumni and
+Phi-Beta orations, for our annual dinners, worthy of the "Doctor's"
+poems and the "General's" speeches, with a wainscot, not of vulgar
+plaster, but of noble oak, against which Copley's pictures and Story's
+busts may properly be placed.
+
+Then let its windows be filled, as in the glorious halls and chapels of
+England, with memorial glass. Let one of these, if no more, be formed,
+of the costliest and most perfect workmanship our art can compass, to
+the memory of the Heroes of Harvard. It shall be the gift of every class
+which counts among its members one of these. There, amid the gorgeous
+emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year, their
+battles.
+
+Or, if this may not be, because our Alma Mater is still too poor or too
+humble to offer to her returning children such banqueting-place,--if
+there is no Wykcham or Waynflete or Wolsey to arch for us the
+high-embowed roof, let us place our memorial in the Library, along its
+shaded alcoves and above its broad portals. There the bright shadows
+shall sleep and pass with the sliding day, where the young scholars
+mused and studied. There the future student, as he walks, shall read as
+noble a lesson as he can glean from any of the groaning shelves and
+dusty tomes. There shall be for Harvard her _Libro d'Oro_ wherein she
+has written the names of her best-beloved.
+
+Some token let us have that they are unforgotten. It was no quarrel of
+vulgar ambition in which they fell. It was the sacred strife for which
+the mother armed them when she sent them forth. For her they fought, for
+culture, generous learning, noble arts, for all that makes a land great
+and glorious, against the barbarism of anarchy and the baseness of a
+system founded upon wrong and oppression. We cannot, indeed, forget them
+while we live to come up to our annual gathering, and see the vacant
+places amid familiar ranks. There will then be question and reply,
+saddening, but proud. "He fell at Port Hudson, cheering on the forlorn
+hope." "He lies beneath the forest-trees of Chancellorsville." "He was
+slain upon the glacis of Fredericksburg." "He died in the foul prisons
+of Richmond." We cannot forget them, and we would fain leave the
+memorial of them to future generations. Their fame belongs to Harvard;
+for what they learned there could not be other than noble, inspiring,
+manly. Let Harvard make the plan, and give the call, and all of us, from
+our distant homes and according to our ability, will offer our gifts
+with gladness. Let the graduates who have leisure and taste and means,
+and who are still dwelling under the pleasant shades of the Cambridge
+elms, come together and take up the matter while love and gratitude and
+pride are fresh.
+
+WHO IS ROEBUCK?
+
+
+An inquiring American mind, seeking the solution of this momentous
+question, would naturally turn to Appleton's "New Cyclopædia," Vol.
+XIV., page 131. The inquiring mind would be enlightened in a somewhat
+bewildering manner by the description there laid down of a little
+animal, some of whose qualities are thus set forth in the first article
+on the page indicated above:--
+
+"ROEBUCK. A small European deer of the genus _Capreolus_.... The skull
+has a very small, shallow suborbital pit, ... tear-bag indistinct, hoofs
+narrow and triangular.... The color in summer is reddish brown, in
+winter olive, with paler shades; inside of the ears fulvous, and a black
+spot at the angles of the mouth.... It is about four feet long.... The
+horns are used for knife-handles.... They congregate in small families,
+but not in herds.... From their strong scent they are easily hunted;
+though they frequently escape by their speed, doublings, springing to
+cover, and other artifices.... The roebucks are represented in North
+America by the Virginia deer."
+
+Inquiring mind, not wishing for researches in the direction of Natural
+History, albeit the subject of parallelisms is a somewhat curious study
+and in special cases infinitely amusing, passes on to the next article
+in the Cyclopædia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is sufficiently obvious that it requires neither fame nor greatness
+to excite public curiosity. A notorious criminal or an unusually
+eccentric lunatic frequently gives rise to a larger share of
+newspaper-comment and general discussion than the wisest and most
+virtuous of mankind. It must be well remembered by those who have read
+Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon that a dwarf was attracting thousands to the
+Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, while the historical painter, stung
+to madness by the neglect of the frivolous crowd, committed the hideous
+and ghastly suicide which threw a tragic darkness over the close of his
+strange and troubled existence. The desperate and dangerous frequently
+succeed in placing themselves on a bad eminence, from which they are
+conspicuous enough; and if to be talked of and pointed at be the sole
+object of their ambition, they can, of course, be congratulated on their
+success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand
+quiet firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread
+widely, and the tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any
+public man or politician, whose taste is so morbidly depraved and whose
+aim in life is so debased as to prefer notoriety to honest, useful
+service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being the especial
+theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that
+so many of our fellow-countrymen are at this moment asking the question
+with which we head these pages,--"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+An unhappy culprit, who combined with an innocent taste for green peas a
+thievish method of acquiring their usual savory accompaniment, is
+reported to have been addressed by an English judge in the following
+felicitous terms:--"Prisoner at the bar, Providence has endowed you with
+health and strength, _instead of which_ you go about the country
+stealing ducks." Providence has endowed John Arthur Roebuck, member of
+the Parliament of Great Britain, with fair talents and some power of
+speech, _instead of which_ (to use the accurate judicial ellipsis) he
+goes about using violent and vulgar words of menace against those who
+have never offended him, and scattering firebrands as if there were no
+gun-powder anywhere to ignite and explode. This would be a mean and
+mischievous occupation for the dullest man; but for one who has proved
+by his very failures that he is not devoid of intellect or energy, it
+is a monstrous perversion of mental gifts, even if they are small.
+
+A portion of the fiery heat of his nature may be traced, perhaps, to the
+fact that he was born at Madras; but as on the mother's side he is
+descended from the poet Tickell, the friend of Addison, it would not be
+altogether unreasonable to have expected in him some few of the
+amenities of the _literæ humaniores_. He soon, however, exchanged the
+torrid scenes of Oriental life for the snows of Canada, where he
+received his education; and when we remember what the bizarre oddities
+of his subsequent career have been, it might be interesting, if we had
+the materials for the purpose, to inquire what that education was. The
+British Provinces, however, were not deemed a sufficiently ample theatre
+of action for the energy of the capacious soul that dwelt in that not
+over-capacious body; and so, at the age of twenty-three, he repaired to
+England and commenced his studies for the profession of the law.
+
+He was called to the bar in 1832. He had, however, by no means paid an
+exclusive attention to the study of the law, or his success in his
+profession might have been greater, and the world might have had a good
+lawyer instead of a bad politician. The period of his Inner-Temple
+student-life was a very stirring time in England. Old principles were
+dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider theories
+of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian
+rushed with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most
+reckless and noisy debating-club spouters of the day. In speaking of the
+Reform Bill at a meeting at a tavern in London, he said, that, if the
+bill did not pass, he for one should like to "wade the streets of the
+capital knee-deep in blood." It was consoling to reflect, even at the
+time, that the atrocious aspiration was mitigated by the reflection that
+it would not require a deluge of gore to reach the knees of such a
+Zacchæus as Roebuck. "Pretty wicious that for a child of six!" said the
+amiable Mr. Squeers on one occasion; and pretty sanguinary that, say we,
+for a rising little demagogue of thirty.
+
+As England was at that time in a seething ferment of excitement, men who
+were unscrupulous in their language were at a premium in the political
+market, and the respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place
+of Bath, in Somersetshire, elected the fierce little man as their
+representative in the Imperial Parliament. This was a great start in
+life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated his
+overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation
+and honest adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful
+position, and been saved, at least, from the indignity of fetching and
+carrying for the Emperor of Austria, and from the impertinence of
+intruding himself into the august presence of Mr. Kinglake's amiable and
+virtuous friend, the Emperor of France. The English nation might then
+possibly have pointed to his portrait in their historical gallery as
+that of an efficient public servant who had deserved well of his
+country, and he might have escaped a ludicrous immortality as the Dog
+Tear-'em, in the recent admirable sketch in "Punch."
+
+But, in the words of a political song,--
+
+    "There weren't no such luck
+    For John A. Roebuck,
+  And he thought he would teach the whole nation
+    That the Tories were fools,
+    And the Whigs only tools,
+  But Roebuck was England's salvation."
+
+And he, according to this programme, set himself to reform the
+Constitution and protect the Colonies.
+
+  "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,"
+
+he was an eclectic in politics,--acknowledged no leader, had himself no
+followers. A chief without a party, an apostle without disciples, a
+critic without the merest ordinary penetration, a cynic whose bitterness
+was not enlivened by wit or humor, a spouter whose arguments, when he
+had any, were usually furnished from the mint, John Arthur Roebuck was
+for many years that impersonation of terrific honesty, glaring purity,
+and indignant virtue, known in English politics as an INDEPENDENT member
+of Parliament. When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are
+disposed to be unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they
+win or retain place and power, such a position, occupied with judgment
+and fortified by modesty and good sense, is a most powerful and a most
+beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on by one whose obtrusive
+egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any serious or
+permanent influence on his fellow-men. When a Pocket-Diogenes rolls his
+little tub into the House of Commons, and complains that everybody is
+standing between him and the sun,--why, in an assembly of educated and
+sensible men the sham is soon discovered, the pseudo-cynic seen through,
+and his affected misanthropy deservedly gains for him universal derision
+and scorn. Some years after he entered Parliament, Mr. Disraeli, with
+whom he had many encounters, in which he was invariably worsted, made
+the House roar with laughter by taunting Roebuck with his "Sadler's
+Wells sarcasms and melodramatic malignities," and drew a most amusing
+picture of him as "a solitary sentinel pacing round the deserted citadel
+of his own opinions."
+
+  "He who surpasses or subdues mankind
+  Must look down on the hate of those below";
+
+but as Mr. Roebuck has done neither the one nor the other, his only
+chance of not being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated,
+by his contemporaries, is to continue his work of mischief, and merely
+change the object of his puny attacks as one becomes more prominent than
+another, and as he can manage to maintain his own quasi-importance by
+attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike for
+this country; so far from that, he admired and praised us, as by an
+extract from one of his books we will presently prove; but since he has
+become a self-appointed lackey, has donned imperial livery, and as a
+volunteer does the dirty work of despots, he must have lost all sympathy
+with and all regard for an independent, free, and brave people. We hope
+and believe that this country vastly prefers his censure to his praise,
+and, as far as it has leisure at the present crisis for any serious
+consideration of his erratic pranks, would rather have his enmity than
+his friendship. _Non tali auxilio!_
+
+But we must recur to his inconsistent and rather uninteresting career,
+and so satisfy, and perhaps weary, the curiosity of any reader who is
+still disposed to ask the momentous question, "Who is Roebuck?"
+
+In 1835, he was appointed the agent--the _paid_ agent--of the House of
+Assembly of Lower Canada, during the dispute then raging between the
+Executive Government and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially
+plume themselves on the fact that the members of their legislative
+bodies are unremunerated, it is somewhat difficult to understand how
+this exception was made in John Arthur's favor. As a precedent it is to
+be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious that such an
+arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members,
+might throw grave suspicions on the purity of public men, and introduce
+a wholesale venality into public life. If such a system is permitted,
+any foreign monarch or any foreign government may secure the services of
+a British senator as his agent and representative. It is quite appalling
+to think that the chivalrous Earl of Derby or the conscientious Mr.
+Gladstone should be shocked by the offer of a handsome annual salary
+paid quarterly, (not deducting the income-tax,) made by the King of
+Dahomey for an eloquent defence of his humane and enlightened rule, or
+by an equally munificent donative from the famous and merry monarch of
+the Cannibal Islands for the support of himself and his loyal subjects
+in their copious consumption of human flesh. We should be sorry wantonly
+to raise so dreadful a suspicion; but if British M.P.s are permitted,
+according to the Roebuck precedent, to be PAID agents, why has not
+Southern money found its way into senatorial pockets? Greedy Mr. Laird,
+and unscrupulous, money-loving Mr. Lindsay,[A] always resolutely
+grubbing for the main chance, are perhaps sufficiently paid by indirect,
+though heavy gains in shipbuilding. Needy Mr. Roebuck may be salaried by
+the Emperor of Austria, though there is nothing to prove, except his own
+open-mouthed and loud-tongued professions of purity, that he is not
+"_paid_ agent" of the Confederate Government. The indulgence of the evil
+feelings of malice and uncharitableness may, however, sufficiently
+recompense him; and to him, perhaps, his virtue may be its own reward.
+But if paid agencies are not permitted, a very serious suspicion fastens
+on that hard-mouthed, rising lordling, Robert Cecil, son of the Marquis
+of Salisbury, and one of the most active and energetic champions of the
+slave-mongers of the South. The young lord, it is well known, stepped
+down from the lofty pedestal of a bad pedigree to marry the fair, but
+portionless daughter of an English judge; his father is proverbially
+mean and stingy, and the young lord himself proportionately poor; and in
+the intervals of his strenuous advocacy of the claims of the Rebels to
+European recognition he laudably ekes out his very narrow income by
+writing articles for the London newspapers and reviews; and rumor says
+that he communicates gossiping letters, full of piquant and satirical
+sketches of the proceedings of the House of Commons to two or three of
+the provincial papers. He is under these circumstances peculiarly open
+to suspicion. If the proceeding in question is a usual one, why does he
+not openly avow it? If it is unusual or improper, why does he not deny
+the soft impeachment so much credited both in this country and in his
+own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck, after being
+the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become
+such a _purist_ as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the
+Commons, and scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he
+had touched the yellow and handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable
+Indian princes and rajahs who come to England with complaints of
+grievances, sometimes real, and sometimes fictitious, against the
+British Government.
+
+[Footnote A: Lindsay's fawning, plastic sycophancy is well known this
+side the water. After shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from
+Northern business-transactions, he now turns about, kicks his old
+friends, who always half suspected his knavish propensities, bows, cap
+in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some honest
+pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion.
+A "fool's gudgeon" will surely reward his laborious endeavors for
+Southern gold, that article growing beautifully less every day.]
+
+During the period of the "paid agency" Roebuck was tolerably industrious
+with his pen; but in literature and journalism he proved his utter
+incapacity for joining in any combined action. Such was his dogged
+self-assertion and indomitable egotism that none of the ordinary
+channels would answer his purpose; and so he issued a series of
+political papers, entitled "Pamphlets for the People," to which the
+curious may sometimes refer, but which have now lost all their
+significance and interest. His quarrels with editors and publishers were
+notorious; and an altercation with Mr. Black, the well-known editor of
+the "Morning Chronicle," eventuated in a duel so bloodless as to be
+ridiculous. David's pebble did not reach Goliath, and Goliath was
+equally merciful to David. In these pamphlets he violently assailed the
+whole body of editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the
+papers of any note. And the more accustomed he became to the House of
+Commons, the greater liberties did he take with the conventional
+fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility were so
+indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most
+unpopular member of the House.
+
+In 1837 he lost his election for Bath, but was reelected in 1841. In a
+subsequent contest at Bath he was successfully opposed by Lord Ashley,
+the present Earl of Shaftesbury. On this occasion he exhibited even more
+than his usual bad temper and bad taste. He declined to accept Lord
+Ashley's proffered hand; and in the chagrin and vexation occasioned by
+unexpected defeat he uttered a rabid invective against the
+Non-Conformist ministers of the place, to whose influence he rightly
+attributed his rival's success. Lord Ashley was a well-known
+philanthropist, and his consistent support and patronage of many
+religious and charitable societies had naturally given him popularity
+among the Protestant clergy of all denominations,--a popularity
+heightened in the case of the Evangelical and Calvinistic ministers by
+his Lordship's strict Sabbatarianism and his belief in cold dinners on
+Sunday. On the other hand, Mr. Roebuck was openly accused of private
+professions of skepticism in matters of religion; and this report, so
+dangerous to the repute of any public man in England, (where theology
+and politics so frequently cross each other,) considerably damaged his
+chance of success. Lord Ashley, however, was in no way responsible for
+the rumor; and the difference between the conduct of the two during the
+contest was this, that Lord Ashley behaved like a gentleman and Mr.
+Roebuck did not.
+
+During his retirement into private life, after this defeat in 1847, he
+wrote his work entitled "The History of the Whig Ministry of 1830,"--a
+book in the preparation of which he is said to have received
+considerable and valuable assistance from no less a person than Lord
+Brougham. Despite the aid that he received, it is amusing to find in his
+preface a characteristic vaunting of his entire difference with Lord
+Brougham about the character of King William IV. "Lord Brougham," he
+writes, "is accustomed to describe William IV as frank, just, and
+straightforward. We believe him to have been very weak and very false, a
+finished dissembler, and always bitterly hostile to the Whig Ministry
+and their great measure of Reform." This is Roebuck all over. He would
+infinitely rather argue that white was black than quietly coincide in
+any generally received opinion.
+
+While on the subject of his writings, we will mention the book in which
+he vouchsafed to praise those whom he now so elaborately vilifies. In
+1849 he published an octavo volume of two hundred and forty-eight pages
+on "The Colonies of England." Speaking (page 84) of the vast and rapid
+progress made by this country, he says:--
+
+"We are led to inquire by what machinery, by what favoring
+circumstances, such a result has been brought about. The people, be it
+remarked, are the same as ourselves,--the original Thirteen States were
+the work of Englishmen. English heads, English hearts, English hands
+brought those new communities into existence. No longer connected by
+government with us, they nevertheless retained the characteristics of
+the race from which they sprang, and proceeding in the great work to
+which they were destined, they strode across the continent, the fairest
+portion of which they could now call their own. In planting new
+settlements they were aided by our own people,--the very elements _out
+of which we endeavor to frame colonies, and with which we do produce
+sickly, miserable communities that can only be said to exist, and to
+linger on in a sort of half-life_, without the spirit of a young, or the
+amenities and polish of an old community, and, above all, _without any
+spirit of independence_."
+
+Again, speaking of colonization In this country as opposed to Canada and
+other English colonies, he writes (page 88):--"Certain adventurous
+persons, the 'pioneers' of civilization, wishing to make new settlements
+beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands
+belonging to the United States, made formal application to the
+Government of the United States at Washington, who, being bound to
+afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land
+surveyed and laid out into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are
+also indicated, and at once the law exists; and security, guarantied by
+the authority of the United States, immediately follows, both for person
+and property; and all the machinery known to the Common Law, and needed
+for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law's
+decrees, is at once adopted. A municipal authority comes into existence;
+a court-house, a jail, a school-room, arise in the wilderness; and
+although these buildings be humble, and the men who exercise authority
+in them may appear to be in some degree rude, yet is the law there in
+all its useful majesty. To it a reverent obedience is rendered; and the
+plain magistrate, who, in a hunter's frock, may, in the name of the
+United States, pronounce the law's decree, commands an obedience as
+complete and sincere as that which is paid to the Chief-Justice of the
+Supreme Court at Washington, or to the ermined judge who presides in the
+courts of our Lady the Queen in Westminster Hall."
+
+This in 1849; but what a very different tone has he thought fit to adopt
+now! Was any agency then expected which has not been forthcoming? Or,
+having degenerated from being a supporter of liberal opinions in his
+youth to being the fond and fatuous admirer of autocrats in his old age,
+does he think that it is absolutely necessary that the firm friend of
+Austrian despotism should be the malignant assailant of the Government
+and people of the United States? The man is consistent in nothing but
+his spiteful vindictiveness and love of mischief. He is now the general
+object of deserved ridicule and contempt for his flunkyistic attendance
+at the Tuileries. At the time of Louis Napoleon's visit to London,
+Roebuck raved and ranted about his "perjured lips having kissed the
+Queen of England."
+
+He has, on some occasions, put himself prominently forward, and in such
+a way as to make himself an influential member of Parliament. He moved
+the vote of confidence in the Whig Government in 1850, when the great
+debate ensued in which the late Sir Robert Peel made his last speech,
+and they were kept in office by a poetical majority of nine. But the
+speech with which Roebuck introduced the motion was entirely eclipsed by
+the magnificent declamation of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the present
+Lord-Chief-Justice of England. On another great occasion, in January,
+1855, he brought forward in the House of Commons a motion for inquiry
+into the conduct of the Crimean War. Lord Aberdeen's Government was
+defeated by an immense majority, and, of course, resigned. Mr. Roebuck
+was chairman of the Committee of Inquiry; but the cabinet that came in
+discreetly declined to give him any official post in their ranks. They
+knew too well the terrible uncertainty and inconsistency of the man's
+conduct. They could place no reliance either on his temper or his
+discretion. In 1855 he was one of the numerous candidates for the
+chairmanship of the Metropolitan Board of Works, but failed to inspire
+the electors with any confidence in his capacity for the post. In the
+following year he became the chairman of the Administrative Reform
+Association, and although the league had at first been highly
+successful, and aided much in awaking public attention to the
+miscarriages and mismanagement in the Crimea, yet, under this fatal
+presidency, it became speedily and ingloriously defunct. This was his
+last great failure, before abdicating all his early liberal principles.
+He has of late years endeavored to solace himself for the now
+irretrievable blunders of his career by an exaggerated indulgence in his
+idiosyncratic waywardness, paradox, and eccentricity. He is proud of
+being considered the acquaintance of the Emperor of Austria, and rather
+pleased than otherwise at being assailed on this account. He affects the
+society and friendship of conservative members of the House of Commons.
+He has become tolerant of lords. He may be seen sitting next to Lord
+Robert Cecil, indulging in ill-natured jocosities, from which his
+Lordship probably borrows when he indites ill-natured articles for the
+misguided "Saturday Review."[A] He hates the Manchester school of
+politicians, because their liberality and their sympathy with the cause
+of freedom and civilization in this country remind Roebuck of his own
+deflection from the right path.
+
+[Footnote A: This journal is now owned by Mr. Alexander James Beresford
+Beresford-Hope, (we dare not omit any portion of this august name,) who
+has ample means to enlist the talents of reckless, "smart" young men in
+search of employment for any work he may require, no matter how
+unprincipled the job in hand.]
+
+His private undertakings have not been more fortunate than his public
+acts. He was chairman of a bank, which was unsuccessful, to say the
+least of it. He has been connected with other enterprises, which soon
+courted and obtained failure.
+
+What he has recently said and done in reference to this country is too
+fresh in our memories to require that we should recite or recapitulate
+it here. His past career, as we have reviewed it, may account for the
+now intolerable acerbity of temper and the ludicrous vanity which
+disgrace him. Never was a Nemesis more just than that which has for the
+present consigned him to a melancholy obscurity. The political
+extinguisher has certainly dropped upon his head, and this burning and
+shining light has gone out with an unpleasant odor into utter darkness.
+
+In summing up his character, it is evident that excessive vanity is his
+besetting sin. He is not too clever or too honest to act in union with
+other people, but he is too _vain_. He is by no means too good for the
+rest of the world; but he is too conceited and self-opinionated to
+condescend to coöperate with them. As, at some of the minor theatres, a
+single actor may play an army, so, in the House of Commons, Roebuck is a
+host in himself,--is his own party, and leads it. His occasional
+popularity in his own country is due to the fact, that, in his own
+character, he, to a certain extent, represents and crystallizes a few of
+the good and many of the bad qualities of Englishmen. He has their
+courage and audacity, their independence and pride, their generally
+defiant front to the rest of the world; but he is also vain, obstinate,
+bigoted, prejudiced, narrow in his views, and boastful in his language.
+His vulgar swagger, for instance, about the navy sweeping the seas,
+would have been condemned here, if it had been addressed by the most
+violent of demagogues to the most ignorant of Irish mobs.
+
+We have heard him speak in the House of Commons in his palmier days,
+before he was as decrepit in mind as he is in body. He had great
+fluency, some power of invective, and a vast stock of assurance. We
+listened to him upon one occasion, when, without the slightest
+provocation, he used the most undignified personalities to the late Sir
+Robert Peel,--to which Sir Robert, very wisely, never replied.
+
+We cannot say that we feel any profound interest as to his future. He
+has compared himself to a dog,--but, on behalf of that faithful and
+valued companion of man, we protest against the similitude. He has the
+kind of pugnacity which prompts a cur or a puppy to attack a
+Newfoundland or a mastiff. He has not the fidelity and many other good
+qualities of the canine race. At any rate, he has become a mischievous
+dog,--and a dull dog,--and will soon be a "sad dog."
+
+We would venture to suggest, that he should at once be raised to the
+peerage, under the title of Baron Tear-'em. He might then aid the good
+cause of the slave-mongers of the South, and act in unison with that
+just, generous, moral, and virtuous nobleman, the Marquis of
+Clanricarde.
+
+We ought to apologize to our readers for so lengthy an account of so
+undeserving a person,--but, at any rate, they ought by this time to know
+"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Six Months in the Federal States_. By EDWARD DICEY. In Two Volumes.
+London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co.
+
+This is a very _gentlemanly_ book. Whatever excellence of commendation
+belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr.
+Dicey. And it is ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British
+tourists who have preceded him. For, to make no mention of the vulgar
+buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that neither the exalted and
+irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the cleverish
+magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony
+Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition. It is no
+mean praise to say that the word _gentlemanly_ naturally applies itself
+to a traveller's work. And it is necessary to allow that the majority of
+Americans who have printed their impressions of a scamper over Europe
+have fallen as hopelessly below it as a few have risen far above it.
+Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the sterling sentences of
+"English Traits"; some epithet of more rare and subtile significance is
+suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with which
+Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the "Atlantic." But after
+the manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would
+emphatically credit as an American _gentleman_ might speak of six months
+in England, so has Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal
+States.
+
+And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or
+"stereographic" descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us
+which Mr. Dicey offers to his countrymen. To such loyal Americans as
+these volumes may reach they will give a heart not to be found in Dr.
+Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the dashing effects of popular Mr.
+Trollope, nor even--making all allowance for the sanative influence of
+counter-irritation--in the weekly malignity of that _ex_-Moral Minstrel
+whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent
+slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out
+what petty enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly,
+English way of accepting the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis
+he came to study. He seldom gets entangled in trivial events, but knows
+how to use them as illustrations of great events. It is really
+refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily delivered
+from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is
+not called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the
+hardships of indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of
+New-York hackmen. There is scarcely an offence against good taste or
+good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and whatever American homes may
+have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more readily than to
+most publishing tourists from the mother-land.
+
+Mr. Dicey clearly exhibits the bearing of the Rebellion upon the fate of
+the servile population of the South, and confesses that his deep
+sympathy with the Federal cause came from the conviction that the
+supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was intimately connected with the
+success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the necessity that was
+upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their society,
+he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign
+well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the
+Free States. He has the sagacity to perceive that the genius and
+development of the graduates of Northern school-houses are totally
+opposed to a military rule. Mr. Dicey cordially recognizes the
+democratic idea which sanctifies our convulsion, and displays a careful
+observation in noting "the self-restraint, the moderation, and the
+patience of the American people in the conduct of the people's war." He
+is not over-disturbed because this same people loved law and order more
+than freedom itself, and with few murmurs committed high principles to
+the championship of whatever petty men happened to represent them.
+Indeed, one of the best sayings he reports is that of an old Polish
+exile, who congratulates himself that there will be no saviours of
+society, no fathers of their country, to be provided for when the war
+is over.
+
+Throughout these two volumes British readers may discern something more
+than the barren facts of our struggle: they may catch glimpses of its
+energy and movement; they may see it as reflected from the most generous
+American minds. For it seems to have been Mr. Dicey's good fortune in
+this country to have gained admission to the society of men and women of
+high intelligence, in whom the religious sentiment was living and
+powerful; and he appears to estimate the full weight of testimony such
+persons offered in sending their loved ones to Virginia to fall beneath
+the rifle of some Southern boor. It is this silent public opinion of the
+North which our foreign critics have generally failed to comprehend.
+They have been so long accustomed to parody the rhetorical elation of
+our third-rate political speakers, and to represent this as a universal
+American characteristic, that they signally failed to estimate the
+genuine emotion with which it is never connected. When the cherished
+barbarism of slaveholders arose and threatened our Western civilization,
+those who most felt and have best wrought for their country were
+cautious in their speech. They knew that the principle underlying the
+struggle must submit itself to the checks and counter-checks of
+constitutional law. While the fire of liberty burned at the heart of
+citizens of abiding loyalty, it seemed best, that, like the Psalmist,
+they should hold their peace even from good words. Many thought it an
+act of necessary self-restraint to dwell only upon the Union as a symbol
+of that universal freedom which they felt the Union must finally
+represent. The dread of overleaping the restraints of law, which,
+perchance, has prolonged the conflict, has been most creditable to the
+genuine democracy we have represented. We are proud to remember many
+intelligent soldiers who used no language of passionate denunciation
+towards the guilty institution which called them to the field, yet who
+knew the end when they gave their lives to a cause utterly antagonistic
+to its despotic claims.
+
+By the representations of Secessionists encountered in the Free States,
+as well as from disloyal newspapers which the "Lincoln despotism" never
+sought to suppress, Mr. Dicey was convinced that the sole purpose of the
+Rebellion was to get possession of the vast regions which lie west of
+the Mississippi, wherein to establish Slave States and Territories. "The
+North," he declares, "is fighting against, the South is fighting for,
+the power of extending slavery across the American continent; and if
+this was all that could be said, it is clear on which side must be the
+sympathies of any one who really and honestly believes that slavery is
+an evil and a sin." But it is not here that Mr. Dicey rests the case of
+the North as appealing to the Christian sentiment of the world. He shows
+that the inexorable logic of facts must work the overthrow of slavery
+where it now exists. The suppression of the slave-trade, the recognition
+of Hayti, abolition in the District of Columbia, and finally the
+Proclamation of January have one tendency and can have but one result.
+We state these views as one more confirmation of the fact, that, whether
+agreeable to us or not, the sympathies of liberal men in Europe are to
+be had on the sole ground that ours is an anti-slavery war.
+
+Mr. Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although
+discriminating, estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored
+to serve their country by leaving the level commonplaces of respectable
+citizenship. It is no slight praise to say that his chapter upon the
+New-England Abolitionists is clear and just. Their points of
+disagreement with the Republican party are stated with no common
+accuracy. Careful sentences give the precise position of Garrison and
+his adherents: the intrinsic essence of the movement of these reformers
+is divested of the subordinate and trivial facts so often put forward to
+misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey endeavors not to commit himself upon
+the vital differences in the agitation of anti-slavery sentiments by the
+Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very evident that he
+inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of disunion,
+acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical
+compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense
+conviction of the national sin.
+
+We have dwelt thus upon Mr. Dicey's views of the war, and of the great
+moral question with which it is connected, because these portions of his
+volumes are most pertinent to us, as well as creditable to him. His
+sketches of public characters are good common-sense grasps at them,
+which generally get their externals, and occasionally something more.
+The description of the President is forcible, though a little too
+graphic for perfect courtesy. Caleb Cushing impresses the traveller as
+one of the ablest of our public men, and Wendell Phillips as by far the
+most eloquent speaker he ever heard. General Butler, however, is not to
+Mr. Dicey's taste. Indeed, he is hardly behind the "Saturday Review" in
+the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man who he acknowledges "was
+associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms, and by some
+means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost
+of either men or money." It is rather late to renew discussion about the
+notorious order relating to the women of the subjected city. But Mr.
+Dicey chooses to express his belief in an infamous intention of General
+Butler at the time of its issue,--though he declares that "the strictest
+care was taken lest the order should be abused," and that the "Southern
+ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their behavior to the Union
+soldiers, using _language and gestures_ which, in a city occupied by
+troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, _without orders_,
+to the coarsest retaliation." To which we have only to reply, that
+General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool.
+Nobody doubts that he has military or civil aspirations for the future,
+and, for such ends, if for nothing else, wishes the approbation of his
+loyal countrymen. Now Mr. Dicey testifies to "the almost morbid
+sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to women": he
+tells us that "it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female
+influences"; also, that this same "sentiment" among us "protects women
+from the natural consequences of their own misconduct." These
+characteristics of his countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler
+as they are patent to Mr. Dicey; and we hold it to be simply incredible
+that one who is at least a very shrewd politician used language which
+_he intended_ should convey a meaning that must necessarily consign his
+future career to privacy and infamy. It is perhaps not wonderful that
+men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system which
+consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil
+interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to _acts_ which, in
+civilized States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one
+purpose. Neither is it very astonishing that such persons as have been
+employed to pump the New-York sewers into the _cloaca maxima_ which sets
+towards us from Printing-House Square should share the sensitive
+chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do. But it is
+passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey,
+one so appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of
+its representatives, should join in an accusation whose absurdity is
+only lost in its infinite offence.
+
+There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of
+carelessness or repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances
+allowed time for revision, might have been avoided. It would require the
+"Pathfinder" himself to discover "Fremont Street" in the city where we
+write; the "Courier" is _not_ "the most largely circulated of any Boston
+paper"; and our Ex-Mayor "Whiteman" requires no fanciful orthography to
+free his name from the obloquy of an over-devotion to the interests of
+colored citizens. These are local illustrations of mistakes which are
+excusable in view of the commendable expedition with which the work was
+issued,--for, in the late crisis of our affairs, an Englishman who had
+any good words to give us fulfilled the proverb by giving twice in
+giving quickly. But, whatever trifling details might be subjected to
+criticism, the total impression of what Mr. Dicey has written bears
+honorable testimony to the accuracy of his observation, as well as to
+his powers of comparison and judgment.
+
+As has been already remarked, we cannot be blind to the fact that our
+only supporters in England are those men who recognize at the heart of
+our contest that genuine principle of Liberty which is not to be limited
+to caste or to race. And it is only by hastening to justify their
+confidence that we can win to our cause the great people they address.
+If we cannot gain the national sympathy of England, we must do without
+the true sympathy of any nation. It was, indeed, remarked by De
+Tocqueville, that, "in the eyes of the English, the cause which is most
+useful to England is always the cause of justice." But the rare insight
+of the philosopher assigns the phenomenon, not to a political
+Machiavelism, but to a "laudable desire to connect the actions of one's
+country with something more stable than interest." The English have a
+peculiar gift of fixing their whole attention upon certain traits or
+single circumstances which they desire to see. We doubt not that a
+portion of their sympathy with the energy and endurance of those in arms
+against their country is estimable according to its light. But as the
+dignity of our mission in this struggle becomes more and more apparent,
+the moral intelligence of England will be forced to unite itself with
+the Government of the United States. Let that day come when it will,
+posterity will remember its obligations to those Englishmen who did so
+much to avert the hideous calamity of a war between the two liberal
+powers of the world. And to us of this present generation it is grateful
+to know that our brave and generous young men have not died wholly
+unrecognized in the land of their ancestors. Mill, Ellison,
+Hughes,--what need to name the rest?--have stood up to report them and
+their cause aright to the unsatisfied: in which roll of the honorable
+and honored we are glad to write the name of Edward Dicey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Hospital Transports_. A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and
+Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Compiled
+and published at the Request of the Sanitary Commission. Boston: Ticknor
+and Fields.
+
+If pure benevolence was ever organized and utilized into beneficence,
+the name of the institution is the Sanitary Commission. It is a standing
+answer to Samson's riddle, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." Out
+of the very depths of the agony of this cruel and bloody war springs
+this beautiful system, built of the noblest and divinest attributes of
+the human soul. Amidst all the heroism of daring and enduring which this
+war has developed, amidst all the magnanimity of which it has shown the
+race capable, the daring, the endurance, and the greatness of soul which
+have been discovered among the men and women who have given their lives
+to this work shine as brightly as any on the battle-field,--in some
+respects even more brightly. They have not the bray of trumpets nor the
+clash of swords to rouse enthusiasm, nor will the land ever resound with
+their victories. Theirs is the dark and painful side, the menial and
+hidden side, but made light and lovely by the spirit that shines in and
+through it all. Glimpses of this agency are familiar to our people; but
+not till the history of its inception, progress, and results is calmly
+and adequately written out and spread before the public will any idea be
+formed of the magnitude and importance of the work which it has done.
+Nor even then. Never, till every soldier whose last moments it has
+soothed, till every soldier whose flickering life it has gently steadied
+into continuance, whose waning reason it has softly lulled into quiet,
+whose chilled blood it has warmed into healthful play, whose failing
+frame it has nourished into strength, whose fainting heart it has
+comforted with sympathy,--never, until every full soul has poured out
+its story of gratitude and thanksgiving, will the record be complete;
+but long before that time, ever since the moment that its helping hand
+was first held forth, comes the Blessed Voice, "Inasmuch as ye have done
+it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
+
+An institution asking of Government only permission to live and
+opportunity to work, planting itself firmly and squarely on the
+generosity of the people, subsisting solely by their free-will
+offerings, it is a noble monument of the intelligence, the munificence,
+and the efficiency of a free people, and of the alacrity with which it
+responds when the right chord is rightly touched. It is, however, not
+unnatural that doubts should exist as to the success of a plan so
+far-reaching in its aims and hitherto so untried. Stories have been
+circulated of a mercenary disposition of its stores and trickery among
+its officers. Where these stories have found considerable credence, they
+have been tracked to their source and triumphantly refuted; but it would
+indeed be hardly less than miraculous, if an institution ramifying so
+widely, with agents so numerous, and resources so extensive, should have
+no knaves among its servants, and no waste in its circulation. The
+wonder is, that more leakage has not been proved than has ever been
+suspected. All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to convince
+all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all
+hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of
+what it has done, is doing, and purposes to do. This information the
+Commission has, at different times, and by piecemeal, furnished:
+necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book justly remarks, the
+immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its operations
+in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in
+the reading as in the performance. In this little volume we have,
+photographed, a single phase of its operations. It consists simply of
+extracts from letters and reports. There is no attempt at completeness
+or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate grouping would probably
+fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work and its
+ways as these unpretending fragments. It delights us to see the--we can
+hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the "self-sacrifice"
+which benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about--but, rather, the
+gay, lively, merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold
+of. Men and women seem to have gone into the service with good-will and
+hearty love and buoyant spirits. It refreshes and strengthens us like a
+tonic to read of their taking the wounded, festering, filthy, miserable
+men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and beef-tea, and
+putting them abed and asleep. There is not a word about "devotion" or
+"ministering angels," (we could wish there were not quite so much about
+"ladies,") but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains
+and quick hands, now bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be
+rewarded with one grateful smile from the parting soul,--now standing in
+the way of a procession of the slightly wounded, to pour a little brandy
+down their throats, or put an orange into their hands, just to keep them
+up till they reach food and rest,--now running up the river in a
+steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they
+go,--now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents
+of rain, into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, "calling
+back to life those in despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again
+catching for mother or wife the last faint whispers of the dying,"--now
+leaving their compliments to serve a disappointed colonel instead of his
+dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by dragging away the stove with
+its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood pot-holes;--and let the
+sutler's name be wreathed with laurel who not only permitted this, but
+offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and would take
+no pay!
+
+The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of
+thousands who love their country and their kind, rest upon those who
+originated, and those who sustain, this noble work. Let the people's
+heart never faint and its hand never weary; but let it, of its
+abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed down, shaken
+together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen,
+its divine footsteps may follow,--that, wherever the red hand of war is
+lifted to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,--that its work
+may never cease until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or
+until peace once more reigns throughout the land. And even then,
+gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory, shall never die out of
+the hearts of the American people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all
+Churches, Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith_. By
+WILLIAM HOWITT. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
+
+There has been a great change of late years in connection with the
+science of Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it. There was a
+revolution of opinion on this subject in the middle of the last century;
+there is a counter-revolution to-day.
+
+The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during
+the course of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopædism of French
+philosophy. The grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the
+supernatural were fiercely attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove
+the insufficiency of such grounds were assumed to prove more than lack
+of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs, that, in the nature
+of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
+the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of
+mortals, except that which relates to the physical,--to this earth, as
+the only phase of existence,--to the vital body, as the all of the human
+being. Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material
+organization, as heat is the result of combustion: they exhibited
+themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death
+supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of
+combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
+phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but
+the mere fancy of an excited imagination.
+
+Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this
+materialistic influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and,
+more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.
+The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not
+merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual. Science, with her
+strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
+direction.
+
+It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the
+Encyclopædian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an
+insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it. It does not appear
+to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of
+Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as
+those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the
+products of chemical combinations.
+
+Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God
+adapts the proofs of that which it is important that man should know to
+the intellectual progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same
+evidence which sufficed for the foundation of religious faith five
+hundred years ago will suffice equally well to-day? Truths are eternal;
+laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts there is a
+childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
+arguments suited to various stages of progress.
+
+Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the
+economy of human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present
+phase, (that phase being but the preparation for another and a higher,)
+may it not be, that, as the world advances, men may gradually be
+permitted, occasionally and to a limited extent, to become aware of
+influences exerted from a more advanced phase of existence over this?
+May it not be that the links connecting the two phases of existence are
+gradually to become more numerous and apparent?
+
+Such are the general views which William Howitt's work is intended to
+illustrate and enforce. He selects, as a title-page motto, an axiom from
+Butler's "Analogy,"--"There are two courses of Nature: the ordinary and
+the extraordinary." By the supernatural he does not mean phenomena out
+of the course of Nature, but such comparatively rare phenomena as are
+governed by laws with which we are unacquainted, and as are, therefore,
+to us something extraordinary, something to be wondered at,--miracles.
+
+The author travels over a vast extent of ground,--more, we think, than
+can be properly explored in the compass of two duodecimo volumes. All
+ages, all countries, all faiths, furnish their quota towards his
+collection. It is curious, interesting, suggestive, rather than
+conclusive. It exhibits more industry than logic. It consists rather of
+abundant materials for others to use, than of materials worked up by the
+collector. It gives evidence of learning, research, and a comprehensive
+study of the subject. It is a _thesaurus_ of pneumatological knowledge,
+collected with German assiduity. It will set many to thinking, though it
+may convince but few, except of the one truth, that the faith in the
+supernatural has been a universal faith, pervading all nations,
+persisting through all ages.
+
+The number of those who take an interest in the subject treated of in
+Mr. Howitt's book, and who believe that great truths underlie popular
+superstitions, increases day by day; and the work will probably have a
+wide circulation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13631 ***
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+<div>*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13631 ***</div>
+
+    <a name="page265" id="page265"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 265]</span>
+    <h1>THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.</h1>
+    <center>
+      A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+    </center>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <center>
+      VOL. XII.&mdash;SEPTEMBER, 1863.&mdash;NO. LXXI.
+    </center>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <center>
+      Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in
+      the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
+    </center>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE PURITAN MINISTER.</h2>
+    <p>It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen hundred and
+    something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest settlement, around whose
+    expanding fields the great American wilderness recedes each day, withdrawing its
+    bears and wolves and Indians into an ever remoter distance,&mdash;not yet so far but
+    that a stout wooden gate at each end of the village street indicates that there is
+    something outside which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
+    thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness which broods
+    over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the smoke ascends more faintly
+    than usual from the chimneys of these abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and
+    since three o'clock yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been
+    done. Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the consummation of
+    the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In which settlement of the
+    Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to pass before our eyes? If it be
+    Cambridge village, the warning drum is beating its peaceful summons to the
+    congregation. If it be Salem village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal,
+    and a red flag is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
+    auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without money and
+    beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham Tyler has been blowing his
+    horn assiduously for half an hour, a service for which Abraham, each year, receives a
+    half-pound of pork from every family in town.</p>
+    <p>Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to this
+    important building, the centre of the village, the one public
+    edifice,&mdash;meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in one. So
+    important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a half-mile from it. And yet
+    the people ride to meeting, short though the distance be, for at yonder oaken block a
+    wife dismounts from behind her husband;&mdash;and has it not, moreover, been found
+    needful to impose a fine of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins <a
+    name="page266" id="page266"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 266]</span> are not modern
+    ones, young gentlemen.</p>
+    <p>We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is the
+    pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a terror to evil-doers,
+    but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house is a high wooden paling, to which
+    the law permits citizens to tie their horses, provided it be not done too near the
+    passage-way. For at that opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is
+    painted black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears also a
+    heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the ground, ready to
+    support the weapon; and he is girded with his bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which
+    sustains a sword and a dozen tin cartridge-boxes.</p>
+    <p>The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself, the first
+    having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat roof and
+    battlements,"&mdash;a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel down below. But
+    this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned pounds, and carefully
+    expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside with clay, and finished with
+    clay-boards, larger than our clapboards, outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet
+    square, with a chimney half the width of the building, and projecting four feet above
+    the thatched roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
+    hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on each of the two
+    sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with oiled paper only, part glazed
+    in numerous small panes. And between the windows, on the outside, hang the heads of
+    all the wolves that have been killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers
+    think that the wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's
+    clothing.</p>
+    <p>The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four vergers
+    bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who have just arrived
+    from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and left to stay quietly in the
+    Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines, and the liberty of a private walk in the
+    garden. The sexton has just called for the minister, as is his duty twice every
+    Sunday, and, removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
+    minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black skull-cap,
+    and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better handling of his manuscript.
+    He looks round upon his congregation, a few hundred, recently <i>seated</i> anew for
+    the year, arranged according to rank and age. There are the old men in the pews
+    beneath the pulpit. There are the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with
+    ruffs, showy belts, gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots.
+    There are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs," "embroidered or
+    needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut works,"&mdash;a
+    mystery,&mdash;"slash apparel,"&mdash;another mystery,&mdash;"immoderate great
+    vayles, long wings," etc.,&mdash;mystery on mystery, but all recorded in the
+    statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate. There are the wives
+    of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the grammar-school master's wife next
+    them; and in each pew, close to the mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the
+    youngest child, still too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit
+    alone also; for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
+    presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday meetings, yet the
+    urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and gallery-stairs, with four constables to
+    guard them from the allurements of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the
+    shrinking form of some humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the
+    principal aisle, bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to
+    the garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.</p>
+    <a name="page273" id="page273"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 273]</span>
+    <p>Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets in!
+    "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one writer,
+    triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be short," which the
+    minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no authority over his pulpit. He
+    may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one thinks it long; for, indeed, at
+    prayer-meetings four persons will sometimes pray an hour each,&mdash;one with
+    confession, one with private petitions, a third with petitions for church and
+    kingdom, and a fourth with thanksgiving,&mdash;neither part of the quartette being
+    for an instant confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
+    hour-glass, may say,&mdash;but that he will not anticipate the levity to be born in a
+    later century with Mather Byles,&mdash;"Now, my hearers, we will take another
+    glass."</p>
+    <p>In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe to any one
+    who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the statute, "If any one
+    interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+    magistrate, and on repetition shall pay &pound;5, or stand two hours on a block four
+    feet high, with this inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone,
+    but the law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It is
+    but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely whipped for
+    declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H&mdash;&mdash;'s
+    preaching,&mdash;since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes for
+    declaring that Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; preached lies, and that his instruction was the
+    doctrine of devils,&mdash;since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was sentenced to pay
+    five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; sent
+    abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and lambs. Truly, it is a perilous
+    thing to attend public worship in such reverential days. However, it is equally
+    dangerous to stay at home; there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any
+    one unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the stocks or in
+    the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.</p>
+    <p>But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the congregation will
+    pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a Scriptural
+    discourse,&mdash;like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all backbone and a great deal
+    of that. It may be some very special and famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is
+    preaching on "The Morning Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy
+    Winds"; or it may be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson
+    of some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking and
+    partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton Mather, his son,
+    rolling forth his resounding discourse during a thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia
+    Sacra,"&mdash;consisting of seven separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with
+    sharp lightning from Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural
+    philosophy. Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
+    glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to tell him
+    that his own house has just been struck, and though no person is hurt, yet the house
+    hath been much torn and filled with the lightnings. With what joy and power he
+    instantly wields above his audience this providential surplus of excitement,
+    reminding one irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself
+    up by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the full power
+    of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the emergency, he tells them
+    grandly, that, as he once had in his house a magnet which the thunder changed
+    instantly from north to south, so it were well if the next bolt could change their
+    stubborn souls from Satan to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan
+    also is sometimes permitted to have <a name="page274" id="page274"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 274]</span> a hand in the thunder, which is the reason why it
+    breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again he admits,
+    pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have undoubtedly the larger
+    share.</p>
+    <p>The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose sleepy eyes
+    have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand of the
+    constables,&mdash;the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is kept for the
+    smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,&mdash;look up thoroughly awakened now. Bright
+    eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for a little interlude is coming.
+    Many things may happen in this pause after the sermon. Questions may be asked of the
+    elders now, which the elders may answer,&mdash;if they can. Some lay brother may
+    "exercise" on a text of Scripture,&mdash;rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns
+    out. Candidates for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be
+    the proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The last
+    town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage may be published.
+    Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending magistrate may be required to stand
+    upon a bench, in his worst garments, with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes,
+    and acknowledge his sins before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.</p>
+    <p>These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is time for
+    contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely offer." Then the people
+    in the galleries come down and march two abreast, "up one ile and down the other,"
+    passing before the desk, where in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of
+    these holds a moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
+    varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and good-will. Some
+    give paper pledges instead; and others give other valuables, such as "a fair gilt
+    cup, with a cover," for the communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after
+    line, by some one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
+    These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten tunes
+    compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the words, "Blessed are
+    they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and then the benediction.</p>
+    <p>And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the aisle,
+    bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom stirs till the minister
+    has gone out; and then the assembly disperses, each to his own home, unless it be
+    some who have come from a distance, and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the
+    meeting-house.</p>
+    <p>Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two centuries ago,
+    lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing prove wearisome in the
+    delineation now. It needed all this accumulation of small details to show how widely
+    the externals of New-England church-going have changed since those early days. But
+    what must have been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
+    service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious and painful
+    preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old Watertown
+    graveyard;&mdash;"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He relates that Mr.
+    Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding his ordinary lecture every
+    Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on Wednesday and Thursday early in the
+    morning, and on Saturday afternoon. He also held a daily lecture in his house, which
+    was at last abandoned as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days
+    occurred, when he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
+    this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly had three
+    sermons a day,&mdash;one after every meal. He was "an universal scholar and a walking
+    library,"&mdash;he studied twelve hours a day, <a name="page275"
+    id="page275"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 275]</span> and said he liked to sweeten
+    his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep.</p>
+    <p>A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous life. It
+    seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have survived to write four
+    thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the Reverend John Mitchell was called "a
+    truly aged young man" at thirty,&mdash;especially when we consider that he was
+    successor at Cambridge to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing
+    Mr. Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture, "wherein he
+    largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most entertaining exposition of the
+    Book of Genesis."</p>
+    <p>For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to have for
+    each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable duty for each. He must
+    visit families during several afternoons in every week, sending previous notice, so
+    that children and domestics might be ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for
+    counsel" in his own home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of
+    conscience, ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
+    unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring towns, a kind of
+    religious dissipation which increased so fast that the Legislature at last interfered
+    to restrict it. He must have five or six separate seasons for private prayer daily,
+    devoting each day in the week to special meditations and intercessions,&mdash;as
+    Monday to his family, Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to
+    other societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He must
+    have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and whole nights
+    prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself starved," unless he fasted
+    once a month at farthest, while he often did it twice in a week. Then there were
+    public fasts quite frequently, "because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought,
+    grasshoppers, caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
+    Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the neighborhood, and the
+    minister must expound it as "symbolizing the conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor
+    people," the latter being the mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military
+    expedition, the minister might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a
+    muster, he must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
+    officiate instead.</p>
+    <p>One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on weddings and
+    funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make a usage seem ancestral, or
+    to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now remembers that our progenitors for more
+    than a century disused religious services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates
+    alone could perform the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the
+    monopoly quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
+    Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin at Geneva, by
+    John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the Westminster Assembly, and by
+    the French Huguenots. The bell might ring, the friends might walk, two and two, to
+    the grave; but there must be no prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions
+    of the English and Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said
+    King James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear shoes
+    and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit of eating salt fish
+    on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that Roman Catholics eat it on
+    Friday.</p>
+    <p>But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were sermons. Mr. John
+    Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral sermon in immortal
+    verse:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "On Sabbath day he went his way,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;As he was used to do,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          God's house unto, that they might know
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;What he had for to show;
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <a name="page276" id="page276"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 276]</span>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          God's holy will he must fulfil,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;For it was his desire
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          For to declare a sermon rare
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Concerning Madam Fryer."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last century, and
+    sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather startling levities. For
+    instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was to marry young Mr.
+    Cranch,&mdash;(what graceful productions of pen and pencil have come to this
+    generation from the posterity of that union!)&mdash;the father permitted the saintly
+    maiden to decide on her own text for the sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath
+    chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse
+    was duly pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
+    certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would not even invite
+    to dinner, she boldly suggested for <i>her</i> text, "John came, neither eating bread
+    nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a devil." But no sermon stands recorded under
+    this prefix, though Abby lived to be the wife of one President of the United States
+    and mother of another.</p>
+    <p>The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being a
+    country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably enwrapped in
+    theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest themselves in politics."
+    Indeed, for many years they virtually controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male
+    church-members could vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
+    malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and imprisoned in
+    1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by permitting non-church-members to
+    vote on a formal certificate to their orthodoxy from the minister. The government
+    they aimed at was not democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a
+    fit government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their first
+    code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,&mdash;that is, based on
+    Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,&mdash;and Cotton's was afterwards rebuked in
+    England as "fanatical and absurd." But the government finally established was an
+    ecclesiastical despotism, tempered by theological controversy.</p>
+    <p>In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as late as
+    1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon, on the day appointed
+    by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for the direction of the town in the
+    work before them." They wrote state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at
+    town-meetings. At the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson,
+    minister of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for his
+    candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from among the boughs.
+    Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which still ornaments the Common; but
+    one sees no chips of that other old block among its branches now.</p>
+    <p>One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence would have
+    been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their consistency unflinching, their
+    range narrow, and their penalties severe,&mdash;and it certainly was so. Looking at
+    their educational provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins
+    and retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a day.
+    Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger Williams, with all
+    his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no such system of schools as his
+    persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But the children who were watched and trained
+    thus carefully might be put to death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after
+    the age of sixteen;&mdash;not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
+    statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with murder,&mdash;though Calvin
+    himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and the young men to practise military
+    training, <a name="page277" id="page277"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 277]</span>
+    after afternoon service, at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place
+    on Sunday in Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
+    the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel" punishments were
+    forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a ducking-stool and dipped over
+    head and ears three times, in running water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome
+    theologian, was silenced with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in
+    1649, was sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
+    shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes offenders, with a
+    refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to the elders." And if any youth
+    made matrimonial overtures to a young female without the consent of her parents, or,
+    in their absence, of the County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new
+    etymology for the word "courting."</p>
+    <p>An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the ministers to
+    the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and powerless, could keep the
+    peace with the natives. But when the brave Miantonimo was to be dealt with for
+    suspected treason, and the civil authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to
+    set him at liberty, they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being
+    finally referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him in
+    cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated, and their heroic
+    King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard, was hunted like a wild beast,
+    his body quartered and set on poles, his head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on
+    a gibbet in Plymouth, and one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers
+    returned thanks, and one said that they had <i>prayed</i> the bullet into Philip's
+    heart. Nay, it seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they
+    came out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought in as
+    captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them," in revenge for the
+    death of some fishermen: a moral application which certainly gives a singular
+    impression of the style of gospel prevailing inside the meeting-house that day. But
+    it is good to know, on the other side, that, when the Commissioners of the United
+    Colonies had declared an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become
+    afterwards convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
+    already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the order from being
+    rescinded.</p>
+    <p>These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives without
+    relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have little to joy in in
+    this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think so, to read the dismal diaries,
+    printed or manuscript, of those days. "I can compare with any man living for fears,"
+    said Hooker. "I have sinned myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I
+    been ready to lay down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in
+    the suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
+    introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who drank, for
+    instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of white wine which the
+    General Court thought it convenient that the Auditor should send, "as a small
+    testimony of the Court's respect, to the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge,"
+    in 1644? Did the famous Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew
+    cosmology, upon the waters,&mdash;strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians
+    who would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is startling to
+    remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public funeral, that "some
+    person be appointed to look after the burning of the wine and the heating of the
+    cider," and to hear that on this occasion there were thirty-two gallons of wine and
+    still more of cider, with one hundred and four pounds of <a name="page278"
+    id="page278"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 278]</span> that ensnaring accessory,
+    sugar. Francis Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
+    England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave convincing
+    proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the very relaxations of the
+    Puritan minister were more spiritual than spirituous, and to send forth a good
+    Nineteenthly from his own lips was more relishing than to have the best Double X go
+    in.</p>
+    <p>In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only Elders
+    for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days. The commonalty bore
+    the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of Roger William's offences was his
+    wishing to limit these terms to those who gave some signs of deserving them. The name
+    "Mr." was allowed to those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and
+    also to professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of vessels,
+    and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs." Mr. Josiah Plastow, when
+    he had stolen four baskets of corn from the Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah.
+    "Mr." seems to have meant simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir"
+    merely, a title given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to
+    the time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the idolatry of
+    saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes designated as Sir Paul, Sir
+    Peter, and Sir James.</p>
+    <p>In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is humiliating to find
+    that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin. The highest compensation I can
+    find recorded is that of John Higginson in 1671, who had &pound;160 voted him "in
+    country produce," which he was glad, however, to exchange for &pound;120 in solid
+    cash. Solid cash included beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and
+    musket-balls, value one farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had
+    &pound;60, and Mr. Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in
+    money and half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap in
+    New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather says, most salaries
+    were less than &pound;100, which he thinks "might account for the scanty harvests
+    enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton both tell the story of a town where
+    "two very eminent ministers were only allowed &pound;30 per annum" and "the God who
+    will not be mocked made them lose &pound;300 worth of cattle that year." The latter
+    also complains that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
+    rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the stars, would
+    shine without earthly contributions.</p>
+    <p>He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words, "Synecdotical
+    Pay,"&mdash;in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a part is used for the
+    whole. And apparently various causes might produce this Synecdoche. For I have seen
+    an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young
+    ministers have often occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of
+    the wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a considerable
+    part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how entirely this source of
+    discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the path of the clergy; and it is
+    painful to think that there ever was a period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy
+    the delineation of their own sins.</p>
+    <p>However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of rhetorical
+    tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine could commonly afford not
+    only to keep house, but to keep horse likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional
+    felicity of printing his own sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been
+    no great trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
+    1677,&mdash;not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors are,&mdash;and
+    Cotton Mather published <a name="page279" id="page279"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    279]</span> three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share. Books
+    were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete
+    Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian
+    Society at Worcester,&mdash;without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
+    monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse, the moral
+    sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man was fined in Newbury
+    for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good beast she was." The minister's
+    house was built by the town; in Salem it was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies
+    and no gable-ends,"&mdash;so that the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody
+    else;&mdash;and the Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day
+    and put the minister's grounds in order.</p>
+    <p>Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev. Ezekiel
+    Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,&mdash;"Much ado I have with my own
+    family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or family duties. I had a rare
+    blessing of servants in England, and those I brought over were a blessing; but the
+    young brood doth much afflict me." Probably the minister's wife had the worst of
+    this; but she seems to have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint,
+    and could bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a
+    model female,&mdash;"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of the most
+    singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old gentleman's own
+    narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later
+    years, with a fascinating young girl, an "ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his
+    parish thought by no means a model female, but from whom it took three days of
+    solitary fasting and prayer to wean him at last.</p>
+    <p>He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat strangely.
+    Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard at Cambridge, as
+    aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the general recommendation of her,"
+    and the college students were greatly delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael
+    Wigglesworth, in 1691, wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have
+    seen in manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,&mdash;one of which treats
+    of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care. She having
+    children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of his own children "out of
+    the way," if necessary,&mdash;a hint which becomes formidable when one remembers that
+    he was the author of that once famous theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which
+    he relentingly assigned to infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the
+    easiest room in hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as
+    if he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little heart-shaped
+    locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart and "Thine forever."</p>
+    <p>Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister. First
+    came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's followers were exasperating
+    enough; they had to be confined in irons separately, one in each town, on pain of
+    death, if they preached their doctrines,&mdash;and of course they preached them. But
+    their offences and penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
+    Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken open,&mdash;a
+    thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do to any one,&mdash;they
+    might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury, for the first offence be
+    fined, for the second lose one ear, for the third lose the other ear, and for the
+    fourth be bored with red-hot iron through the tongue,&mdash;though this last penalty
+    remained a dead letter. They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and
+    whipped through town after town,&mdash;three women were whipped through eleven towns,
+    eighty miles,&mdash;but afterwards the number <a name="page280"
+    id="page280"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 280]</span> was limited to three. Their
+    testimony was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
+    fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless among wolves and
+    bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic, and R for Rogue; they could be
+    sold as slaves; and their graves must not be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest
+    their poor afflicted bodies should find rest there.</p>
+    <p>Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta and to
+    Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan must have looked on
+    the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have since regarded the Bloomer
+    costume,&mdash;and the Inquisition imprisoned the missionaries, though the Sultan did
+    not. But meanwhile the Quaker women in New England might be walking to execution with
+    their male companions,&mdash;like Mary Dyer in Boston,&mdash;under an armed guard of
+    two hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for every year.
+    When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus hand in hand between two
+    young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an hour of the greatest joy I could
+    enjoy in this world. No tongue could utter and no heart understand the sweet
+    influence of the Spirit which now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and
+    covered her face with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman;
+    and when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying that she
+    would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at last, and the Reverend
+    Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.</p>
+    <p>It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat of
+    Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow wormy. It is no
+    wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on, the Quakers called it a
+    retribution for these things. But let us be just, even to the unjust. Toleration was
+    a new-born virtue in those days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment
+    recognized as such, or asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did
+    not wish to be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
+    the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of legislators to
+    establish the true religion and to punish false,"&mdash;a doctrine equally fatal,
+    whether applied to enforce the right theology or the wrong. They objected to the
+    Church of England, not that it persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly
+    aimed. It is, therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
+    professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised intolerance.
+    They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely blamed. What was great in
+    them was their heroism of soul, not their largeness. They sought the American
+    wilderness not to indulge the whims of others, but their own. They said to the
+    Quakers, "We seek not your death, but your absence." All their persecution, after
+    all, was an alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
+    their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties were borrowed
+    from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to death from the
+    beginning;&mdash;of course, four too many.</p>
+    <p>Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not theological
+    only, but political and social also. Everything that the Puritan system of government
+    asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no
+    taxes, bore no arms. With the best possible intentions, they subverted all
+    established order. Then their modes of action were very often intemperate and
+    violent. One can hardly approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a
+    certain Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
+    would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the Rareys.
+    Running naked through the public streets,&mdash;coming into meeting dressed in
+    sackcloth, with ashes <a name="page281" id="page281"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    281]</span> on their heads and nothing on their feet,&mdash;or sitting there with
+    their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and
+    tithing-men: these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the
+    main body. The Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
+    so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed, the Quakers
+    themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in Philadelphia, thirty
+    years afterwards,&mdash;playing over again upon George Keith and his followers the
+    same deluded policy of fines and imprisonment from which they had just
+    escaped;&mdash;as minorities have persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance
+    began.</p>
+    <p>Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the majority.
+    Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these: "Thou fiery
+    fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou
+    tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou
+    wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou
+    ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the
+    earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!"&mdash;all of which are genuine
+    epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who
+    collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even Dr. Chauncy's catalogue
+    of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was
+    not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in
+    authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that
+    Major Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.</p>
+    <p>There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the Quaker feud
+    in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a fair
+    Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his marrying out of their society, and
+    the Congregationalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed
+    her:&mdash;"Ruth, let us break from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my
+    religion, and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
+    England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the resolution, the
+    Puritan historian says, <i>so far</i> as going into the Church, and marrying, and
+    staying there for life. But probably the ministers thought it to be another case of
+    synecdoche.</p>
+    <p>With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the astonishing part
+    played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It must be remembered that the
+    belief in this visitation was no new or peculiar thing in New England. The Church,
+    the Scriptures, the medi&aelig;val laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had
+    been laws against it in England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to
+    Queen Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas Browne
+    had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and judicial authorities, as
+    Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described this crime as definitely and
+    seriously as any other. In Scotland four thousand had suffered death for it in ten
+    years; Cologne, Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in
+    1749 a girl was burnt alive in W&uuml;rtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
+    wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is in the
+    independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there were no witches on
+    the earth, nor devils,&mdash;except" (as they profanely added) "the New-England
+    ministers, and such as they."</p>
+    <p>John Higginson sums it up best:&mdash;"They proceeded in their integrity with a
+    zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and evidence." "<i>But
+    there is a question</i>," he wisely adds, "whether some of the laws, customs, and
+    privileges used by judges and juries in England, which were followed as patterns <a
+    name="page282" id="page282"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 282]</span> here, were not
+    insufficient." Cotton Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
+    conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long list of the
+    legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally, that the fact of fifty
+    confessions was, after all, the one irresistible vindication of their strong
+    measures.</p>
+    <p>It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every other
+    evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the authorities to do,
+    when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural precedents, the prisoners insisted on
+    entering a plea of guilty? When Goody E&mdash;&mdash; testified that she and two
+    others rode from Andover to a witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and
+    she fell and was still lame from it,&mdash;when her daughter testified that she rode
+    on the same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,&mdash;when the
+    grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another stick, and
+    they all signed Satan's book together,&mdash;when W. B&mdash;&mdash;, aged forty,
+    testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem Meeting-House, and
+    the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried round, and Satan was like a
+    black sheep, and wished them to destroy the minister's house, (by thunder probably,)
+    and set up his kingdom, and "then all would be well,"&mdash;when one woman summoned
+    her three children and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified
+    that she was a witch and so were they all,&mdash;what could be done for such
+    prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty? It was only
+    the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the convictions.</p>
+    <p>One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
+    us,&mdash;though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not yet
+    unfolded,&mdash;was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it. Conceive, for
+    an instant, of believing in the visible presence and labors of the arch-fiend in a
+    peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of their souls these strong men held to it,
+    and they waged a hand-to-hand fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently
+    the opponent sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
+    thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed discourse, to have a
+    girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears start up and exclaim, "Parson, your
+    text is too long,"&mdash;or worse yet, "Parson, your sermon is too long,"&mdash;or
+    most embarrassing of all, "There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in
+    the pulpit." But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
+    stern discipline in such cases made and provided.</p>
+    <p>But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female tormentors to deal
+    with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel,
+    laying out of hair, borders, naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with
+    superfluous ribbons,"&mdash;these were the things which tried men's souls in those
+    days, and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
+    inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel" seem to have
+    been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one slash on each sleeve and
+    one in the back. Men also must be prohibited from shoulderbands of undue width,
+    double ruffs and cuffs, and "immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was
+    for modesty, part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
+    condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each and costs for
+    wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another for tiffany, and another
+    for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a silk hood, but, proving herself worth
+    more than two hundred pounds, escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same
+    time, was charged with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he
+    was fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.</p>
+    <p>The question of veils seems to have <a name="page283" id="page283"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 283]</span> rocked the Massachusetts Colony to its foundations,
+    and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th, 1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was
+    utterly and unalterably opposed to veils, regarding them as a token of submission to
+    husbands in an unscriptural degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an
+    unscriptural extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
+    Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such cases; so Paul,
+    veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr. Cotton came to Salem to preach
+    for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his chance to put in his solemn protest against
+    veils; he said they were a custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to
+    meeting without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding visible
+    result from a single sermon within the memory of man.</p>
+    <p>Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what was under
+    them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done much harm of late, and
+    the Deity was evidently displeased with something, the General Court should publish a
+    list of the evils of the time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this:
+    "Long hair like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
+    made into periwigs;&mdash;and by some women wearing borders of hair, and their
+    cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does this hint at
+    puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially among the younger sort." Not
+    much was effected, however,&mdash;"divers of the elders' wives," as Winthrop lets
+    out, "being in some measure partners in this disorder." The use of wigs also, at
+    first denounced by the clergy, was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later
+    than 1700 they usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752
+    the tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused communion
+    because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought they played no small
+    part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous Periwigs, such as some of our
+    church-members indulge in, which make them resemble the Locusts that came out of y^e
+    Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7, 8,&mdash;and as an eminent Divine calls them, <i>Horrid
+    Bushes of Vanity</i>; such strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and
+    to express Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord to
+    kindle fires in all the towns in the country."</p>
+    <p>Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a community where
+    every man was expected to have a current supply of religious experiences always ready
+    for circulation. There was a certain hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a
+    seafaring man, who gave much trouble; and E.F.,&mdash;for they mostly appear by
+    initials,&mdash;who, coming to New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in
+    black, was taken for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little
+    insane, and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh," Cotton
+    Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally stole his employer's
+    leather breeches and set up for a preacher,&mdash;less innocently apparelled than
+    George Fox. But the worst of all was one bearing the since sainted name of Samuel
+    May. This vessel of wrath appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel
+    spirit,&mdash;though, indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous
+    fire-ship among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
+    this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who knew no Latin,
+    Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,&mdash;for (as he indignantly asserts) "there were
+    eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in one very short note I received
+    from him." This doubtful personage copied his sermons from a volume by his namesake,
+    Dr. Samuel Bolton,&mdash;"Sam the Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them.
+    Finally, "this eminent worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled
+    <a name="page284" id="page284"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 284]</span> with his
+    parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting this among
+    other fire at them:&mdash;'I see, no longer pipe, no longer dance,'&mdash;so that
+    they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had never seen him." Then "the guilty
+    fellow, having bubbled the silly neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a
+    sudden was gone," and Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to
+    have been the worst penalty the man suffered.</p>
+    <p>It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan ministers, lest
+    the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and have no tithingman to take
+    his part. But however it may be with the regular standards of theology of that
+    period, every one could find a sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies.
+    Eighty-two "pestilent heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637;
+    others say one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept Rhode
+    Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to crowd all these
+    eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened to lose his religious opinion,
+    he might be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger
+    Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann
+    Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country
+    by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the
+    strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions. Thither went also Samuel
+    Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love,
+    thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy
+    and the ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous
+    Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath should
+    give place to the modern Sunday. All these, and such as these, were called generally
+    "Seekers" by the Puritans,&mdash;who claimed for themselves that they had found that
+    which they sought. It is the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be
+    afloat or to be at anchor?</p>
+    <p>Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with the
+    leadership of the New-England colonies,&mdash;Cotton, Hooker, Norton, Shepard, the
+    Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an obscurer name, preserved in
+    the quaint epitaphs of the "Magnalia":&mdash;Blackman, "in spite of his name, a
+    Nazarene whiter than snow";&mdash;Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove
+    and an eagle";&mdash;Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
+    children might pluck";&mdash;Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a very
+    preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family and he taught his
+    family as if it had been his church";&mdash;Warham, the first who preached with
+    notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt respecting the Lord's Supper;&mdash;Stone,
+    "both a loadstone and a flint stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of
+    preaching only one hour.</p>
+    <p>These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,&mdash;nobler than
+    their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The most strait-laced
+    Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been disciplined by them for
+    insufferable laxity, and yet their modern successor would count it utter shame,
+    perhaps, to own a slave in his family or to drink rum-punch at an
+    ordination,&mdash;which Puritan divines might do without rebuke. Not one of them has
+    left on record a statement so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:&mdash;"To be
+    content with food and raiment,&mdash;to mind, not our own, but every man the things
+    of another,&mdash;yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
+    right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many as there be
+    hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of God's sake,&mdash;this
+    is humanity, this is Christianity; the <a name="page285" id="page285"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 285]</span> rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry,
+    and Jewish and Popish blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of
+    Roger Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and in
+    what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the testing of two
+    centuries, less solid or durable than his?</p>
+    <p>These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held evil,&mdash;Satan
+    and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians, negligent parishioners,
+    disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and women in slash apparel. Yet the
+    tenderest private gentleness often lay behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience.
+    Some of them would never chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others
+    would write in Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
+    the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made the ballad
+    at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day. "Sir," said some one,
+    "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there's not seven
+    of them all but loves Mr. Wilson." "Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a
+    thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson
+    loves him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men came
+    along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton," and one came and
+    cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"&mdash;"I know it, I know it,"
+    retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently added, "The Lord make both me and
+    thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied,
+    "I see you are in a passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts
+    all one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man, finding
+    afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to apologize, and owned
+    himself to have been wrong.</p>
+    <p>What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness and zeal,
+    with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their shoulders, and put that
+    iron into the New-England blood which has since supplied the tonic for a continent?
+    It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he was "a person who, while doing his Master's work,
+    would put a king in his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket
+    anything but a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
+    flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound Christians" was a
+    proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers, and sometimes their parishes,
+    but never their independence. I find a hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty
+    laid up against them, but not one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored
+    the tongues of others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
+    with a bar of gold,&mdash;as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to do, and
+    not African tribes alone.</p>
+    <p>There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day every man of
+    New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous habit they accumulated. And,
+    on the other hand, every man of the many who still stand ready to indorse everything
+    signed by a D.D.&mdash;without even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors
+    Excepted&mdash;is in part the victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there
+    was a kind of democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
+    thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no separate
+    clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of his own church. Each
+    religious society could choose and ordain its own minister, or dispense with all
+    ordaining services at will, without the slightest aid or hindrance from council or
+    consociation. So the stern theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology
+    of the pews; the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were <a
+    name="page286" id="page286"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 286]</span> recognized as
+    spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the men of their time, whatever
+    they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when asked about the priests' money, said,
+    that, if they were really the leaders of the people, they could not have too much
+    payment,&mdash;or too little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions
+    the Puritan ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
+    discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and musket-balls.
+    What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the heavier ammunition of moral
+    truth. Here is a specimen of their grape-shot:&mdash;"My fathers and brethren," said
+    John Higginson, "this is never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a
+    plantation of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as are
+    making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over since at sundry
+    times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of
+    New England, but religion. And if any man among us make religion as twelve and the
+    world as thirteen, let such a man know he hath neither the spirit of a true
+    New-England man, nor yet of a sincere Christian."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THOREAU'S FLUTE.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;His pipe hands mute beside the river;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But Music's airy voice is fled.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The bluebird chants a requiem;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The willow-blossom waits for him;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The Genius of the wood is lost."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;There came a low, harmonious breath:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;"For such as he there is no death;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          His life the eternal life commands;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Above man's aims his nature rose:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The wisdom of a just content
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Made one small spot a continent,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And tuned to poetry Life's prose.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;To him grew human or divine,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;And yearly on the coverlid
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;'Neath which her darling lieth hid
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Will write his name in violets.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <a name="page287" id="page287"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 287]</span>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "To him no vain regrets belong,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Gave to the world no poor lament,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          O lonely friend! he still will be
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;A potent presence, though unseen,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Seek not for him,&mdash;he is with thee."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.</h2>
+    <p>The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of acquaintanceship,
+    that, should these circumstances be comic in their nature, the intercourse which
+    follows partakes much of the grotesque. Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of
+    Edward Martin, apart from the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my
+    memory a smile rather than a sigh.</p>
+    <p>Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it became
+    necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon S&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+    <p>Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had lingered
+    about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many sweet memories of
+    Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in the neighborhood of Gramley
+    Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels, and the plenty of a country
+    tea-table,&mdash;not averse to strawberry short-cake, or the snowy delights of
+    cottage-cheese.</p>
+    <p>It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful welcome, a
+    bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled me with curiosity and
+    amazement.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Was it a man?
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        A devil infernal?
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        An angel supernal?"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and, as I
+    cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in the singular
+    form,&mdash;stooping, squatting, and groping before me.</p>
+    <p>The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics upon the
+    ground,&mdash;smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy, too silent to be
+    mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at nightfall with a maniac, and I
+    was not sorry when my nearer approach resolved these strange phenomena into a
+    well-dressed pedestrian on all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.</p>
+    <p>He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride his
+    handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly bewildered. I
+    looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay shining at me from the very spot
+    where he had been so industriously peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him,
+    fitted his treasure into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle
+    said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
+    circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"</p>
+    <p>"Yes."</p>
+    <p>"So do I."</p>
+    <p>We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,&mdash;I too
+    tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again; but when, at
+    last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's door-step, he turned suddenly to
+    me and asked,&mdash;</p>
+    <a name="page288" id="page288"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 288]</span>
+    <p>"Are you fond of the country?"</p>
+    <p>"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.</p>
+    <p>"Ah, you are an artist!"</p>
+    <p>"I hope to be one."</p>
+    <p>"Its a bad business," said he, testily,&mdash;"a very bad business. If I were you,
+    I would give it up."</p>
+    <p>"Have you ever tried it?"</p>
+    <p>"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,&mdash;"yes, and everything
+    else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I would give you the benefit
+    of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and make a good story of it to your
+    wife."</p>
+    <p>"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."</p>
+    <p>"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true artist,
+    who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite relations, who
+    penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the silent sanctuaries of the
+    mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man. He must be a happy man,&mdash;happy in
+    a sweet and natural way. A man whose life is passed in a daily delight that gently
+    stirs without feverish excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He
+    <i>ought</i> to marry."</p>
+    <p>"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.</p>
+    <p>"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
+    commencing,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        'O thou earthly sea,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Every person thinks of thee,&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The sailor, and the busy bee,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And the Chinese drinking tea!'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they seemed
+    good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they struck others."</p>
+    <p>He smiled pleasantly.</p>
+    <p>"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding your
+    history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with your
+    experience."</p>
+    <p>"Take warning, then, if need be.</p>
+    <p>"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of a ready
+    writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a young miss of her first
+    conquest.</p>
+    <p>"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just rising
+    into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my condescension. It was a
+    charity, indeed, to give my support to this fledgling, and I sent to it a long
+    article, entitled, 'The Cultivated, as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts
+    were returned, with this quiet bit of advice:&mdash;'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any
+    other reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from having
+    a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I determined to revenge
+    myself on the paltry malignant who dared to despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a
+    slashing criticism for one of the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the
+    delinquent periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
+    almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for publication.</p>
+    <p>"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now Mrs.
+    Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings in ten melancholy
+    stanzas, beginning,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
+    'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'</p>
+    <p>"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the plot of
+    which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left to my hero, who
+    forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but, fearful lest the beloved object
+    should worship his money more than his merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue
+    spectacles, becomes tutor to her brother, and wins her affections while playing
+    pedagogue. On her acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea,
+    and, in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin, Greek,
+    Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, <a name="page289"
+    id="page289"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 289]</span> Natural Science, and Civil
+    Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into the surf, where both
+    are drowned.</p>
+    <p>"This, you see, was quite new."</p>
+    <p>"Quite," I replied, laughing.</p>
+    <p>"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive the first
+    remittance for this truly original work.</p>
+    <p>"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable 'M&auml;rchen,'
+    and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's Legacies,' a series of
+    children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of poetry, pleasantry, and information.
+    I sent them to 'The Juvenile Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted
+    with a profusion of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
+    expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.</p>
+    <p>"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a small,
+    uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He seemed the
+    personification of <i>nonchalance</i>, impudence, and conceit. As I entered, he
+    looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a woman, would have brought a hot
+    flush of indignation to my face, and, on my mentioning my name, he rose and extended
+    a very dirty hand.</p>
+    <p>"'Glad to see you, Sir,&mdash;hope you'll continue your contributions,&mdash;Uncle
+    Job,&mdash;good idea, Sir,&mdash;love the little ones? So do we, Sir,&mdash;work very
+    hard for them,&mdash;don't pay at all,&mdash;poor business,&mdash;pure
+    charity,&mdash;that's all.'</p>
+    <p>"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are expected to
+    work from charity?'</p>
+    <p>"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,&mdash;more contributions
+    than we can use,&mdash;best authors in the country write for us,&mdash;pure love for
+    the little ones, I assure you.'</p>
+    <p>"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to bestow my time
+    and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer them to others who do.'</p>
+    <p>"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he growled. 'We
+    don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most of the articles
+    ourselves.'</p>
+    <p>"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end to the
+    interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.</p>
+    <p>"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'</p>
+    <p>"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than the first,
+    emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'</p>
+    <p>"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall take measures
+    that you will not at all relish. If you will not <i>give</i> me my manuscripts, I
+    shall <i>take</i> them'; and, suiting the action to the word, I snatched them from a
+    shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and carried them off without further parley.</p>
+    <p>"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet spirit within
+    me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote a sentimental tale, full
+    of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft epithets. It was accepted by a well-known
+    monthly, then supposed to be in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of
+    comfort, and I looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and
+    renown, when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my story,
+    and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the magazine had been
+    sold to pay her debts.</p>
+    <p>"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it to 'The
+    Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it was published,
+    praised, and further contributions requested. Several weeks passed away. I indited a
+    poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or, Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in
+    print, and my thirst for fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note
+    reached me from 'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to
+    pay <a name="page290" id="page290"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 290]</span> me in
+    <i>back numbers of the magazine</i>. I wrote no more."</p>
+    <p>"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"</p>
+    <p>"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist, and was
+    thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I took for my motto;
+    and, hiring a small studio in &mdash;&mdash; Street, I bought a large canvas, on
+    which I sketched out a picture which cost me much money, more time, and many anxious
+    thoughts.</p>
+    <p>"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a marriage was
+    being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people, in anomalous costumes,
+    was gathered round a youth supposed to be a rejected and despairing lover, who had
+    fallen on the ground in a swoon. It was very affecting, I thought.&mdash;it would be
+    very effective. Were <i>she</i> to see it, she would be stung with remorse,&mdash;she
+    would behold the probable effects of her present indifference,&mdash;she would
+    relent.</p>
+    <p>"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it was a
+    complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio, draping before a
+    cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing for my men, until the last
+    touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was all ready for the Spring Exhibition.
+    Then came doubts and speculations. Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all?
+    Would Ellen like it? How would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to
+    look at it? Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?</p>
+    <p>"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name sent my
+    picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it, by some strange
+    chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington. The juxtaposition gave me a
+    new idea. I saw at once what a villanous daub mine was, and went away oppressed with
+    shame and a new-found modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the
+    Exhibition, in the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
+    coming out.</p>
+    <p>"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I <i>must</i> turn
+    back, and show you the <i>funniest</i> picture! So theatrical! So distorted!'</p>
+    <p>"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'</p>
+    <p>"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are such a good
+    critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art you ever saw?'</p>
+    <p>"Can you imagine my feelings?"</p>
+    <p>"I think I can."</p>
+    <p>"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken studio,
+    previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully packing my
+    materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and an elderly,
+    shrewd-looking man walked into the room.</p>
+    <p>"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.</p>
+    <p>"'I am a friend of his.'</p>
+    <p>"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number &mdash;&mdash;?'</p>
+    <p>"'Yes.'</p>
+    <p>"'How much does he ask for it?'</p>
+    <p>"'How much are you willing to give?'</p>
+    <p>"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'</p>
+    <p>"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'</p>
+    <p>"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio. Twenty-five
+    dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture? I looked at the
+    card:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>'PARKER J. SPERRY,</p>
+      <p>'<i>Yankee Pie Depot</i>,</p>
+      <p>'126 &mdash;&mdash; Street.'"</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>"Did you ever paint again?"</p>
+    <p>"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in a
+    gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning, when she was
+    out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the wall. I turned it round.
+    Directly across the mouth was pasted a white label, on which I saw neatly <a
+    name="page291" id="page291"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 291]</span> printed in
+    India-ink,&mdash;'Queen of the Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in
+    my library as a lesson to me for all future time.</p>
+    <p>"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard my
+    experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing business, and make a
+    handsome income for my wife and two children. To-morrow I go to New York, to bring
+    them into these wilds for change of air. And now, good night."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.</h2>
+    <center>
+      FLORESTAN'S STORY.
+    </center>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are sacred
+    persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you, staining the pane
+    through which their light shone with their own images, but who became perfectly
+    transparent to the word they uttered, the song they sang, or the work they did. Such
+    a sacred person to me is the gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's
+    Albums. Many years ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in
+    the half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
+    rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had been awaiting
+    its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was a listener, and, hastily
+    brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a far corner of the room, away from his
+    <i>r&eacute;pertoire</i>. She confessed, that, afterward, when he was not present,
+    she had looked on that which he evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in
+    pencil, upon it, "Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but
+    no "Sternenkranz" was found,&mdash;the word was evidently her master's own fancy; so
+    she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto complained of her indifference
+    to the pieces he set before her, and informed him that she should perish at his feet,
+    unless he would give her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr
+    Otto, in a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
+    treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to which he had
+    given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to each soul that could
+    receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower of Lilies to another. It was the
+    same as with that white stone which the Seer of Patmos saw,&mdash;within it "a name
+    written which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it."</p>
+    <p>This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was known
+    among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day, next to the divine
+    Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert Schumann's works living; and if
+    the love she has obtained for him is not as universal, it is just as fervent. Many
+    silent and holy hours have I sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans
+    love to call their Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture
+    of romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his sorrow,
+    and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to know of
+    him,&mdash;of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I came to know, in
+    the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to relate.</p>
+    <a name="page292" id="page292"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 292]</span>
+    <p>A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to accommodate a
+    certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold winds from over the Lakes made
+    me wish that the Modern Athens had kept its lecture-system at home; for it has always
+    seemed to me, that, wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it.
+    Such ugly thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from the
+    face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed out of me by the
+    glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which animated the coziest of rooms. Why
+    has not some poet celebrated the experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of
+    the thawee responds to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release
+    until all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from the
+    Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet nothing-at-all
+    thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to life.</p>
+    <p>Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into the room,
+    soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls. Confused, I started up;
+    and it was some moments before I understood that the music proceeded from the room
+    adjoining mine in the hotel. Not altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess
+    of whom I have spoken had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was
+    appointed to stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"</p>
+    <p>As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave. Whether the
+    musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a terrible termination was in the
+    music, I knew not: the latter was quite probable, for, alas! such fearful
+    Icarus-falls are not rare in poor Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long,
+    but, rising quickly, passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next
+    room.</p>
+    <p>"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.</p>
+    <p>Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was so swart
+    that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once imagined that a stream
+    of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from some more Oriental race. I
+    stammered out an apology for my intrusion, but told him how irresistible were such
+    subtile threads as Schumann's "Carnival" had projected through the walls which
+    separated our rooms.</p>
+    <p>"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."</p>
+    <p>Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which, having for
+    bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the ice-dragon coiled about him,
+    is suddenly filled with the warm spread of the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he
+    said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"In me, wanderer that I am,&mdash;in me, with the <i>Heimweh</i> in my heart never
+    to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,&mdash;you see
+    Florestan."</p>
+    <p>"Louis Boehner!"</p>
+    <p>Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little piece of
+    paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand. On it these words
+    were written:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"<i>Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never want for such
+      a friend as thou hast been to</i></p>
+      <p>ROBERT SCHUMANN."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when, at this
+    moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a living halo.</p>
+    <p>Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before them the
+    fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention some facts connected
+    with Schumann's "Carnival, or <i>Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes</i>, on Four Notes." Not by
+    any means representing the pure depths of Schumann's soul, this strange <a
+    name="page293" id="page293"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 293]</span> medley is yet
+    pregnant with historic associations. The composer wrote it in his young days,
+    stringing twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a town
+    of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts frequently
+    strayed, because at that time there was an object there interesting to his sensitive
+    soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must be remembered that the H in German stands
+    for our B natural, and S or <i>es</i> for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift
+    f&uuml;r Musik" was begun and for ten years edited by Schumann,&mdash;in what spirit
+    we may gather from his own words:&mdash;"The musical state of Germany, at that time,
+    was not very encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
+    H&uuml;nten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since Beethoven,
+    Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star was ascending, and there
+    were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole, Chopin; but it was later that these gained
+    their lasting influence. One day the idea took possession of our young and hot
+    heads,&mdash;Let us not idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the
+    Poetry of Art shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league
+    of music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at which they
+    threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the <i>Philistines</i>, which is the
+    general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow,
+    hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities. "Young Germany" was making itself felt
+    in all co&ouml;rdinate directions: forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and
+    Dresden,&mdash;a sharp and spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead
+    of Heine and Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
+    revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality brought together
+    in K&uuml;hne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who talked of Callot,
+    Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz Schubert, and of the three foreign
+    Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry,
+    Victor Hugo." This was the <i>Davidsbund</i>, or League of David (the last of the
+    "Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes" is named "Marche des <i>Davidsb&uuml;ndler</i> contre les
+    Philistines"). An agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a
+    fine sketch of this company, which we will quote.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      "The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle age,
+      intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty remarks. He was
+      the instructor of more than one of the young musicians around him, who all listened
+      to his observations with profound attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the
+      conversation and suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young,
+      highly promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain consciousness of
+      having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl of fourteen, into a prodigy,
+      whose first appearance delighted the whole world, and whose subsequent
+      artist-activity became the pride of her native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a
+      quiet, thoughtful young man of twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a
+      student in Heidelberg, he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to
+      Leipsic and was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
+      liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be melancholy. After
+      long struggles, he had only been able to devote himself entirely to music
+      comparatively late in life, and had been obliged to pass a part of his precious
+      youth in studies which were as uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had
+      finally decided for the career of a <i>virtuoso</i>, and was pursuing the study of
+      the piano with an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
+      consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career forever. He
+      did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate for him in the end, by
+      directing him to <a name="page294" id="page294"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+      294]</span> his true vocation, composition. Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of
+      love, in the garb of admiration for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young
+      Robert so quiet and dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the
+      eccentric Louis Boehner,<a id="footnotetag1" name="footnotetag1"
+      href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a> who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
+      Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet
+      as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet
+      unsuccessful composer of songs,&mdash;now, in his capacity of critic, the paper
+      bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just returned from Italy, and believed
+      himself in possession of the true secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of
+      which every singing-master is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the
+      eminent organist and industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as
+      many more young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."<a
+      id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2" href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood that
+    sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of so many future
+    sorrows and glories.</p>
+    <p>"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys together at
+    Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day, which since has blessed
+    hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone; this breast held his sorrows and his
+    hopes, when he was struggling to reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his
+    madness he cast himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
+    eyelids when they were closed in death."</p>
+    <p>Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.</p>
+    <p>At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out, and was
+    informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had been waiting nearly
+    fifteen minutes!</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <p>Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room, listening to
+    that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And first he told me the story of
+    Schumann's love.</p>
+    <p>The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously than
+    judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have survived the
+    tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no childhood: at the piano she was
+    kept through all the bright days, roving only from scale to scale, when she should
+    have been roving from flower to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she
+    entered into her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
+    and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which were mosses
+    beneath them. From this training she came before the best audience in Germany, and
+    stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen summers, and by acclamation was crowned
+    the Queen of the Piano. Franz Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and
+    many years afterward wrote in his extravagant way,&mdash;"When we heard Clara Wieck
+    in Vienna, fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
+    to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks and lifted by
+    delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets." At her performance of
+    Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was inspired to write the following
+    verses:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "A weird magician, weary of the world,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        In sullen humor locked his charms all up
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And threw the key into the sea, and died.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The manikins here tried with all their might;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
+      </div>
+      <a name="page295" id="page295"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 295]</span>
+      <div class="line">
+        Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Who with white fingers guides them in her play."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child was the
+    young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first appearance, he
+    wrote,&mdash;"Others make poetry,&mdash;she is a poem." And soon
+    afterward,&mdash;"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
+    up,&mdash;the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."</p>
+    <p>From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young composer, the
+    secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one caught in the whorls of some
+    happy dream, who will not pause to ask, "Whither?" he poured out before this child
+    the half-revealed hopes striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her
+    ingenuous and earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
+    due time they were to be rather <i>clenched</i>, through pain. It was under this
+    baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first sonata,&mdash;"Florestan and
+    Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all from whom fame was graceful.</p>
+    <p>In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those wonderful little
+    "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without it their meaning is as strange
+    as their names. Often did he say,&mdash;"I can write only where my life is in unison
+    with my works." "Listen now to these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and
+    struck the piano; "these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with
+    song, "My peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
+    written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged aspirant
+    released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But faster than planets
+    through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased, and there was a long silence;
+    and then he told the unspeakable portion of his story by performing these two:
+    "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed
+    the pathos of the latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath
+    that crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts with the
+    terrible questioning, <i>Wherefore?</i></p>
+    <p>Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each other, the
+    shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was coming to pass. He had
+    educated this girl to be an artist to bring <i>him</i> fame; alas, it must be
+    confessed that he thought also of certain prospective thalers. Willing as he was that
+    all Leipsic should admire his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the
+    "Zeitschrift." He then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who,
+    when he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally the poor
+    soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst have known that it is
+    Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!</p>
+    <p>The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all acquaintance,
+    forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating at once Clara's career as a
+    <i>virtuoso</i>, he took her to Vienna.</p>
+    <p>No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess of
+    Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up to Beethoven.
+    Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the "Schw&auml;rmibriefe of Eusebius to
+    Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the general reader of the "Zeitschrift," <a
+    name="page296" id="page296"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 296]</span> who, doubtless,
+    fancied that its editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
+    Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.</p>
+    <p>"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out an
+    angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou not with us?
+    (<i>Warum!</i>) And how thou wilt have thought of us last night, from the
+    'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major symphony! I also thought of thee
+    then, Chiara, pure one, bright one, whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither
+    thy longing draws thee, but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."</p>
+    <p>At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's "Myrthen,"
+    whose dedication, <i>Seiner geliebten Braut</i>, breaks forth in the passionate and
+    beautiful song,&mdash;"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"</p>
+    <p>But this word <i>Braut</i> means Bride in the German sense of "affianced"; and
+    although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the breath of a Tropic,
+    bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his glorious First Symphony, which
+    some one has well called the Symphony of Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an
+    elusive vision, the two passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of
+    bitter Marahs. "But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the
+    right to know, from these,"&mdash;his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."</p>
+    <p>Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces when they
+    ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to have
+    revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I sought Boehner, and
+    asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded to the one subject that bound us
+    together, I requested him to tell me, what had not yet been given to the world, the
+    details of Schumann's insanity and death.</p>
+    <p>Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings so
+      sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in extremes, was
+      as if you gave an &AElig;olian harp to be swept now by a cold north-wind and now by
+      a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines of his flesh, and was not warmly
+      covered thereby, but only veiled. Under his grief he seemed stronger; but when his
+      joy came, when Clara was his own, and went through Europe with him, giving
+      expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable,&mdash;then we
+      saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
+      gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
+      devastating torrent.</p>
+      <p>"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or six years
+      before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times he imagined himself
+      again cruelly separated from the patient and tender being who never left his side;
+      and he would write pieces full of distractions, in the midst of each of which,
+      however, some touchingly beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through
+      seething seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
+      which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a wearing
+      persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice aside gently,
+      saying,&mdash;'A long life is before me; but it must be lived in a few years.' And,
+      indeed, the works which have reached farthest into hearts that loved him most
+      deeply date from these times. I remember, that, when he sat down to compose his
+      last symphony, he said,&mdash;'It is almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion
+      needs another chamber.'</p>
+      <p>"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word: 'Hasten.' I
+      left all my affairs, and came to <a name="page297" id="page297"></a><span
+      class="newpage">[pg 297]</span> watch for many months beside this beloved one. It
+      was not a wild delirium which had taken possession of him; the only fit of that
+      kind was that in which he tried to drown himself in the Rhine,&mdash;at the time
+      when the papers got hold of the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his
+      conviction that he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
+      manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
+      power,&mdash;would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest discords.
+      These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till night,&mdash;during
+      much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance. Of this music no chord or
+      melody was true; they were jangling memories of his earlier works.</p>
+      <p>"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
+      own:&mdash;'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be understood
+      here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.' Then, turning to me, he
+      said,&mdash;'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my last prayer for
+      you,'&mdash;handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and now leave us, to come
+      again and kiss me when I am cold.'</p>
+      <p>"Then I left him alone with his Clara.</p>
+      <p>"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis Boehner, and
+    said, as my voice would let me.&mdash;"Take this paper, and when you would have a
+    friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come and help me to be that
+    friend."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.</h2>
+    <p>Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is, Will the
+    people of African descent work for a living? and the other is, Will they fight for
+    their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must be put beyond any fair dispute
+    before they will receive permanent security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the
+    theses of philosophers or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of
+    mankind is not likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
+    paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have not industry
+    sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present development of human nature, is
+    the conscience of great communities likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to
+    restrain them from disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to
+    injure, because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
+    lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like all
+    unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full recognition as citizens
+    and men when they have vindicated their title to be an estate of the realm, and not
+    before. Let us, then, take the world as we find it, and try this people accordingly.
+    But it is not pertinent to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs
+    in art, literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to glow
+    upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes. No Plutarch may
+    gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with
+    their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like
+    Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture.
+    It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a
+    fair chance in the <a name="page298" id="page298"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    298]</span> world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
+    appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of
+    mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with the conservative and
+    progressive elements of character common to ordinary humanity.</p>
+    <p>It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise it, to make
+    a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but it can do little either
+    in directing or deterring. There is nothing in the gloomy vaticinations of
+    Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is, which should be permitted to darken our
+    future. The medi&aelig;val antagonisms of races, when Christianity threw but a
+    partial light over mankind, and before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests
+    among people of diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
+    richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results of
+    emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they may be, afford any
+    measure of the progress which opens before our enfranchised masses. The insular and
+    contracted life of the colonies, cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism,
+    has no parallel in the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through
+    the continent on which our problem is to be solved.</p>
+    <p>In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report truthfully upon
+    the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the name. Civilization, in its
+    career, may often be traced in the nomenclatures of successive periods. These people
+    were first called contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were
+    next introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally referred to as
+    freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and they are yet to be lost in
+    the better and more comprehensive designation of citizens, or, when discrimination is
+    convenient, citizens of African descent.</p>
+    <p>The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at Port Royal
+    has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of Europe, as well as the
+    best friends of the United States, like Cairnes and Gasparin, have testified much
+    interest in its progress. An English periodical of considerable merit noticed at some
+    length "Mr. Pierce's Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in
+    its incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in American
+    affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number, characterizes the colony as
+    "that small pacific army, far more important in the history of civilization than all
+    the military expeditions despatched from time to time since the commencement of the
+    civil war."</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>No little historical interest covers the region to which this account belongs.
+    Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida,
+    involving the rival pretensions of Spain and France, were made in the first half of
+    the sixteenth century. They were conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and
+    Soto, in search of the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
+    discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was attempted
+    until 1562.</p>
+    <p>In that year,&mdash;the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and ten
+    years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the most illustrious
+    victim,&mdash;Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief, anxious to found beyond
+    the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots, fitted out the expedition of Jean
+    Ribault, which, after a voyage of over three months across the ocean and northward
+    along the coast, cast anchor on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the
+    name which it retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for
+    another and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark and
+    perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John <a name="page299"
+    id="page299"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 299]</span> Hawkins sailed for Africa in
+    quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to the New World. The expedition of
+    Ribault was the first visit of Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South
+    Carolina, and the garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices
+    ever made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to detail
+    here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their abandonment of the post,
+    the terrible voyage homeward, or the perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose.
+    Nor is it within the compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
+    garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins in 1565 with
+    timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his sad fate, the ferocity of
+    Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and the avenging chivalry of Dominic de
+    Gourges. The student is baffled in attempts to fix localities for the deeds and
+    explorations of this period, even with the help of the several accounts and the
+    drawings of Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
+    permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been abandoned by
+    the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for trade or adventure.</p>
+    <p>Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other commissioners
+    to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the country with reference to an
+    emigration thither. Hilton's Narration, published in London the year after, mentions
+    St. Ellens as one of the points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including
+    the Sea Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish words,
+    and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be alarmed by it. The
+    commissioners, whose explorations were evidently prompted by motives of gain, close a
+    somewhat glowing description of the country by saying, "And we could wish that all
+    they that want a happy settlement of our English nation were well transported
+    thither."</p>
+    <p>Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But, relieved of her
+    civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek colonial empire on the southern
+    coast of North America. In 1663, Charles II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk,
+    Shaftsbury,&mdash;each famous in the conflicts of those times,&mdash;and to their
+    associates, as proprietors of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for
+    philosophy than affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,&mdash;an idle work,
+    as it proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle, arrived at
+    Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed probably with
+    apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they removed to the banks of the
+    Ashley, and, after another change of site, founded Charleston.</p>
+    <p>In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port Royal, but
+    was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent settlement of the
+    Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until 1700. This district is divided into
+    four parishes, St. Peter's, St. Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being
+    fifty-eight miles long and thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St.
+    Helena parish includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a
+    few smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district occupied by
+    our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands is St. Helena, being
+    fifteen miles long and six or seven broad, containing fifty plantations and three
+    thousand negroes, and perhaps more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is
+    two-thirds or three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
+    Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and Coosaw, Morgan,
+    Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort is the largest town in the
+    district of that name, and the only one at Port Royal in our possession. Its
+    population, black and white, in time of peace may have been <a name="page300"
+    id="page300"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 300]</span> between two and three
+    thousand. The first lots were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in
+    1720. Its library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
+    hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about thirty-five
+    hundred.</p>
+    <p>The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since to an
+    island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to a sound, a parish,
+    and an island, originated probably with the Spaniards, and was given by them in
+    tribute to Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, whose day in the
+    calendar is August 18th. Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given
+    by Ribault. Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
+    Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely to have been
+    so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord proprietors, while Carolina
+    was a province of Great Britain.</p>
+    <p>The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable Revolutionary romance.
+    In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent two hundred troops with a howitzer
+    and two field-pieces to Beaufort. Four companies of militia from Charleston with two
+    field-pieces, reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
+    off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and are said to
+    have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port Royal Islands.</p>
+    <p>There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands. One of
+    these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is claimed by some
+    antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault. There are the well-preserved
+    walls of one upon the plantation of John J. Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles
+    south of Beaufort, now called Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel
+    Higginson's regiment. It is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to
+    it as a Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site of
+    Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and other
+    points.</p>
+    <p>The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of the sea.
+    They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present a rather monotonous
+    and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of French explorers. The creeks run
+    up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by
+    flats and boats to the buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light,
+    sandy mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen bushels
+    of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of ginned cotton to the
+    acre,&mdash;quite different from the plantations in Mississippi and Texas, where an
+    acre produces five or six hundred pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the
+    cultivated grasses, and one finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses,
+    gathered in stacks, furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton
+    peculiar to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the action
+    of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks which permeate the land
+    in all directions. The seed of this cotton, planted on the upland, will produce in a
+    few years the cotton of coarser texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the
+    islands, will in a like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department
+    secured eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
+    including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in storehouses, when
+    our military occupation began.</p>
+    <p>The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
+    lignum-vit&aelig;, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in diameter,
+    and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the long, pendulous,
+    funereal moss adhering to them,&mdash;and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy
+    stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by <a name="page301" id="page301"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 301]</span> vines or branches, with a disproportionately small
+    cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
+    coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the
+    cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil is luxuriant with an
+    undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These interlacing the trees, supported also by
+    shrubs, of which the cassena is the most distinguished variety, and faced with
+    ditches, make the prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in
+    March and April with the yellow jessamine, (<i>jelseminum</i>,)&mdash;the cross-vine
+    (<i>bignonia</i>,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,&mdash;the Cherokee rose,
+    (<i>loevigata</i>,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,&mdash;and, two
+    months later, the palmetto royal, (<i>yucca gloriosa</i>,) which protects the fence
+    with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its pyramid-like clusters of
+    white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs serve a utilitarian end in art and
+    medicine. The live-oak is famous in shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto,
+    as it is called, resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
+    employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British fleet; and
+    the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The moss (<i>tillandsia
+    usneoides</i>) served to calk the rude vessel of the first French colonists, longing
+    for home. It may be used for bedding after its life has been killed by boiling water,
+    and for the subsistence of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a
+    powerful diuretic.</p>
+    <p>The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and to the
+    pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described in Eliot's book.
+    Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to fishing for devil and
+    drum.</p>
+    <p>The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first and
+    second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a free circulation
+    of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built under the supervision of a
+    professional architect. Those on the plantations, designed for the planters or
+    overseers, were, with a few exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving
+    mechanic in New England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards
+    are without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of orange-trees.
+    One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed, they are not well enough
+    built to last long. The estates upon Edisto Island are of a more patrician character,
+    and are occasionally surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees
+    fancifully trimmed.</p>
+    <p>The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although some may be
+    traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from the religious persecutions
+    of France.</p>
+    <p>The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious periodicals, mainly
+    Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern life has been elsewhere observed
+    in the progress of our army. Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal
+    and ruinous was found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
+    South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's collection. Another was
+    Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and tribute to its distinguished examples,
+    translated by Warden in 1810. These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to
+    see the infinite wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
+    sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the moral basis
+    of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who distrusts the rightfulness of
+    his daily conduct, has resolved to persist in it, and therefore hates most of all the
+    prophet who comes to confront him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them
+    to mankind.</p>
+    <p>Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice without
+    <a name="page302" id="page302"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 302]</span> being sought
+    for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out, still showing the place where it was
+    worn by the rope which bound the sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own
+    quarters were was a woman who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of
+    maternity as to crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
+    daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the unwilling witness.
+    She declared to her parents and sisters that it was hell to live in such a place. She
+    was accustomed to advise the negroes how best to avoid being whipped. When the war
+    began, she assured them that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to
+    send them to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
+    girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds which marriage
+    and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell on these painful scenes of
+    the past, constant and authentic as they are; and they hardly concern the practical
+    question which now presses for a solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need
+    of injustice or exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
+    persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are fortunate
+    slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides, there was less labor
+    exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely managed plantations of the Sea
+    Islands than in other districts where slave-labor was better and more profitably
+    organized and directed.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th, 1861, was
+    followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea Islands. In the latter part
+    of December, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman
+    and humane disposition naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a
+    special agent to visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition
+    of the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of suggesting some
+    plan for the organization of their labor and the promotion of their general
+    well-being. The agent, leaving New York January 13th, 1862, reached that city again
+    on his way to Washington on the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a
+    large number of the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their
+    cabins. The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the people,
+    their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the best mode of
+    administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a report. The plan proposed
+    by him recommended the appointment of superintendents to act as guides of the negroes
+    and as local magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
+    Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the same agent. The
+    agent presented the subject to several members of Congress, with whom he had a
+    personal acquaintance, but, though they listened respectfully, they seemed either to
+    dread the magnitude of the social question, or to feel that it was not one with which
+    they as legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself, and
+    Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone seemed to grasp it,
+    and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is doubtful if any member of the
+    Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any interest in the enterprise, though it has
+    since been fostered by the Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the
+    President appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
+    under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then said, somewhat
+    impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be troubled with such
+    details,&mdash;that there seemed to be an itching to get negroes into our lines; to
+    which the agent replied, that these negroes were within them by the invitation of no
+    one, being domiciled there before we commenced occupation. The President then <a
+    name="page303" id="page303"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 303]</span> wrote and
+    handed to the agent the following card:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion give Mr.
+      Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as may seem
+      judicious.</p>
+      <p>"A. LINCOLN.</p>
+      <p>"Feb. 15, 1862."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>The President, so history must write it, approached the great question slowly and
+    reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the proclamations he was to
+    issue in the September and January following. Perhaps that slowness and reluctance
+    were well, for thereby it was given to this people to work out their own salvation,
+    rather than to be saved by any chief or prophet.</p>
+    <p>Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no funds
+    wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission," organized in
+    Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief Association," organized in
+    New York on the 20th of the same month, gallantly volunteered to pay both
+    superintendents and teachers, and did so until July 1st, when the Government, having
+    derived a fund from the sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the
+    Rebels, undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies, together
+    with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and called the "Port Royal
+    Relief Committee," providing for the support of the teachers.</p>
+    <p>When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an enterprise which
+    otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance had been given as to the legal
+    condition of the negroes. The Secretary, in a letter to the agent, had said, that,
+    after being received into our service, they could not, without great injustice, be
+    restored to their masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
+    citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private, that negroes
+    who were within our lines, and had been employed by the Government, should be
+    protected in their freedom. No official assurance of this had, however, been given;
+    and its absence disturbed the societies in their formation. At one meeting of the
+    Boston society action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
+    gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people, when
+    educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A public meeting in
+    Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken up without action, because of a
+    speech from a furloughed officer of a regiment stationed at Port Royal, who
+    considered such a result the probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely
+    determined to do what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens,
+    in the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be found
+    base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it should be stated, have
+    been managed by persons of much consideration in their respective communities, of
+    unostentatious philanthropy, but of energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one
+    of whom has ever filled or been a candidate for a political office.</p>
+    <p>There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be mentioned. The
+    venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first year, hearing of the
+    enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of it. I went to his chamber, where he
+    had been confined to his bed for many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a
+    patriot who read the hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not
+    been given to protect the enterprise,&mdash;said that but for his disability he
+    should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the postscript of
+    his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty benediction to the work and to
+    myself. Restored in a measure to activity, he is still spared to the generation which
+    fondly cherishes his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
+    read to his fellow-citizens, <a name="page304" id="page304"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 304]</span> gathering close about him and hanging on his speech,
+    words of counsel and encouragement.</p>
+    <p>On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of superintendents
+    and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were women, left the harbor of New
+    York, on board the United States steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on
+    the 9th. It was a voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange,
+    and it was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store for
+    us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal to our
+    responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South Carolina, they were
+    addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the little he had learned of their
+    duties, enjoined patience and humanity, impressed on them the greatness of their
+    work, the results of which were to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps,
+    one way or the other, the social problem of the age,&mdash;assuring them that never
+    did a vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when she
+    conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written history which
+    should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful to their trust, there would
+    come to them the highest of all recognitions ever accorded to angels or to men, in
+    this life or the next,&mdash;"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye
+    have done it unto Me."</p>
+    <p>This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed during the
+    first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its close they had all
+    reached their appointed posts. They took their quarters in the deserted houses of the
+    planters. These had all left on the arrival of our army, only four white men,
+    citizens of South Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except
+    one, who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not interfered
+    with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be so. The negroes had, in
+    the mean time, been without persons to guide and care for them, and had been exposed
+    to the careless and conflicting talk of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were
+    also brought in connection with some <i>employ&eacute;s</i> of the Government,
+    engaged in the collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were
+    doing anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing the
+    plantations and the negroes upon them as <i>adscripti gleboe</i> looking forward to
+    their restoration to their masters at the close of the war. They were uncertain as to
+    the intentions of the Yankees, and were wondering at the confusion, as they called
+    it. They were beginning to plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant
+    cotton, regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except one
+    at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one bearing the name of
+    John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr. Peck. This is not the place to detail
+    the obstacles we met with, one after another overcome,&mdash;the calumnies and even
+    personal violence to which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early
+    period of our struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
+    likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they deserve, and let
+    others of better natures, who were then blind, but now see, not be taunted with their
+    inconsiderate acts. The nickname of Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may,
+    however, be fitly remembered. It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of
+    Puritan and Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
+    disposed to co&ouml;peration. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our most
+    important operations were in the district under the command of Brigadier-General
+    Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were not supposed to be favorable to
+    the enterprise, and who, during the political contest of 1860, had been the chairman
+    of the National Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and
+    his sense of the <a name="page305" id="page305"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    305]</span> duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government, that his personal
+    courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He received his mortal wound at
+    Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of September following, and a braver and abler
+    officer has not fallen in the service.</p>
+    <p>Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other hindrances
+    occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some eight thousand acres of
+    esculents,&mdash;a fair supply of food,&mdash;and some four thousand five hundred
+    acres of cotton (after a deduction for over-estimates) were planted. This was done
+    upon one hundred and eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty
+    people, of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands, made up
+    of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual classification and estimate
+    of the productive capacity of laborers, to three thousand eight hundred and five and
+    one-half full hands. The cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand
+    pounds of ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred thousand
+    pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod, resulting from the lateness
+    of the planting, exposed it to the ravages of the frost and the worm. Troops being
+    ordered North, after the disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated
+    in the middle of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
+    hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished, were abandoned.
+    In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty tons of corn-fodder and
+    seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the ear, for army-forage. These are but some
+    of the adverse influences to which the agricultural operations were subjected.</p>
+    <p>It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the superintendents and
+    teachers commissioned by the associations. There was as high a purpose and devotion
+    among them as in any colony that ever went forth to bear the evangel of civilization.
+    Among them were some of the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard,
+    Yale, and Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,&mdash;men of
+    practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was scarce worthy,
+    and to whom, whether they are among the living or the dead, I delight to pay the
+    tribute of my respect and admiration.</p>
+    <p>Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at Boston, April
+    25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work, which he was obliged to leave
+    six months before his death. He was a faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so
+    many months had passed since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he
+    dwelt fondly upon them in his last days.</p>
+    <p>The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St. Helena
+    Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,&mdash;and though not
+    fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of a superintendent, yet
+    even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He was an evangelist, also, and he
+    preached with more unction than any other the gospel of freedom,&mdash;always,
+    however, enforcing the duties of industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but
+    always buoyant and trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
+    company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to Beaufort,&mdash;being
+    assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a month, and was a remote and
+    exposed point; but he went fearlessly and without question. The evacuation of Edisto
+    in July, the heat, and the labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at
+    the village on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where were
+    some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive exertions brought on
+    malarious fever. This produced an unnatural excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot
+    sun, he rode about to attend to his people. He died,&mdash;men, women, and children,
+    for whom he had toiled, filling the house with <a name="page306"
+    id="page306"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 306]</span> their sobs during his
+    departing hours. His funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers
+    which they and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
+    native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church of Dorchester.
+    Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth can live fourscore years in a
+    little more than one score. One high privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear
+    of the immortal edict of the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his
+    people was to be secured for all time to come.</p>
+    <p>Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he never
+    advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the Episcopal Church. He
+    was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the quality as well as adding to it by
+    self-discipline. He had good business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences,
+    was humane, yet not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
+    unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was recently asking
+    the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who first taught them their
+    letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr. Phillips." He was at home in the autumn
+    for a vacation, was at the funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time
+    in imperfect health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
+    Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate return
+    necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,&mdash;but his health never came back
+    to him. His quarters were in the same house where Barnard had died, and in a few
+    days, on the 5th of December, he followed him. He was tended in his sickness by the
+    negroes, and one day, having asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the
+    words, "Thank God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the
+    same funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North to
+    bereaved relatives.</p>
+    <p>Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
+    Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his professional studies
+    at the summons of Christian duty. He labored faithfully as a superintendent, looking
+    after the physical, moral, and educational interests of his people. He had a
+    difficult post, was overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of
+    taking as good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came home
+    in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the citizens and students
+    of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill, and, again coming North, died
+    October 30th, a few days after reaching New York. The young woman who was betrothed
+    to him, but whom he did not live to wed, has since his death sought this field of
+    labor; and on my recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
+    teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had guided to
+    freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed away!</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal having
+      been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the charge of the
+      freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, a native of
+      Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the free air of the valley of the
+      Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane nature; and under his wise and benevolent
+      care they still remain. The Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in
+      Florida, are within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
+      eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.</p>
+      <p>The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject race,
+      more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The native African was
+      of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and untamable. The master was obliged to
+      abate something of the <a name="page307" id="page307"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+      307]</span> usual rigor in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner,
+      now at Port Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
+      African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would perpetually insist on
+      doing his work in his own way, and being asked the threatening question, "A'n't you
+      going to mind?" would answer, with spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master
+      desisted! Severe discipline drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a
+      mutilation of person which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816,
+      eight hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades of
+      Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the early part of
+      the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on farms, and raising cattle.
+      They had two hundred and fifty men fit to bear arms, led by chiefs brave and
+      skilful. The story of the Exiles of Florida is one of painful interest. The
+      testimony of officers of the army who served against them is, that they were more
+      dangerous enemies than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the
+      longest. The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of Charleston
+      during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark Vesey, relates that
+      one of the native Africans, when called to answer to the charge against him,
+      haughtily responded,&mdash;"<i>I was a prince in my country, and have as much right
+      to be free as you!</i>" The Carolinians were so awe-struck by his defiance that
+      they transported him. Another, at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade
+      about to speak, and said, "<i>Die silent, as I do!</i>" and the man hushed. The
+      early newspapers of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned
+      by these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the third
+      generation reduced to obedient slaves.</p>
+      <p>Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood been
+      carried so far as on these Sea Islands,&mdash;a deterioration due to their
+      isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the constant
+      surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with each other, involving a
+      physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature punishes disobedience to her laws.
+      The population with its natural increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the
+      soil under existing modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is
+      found pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
+      Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had been carried
+      so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration, in January, 1862, was
+      obliged to confess the existence of a general disinclination to military service on
+      the part of the negroes; though it is true that even then instances of courage and
+      adventure appeared, which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to
+      be developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it has been.
+      You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a subject race; but in
+      vain will you attempt to study it until the burden is lifted. The slave is unknown
+      to all, even to himself, while the bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She
+      soothes us with her deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing
+      in pain, is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the spirit
+      the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not even Tocqueville or
+      Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the capacities and possibilities of the
+      slave, until the slave himself is transmuted to a man.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It was
+    pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their posts, and specially
+    grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen, and to note the progress they had
+    made. There were interesting scenes to fill the days. I saw an aged negro,
+    C&aelig;sar by name, not less than one hundred years old, who had left children in
+    Africa, when stolen away. The vicissitudes <a name="page308" id="page308"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 308]</span> of such a life were striking,&mdash;a free savage in
+    the wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long years a
+    toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the President,&mdash;his
+    life covering an historic century. A faithful and industrious negro, Old Simon, as we
+    called him, hearing of my arrival, rode over to see me, and brought me a present of
+    two or three quarts of pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don
+    Carlos, whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon Barnard,
+    and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last hours,&mdash;now not
+    less than seventy years of age, and early in life a slave in the Alston family, where
+    he had known Theodosia Burr, the daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston.
+    He talked intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
+    known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and accompanying
+    the sons on their way North to college after the completion of their preparatory
+    studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C. Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon
+    graduating, went South as a private tutor.</p>
+    <p>Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,&mdash;an old woman, with much power
+    of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had formerly been. The
+    attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If you're as long beating Secesh
+    everywhere as you have been in taking the town, guess it'll take you some time!"
+    Indeed, the negroes had somewhat less confidence in our power than at first, on
+    account of our not having followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The
+    same quaint old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
+    of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"</p>
+    <p>I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of Trescot,
+    formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom Russell describes in his
+    "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when Russell saw it. Its large library is
+    deposited in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the
+    first and second stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families
+    of negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see a
+    cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the plantation,
+    and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name, linked with the struggles
+    for freedom in both hemispheres.</p>
+    <p>The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are usually in
+    an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees, perhaps live-oaks, and
+    not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred graves, marked only by sticks eighteen
+    inches or two feet high and about as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones
+    in a negro graveyard at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather
+    illiterate inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
+    not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and that was in a
+    burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the head of the grave, shaped
+    something like an ordinary gravestone, about three feet high and six inches wide. The
+    inscription was as follows:&mdash;</p>
+<pre>
+  OLd Jiw
+de PArt his
+Life on the
+  2 of WAY
+ Re st frow
+   LAuer
+</pre>
+    <p>On the foot-board were these words:&mdash;</p>
+<pre>
+ We ll
+d OW N.
+</pre>
+    <p>The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also write a
+    little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He said that he used to
+    carry his father in his arms in his old age,&mdash;that the old man had no pain, and,
+    as the son expressed it, "sunk in years." I inquired of Kit concerning several of the
+    graves; and I found, by his intelligent <a name="page309" id="page309"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 309]</span> answers, that their tenants were disposed in families
+    and were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing, are not
+    without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a faster hold on the
+    sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned with shafts of marble and granite,
+    and rich in illustrious dead.</p>
+    <p>There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African origin, which
+    the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as evil spirits, and in a kind of
+    witchcraft which only certain persons can cure. They have a superstition, that, when
+    you take up and remove a sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry,
+    on awaking, until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
+    They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and they will not
+    talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby be brought on.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing directly on the
+    solution of the social problem deserve most consideration.</p>
+    <p>And, first, as to <i>education</i>. There are more than thirty schools in the
+    territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are commissioned
+    by the three associations in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and by the American
+    Missionary Association. They have an average attendance of two thousand pupils, and
+    are more or less frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range
+    in the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their letters prior to
+    a year ago last March, except those who were being taught in the single school at
+    Beaufort already referred to, which had been going on for a few weeks. Very many did
+    not have the opportunity for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the
+    spring and summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
+    much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times some of the
+    teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a brief time, and upon its
+    expiration, or for other cause, returned home, leaving the schools to be broken up.
+    It was not until October or November that the educational arrangements were put into
+    much shape; and they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is
+    as yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds wherewith
+    to provide one.</p>
+    <p>I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others. There
+    were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the town of
+    Beaufort,&mdash;ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of sixty-four, and
+    twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the plantations there were never more
+    than half a dozen in one school, in some cases but two or three, and in others
+    none.</p>
+    <p>The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages in the
+    ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader,
+    and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction
+    were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a
+    class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The
+    eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
+    had not abated.</p>
+    <p>On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on St.
+    Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with the long,
+    pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading branches, and surrounded
+    by the gravestones of the former proprietors, which bear the ever-recurring names of
+    Fripp and Chaplin. This school was opened in September last, but many of the pupils
+    had received some instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were
+    present on my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
+    few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened at noon and
+    closed at <a name="page310" id="page310"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 310]</span>
+    three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the children to work in the field or perform
+    other service in which they could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page
+    70th in Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before, and
+    they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had recited the first
+    thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the multiplication-table as high as fives, and
+    were commencing the sixes. A few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come
+    latest to the school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
+    recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring prompting at the
+    beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much spirit hymns which had been
+    taught them by the teachers, as,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "My country, 'tis of thee,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Sweet land of liberty";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>also,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Sound the loud timbrel";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the closing stanzas
+    of which are,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "The very oaks are greener clad,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The waters brighter smile;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Oh, never shone a day so glad
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;On sweet St. Helen's Isle!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "For none in all the world before
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Were ever glad as we,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          We're free on Carolina's shore,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;We're all at home and free!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the highest
+    beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service than to write the songs
+    of praise for these little children, chattels no longer, whom the Saviour, were he
+    now to walk on earth, would bless as his own.</p>
+    <p>The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by the
+    way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white soldiers,
+    particularly when the singers roll out,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The children also sang their own songs, as,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "In de morning' when I rise,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?<a id="footnotetag3" name="footnotetag3"
+          href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a>
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          In de mornin' when I rise,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Also,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I would not let you go, my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I would not let you go,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I would not let you go, my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I would not let you go.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Dere's room enough," etc.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down in the
+    lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my home." Russell's
+    "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard them in his evening row over
+    Broad River, on his way to Trescot's estate.</p>
+    <p>One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from Philadelphia, <a
+    name="page311" id="page311"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 311]</span> Another is from
+    Newport, Rhode Island, where she had prepared herself for this work by benevolent
+    labors in teaching poor children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of
+    olive complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of gentle
+    address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with an overwrought
+    consciousness of her race. She had read the best books, and naturally and gracefully
+    enriched her conversation with them. She had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had
+    been a pupil in the Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that
+    city, then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had received
+    only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their parents,&mdash;and let this
+    be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She had refused a residence in Europe,
+    where a better social life and less unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she
+    would not dissever herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a
+    superficial sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
+    elevation.</p>
+    <p>At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a young woman
+    from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of parents passed into the skies,"
+    whose lives have both been written for the edification of the Christian world. She
+    teaches two schools, at different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars
+    in each. One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on a
+    review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being questioned as to
+    the subjects of the lessons, they answered intelligently. They recited the twos of
+    the multiplication-table, explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard,
+    and wrote letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining district, a
+    graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian clergyman of Providence,
+    Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which a class of three pupils was about
+    finishing Ellsworth's First Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had
+    just finished Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
+    Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two schools. He
+    exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence to be repeated with
+    different tones and inflections, and one could not but remark the excellent
+    imitations.</p>
+    <p>In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto refugees,
+    ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were engaged in teaching,
+    assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had picked up clandestinely a
+    knowledge of reading while still a slave. One class of boys and another of girls read
+    in the seventh chapter of St. John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They
+    stumbled a little on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they
+    got along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July, 1862, Ned,
+    who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus, a man of seventy, who
+    also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty children into two schools, and taught
+    them as best they could for five months until teachers were provided by the
+    societies. Ned has since received a donation from one of the societies, and is now
+    regularly employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this school
+    for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to bed. She had become
+    interested in learning by hearing her younger sister read when she came home from
+    school; and when she asked to be taught, she had learned from this sister the
+    alphabet and some words of one syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are,
+    however, learning.</p>
+    <p>On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a small church
+    on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from Kingston, Massachusetts. She
+    had manifested much persistence in going to this field, went with the <a
+    name="page312" id="page312"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 312]</span> first
+    delegation, and still keeps the school which she opened in March, 1862. She taught
+    the pupils their letters. Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of
+    ten pupils read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
+    Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read so rapidly
+    that she had to be checked,&mdash;the only case of such fast reading that I found.
+    She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners to a corner of the room and
+    exercising them upon an alphabet card, requiring them to give the names of letters
+    taken out of their regular order, and with the letters making words, which they were
+    expected to repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
+    Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states, lakes, and
+    large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the different continents on
+    the map of the world, as they were called. I saw the teacher of this school at her
+    residence, late in the afternoon, giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and
+    girls, all but two being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the
+    Book of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St. John.
+    Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly at the teacher, and
+    whispered,&mdash;"he's putting me in the book"; and as Elsie guessed, so I do. The
+    teacher was instructing her pupils in some dates and facts which have had much to do
+    with our history. The questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were
+    these:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"</p>
+      <p>"Virginia."</p>
+      <p>"When?"</p>
+      <p>"1620."</p>
+      <p>"Who brought them?"</p>
+      <p>"Dutchmen."</p>
+      <p>"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"</p>
+      <p>"Pilgrims."</p>
+      <p>"Did they bring slaves?"</p>
+      <p>"No."</p>
+      <p>A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given in a loud
+      tone by the whole school:&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"What country do you live in?"</p>
+      <p>"United States."</p>
+      <p>"What State?"</p>
+      <p>"South Carolina."</p>
+      <p>"What island?"</p>
+      <p>"Port Royal."</p>
+      <p>"What town?"</p>
+      <p>"Beaufort."</p>
+      <p>"Who is your Governor?"</p>
+      <p>"General Saxton."</p>
+      <p>"Who is your President?"</p>
+      <p>"Abraham Lincoln."</p>
+      <p>"What has he done for you?"</p>
+      <p>"He's freed us."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited, each
+    having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and each provided with
+    two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But it is unnecessary to describe
+    them, as they were very much like the others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an
+    industrial school, which meets two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady
+    from New York, with some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the
+    afternoon I visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
+    age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others with aprons,
+    pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.</p>
+    <p>Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations to
+    address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the pupils with
+    questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I have rarely heard children
+    answer with more readiness and spirit. We had a dialogue substantially as
+    follows:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to work, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"On what?"</p>
+      <p>"Cotton and corn, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the corn?" <a name="page313"
+      id="page313"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 313]</span> "Eat it."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the cotton?"</p>
+      <p>"Sell it."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"</p>
+      <p>One boy answered in advance of the rest,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"Put it in my pocket, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"That won't do. What's better than that?"</p>
+      <p>"Buy clothes, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What else will you buy?"</p>
+      <p>"Shoes, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What else are you going to do with your money?"</p>
+      <p>There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do Sundays?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to meeting."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do there?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to sing."</p>
+      <p>"What else?"</p>
+      <p>"Hear the parson."</p>
+      <p>"Who's going to pay him?"</p>
+      <p>One boy said,&mdash;"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"We's pays him."</p>
+      <p>"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people do, and
+      you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with them?"</p>
+      <p>There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"Send 'em to school, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"</p>
+      <p>"We's pays him."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any natural
+    incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years the ideas and habits
+    of good citizens.</p>
+    <p>The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved, except that
+    it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking. They are joyous, and you can
+    see the boys after school playing the soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory
+    is very susceptible in them,&mdash;too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the
+    reasoning faculty.</p>
+    <p>The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the parents
+    being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and cultivating their
+    crops, and it not being thought best to allow the teaching to interfere in any way
+    with industrious habits.</p>
+    <p>A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading, have assisted
+    our teachers, though a want of proper training materially detracts from their
+    usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have already been mentioned. The
+    latter, a man of earnest piety, has died since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on
+    Hilton Head Island last summer and autumn, being paid at first by the
+    superintendents, and afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he
+    enlisted in the negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
+    Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were brought to St.
+    Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to the school at the Baptist
+    Church, saying to the teachers there that she could carry them no farther. They could
+    read their letters and words of one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on
+    Wadmelaw Island, a kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only
+    citizen of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South Carolina,
+    stood up boldly for his official and personal protection. Hettie had been taught to
+    read by his daughter; and let this be remembered to the honor of the young woman.</p>
+    <p>Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The most advanced
+    classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can read simple stories and the
+    plainer passages of Scripture; and they could even pursue self-instruction, if the
+    schools were to be suspended. The knowledge they have thus gained can never be
+    extirpated. They could read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them
+    and adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not bounded north
+    <a name="page314" id="page314"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 314]</span> by
+    Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and east by the sea, with dim
+    visions of New York on this planet or some other,&mdash;about their conception of
+    geography when we found them. They are acquiring the knowledge of figures with which
+    to do the business of life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their
+    schools; remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a letter,
+    and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their race; then contemplate
+    what is now transpiring, and you have a scene which prophets and sages would have
+    delighted to witness. It will be difficult to find equal progress in an equal period
+    since the morning rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I
+    have never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel Angelo
+    has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor souls struggling in
+    darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the upper and better light
+    transcends in moral grandeur anything that has ever come from mortal hands.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Next as to <i>industry</i>. The laborers, during their first year under the new
+    system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages, and have
+    come to see that labor and slavery are not the same thing. The notion that they were
+    to raise no more cotton has passed away, since work upon it is found to be
+    remunerative, and connected with the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were
+    at first particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
+    collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of their masters,
+    the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and ginned the cotton on the promise
+    of wages. Except upon plantations in the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more
+    immediately remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
+    disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the only penalty
+    for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for the tenement and land
+    adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not exceeding two dollars per month. Both the
+    Government and private individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land
+    by the recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which may,
+    by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by noon; and the same
+    was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on very many of the plantations.
+    As I was riding through one of Mr. Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty
+    persons at work who belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the
+    first delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent contributions
+    for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the tax-sales, and combining a fine
+    humanity with honest sagacity and close calculation, no man is so well fitted to try
+    the experiment. He bought thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and
+    cultivated eight hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and
+    ninety-nine and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,&mdash;a larger
+    increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due mainly to
+    prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal Wand said to
+    me,&mdash;"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the negroes to take land for
+    cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton Head Island said, that on that island
+    the negroes had, besides adequate corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four
+    acres of cotton to a hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it,
+    except near the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
+    going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had charge of the
+    refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena village, and who had cleared
+    and fenced patches for gardens, felling the trees for that purpose.</p>
+    <p>The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might <a
+    name="page315" id="page315"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 315]</span> do; but they do
+    about as much as he himself would do, after a residence of a few years in the same
+    climate, and when he had ceased to work under the influence of Northern habits.
+    Northern men have sometimes been unjust to the South, when comparing the results of
+    labor in the different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
+    tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing latitude. There has
+    been less complaint this year than last of "a pain in the small of the back," or of
+    "a fever in the head,"&mdash;in other words, less <i>shamming</i>. The work has been
+    greatly deranged by the draft, some features of which have not been very skilfully
+    arranged, and by the fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the
+    military authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by the
+    women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that field-work does not
+    become women in the new condition; and so it may seem to some persons of just
+    sympathies who have not yet learned that no honest work is dishonorable in man or
+    woman. But this matter may be left to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation,
+    may not be consistent with the finest feminine culture or the most complete
+    womanliness; but it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
+    development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country of Europe;
+    and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this generation, when the American
+    negroes become the peers of the Swiss peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than
+    without it, when she is not yet fitted for the needle or the book.</p>
+    <p>The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply capital
+    to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my faithful guide and
+    attendant, who had done for me more service than any white man could render," with
+    funds of his own, and some borrowed money, bought at the recent tax-sales a small
+    farm of three hundred and thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was
+    to plant sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one and a
+    half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my last day in the
+    territory, and one-third of his crop was then in. Besides some servant's duty to an
+    officer, for which he is well paid, he does the work of a full hand on his place. He
+    hires one woman and two men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters
+    hand. He has two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
+    likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he said, "She's the
+    best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with her hoe as I know her to be with
+    her tongue, Harry's estimate must be right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and
+    blind in both eyes, whom he guides with a rope,&mdash;carrying on farming, I thought,
+    somewhat under difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
+    delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor. He has
+    promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an account of the progress
+    of his crop. He has had much charge of Government property, and when Captain Hooper,
+    of General Saxton's staff, was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany
+    him; but at last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
+    all two to leave together."</p>
+    <p>Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The Government is
+    building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen feet by fourteen, with two
+    rooms, each provided with a swinging board-window, and the roof projecting a little
+    as a protection from rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have
+    fifty cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the direction
+    of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a month. Rarely have I
+    talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was my great regret that I had not time
+    to visit the village of <a name="page316" id="page316"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    316]</span> improved houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
+    extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of his last
+    days.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Next as to the <i>development of manhood</i>. This has been shown, in the first
+    place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not appear upon our first
+    introduction to these people, and they did not seem to understand us when we used to
+    tell them that we wanted them to own land. But it is now an active desire. At the
+    recent tax-sales, six out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them,
+    comprising two thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one
+    hundred and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
+    superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United States. One
+    of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The other five were made by the
+    negroes on the plantations combining the funds they had saved from the sale of their
+    pigs, chickens, and eggs, and from the payments made to them for work,&mdash;they
+    then dividing off the tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit,
+    before mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands, who are
+    equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are cultivating sixty-three
+    acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes, with as many more to be planted,
+    four and a half of cow-peas, three of pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These
+    facts are most significant. The instinct for land&mdash;to have one spot on earth
+    where a man may stand, and whence no human being can of right drive him&mdash;is one
+    of the most conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any fair
+    degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.</p>
+    <p>This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness of rights,
+    and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed by white men. The former
+    slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a resident of New York when the war
+    broke out, have generally left the plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying
+    that they will not be his bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if
+    they remain on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
+    during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to Coosaw
+    Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken belonging to a negro.
+    The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from the corporal, to whom the soldier had
+    handed it, thinking that the negroes would not take it from an officer. They then
+    carried it to the superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was
+    given for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but these are
+    sufficient.</p>
+    <p>Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the comforts
+    and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society, for the purpose of
+    maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St. Helena Island, which is under the
+    charge of Friend Hunn, of the good fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in
+    Delaware three thousand dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he
+    now harbors and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
+    which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of the world's
+    people. In this store alone&mdash;and there are others on the island, carried on by
+    private enterprise&mdash;two thousand dollars' worth of goods are sold monthly. To be
+    sure, a rather large proportion of these consists of molasses and sugar,
+    "sweetening," as the negroes call it, being in great demand, and four barrels of
+    molasses having been sold the day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for
+    plates, knives, forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
+    Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,&mdash;in short, the
+    distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform allowance,&mdash;are
+    very generally rejected. But there is no article of household-furniture or wearing
+    apparel, used <a name="page317" id="page317"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    317]</span> by persons of moderate means among us, which they will not purchase, when
+    they are allowed the opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South
+    would open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops astir. Four
+    millions of people would become purchasers of all the various articles of manufacture
+    and commerce, in place of the few coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in
+    gross by the planters. Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The
+    indisposition to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
+    superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed and fed, the
+    sense of security derived from provision for the future, the feeling of self-respect,
+    the love of family and children, and the convictions of duty. These all exist in the
+    negro, in a state of greater or less development. To give one or two examples. One
+    man brought Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
+    obtained from selling pigs and chickens,&mdash;thus providing for the future.
+    Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same officer,
+    intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred dollars, to be transmitted
+    by him to their wives, and this besides what they had sent home in other
+    ways,&mdash;showing the family-feeling to be active and strong in them. They have
+    also the social and religious inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of
+    Hilton Head, they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
+    for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the Government longer
+    to provide them. The result was a contribution of two dollars and forty-eight cents.
+    They had just fled from their masters, and had received only a small pittance of
+    wages, and this little sum was not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the
+    treasury. Another collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena
+    Island, upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses of
+    worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,&mdash;not a bad collection for some of our
+    Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are said to be lowest, and sad
+    indeed are some features of their lot, yet with all earnestness and confidence I
+    enter my protest against the wicked satire of Carlyle.</p>
+    <p>Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste which has
+    troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer be used as slaves, men
+    will try to see how they can make the most out of them as freemen. Your Irishman, who
+    now works as a day-laborer, honestly thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war
+    is over, he will have no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
+    household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or to hiring him
+    to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our prejudices, under any
+    reasonable adjustment of the social system, readily accommodate themselves to our
+    interests, even without much aid from the moral sentiments.</p>
+    <p>Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public trusts are
+    charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive in the minds of these
+    people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must be addressed. All the elements of
+    human nature must be appealed to, physical, moral, intellectual, social, and
+    religious. Imperfect indeed is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers
+    wages, but does not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars
+    or thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to bind both
+    parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them, and truth
+    requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good deal of petty pilfering
+    among them, although they are faithful to trusts. This is the natural growth of the
+    old system, and is quite <a name="page318" id="page318"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    318]</span> likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present disturbed
+    and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the rigid virtues. But
+    inferences from this must not be pressed too far. When I was a private soldier in
+    Virginia, as one of a three-months' regiment, we used to bide from each other our
+    little comforts and delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
+    disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
+    characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom to the
+    conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And what inferences might
+    not one draw, discreditable to all traders and manufacturers, from the universal
+    adulteration of articles of food! These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood
+    in order to get rations and small benefits,&mdash;a natural vice which comes with
+    slavery, and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
+    demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed, hypocritical, but
+    satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and indulgence in
+    emotion,&mdash;psychological manifestations which one may find in more advanced
+    communities. They show no special gratitude to us for liberating them from bonds. Nor
+    do they ordinarily display much exhilaration over their new condition,&mdash;being
+    quite unlike the Italian revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the
+    forum, and personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
+    chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their excitement when an
+    attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while the assault on Charleston was
+    going on, and in their desire to get their friends and relatives away from the
+    Rebels,&mdash;an appreciation of freedom, if not ostentatious, at least sensible.</p>
+    <p>But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races to
+    self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and conceited,
+    Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of one other nation are
+    sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these therefore be slaves? And where is
+    that model race which shall sway them all? A people may have grave defects, but it
+    may not therefore be rightfully disabled.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different occasions, to
+    note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment, known as the First Regiment
+    of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General Hunter's first regiment was mainly made
+    up of conscripts, drafted May 12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months
+    afterwards, there being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going
+    home to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On the 10th
+    of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent authority to raise five
+    thousand colored troops, began to recruit a regiment. His authority from the War
+    Department bore date August 25th, and the order conferring it states the object to be
+    "to guard the plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
+    This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise a negro
+    regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words in the instructions of
+    Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the original expedition went to Port
+    Royal, authorizing him to organize the negroes into companies and squads for such
+    services as they might be fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for
+    military service. Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to
+    General Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
+    payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General Saxton, numbered
+    four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson took command of it on the 1st
+    of December; and on the 19th of January, 1863, it had increased to eight hundred and
+    forty-nine. It has made three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,&mdash;one before
+    Colonel Higginson assumed <a name="page319" id="page319"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 319]</span> the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the
+    women of England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in January
+    up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which it occupied for a
+    few days until an evacuation was ordered from head-quarters. The men are volunteers,
+    having been led to enlist by duty to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and
+    to us, their allies. Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
+    themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white regiments in
+    skirmishing. In <i>morale</i> they seemed very much like white men, and with about
+    the same proportion of good and indifferent soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal,
+    like Robert Sutton, whom Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of
+    the whole expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
+    capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said, addressing a
+    meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights, thinking of the war and of
+    his people,&mdash;that, when he heard of the regiment being formed, he felt that his
+    time to act had come, and that it was his duty to enlist,&mdash;that he did not fight
+    for his rations and pay, but for wife, children, and people.</p>
+    <p>These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily depressed,
+    and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have been reluctant to
+    engage in military service,&mdash;their imagination investing it with the terrors of
+    instant and certain death. But this reluctance has passed away with participation in
+    active service, with the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the
+    latent manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was of the
+    first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,&mdash;a truthful man, and not given to
+    rose-colored views,&mdash;"I did not have faith in arming negroes, when I visited the
+    North last autumn, but I have now. They will be not mere machines, but real tigers,
+    when aroused; and I should not wish to face them." One amusing incident may be
+    mentioned. A man deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in
+    the district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
+    Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes, became excited
+    with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a furlough on his return, went
+    to the plantation where he had hid, and said he would not take five thousand dollars
+    for his place.</p>
+    <p>But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the change of
+    feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a change due in part to
+    the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the President's Proclamation of January
+    1st, which has done much to clear the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines,
+    but more than all to the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
+    expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the 6th of
+    April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty on Port Royal
+    Island,&mdash;the first active duty it had performed on the Sea Islands,&mdash;and
+    was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a march of ten miles, it
+    reached the advanced picket-station, there were about two hundred soldiers of the
+    Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a
+    careless tone, to one of the Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's
+    regiment as it stood in line,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"</p>
+    <p>"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as I have to
+    fight for them."</p>
+    <p>A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting him as
+    their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a soldier,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"What do you think of that regiment?"</p>
+    <p>The answer was,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot <a name="page320" id="page320"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 320]</span> the Rebels than have the Rebels shoot me"; and none
+    of the by-standers dissented.</p>
+    <p>As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station at the
+    Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the Pennsylvania soldiers,
+    just formed into line preparatory to marching to Beaufort. The countenances of the
+    latter, which I watched, exhibited no expression of disgust, dislike, or
+    disapprobation, only of curiosity. Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the
+    hominy left from the morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command
+    of the relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
+    stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid desired. This was,
+    it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways than one in which to perform
+    even an official duty. I rode back to Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a
+    captain of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said
+    "he wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our fighting."
+    He pronounced the word as spelled with two <i>g</i>s; but I prefer to retain the good
+    English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled regiment, most of whom were
+    conscripts, said that on his return from Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men
+    ashore in charge of some prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them
+    approach from the wharf, one said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"What are those coming?"</p>
+    <p>"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the answer.</p>
+    <p>"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.</p>
+    <p>But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was inquired.</p>
+    <p>"Why, some Secesh prisoners."</p>
+    <p>"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then the response
+    from all.</p>
+    <p>So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had demonstrated
+    their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember that such an unreasonable
+    and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time existed; but it is never worth while to
+    suppress the truth of history. This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free
+    States; and one of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston,
+    on the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment
+    of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of negro soldiers which the Free
+    States have sent to the war. On the day previous, May 27th, a far different scene
+    transpired on the banks of the Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months
+    before in Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and one
+    with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge on the batteries
+    of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass, the survivors, many with
+    mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks and pressing on again, careless of
+    life, and mindful only of honor and duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in
+    the annals of war, and leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves
+    and their race.</p>
+    <p>I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson. Devoting himself
+    heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties, and bearing his oppressive
+    responsibility as the leader of a regiment in which to a great extent are now
+    involved the fortunes of a race, he adds another honorable name to the true chivalry
+    of our time.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again among the
+    familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that Major-General Butler, first of
+    all the generals in the army of the Republic, and anticipating even Republican
+    statesmen, had clearly pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two
+    accomplished women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
+    every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two good men, <a
+    name="page321" id="page321"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 321]</span> one at the fort
+    and the other at Norfolk, were distributing the laborers on farms in the vicinity,
+    and providing them with implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had
+    furnished. Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
+    ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war, had been for a
+    brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to one whom they remembered as
+    the first to point them to freedom and cheer them with its prospect could hardly be
+    received without emotion. But there is no time to linger over these scenes.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
+    particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in doubt, is no
+    longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a consummation. The negroes
+    will work for a living. They will fight for their freedom. They are adapted to civil
+    society. As a people, they are not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity,
+    nor from the vices which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said
+    to take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it may not be
+    possible in a single generation to restore the pristine manhood. One who expects to
+    find in emancipated slaves perfect men and women, or to realize in them some fair
+    dream of an ideal race, will meet disappointment; but there is nothing in their
+    nature or condition to daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to
+    cheer and fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
+    industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly fortitude, for
+    social and family relations, for religious culture and aspirations; and these
+    qualities, when stirred and sustained by the incitements and rewards of a just
+    society, and combining with the currents of our continental civilization, will, under
+    the guidance of a benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them
+    a constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the calamity of
+    another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity of being again their
+    oppressors.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>NO AND YES.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          I watched her at her spinning;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And this was my beginning
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of wooing and of winning.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          But when a maid opposes,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And throws away your roses,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          You say the case forecloses.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Yet sorry wit one uses,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Who loves and thinks he loses
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Because a maid refuses.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          For by her once denying
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She only means complying
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Upon a second trying.
+        </div>
+        <a name="page322" id="page322"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 322]</span>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          When first I said, in pleading,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She heard me half unheeding.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          When afterward I told her,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And blamed her growing colder,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She dropped upon my shoulder.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Her very look dispelled it,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I caught her hand, and held it.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Along the lane I led her,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And while her cheeks grew redder,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I sued outright to wed her.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Good end from bad beginning!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          My wooing came to winning,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And still I watch her spinning.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE MATHER SAFE.</h2>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
+    &mdash;&mdash; College in New England procured me access to the library belonging to
+    that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had previously enjoyed
+    the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning for money to buy books for
+    interment in this choice literary catacomb; nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction
+    of an annual stare at them through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the
+    effect that nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
+    occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more to the
+    select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the shelves, could really
+    use the library, I demanded this favor of the gentleman who desired to recompense me
+    for what I had done for him. The Librarian, who valued books as things capable of
+    being locked up in cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion
+    of rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my credentials. The
+    authority, however, was not to be questioned;&mdash;I was to be admitted to the
+    library at any hour of the day; and I took care to drop a civil expression to imply
+    my estimation of the privilege and my purpose of enjoying it.</p>
+    <p>Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a course of
+    reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon Saturday afternoons,
+    and finally to establish myself, with whatever authors I had selected, in a certain
+    retired alcove devoted to the metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind
+    Crawford's bust of the late President T&mdash;&mdash;, and is nearly opposite the
+    famous Mather Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
+    of &mdash;&mdash; College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
+    word of the history of the spacious <a name="page323" id="page323"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 323]</span> and ancient coffer to which allusion is made.</p>
+    <p>The Mather Safe&mdash;which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily bound
+    with that metal&mdash;is said to have been among the possessions of the author of the
+    "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral descendant of the Mathers,
+    an eccentric character, popularly known as Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor,
+    and had the reputation of being enormously rich, the College authorities of his day
+    were accustomed to treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I
+    believe, as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic blandishments
+    may have had upon their object cannot at present be determined. For when the day came
+    for the long-expected will to be opened, it was found that the old gentleman had
+    bequeathed to the College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let
+    into the wood-work in one corner of the same,&mdash;which papers were not to be
+    removed or opened for a hundred years.</p>
+    <p>It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with the best
+    grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for considerable expense
+    necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in the library. Yet, not satisfied
+    with this culpable negligence, Mr. Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the
+    acceptance of his gift. He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather
+    Safe, of which he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
+    President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could have access to
+    its contents except in the presence of the other. Moreover, he required that the Safe
+    should be used only as a receptacle for packages which the depositors desired to keep
+    from the world for at least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would
+    have endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers left in
+    the Safe,&mdash;these being considered instruments whereby immense possessions would
+    finally come to the College. But, as their worthy friend, however niggardly in other
+    respects, had taken care to save nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of
+    disregarding his wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so,
+    many years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the conditions
+    already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so many persons appeared
+    to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had
+    been consigned to various periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women.
+    These were numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
+    severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living person, perhaps
+    to the future occupant of some professor's chair or metropolitan pulpit.</p>
+    <p>It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite alcove
+    opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight thickened without the
+    building, and the type began to blur within, I would lay aside my book and muse over
+    wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. Journals and
+    letters, it was said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
+    history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the world. There
+    were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church and State, which their
+    perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before their fellows, but which, in the
+    bitterness of remorse, they had recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to
+    future times,&mdash;thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
+    should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was vague talk, also,
+    of funds which had been deposited to found some professorship in the College, to
+    furnish some instruction which the age was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too,
+    there were intimations of endowments to establish scholarships for women,
+    who,&mdash;so <a name="page324" id="page324"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    324]</span> it was argued,&mdash;after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of
+    years, would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In short,
+    there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the blood, as this tough
+    old ark, buffeting slowly through the years, entered its familiar night. If there was
+    deficiency in the testimony which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there
+    was, doubtless, sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
+    interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.</p>
+    <p>During the latter part of a certain August&mdash;my family being established at
+    the seaside&mdash;I determined to devote a long day to the College Library. The fact
+    was, that a trifling domestic incident&mdash;no other than the smoking of a
+    kitchen-chimney&mdash;had turned my attention to the conditions of atmospheric
+    changes. Certain phenomena I had observed seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in
+    popular text-books. Indeed, as it appeared to me, modifications of a received
+    theory&mdash;which might be determined by a diligent comparison of existing
+    authorities&mdash;would suggest a household economy of great practical importance.
+    Certain facts, which must have been noted by all the great voyagers of the world,
+    might give me data from which to establish the suspected conclusion. I accordingly
+    repaired to the library at a very early hour, and labored through the day in
+    collecting and committing to writing what had been observed by many eminent
+    navigators upon the point in question. Four o'clock in the afternoon found me too
+    tired to apply any process of analysis to the observations obtained. I therefore
+    retired to my accustomed seat, took down almost the first book which came to hand,
+    and resigned myself to the impressions of a favorite author. I had passed about an
+    hour in a delicious state of dreamy tranquillity, sometimes reading, sometimes
+    pausing to color the faded page with the brilliant hues of more modern thought, when
+    my attention was attracted by a familiar voice proceeding from the neighborhood of
+    the Mather Safe.</p>
+    <p>"The President and Treasurer were to have been here at five o'clock."</p>
+    <p>"I have heard nothing of it," said the Librarian. "I am sure that the President is
+    out of town for the day."</p>
+    <p>"Strange! strange!" exclaimed the Reverend Mr. Clifton, in a very excited tone. "I
+    wish to make a deposit of great importance in the Mather Safe. I had the assurance
+    that the Safe should be opened at five this afternoon. Here, read the solemn promise
+    upon which I have come from Foxden!"</p>
+    <p>The Librarian glanced at an open letter which Clifton held out to him, and said,
+    in a quiet manner,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"The President promises to meet you in the College Library on the afternoon of
+    Thursday, the twenty-fourth instant; to-day is Wednesday, the twenty-third."</p>
+    <p>"Is it possible?" muttered the clergyman, with a look of startled despair. "Pardon
+    my disturbance. I have been hardly myself for these last weeks. Yet I can wait."</p>
+    <p>I spoke to Mr. Clifton as he was about to leave the library. He blenched at
+    hearing my voice, and strove to conceal the package beneath his arm.</p>
+    <p>"How do my good friends in Foxden?" said I, inviting him into my alcove. "Is it
+    true that Dr. Dastick has presented his cabinet of curiosities to the town?"</p>
+    <p>"What are you reading?" said the clergyman, in a tone of curt authority very
+    foreign to the mild persuasiveness of his usual professional accents.</p>
+    <p>I exhibited the title of the book: it was the "Meditations of Descartes."</p>
+    <p>"And do you follow those who vainly seek for truth through the inner world of man,
+    not conforming themselves to the necessities of the outward world and the teachings
+    of Revelation?"</p>
+    <p>I defended the usefulness of some acquaintance with the original and powerful
+    thinker, whose apologies are certainly profuse enough to satisfy the most
+    orthodox.</p>
+    <a name="page325" id="page325"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 325]</span>
+    <p>"Yes; I suppose you read Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, the Atheism of D'Holbach,
+    Utilitarianism Systematized by Auguste Comte! Did you ever go fishing in a dory when
+    the wind was off shore?"</p>
+    <p>There was an alarm in the eye and manner of Mr. Clifton, a tremulous restlessness
+    in his speech, which warned me to avoid discussion, and endeavor to soothe his
+    agitation. It was only to the last interrogatory, therefore, that I made some light
+    reply.</p>
+    <p>"The sea sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an
+    extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations some
+    illustration which presents itself,&mdash;"the boat tosses on from wave to wave, for
+    dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from shore, and throw the anchor.
+    What auspicious expansion of soul and body! How we slide up and down the backs of
+    great billows, and cast our lines with ever-varying success! But the night comes, and
+    with it the necessity of rowing back against wind and tide. Ah, then how long the
+    lonely ocean-leagues! How distant the time when we may hope to stand confused and
+    giddy upon solid earth! Some never see the land again, but are swept out into the
+    storm and darkness, and are lost,&mdash;<i>lost</i>!"</p>
+    <p>"I presume I understand the significance of your similitude," I replied, a little
+    annoyed at this inopportune indulgence of the pastoral privilege. "You would imply
+    the dangerous tendency of a certain sort of philosophical speculation; and so far we
+    doubtless agree. Yet I ought to say, that, in cases where personal investigation is
+    possible, I would take neither popular clamor nor learned dogmatism as conclusive
+    evidence against any writer's honesty and usefulness. With the vulgar, genius has
+    always seemed a sort of madness; and should a man rise preeminent above the teachers
+    of his generation, his wisdom would appear to them as foolishness."</p>
+    <p>A change came over the face of Clifton as I said these words. It was as if a mask
+    had fallen. Perchance he had wished to appear to me in that character of instructor
+    which he desired some competent person to assume to him. Now, the relaxed muscles and
+    averted eye only asked the sympathy of an equal. He spoke with forced, and almost
+    grating, utterance.</p>
+    <p>"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may bear into
+    the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general perception, too pure for even
+    exceptional recognition."</p>
+    <p>"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says true, holds
+    many mystic signals which the past and present could address only to the
+    future,&mdash;signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but which the freemasonry of
+    higher intelligence shall render plain in the time hereafter."</p>
+    <p>"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,&mdash;"what if I had come to
+    add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may be for other times?
+    What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we common men, who find a life full
+    of active duties presented to our acceptance,&mdash;should such as we, I say, receive
+    this world as a pageant before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The
+    conceit of external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
+    element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind only an
+    awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now tolerated, but an
+    extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether wanting the perception, that,
+    rising from the gross symbols of language, can know the subtile and precious emotion
+    which in a more advanced state of being those symbols might suggest."</p>
+    <p>As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous excitability,
+    I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what he said, or even demand that
+    it be made intelligible by further explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied
+    in striving to identify this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance,
+    the pastor of the <a name="page326" id="page326"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    326]</span> First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had once been
+    said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality popularly known as "The
+    Transcendentalists." But this was many years ago; and the world always supposed that
+    he had outgrown his early errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England,
+    a more genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
+    remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to resist the social
+    influences into which they may be thrown. This was probably the case even where that
+    influence tended to degrade him from the plane he would have occupied, if left to
+    himself. His spiritual life seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely
+    important to contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which
+    should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some moments, Clifton
+    again addressed me.</p>
+    <p>"Recollections of moments, months of excitement, of intense power, have returned!
+    They may not fade again unspoken. You shall know my long-cherished secret. Younger in
+    years, you may scarcely advise; but, at least, you may give sympathy that shall
+    confirm my decision. I have engaged rooms at the neighboring hotel. Come and pass the
+    evening&mdash;nay, the night&mdash;with me; for much must be read and thought and
+    spoken before the black veil of personality can be lifted between us."</p>
+    <p>It has already been observed that my family were at the seaside. This circumstance
+    left me sole disposer of my time and localities. How, then, resist the inclination to
+    see out the adventure upon which I had stumbled? Let me credit myself also with a
+    worthier motive: I saw that my companion was in no state to be left to
+    himself,&mdash;and, really, there was no mutual friend to whom I could consign him.
+    Accordingly I offered my arm in a manner to imply acquiescence in his proposal.</p>
+    <p>We soon reached the hotel, and ascended to a room in the remote corner of a
+    spacious wing. Clifton at once turned the key, placed his package upon the table, and
+    proceeded to employ a stray bit of carpet in stopping a ventilator which communicated
+    with the entry. Having satisfied himself that this passage was rendered impervious to
+    sound, he drew two chairs up to the table, motioned me into one, and planted himself
+    in the other with the air of a man, in popular phrase, about to make a night of
+    it.</p>
+    <p>"Did you ever hear of Herbert Vannelle?" he asked, abruptly.</p>
+    <p>It can hardly be necessary to say that a substitute is here placed for the name
+    really mentioned.</p>
+    <p>I replied in the negative, and asked where the gentleman lived.</p>
+    <p>"He lives nowhere on earth; he is dead,&mdash;just dead."</p>
+    <p>"A friend of yours?"</p>
+    <p>"A master once; now a presence eluding, haunting, torturing. He left me this
+    manuscript; it is a 'Philosophy of the Absolute.'" (Here Clifton drew from a
+    curiously contrived case of parchment a cluster of pages.) "It has now twenty-two
+    hours to appear in the present century. You shall devote the night to reading it, and
+    tell me that I have acted well."</p>
+    <p>A sultry August evening, a smoky boarding-house lamp, much skirmishing of
+    mosquitoes, and&mdash;a manuscript system of philosophy! The prospect was not
+    inviting. The reading of other people's manuscripts is surely the crucial test of a
+    devoted benevolence. There are few ways in which I am so little ready to oblige my
+    fellow-men. I had, indeed, at times, been induced to inspect sundry romances in
+    blotted embryo; but, as yet, nobody had called upon me with a system of philosophy.
+    <i>Printed</i> philosophy is none too easy reading. But to sit there, under the
+    guardianship of Clifton, and spell out the dim dogmatism of some nebulous
+    fanatic,&mdash;of course it was not to be thought of for a moment. With a
+    <i>suave</i> periphrasis of speech I questioned the expediency of the
+    proposition.</p>
+    <a name="page327" id="page327"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 327]</span>
+    <p>"I shall ring for candles that will burn during the night," said Mr. Clifton,
+    heedless of my expostulation. "Also some refreshment. You take tea, I suppose? You
+    shall read the first ten pages of Vannelle's writing. It is possible you may exercise
+    self-control enough to abandon it unfinished. But you will not sleep tonight."</p>
+    <p>There was a confidence in the minister's tone which gave rather unpleasant
+    emphasis to this final prophecy. Still, I believed myself capable of the ten pages
+    without establishing a hopelessly wakeful condition,&mdash;indeed, it was something
+    to be guarantied against the opposite infirmity. The tea, accompanied by a few thin
+    shavings of toast, presently arrived. The means of procuring light were also
+    furnished us. Clifton's hand lay heavily upon the manuscript until the attendant had
+    disappeared for the last time, and the door was locked behind him. He then opened the
+    papers before me, and signified that the time had come. I braced myself as for a
+    serious undertaking.</p>
+    <p>Thus I accepted the task. How give words to the singular emotions which soon
+    possessed me? As if some charm, some spell of magnetism, had been given to the paper,
+    my whole consciousness was riveted upon it. I know not how to represent this bold,
+    this startling attempt to establish a positive basis for metaphysical philosophy, an
+    exact science of all things human and divine. Here was a man, perchance of more
+    courage and conscience, perchance of more devilish recklessness, than any of his
+    contemporaries. But how deal with what came to me from that wondrous writing in the
+    ambiguities of common language? All thought&mdash;even supposing it embodied in a
+    perfect form of speech&mdash;is subject to the limitations of the recipient mind. My
+    own glimpses of the writer's meaning were necessarily most indistinct. I cannot
+    attempt to transfer them. I was controlled by a force not my own. The shadow of a
+    mysterious power was over me. The mists of sentimental pantheism were left far below
+    the clear-cut summits whither the reader was invited to ascend. There was an
+    interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the apparent letter than that of
+    Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for a widely different purpose) what the
+    Romish Church has ever declared,&mdash;that the Scriptures, recording spiritual
+    truth, cannot be comprehensible to the natural understanding,&mdash;that, while the
+    Sacred Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual verity
+    only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was an idealism, it
+    nevertheless manifested itself through the plainest realities. The solution of the
+    problem seemed to come not from one point, but from all points. Certainly there was a
+    tendency towards the supersensible; but this direction was taken through stern
+    grappling with the actual. At one time I struggled against the august spirit that was
+    borne in upon me; at another, I was utterly subdued by the lofty enthusiasm of the
+    writer,&mdash;something within me capable of absolute cognition seemed responding to
+    his appeals. But the pith and vitality of this marvel could be recognized only by
+    long experience. And here the student was required to stake his soul upon a perilous
+    cast. For, if not pursued and fathomed to full satisfaction, this view of things
+    would be disturbing, paralyzing. With any half-acceptance a man might scarcely live.
+    It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals into a musical
+    instrument, and then every event in time might touch it to exquisite harmony. But the
+    more ravishing the beauty which seemed offered through perfect realization of this
+    knowledge, the more blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a
+    selfish dilettanteism. For in certain passages were breathed faint suggestions, that
+    moral codes held sacred by the people could not bind the initiated,&mdash;nay, that
+    what seemed most evil might be so explained as to become wholly legitimate to the
+    elect.</p>
+    <p>It was far into the night. I had gone over about a third of the manuscript. <a
+    name="page328" id="page328"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 328]</span> Sharp questions
+    assailed my ears. Was I bound to jeopard all the common good of life for the chance
+    of&mdash;just failing to know existence from a higher plane? Could I ascend so far
+    above the frailties of average men as to receive in purity and innocence the license
+    which acceptance of this strange scheme would surely give? Dim-sighted as I was, it
+    was necessary to rise and dispel this splendid phantasm. I shuddered in sudden alarm
+    at the danger which threatened me. By a spasmodic movement, in which I failed to
+    recognize any presence of my will, the manuscript was closed and handed to Clifton.
+    Welcome existence under coarsest and harshest terms, rather than tamper with such
+    fearful possibilities!</p>
+    <p>For hours the minister had gazed into my face, partaking the excitement to which
+    he had subjected me. He had lighted and trimmed the candles, as was necessary, but
+    had never broken silence. And now there came from him the deep sigh of relief from an
+    absorbing interest; he sighed as a little child when the fairytale is ended and the
+    tense strain of attention may be relaxed.</p>
+    <p>"What was this man?" I demanded, hurriedly.</p>
+    <p>"What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be found out at
+    all. What he was is not for me nor for you to know. It is possible that he may meet
+    with competent judges hereafter, even among men. Look at this address."</p>
+    <p>Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate disposition of the
+    manuscript. It was to remain for eighty years in the Mather Safe, and was then to be
+    consigned to the occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the College.</p>
+    <p>"Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!" I exclaimed. "I
+    doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession will feel disposed to
+    abandon the market-worth of conventional acquirements, and set forth as a humble
+    student of unpopular truth."</p>
+    <p>The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration I had
+    indicated.</p>
+    <p>The darkest hour of the night had come. Every sound of human activity had long ago
+    ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily probe an intense experience. I
+    felt that more was to be known,&mdash;something which the minister longed to
+    tell,&mdash;something to which what he had caused me to read was to serve as a
+    prelude. I suspected how powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence
+    of the Idea which he had carried. Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it
+    might prevent all harmonious action,&mdash;it might ever goad the intellect, and
+    crush the heart. As the confession trembled upon the lips of Clifton, I signified my
+    profound sympathy. It is an awful moment, when a mature man tries to put off the
+    solitariness of his life.</p>
+    <p>What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person. The pathetic
+    earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very phrases that he used;
+    there can be few verbal changes as they now flow from the pen.</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <center>
+      NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.
+    </center>
+    <p>I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great bereavement,
+    received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at that time about twelve
+    years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome annuity, which he spent with the utmost
+    liberality. As I was rather a thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was
+    determined that I should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my
+    seventeenth birthday,&mdash;an age somewhat later than the average at that time.</p>
+    <p>Two years before me in college was the class of 18&mdash;. Upon the roll of its
+    fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an orphan, <a
+    name="page329" id="page329"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 329]</span> inclined to
+    thought and study beyond the limited academic range of those days, endowed with
+    personal fascinations of a very rare and peculiar kind,&mdash;there seemed only one
+    possible shadow to darken his career. In his family there had been said to exist a
+    tendency to eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed
+    for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college, had given much
+    uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle with which he was socially
+    connected. Upon the death of his wife he had retired to the Vannelle homestead in the
+    northwestern part of Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he
+    insisted upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and
+    companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended his studies
+    with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to accomplish him in the grace of
+    physical power, at that time little recognized as a part of education.</p>
+    <p>So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the young men of
+    the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he left America on the day
+    his class graduated. His connections with the other students had been very slight. He
+    had never cared to acquire that fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon
+    which college-rank depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value
+    in his connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with the
+    openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the bewildering sophistries of
+    the school-philosophies, and their aimless wrangling over verbal conceits.</p>
+    <p>At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting rounds upon
+    the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often encountered Vannelle in search
+    of some volume of which I had just possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I
+    was soon fascinated by a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and
+    persuaded by a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no
+    other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that which the
+    mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an interest in directing
+    my inquiries along the paths to which they naturally tended, he never communicated
+    the results of his own studies, or offered me the slightest assistance in
+    generalizing my random observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he
+    was influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the writings
+    of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest notoriety, yet never
+    for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights where those earnest spirits
+    soared.</p>
+    <p>Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the time that
+    my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him during his absence was from
+    the scattered notices of newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert
+    possessed the privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for
+    knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter dated from
+    X&mdash;&mdash;, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed almost a command,
+    to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert had returned, and thus
+    abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until the autumn the study of a
+    profession, I promised to come to him for a few weeks,&mdash;a visit which might be
+    extended, were it mutually agreeable.</p>
+    <p>There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars, before
+    arriving in the village of X&mdash;&mdash;; there were also six rough miles of
+    carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house by the damp
+    river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there, Vannelle stood at the door
+    to greet me.</p>
+    <p>"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering himself of some
+    studied speech,&mdash;"we have six months' concern together; then we may <a
+    name="page330" id="page330"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 330]</span> stand at the
+    parting of the ways,&mdash;we may cleave to one another, or separate forever."</p>
+    <p>A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and cedars.
+    The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into dusty ridges. The
+    wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the pine-trees without. Little oval
+    mirrors distorting the human countenance within. In the living-room (so called by
+    those able to live in it) loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral
+    proportion,&mdash;a ghastly altar which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel
+    fully justified in protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the
+    house, had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused mass
+    of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical apparatus about the
+    floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to the ceiling;&mdash;at first I
+    supposed them to be made of painted wood; afterwards I discovered they were of iron,
+    and filled with rare books and manuscripts.</p>
+    <p>"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He wished to
+    get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is no escape in a
+    New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our farmer, could never resist the
+    feminine itch to put things to rights. She was always contriving to arrange papers
+    and books in symmetrical piles where nothing could be found. My father could never
+    turn his back but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were
+    lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom of dust that
+    hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this room, and kept the key of
+    it, there was no more trouble."</p>
+    <p>I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which I hardly
+    dare to put into words must accompany them. All these surroundings, seen by me for
+    the first time, had a fearful familiarity. In some occult state of spiritual
+    existence I seemed to have known them all. I have learned that the soul may enter
+    into communion with other minds otherwise than through the senses,&mdash;nay, more,
+    it may thus take an inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had
+    such proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this
+    startling suspicion for the first time.</p>
+    <p>"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the house.
+    "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber projecting over the
+    porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he wore at city club-houses and
+    family-dinners,&mdash;but the man as you knew him <i>here</i>, how little does it
+    resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet which stands between the windows, it has
+    associations, no doubt, but it is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the
+    fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as
+    corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and
+    execrable drawing always put me."</p>
+    <p>The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and said,
+    slowly,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Have you been here before?"</p>
+    <p>"No."</p>
+    <p>"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"</p>
+    <p>"No."</p>
+    <p>"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned purity. It is
+    as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."</p>
+    <p>The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the study. I
+    glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which seemed in strange contrast
+    with the exquisitely neat and even fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of
+    proud pity touched the lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as
+    if I had read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of mankind, fret <a
+    name="page331" id="page331"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 331]</span> our souls at
+    trifles,&mdash;we, who are to be instruments in marshalling the race from slavery and
+    folly to wisdom and freedom? Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth
+    shall be alike, and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as
+    the highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to
+    declare!"</p>
+    <p>These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into my
+    consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been uttered. It was with
+    awe that this mystic correspondence between mind and mind was made plain to me. One
+    man out of this myriad-bodied humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was
+    never more to be alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in
+    the potter's hands!</p>
+    <p>At length Herbert spoke.</p>
+    <p>"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to me,&mdash;not by
+    my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till I go to join my father,
+    with his great work more nearly completed than when it came to my hands. At that
+    table he died, with some glimpses of the promised land whither he tended,&mdash;where
+    he prayed that I might enter."</p>
+    <p>There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,&mdash;no utterance of the heart, but
+    rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered in the memory.</p>
+    <p>"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,&mdash;you, whose career might be
+    such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must know, the wonderful
+    gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be ignorant of the fascination you might
+    exercise over man and woman."</p>
+    <p>"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise," exclaimed
+    Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,&mdash;if not through spiritual grace, then by
+    some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you certain qualities of mind
+    that may serve to regulate the equipoise of mine. I have the means to provide for us
+    both during the high speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in
+    this undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural from the
+    spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of obtaining an absolute
+    ground for the philosophy which should include all things human and divine. He passed
+    onward before the inestimable gift he seemed to have won could be set forth in the
+    symbols of the world. To see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular
+    adaptation through which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express
+    the truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such colored
+    mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man has found out the
+    knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos: shall he not perfect that
+    knowledge in the Law which includes the divine element by which the universe is
+    informed? How can we love with our whole heart what we do not know with our whole
+    mind? Clifton, I declare to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and
+    acts is possible to man!"</p>
+    <p>I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been moved by
+    utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the words, not the wild power
+    of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring courage that struck me from his eye.
+    Almost against my will there was produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to
+    demand the impress of some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst
+    of the garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes shall
+    be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."</p>
+    <p>I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly lores, that I
+    at length came to think it possible he might be the appointed instrument of
+    communicating the singular intelligence that he sought. He proposed to review the
+    different systems built by human <a name="page332" id="page332"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 332]</span> thought before applying himself to the problem of
+    finding a system of philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from
+    the extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position&mdash;when that
+    position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious
+    thinker&mdash;some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking from the
+    conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after the inaccessible, but a
+    definite effort so to place the soul and discipline the understanding that wisdom
+    could be realized without process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he
+    had no love for the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as
+    finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He declared that
+    only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism. Let me
+    also say this for my friend,&mdash;that his directing stimulus to action was neither
+    ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the
+    world would have called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow
+    wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest self-culture only
+    as a state of more passionate yearning for regeneration.</p>
+    <p>What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble companionship?
+    how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the feasibility of the object he
+    strove to attain? We read together certain manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in
+    which, wrapt in a gorgeous symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which,
+    at times, could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints,
+    apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored to grasp
+    them, vanished like a vision.</p>
+    <p>Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with Vannelle
+    in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I knew an intellectual
+    intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of spirit wholly delivered from the burden
+    of the flesh. Vannelle talked like one inspired upon the higher problems of
+    metaphysical research, showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations
+    of the philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to have
+    cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it from a position
+    whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable oppressions marked the rhythm
+    in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of
+    blessedness, were equally wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed
+    impossible that any words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the
+    thought which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding to
+    what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of opinion man had
+    known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and despair analogous to those
+    which succeed physical intoxication. The grosser systems of antiquity were not only
+    considered, but actually personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us
+    to penetrate into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how
+    nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how the noblest
+    virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we learned to welcome these
+    convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly bearing us onward towards our destined
+    goal.</p>
+    <p>&mdash;But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was the
+    delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?) which has overhung
+    my earthly life.</p>
+    <p>Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,&mdash;partially broken.
+    During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from friends once dear to me
+    had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly valueless. On the eleventh of November I
+    started,&mdash;as a black seal was to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last
+    instalment of his annuity had been paid, and my little <a name="page333"
+    id="page333"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 333]</span> sister, an orphan and
+    penniless, was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then
+    hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put the letter
+    into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him forever. Let me forget the
+    bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged to provide for my sister from his own
+    ample means, and even offered her an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient
+    sanity to perceive the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither
+    removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a condition to be
+    sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would be confused, and finally
+    petrified. Had this refined probing and questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was
+    this the end of my Absolute Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of
+    the conscience and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such
+    questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have bantered aside. I
+    seemed to realize the torture described in the dream of Dante,&mdash;two souls
+    struggling together in one frail body. I had been applauding good and condemning evil
+    when it cost me nothing but the sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose
+    cracked and shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the
+    victory have ached through my life.</p>
+    <p>There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my bread; for
+    how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and huckster through the
+    world,&mdash;<i>I</i>, who had thought to condition the Spirit of the Universe? But
+    there were metaphors faintly shadowing divine things, symbols adapted to the
+    limitations of the popular mind, and with these I might do an honest work for the
+    souls of men. <i>Honest?</i> Yes,&mdash;unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he
+    declared that he spoke of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something
+    than not to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the clergy
+    this is the daily cross,&mdash;the necessity of maintaining a fixed position, and
+    ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever yearning upward to be taught.</p>
+    <p>It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by school-teaching, I
+    achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to qualify for enrolment among the
+    liberal clergy of New England. Until the time when my sister left me by marriage I
+    was settled at N&mdash;&mdash;, on the Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old
+    Dr. P&mdash;&mdash; of Foxden, and I received a call to his vacant parish. I knew
+    that the sort of society to be found in that place would minister to my most urgent
+    need. I craved some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal
+    spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might speak freely, and
+    from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the years had led us! Sometimes there
+    came a whisper that I had been snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls;
+    sometimes my only opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead.
+    I could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever was I
+    controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant power. No occupation
+    was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading presence of Herbert Vannelle.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary of the day
+    that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a written sermon on those
+    solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." For the first time
+    I shrank from the consciousness that the words uttered were true to me in a very
+    different sense from that in which the congregation received them. I found it
+    difficult to poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available
+    representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously in the
+    afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could perceive that my
+    pulse and breathing <a name="page334" id="page334"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    334]</span> were accelerated. A certain numbness of the brain seemed pierced with
+    convulsive, fugitive shocks. An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral
+    sympathy, seemed beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but
+    could find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come
+    incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and boisterous
+    objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us. More
+    of these no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in martial
+    attitude, but on my knees."</p>
+    <p>An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have said that I
+    spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before. Indeed, I was conscious of
+    a capacity to receive and convey such portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to
+    their needs. To speak in figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued
+    my soul.</p>
+    <p>Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw myself upon a
+    sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state where one far distant may
+    make himself perceived and known. The occult power of foreknowing events, the
+    delicate perception of forbidden things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the
+    brain. I became conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I
+    knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the night. One by one
+    went out the scattered village-lights. Another consciousness of twenty years seemed
+    compressed into those brilliant, bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort
+    and supplied oil; it would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew
+    that Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.</p>
+    <p>A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul burning with
+    lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the face,&mdash;it was ghastly,
+    livid as the face of a leper: it was spectral,&mdash;blanched and dried with the
+    white flames of his exalted vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible
+    triumph! The old idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon
+    my visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of time. His
+    magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself&mdash;and wait. At length the
+    silence was broken.</p>
+    <p>"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught! For the
+    last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense. The impulses with
+    which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me. Alone, alone, I have risen from
+    the abysmal depths of personality. I have struggled fiercely. I have also
+    conquered."</p>
+    <p>The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some voluntary
+    disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had cut away the lusts for
+    pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would kiss that ghastly cheek? What
+    sycophant could fawn and smirk in that chilly presence? The injunctions concerning
+    the offending eye and hand Vannelle had interpreted literally.</p>
+    <p>"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction seized by
+    effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity, and you may guess a
+    little of the sublime contentment which wraps me round! Does the best stage-trick of
+    your liberal clergy help them to anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into
+    artistic forms of skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
+    affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men? How can you
+    come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it alone dogmatic and
+    compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you from this haze of thought and
+    feeling,&mdash;I, who have even now discarded Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."</p>
+    <a name="page335" id="page335"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 335]</span>
+    <p>"I hope to be pardoned," I said,&mdash;"the current of this life sets so in favor
+    of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with sentiment,&mdash;why try to
+    give them ideas?"</p>
+    <p>"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties," exclaimed
+    Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the pardonable weakness of one
+    who has done his best. You may be guiltless in failing to attain the strength, the
+    glory, of a true conviction."</p>
+    <p>"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.</p>
+    <p>"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in this
+    manuscript the result of my life,&mdash;the result of two lives. Here is written, as
+    clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human language, that which may suggest
+    the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but
+    divinely founded upon Law."</p>
+    <p>I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.</p>
+    <p>"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
+    manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may be brought to
+    you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with the pride of inventing
+    arguments and detecting analogies, if they have only given you the petty skill of a
+    petty scholar, why then dally on with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments,
+    and give others the blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."</p>
+    <p>"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may have found,
+    it is for your honor to promulgate."</p>
+    <p>"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual manhood is
+    indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters towards earth. My
+    responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will now begin."</p>
+    <p>A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid as Fate
+    seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that Vannelle had left the room.
+    Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the
+    distance. A dream of passionate excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old
+    hopes, of the life I might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of
+    Vannelle seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable thirst
+    that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the manuscript, and devoured
+    page after page. Then I felt the approaches of a supreme despotism that might
+    annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to be,&mdash;that might compel me to denounce
+    all that I had taught, to hear all that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer
+    at me as an impostor, an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited
+    to come above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and encouraged
+    by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself where the most earnest
+    souls&mdash;unless a second birth could be granted them&mdash;would scoff with the
+    ignorance and intolerance of the mass.</p>
+    <p>At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.</p>
+    <p>One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A physical
+    emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the influence of the
+    night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I closed the manuscript forever.
+    Hereditary imperfections of body and mind confine me to a sphere of reputable
+    usefulness. If I have sinned in the past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes
+    suspect, I have thrust from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss
+    through all eternity will be mine.</p>
+    <p>In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>As the last words of his strange narration fell from Clifton's lips, he bowed his
+    head and was greatly agitated. The <a name="page336" id="page336"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 336]</span> vast theologic conception over which he had so long
+    brooded, instead of lifting him on high, had crushed him to the earth. His moral
+    consciousness had demanded a satisfaction which he lacked integrity of purpose to
+    pursue and challenge. A fixed conviction of the dreariest pessimism would have been
+    better for this man than the lofty uncertainty which had tortured his days; for in
+    the belief that one may neither struggle nor aspire there is a certain practical
+    drift. But how shall he do any good who bears about him a quick conscience, a
+    skeptical understanding, sensitive religious affections, and a feeble will? Charles
+    Clifton had neither the leisure, nor possibly the application, to follow the creeping
+    advances of systematic knowledge. He had listened to a fatal persuasion, and at the
+    same time had sought to satisfy contradictory principles of the human mind. The
+    kindest thing I could do for him was soon perceived.</p>
+    <p>"Reverend Sir," I said, "you must permit me to advise you. It is now six o'clock.
+    In an hour the early train leaves for Foxden. You must take it and return home. Any
+    further vacuum in your daily employment will produce a crushing pressure from without
+    that might endanger reason itself. I solemnly promise to deposit this manuscript in
+    the Mather Safe,&mdash;nay, I will not leave town until the President and Treasurer
+    have met me this afternoon according to your agreement. I pledge you my honor that
+    the parchment shall be consigned to its resting-place with every necessary
+    formality."</p>
+    <p>My companion gazed long upon vacancy before returning any answer. He strove to
+    dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in shapeless beauty. He walked
+    up and down the chamber, paused, threw open the window, and looked upon the street
+    below. I felt that every petty detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful
+    vividness upon the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he spoke to this
+    effect: &mdash;</p>
+    <p>"A grief has been lessened in giving it words. My deepest and most solitary
+    moments have been revealed to human sympathy, and the relief is great. It may be that
+    I have been created to some wholesome end,&mdash;that some truth may shine before the
+    world through what seems the failure of my life. I will return at once to the sphere
+    of the senses: it is, as you say, all that is left me. Let who will inquire into the
+    significance and purpose of the Universe; it is for me to work in the bondage of the
+    flesh, to be the humble tool of the age in which my lot is cast."</p>
+    <p>Yet it was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the conclusion of
+    the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar nervous temperament
+    foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the precious legacy of his friend. It
+    was only by addressing his reason in repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating
+    my entire fidelity, that I induced him to yield.</p>
+    <p>It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.</p>
+    <p>I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding. Without
+    acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by what I had read and
+    heard. As Clifton emerged from the magical influence of Vannelle, was it not
+    concentrated upon me? The impulse to return to the perusal of the manuscript was
+    almost irresistible. Yet it was evident, that, failing to receive as my very life
+    what was there written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and
+    contradictions. A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my only
+    safety.</p>
+    <p>It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries tending to
+    modify the received understanding of a certain natural law. During my morning in the
+    College Library I had collected the records of many facts, which, laboriously
+    compared, might confirm the hypothesis I had conceived. I now braced myself to the
+    task of tracing an order in these random observations. I was soon stimulated by
+    perceiving that my <a name="page337" id="page337"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    337]</span> statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at first
+    roused my suspicion. More and more plainly did man's experience respond to the
+    results I had dared to predict. Trivial circumstances, noted in remote times and
+    disconnected places, pointed in one direction, and there beat the regular pulse of
+    Nature.</p>
+    <p>It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards discovered, that
+    the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been already conceived and passed upon
+    by a not very eminent scientist in one of the Western States. But at that time
+    absorption in the search for attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with
+    very brief intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the
+    afternoon-hour for visiting the library.</p>
+    <p>The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o'clock.</p>
+    <p>For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather Safe,
+    wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular than the
+    consignment about to be made to its keeping.</p>
+    <p>"Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?" inquired the President.</p>
+    <p>"I am here to represent him," I replied. "He made a strange mistake in the day of
+    appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning. The package which he
+    wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my hand."</p>
+    <p>"<i>Lex Universalis Natur&aelig;</i>; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE," exclaimed
+    the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment. "Poh, poh! I thought
+    that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to the limbo of fallacies."</p>
+    <p>"By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for anything not
+    transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has," I rejoined, somewhat tartly.</p>
+    <p>"Come, come!" said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones; "since the
+    days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians have generally been
+    broken-down poets, and should be treated with the greatest tenderness. Some flighty
+    minds will prefer dangerous trips to dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of
+    figures; but the mass of our graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that
+    only the mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers
+    only natural philosophers are competent instructors."</p>
+    <p>"Yet, Sir," I said, "you will remember that the time was when your natural
+    philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State. Even the mathematician
+    is defined by an old lexicographer to be '<i>Magus d&aelig;monum invocator</i>'; and
+    I cannot forget that all that is of honor and respect to-day is but the actual of a
+    once despised ideal."</p>
+    <p>I really marvelled at my own audacity in presuming to question the words of this
+    distinguished and excellent gentleman. Indeed, it was particularly surprising,
+    because (if I knew myself) I precisely agreed with him. But there is a certain
+    waywardness in my composition, which loves to puncture an inflated conventionality,
+    even when I myself am most conventional.</p>
+    <p>In the mean time the Treasurer, taking the President's key with his own, had
+    opened the Safe. I looked in and beheld coffers of lead and oak, nooks and
+    pigeon-holes covered and sealed with the College seal, little cells of glass which
+    appeared to hold documents of the utmost importance, and, in short, whatever might
+    best defy the injuries of time. The weighty book which registered the contents of the
+    Safe was opened before me. I was told to write the number assigned to the manuscript,
+    to describe its present condition, and to indicate its destination. This I carefully
+    did, and was about to confide my charge to its long oblivion.</p>
+    <p>"Stay!" said the President. "You have forgotten the mottoes! Here is only one; and
+    it is our rule that every deposit in the Mather Safe be distinguished by three, in as
+    many languages.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        '<i>Alteri S&aelig;culo</i>.'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <a name="page338" id="page338"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 338]</span>
+    <p>The selection is good, though it has already been adopted by a Massachusetts
+    statesman. It is now for you to supply two others."</p>
+    <p>Singular as it may appear, this sudden call to perform a trifling office which I
+    had not anticipated, filled me with a conflict of emotions. In choosing another's
+    words, I seemed to indorse or repudiate the strange matter with which they were to be
+    associated. I thought of Vannelle's wondrous language, of Clifton's exhilaration, and
+    of the vivid buoyancy with which my spirit had striven to rise. I even groped for
+    some phrase which might hint what delicate a&euml;rial impressions had tended to
+    condense the soul on the supreme point of spiritual ecstasy. But memory was a blank
+    when I demanded words for this seeming-glorious fact in the experience of humanity.
+    Success was made impossible by the very intensity of the effort to summon an
+    appropriate message to be dropped over the abyss of Time. I was confident that there
+    were many apt things which might be said, if I could come at them, as it were,
+    sideways. In order that I might take them at this advantage, I snatched a letter from
+    my pocket, and began to read. My eye was soon caught by the impression of a seal that
+    I had once given my wife. It was a good [woman's] motto, I jestingly told her; and
+    now it was returned to me at my sorest need. Six little words of the good
+    Pascal,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "<i>Le plus s&uacute;r est de croire</i>."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Something compelled me to write them, and a new freedom was with me when I had
+    done so.</p>
+    <p>"Make haste, make haste, for the prayer-bell is ringing!" cried the President
+    "See, here is a copy of Plato's 'Ph&aelig;drus,'&mdash;a work which our vapory
+    brethren are fond of quoting, generally at second-hand; perhaps you may pick out a
+    sentence that will prophesy with sufficient ambiguity."</p>
+    <p>But it was not Plato or his "Ph&aelig;drus" that then claimed my thoughts. There
+    loomed a Rock graven with more august instruction than the sage of the Academy was
+    privileged to communicate,&mdash;a Rock against which the heaving surface of human
+    opinion had chafed and broken in vain. Tossed to and fro upon the tide of life, who
+    has not sometimes listened to the wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical
+    Interpretation," "Absolute Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has
+    never been caught by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers,
+    Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature, Clairvoyance, and
+    Magnetic Currents? Happy those who are able to return to that one channel through
+    which magnetic currents have indeed descended from an unseen sphere, and touched the
+    noblest hearts! For there <i>is</i> a certain mediation between the necessities and
+    aspirations of man,&mdash;an assured deliverance from the gross and sordid
+    surroundings of his earthly life. There came before me one simple period from a
+    familiar Book. Most direct and confident is the solemn statement. I wrote it as the
+    final motto.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"NOW THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTILE THAN ANY BEAST OF THE FIELD WHICH THE LORD GOD
+      HAD MADE."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <a name="page339" id="page339"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 339]</span>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE TERTIARY AGE, AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC ANIMALS.</h2>
+    <p>In entering upon the Tertiaries, we reach that geological age which, next to his
+    own, has the deepest interest for man. The more striking scenes of animal life,
+    hitherto confined chiefly to the ocean, are now on land; the extensive sheets of
+    fresh water are filled with fishes of a comparatively modern character,&mdash;with
+    Whitefish, Pickerel, Perch, Eels, etc.,&mdash;while the larger quadrupeds are
+    introduced upon the continents so gradually prepared to receive them. The connection
+    of events throughout the Tertiaries, considered as leading up to the coming of man,
+    may be traced not only in the physical condition of the earth, and in the presence of
+    the large terrestrial Mammalia, but also in the appearance of those groups of animals
+    and plants which we naturally associate with the domestic and social existence of
+    man. Cattle and Horses are first found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the
+    Rosace&aelig;, with their variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges,
+    Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter
+    of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation
+    of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the
+    gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with
+    human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn and
+    winter, its seed-time and harvest, though neither sower nor reaper was there; the
+    forests then, as now, dropped their thick carpet of leaves upon the ground in the
+    autumn, and in many localities they remain where they originally fell, with a layer
+    of soil between the successive layers of leaves,&mdash;a leafy chronology, as it
+    were, by which we read the passage of the years which divided these deposits from
+    each other. Where the leaves have fallen singly on a clayey soil favorable for
+    receiving such impressions, they have daguerreotyped themselves with the most
+    wonderful accuracy, and the Oaks, Poplars, Willows, Maples, Walnuts, Gum- and
+    Cinnamon-trees, etc., of the Tertiaries are as well known to us as are those of our
+    own time.</p>
+    <p>It was an eventful day, not only for science, but for the world, when a Siberian
+    fisherman chanced to observe a singular mound lying near the mouth of the River Lena,
+    where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. During the warmer summer-weather, he noticed,
+    that, as the snow gradually melted, this mound assumed a more distinct and prominent
+    outline, and at length, on one side of it, where the heat of the sun was greatest, a
+    dark body became exposed, which, when completely uncovered, proved to be that of an
+    immense elephant, in so perfect a state of preservation that the dogs and wolves were
+    attracted to it as by the smell of fresh meat, and came to feed upon it at night. The
+    man knew little of the value of his discovery, but the story went abroad, and an
+    Englishman travelling in Russia, being curious to verify it, visited the spot, and
+    actually found the remains where they had been reported to lie, on the frozen shore
+    of the Arctic Sea,&mdash;strange burial-place enough for an animal never known to
+    exist out of tropical climates. Little beside the skeleton was left, though parts of
+    the skin remained covered with hair, showing how perfect must have been the condition
+    of the body when first exposed. The tusks had been sold by the fisherman; but Mr.
+    Adams succeeded in recovering them; and collecting all the bones except those of one
+    foot, which had been carried off by the wolves, he had them removed to St.
+    Petersburg, where the skeleton now stands in the Imperial Museum. The inhabitants of
+    Siberia seem to be familiar with this animal, which they designate by the name of
+    <i>Mammoth</i>, while naturalists call <a name="page340" id="page340"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 340]</span> it <i>Elephas primigenius</i>. The circumstance that
+    they abound in the frozen drift of the great northern plain of Asia, and are
+    occasionally exposed in consequence of the wearing of the large rivers traversing
+    Siberia, has led to the superstition among the Tongouses, that the Mammoths live
+    under ground, and die whenever, on coming to the surface, the sunlight falls upon
+    them.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image1_full.png"><img src="images/image1_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Had this been the only creature of the kind found so far from the countries to
+    which elephants are now exclusively confined, it might have been believed that some
+    strange accident had brought it to the spot where it was buried. But it was not long
+    before similar remains were found in various parts of Europe,&mdash;in Russia, in
+    Germany, in Spain, and in Italy. The latter were readily accounted for by the theory
+    that they must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the
+    armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have been swept from
+    India by some great flood, and stranded where they were found. It was Cuvier,
+    entitled by his intimate acquaintance with the anatomy of living animals to an
+    authoritative opinion in such matters, who first dared to assert that these remains
+    belonged to no elephant of our period. He rested this belief upon structural
+    evidence, and insisted that an Indian elephant, brought upon the waves of a flood to
+    Siberia, would be an Indian elephant still, while all these remains differed in
+    structure from any species existing at present. This statement aroused research in
+    every direction, and the number of fossil Mammalia found within the next few years,
+    and proved by comparison to be different from any living species, soon demonstrated
+    the truth of his conclusion.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image2_full.png"><img src="images/image2_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Shortly after the discovery of fossil elephants had opened this new path of
+    investigation, some curious bones were found by some workmen in the quarries of
+    Montmartre, near Paris, and brought to Cuvier for examination. Although few in
+    number, and affording but very scanty <i>data</i> for such a decision, he at once
+    pronounced them to be the remains of some extinct animal preceding the present
+    geological age. Here, then, at his very door, as it were, was a settlement of that
+    old creation in which he could pursue the inquiry, already become so important in its
+    bearings. It was not long before other bones of the same kind were found, though
+    nothing as yet approaching an entire skeleton. However, with such means as he had,
+    Cuvier began a comparison with all the living Mammalia,&mdash;with the human skeleton
+    first, with Monkeys, with the larger Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the
+    smaller Mammalia, then with the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to
+    find some resemblance. He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to the
+    family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare all the living
+    species, till he had collected ample <a name="page341" id="page341"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 341]</span> evidence to show that the bones in question did not
+    correspond with any species, and could not even be referred to any genus, now in
+    existence. At length there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same
+    animal,&mdash;next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole head
+    with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with Cuvier's vast
+    knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the whole skeleton. At about the
+    same time, in the same locality, were found other bones and teeth also, differing
+    from those first discovered, and yet equally unlike those of any living animal. The
+    first evidently belonged to some stout and heavy animal, the others were more slender
+    and of lighter build. From these fragments, ample evidence to him of his results, he
+    drew the outlines of two animals: one which he called the Pal&aelig;otherium, (old
+    animal,) a figure of which is given in the above wood-cut, and the other
+    Anoplotherium, (animal without fangs). He presented these figures with an explanatory
+    memoir at the Academy, and announced them as belonging to some creation preceding the
+    present, since no such animals had ever existed in our own geological period. Such a
+    statement was a revelation to the scientific world: some looked upon it with
+    suspicion and distrust; others, who knew more of comparative anatomy, hailed it as
+    introducing a new era in science; but it was not till complete specimens were
+    actually found of animals corresponding perfectly to those figured and described by
+    Cuvier, and proving beyond a doubt their actual existence in ancient times, that all
+    united in wonder and admiration at the result obtained by him with such scanty
+    means.</p>
+    <p>It would seem that the family of Pachyderms was largely represented among the
+    early Mammalia; for, since Cuvier named these species, a number of closely allied
+    forms have been found in deposits belonging to the same epoch. Of course, the
+    complete specimens are rare; but the fragments of such skeletons occur in abundance,
+    showing that these old-world Pachyderms, resembling the Tapirs more than any other
+    living representatives of the family, were very numerous in the lower Tertiaries.</p>
+    <p>There is, however, one animal now in existence, forming one of those singular
+    links before alluded to between the present and the past, of which I will say a few
+    words here, though its relation is rather with a later group of Tertiary Pachyderms
+    than with those described by Cuvier. On the coast of Florida there is an animal of
+    very massive, clumsy build, long considered to be a Cetacean, but now recognized, by
+    some naturalists at least, as belonging to the order of Pachyderms. In form it
+    resembles the Cetaceans, though it has a fan-shaped tail, instead of the broad
+    flapper of the Whales. It inhabits fresh waters or shoal waters, and is not so
+    exclusively aquatic as the oceanic Cetaceans. Its most striking feature is the form
+    of the lower jaw, which is bent downward, with the front teeth hanging from it. This
+    animal is called the Manatee, or Sea-Cow. There are three species known to
+    naturalists,&mdash;one in Tampa Bay, one in the Amazon, and one in Africa. In the
+    Tertiary deposits of Germany there has been found an animal allied in some of its
+    features to those described by Cuvier, <a name="page342" id="page342"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 342]</span> but it has the crown of its teeth folded like the
+    Tapir, while the lower jaw is turned down with a long tusk growing from it. This
+    animal has been called the Dinotherium. A part of the head, showing the heavy jaws
+    and the formidable tusk, is represented in the subjoined wood-cut.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image3_full.png"><img src="images/image3_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Its hanging lower jaw, with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly to the
+    formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some resemblance of the
+    Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison with that animal as the next step
+    in the investigation, when it was found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the
+    latter there was a pit with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in
+    its position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. The Elephant was now examined; and in
+    him also a rudimentary tooth appeared in the lower jaw, not cut through, but placed
+    in the same relation to the jaw and the other teeth as that of the Mastodon. It would
+    seem, then, that the Manatee makes one in this series of Dinotherium, Mastodon, and
+    Elephant, and represents the aquatic Pachyderms, occupying the same relation to the
+    terrestrial Pachyderms as the Seals bear to the terrestrial Carnivora, and, like
+    them, lowest in structure among their kind.</p>
+    <p>The announcement of Cuvier's results stimulated research, and from this time
+    forward Tertiary Mammalia became the subject of extensive and most important
+    investigations among naturalists. The attention of collectors once drawn to these
+    remains, they were found in such numbers that the wonder was how they had been so
+    long hidden from the observation of men. They remind us chiefly of tropical animals;
+    indeed, Tigers, Hyenas, Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had
+    their home in countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the
+    climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present. Bones of many
+    of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France, Italy, and England.
+    Perhaps the story of Kirkdale Cave, where the first important discovery of this kind
+    was made on English soil, may not be so well known to American readers as to forbid
+    its repetition here.</p>
+    <p>It was in the summer of 1821 that some workmen, employed in quarrying stone upon
+    the slope of a limestone hill at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, came accidentally upon the
+    mouth of a cavern. Overgrown with grass and bushes, the mouth of this cave in the
+    hill-side had been effectually closed against all intruders, and it was not strange
+    that its existence had never been suspected. The hole was small, but large enough to
+    admit a man on his hands and knees; and the workmen, creeping in through the opening,
+    found that it led into a cavern, broad in some parts, but low throughout. There were
+    only a few spots where a man could stand upright; but it was quite extensive, with
+    branches opening out from it, some of which have not yet been explored. The whole
+    floor was strewn, from one end to the other, with hundreds of bones, like a huge
+    dog-kennel. The workmen wondered a little at their discovery, but, remembering that
+    there had been a murrain among the cattle in this region some years before, they came
+    to the conclusion that these must be the bones of cattle that had died in great
+    numbers at that time; and, having so settled the matter to their own satisfaction,
+    they took little heed to the bones, but threw many of them out on the road with the
+    common limestone. Fortunately, a gentleman, living in the neighborhood, whose
+    attention had been <a name="page343" id="page343"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    343]</span> attracted to them, preserved them from destruction; and a few months
+    after the discovery of the cave, Dr. Buckland, the great English geologist, visited
+    Kirkdale, to examine its strange contents, which proved indeed stranger than any one
+    had imagined; for many of these remains belonged to animals never before found in
+    England. The bones of Hyenas, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, and Hippopotamuses
+    were mingled with those of Deer, Bears, Wolves, Foxes, and many smaller creatures.
+    The bones were gnawed, and many were broken, evidently not by natural decay, but
+    seemed to have been snapped violently apart. After the most complete investigation of
+    the circumstances, Dr. Buckland convinced himself, and proved to the satisfaction of
+    all scientific men, that the cave had been a den of Hyenas<a id="footnotetag4"
+    name="footnotetag4" href="#footnote4"><sup>4</sup></a> at a time when they, as well
+    as Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., existed in England in as great numbers as
+    they now do in the wildest parts of tropical Asia or Africa. The narrow entrance to
+    the cave still retained the marks of grease and hair, such as one may see on the bars
+    of a cage in a menagerie against which the imprisoned animals have been in the habit
+    of rubbing themselves constantly, and there were marks of the same kind on the floor
+    and walls.</p>
+    <p>It was evident that the Hyenas were the lords of this ancient cavern, and the
+    other animals their unwilling guests; for the remains of the latter were those which
+    had been most gnawed, broken, and mangled; and the head of an enormous Hyena, with
+    gigantic fangs found complete, bore ample evidence to their great size and power.
+    Some of the animals, such as the Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., could not have been
+    brought into the cave without being first killed and torn to pieces, for it is not
+    large enough to admit them. But their gnawed and broken bones attest, nevertheless,
+    that they were devoured like the rest; and probably the Hyenas then had the same
+    propensity which characterizes those of our own time, to tear in pieces the body of
+    any dead animal, and carry it to their den to feed upon it apart.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image4_full.png"><img src="images/image4_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other caverns in
+    Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a gigantic species of Bear.
+    Their remains, mingled with those of the animals on which they fed, have been found
+    in great numbers in the Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia. The subjoined wood-cut
+    shows the head of this formidable beast, which must have exceeded in size any Bear
+    now living. <a name="page344" id="page344"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 344]</span>
+    Indeed, although there were many smaller kinds, and the other types of the Animal
+    Kingdom in the Tertiaries seem to approach very nearly both in size and general
+    character their modern representatives, yet, on the whole, the earlier Mammalia were
+    giants in comparison with those now living. The Mastodon and Mammoth, as compared
+    with the modern Elephant, the Megatherium, as compared with the Sloths of present
+    times, the Hyenas and Bears of the European caverns, and the fossil Elk of Ireland,
+    by the side of which even the Moose of our Northern woods is belittled, are
+    remarkable instances in proof of this. One cannot but be struck with the fact that
+    this first representation of Mammalia, the very impersonation of brute force in
+    power, size, and ferocity, immediately preceded the introduction of man, with whose
+    creation intelligence and moral strength became the dominant influences on earth.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image5_full.png"><img src="images/image5_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the North-American
+    continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The magnificent specimens preserved in
+    this country are too well known to require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros
+    occur also in the recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect
+    skeletons have been found. The Edentata, now confined to South America and the
+    western coast of Africa, were also numerous in the Southern States during that time;
+    their remains have been found as far north as the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must
+    not judge of the Tertiary Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the
+    Armadillos, the Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but
+    formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the Megalonyx, and the
+    Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant, and others about the same size
+    of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The subjoined wood-cut represents a Mylodon in the
+    act of lifting himself against the trunk of a tree.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image6_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>They were clumsy brutes, and though their limbs were evidently built with
+    reference to powerful movements, perhaps climbing, or at least rising on their hind
+    quarters, the act of climbing with them cannot have had anything of the nimbleness or
+    activity generally associated with it. On the contrary, they probably were barely
+    able to support their huge bodies on their hind limbs, which are exceedingly massive,
+    and on the stiff, heavy tail, while they dragged down with their front limbs the
+    branches of the trees, and fed upon them at leisure. The Zo&ouml;logical Museum at
+    Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates for a very fine set of
+    casts taken from the Megatherium in the British Museum. They are now mounted, and may
+    be seen in one of the exhibition-rooms of the building. Large Reptiles, but very
+    unlike those of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of
+    Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the Tertiary epochs.
+    The <a name="page345" id="page345"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 345]</span> wood-cut
+    below represents a gigantic Salamander of the Tertiary deposits. It is a curious
+    fact, illustrative of the ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that,
+    when the remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first discovered
+    toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were described by old Professor
+    Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually
+    preserved, not for their scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and
+    described in a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Homo Diluvii Testis." Among the Tertiary
+    Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their size as well
+    as by their extensive distribution. Their remains have been found both in the far
+    West and in the East. The fossil Turtles of Nebraska are well known to American
+    naturalists; but the Oriental one exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most
+    gigantic representative of the order known thus far. A man could stand under the arch
+    of the shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image7_full.png"><img src="images/image7_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image8_full.png"><img src="images/image8_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than the most
+    cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed, they are so well
+    known, and have been so fully represented in text-books, that I fear some of my
+    readers may think even now that I have dwelt too long upon them. Monkeys were
+    unquestionably introduced upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones
+    have been found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the
+    later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected in sufficient
+    number to establish much more than the fact of their presence in the animal creation
+    at that time. I do not offer any opinion respecting the fossil human bones so much
+    discussed recently, because the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any
+    decisive judgment concerning them. It becomes, however, daily more probable that
+    facts will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far beyond
+    any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human races, as of animals,
+    have followed one another upon the earth. It may be the inestimable privilege of our
+    young naturalists to solve <a name="page346" id="page346"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 346]</span> this great problem, but the older men of our
+    generation must be content to renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision
+    of its fulfilment, we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not
+    enter in and possess it.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image9_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image10_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image11_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>The other great types of the Animal Kingdom are very fully represented in the
+    Tertiaries, and in their general appearance they approach much more closely those of
+    the present creation than of any previous epochs. Professor Heer has collected and
+    described the Tertiary Insects in great number and variety; and the Butterflies,
+    Bugs, Flies, Grasshoppers, Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., described in his volumes,
+    would hardly be distinguished from our own, except by a practised entomologist. Among
+    Crustacea, the Shrimp-like forms of the earlier geological epochs have become much
+    less conspicuous, while Crabs and Lobsters are now the prominent representatives of
+    the class. Among Mollusks, the Chambered Shells, hitherto so numerous, have become,
+    as they now are, very few in comparison with the naked Cephalopods. The Nautili,
+    however, resemble those now living in the Pacific Ocean; and some fragments of the
+    Paper-Nautilus have been found, showing that this delicate shell was already in
+    existence. There is one very peculiar type of this class, belonging to the
+    Tertiaries, which should not be passed by unnoticed. It partakes of the character
+    both of the Cretaceous Belemnites and of the living Cuttle-Fish, and is known as the
+    Spirulirostra. Another very characteristic group among the Tertiary Shells is that of
+    the Nummulites, formerly placed by naturalists in immediate proximity with the
+    Ammonites, on account of their internal partitions. This is now admitted to have been
+    an error; their position is not yet fully determined, but they certainly stand very
+    low in the scale, and have no affinity whatever with the Cephalopods. The subjoined
+    wood-cut represents one of these Shells, so numerous in the Tertiaries that large
+    masses of rock consist of their remains. The Univalve Shells or Gasteropods of the
+    Tertiaries embraced all the families now living, including land and fresh-water
+    Shells as well as the marine representatives of the type. Some of the latter, as, for
+    instance, the Cerithium, are accumulated in vast numbers. The limestone quarries out
+    of which Paris is chiefly built consist wholly of these Shells. The fresh-water
+    basins were filled with Helices, one of which is represented in the following <a
+    name="page347" id="page347"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 347]</span> wood-cut, with
+    Planorbis, Limn&aelig;us and other Shells resembling those now so common in all our
+    lakes and rivers, and differing from the living ones only by slight specific
+    characters. The Bivalves also have the same resemblance to the present ones,
+    including fresh-water Mussels as well as the marine Clams and Oysters. Among
+    Radiates, the higher Echini (Sea-Urchins) have become numerous, while the other
+    Echinoderms of all families abound. Corals include, for the first time, the more
+    highly organized Madrepores.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image12_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things, not only in
+    the character of the animals and plants, but in the height of the mountains and in
+    the distribution of land and sea.</p>
+    <p>Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been following, and
+    see what these more recent geological epochs have done for their completion. In
+    Europe they have filled the basin in Central France, and converted all that region
+    into dry land: they have filled also the channel between France and Spain; they have
+    united Central Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
+    greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the promontories of Italy
+    and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at the foot of the Jura into the plain
+    of Switzerland. But this fruitful period in the progress of the world, when the
+    character of organic life was higher and the physical features of the earth more
+    varied than ever before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees,
+    the Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and Himalayas,
+    were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or in the course of the
+    Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant passage in her history, Europe
+    acquired all her essential characters. There remained, it is true, much to be done in
+    what is called by geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet
+    finished when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
+    stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued from the
+    water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her soil was clothed with
+    field and forest, processes by which her valleys were to be made more fruitful, her
+    gulfs to be filled with the rich detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole
+    surface to be rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess
+    it.</p>
+    <p>We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
+    geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic
+    epochs little was added to the United States, though here and there deposits
+    belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous epoch, however, large tracts of
+    land were accumulated, chiefly in the South and West; and during the Tertiaries the
+    continent was very nearly completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the
+    neighborhood of St. Louis to be filled by modern detritus, and the peninsula of
+    Florida to be built by the industrious Coral-Workers of our own period. The age of
+    the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was probably raised at
+    the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that time, only the Laurentian Hills, the
+    northern side of that mountainous triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were,
+    of the United States, existed. The upheaval of the Alleghanies added its eastern
+    side, raising the central part of the continent so as to form a long slope from the
+    base of the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean; but it was not until the Tertiary Age
+    that the upheaval of the great chain at the West completed the triangle, and
+    transformed that wide westerly slope into <a name="page348" id="page348"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 348]</span> the Mississippi Valley, bounded on one side by the
+    Alleghanies, and on the other by the Rocky Mountains.</p>
+    <p>It is my belief, founded upon the tropical character of the Fauna, that a much
+    milder climate then prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere than is now known to
+    it. Some naturalists have supposed that the presence of the tropical Mammalia in the
+    Northern Temperate Zone might be otherwise accounted for,&mdash;that they might have
+    been endowed with warmer covering, with thicker hair or fur. But I think the simpler
+    and more natural reason for their existence throughout the North is to be found in
+    the difference of climate; and I am the more inclined to this opinion because the
+    Tertiary animals generally, the Fishes, Shells, etc., in the same regions, are more
+    closely allied in character to those now living in the Tropics than to those of the
+    Temperate Zones. The Tertiary age may be called the geological summer; we shall see,
+    hereafter, how abruptly it was brought to a close.</p>
+    <p>One word more as to the relation of the Tertiary Mammalia to the creation which
+    preceded them. I can only repeat here the argument used before: the huge quadrupeds
+    characteristic of these epochs make their appearance suddenly, and the deposits
+    containing them follow as immediately upon those of the Cretaceous epoch, in which no
+    trace of them occurs, as do those of the Cretaceous upon those of the Jurassic epoch.
+    I would remind the reader that in the central basin of France, in which Cuvier found
+    his first Pal&aelig;otherium, and which afterwards proved to have been thickly
+    settled by the early Mammalia, the deposits of the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary
+    epochs follow each other in immediate, direct, uninterrupted succession; that the
+    same is true of other localities, in Germany, in Southern Europe, in England, where
+    the most complete collections have been made from all these deposits; and there has
+    never been brought to light a single fact leading us to suppose that any intermediate
+    forms have ever existed through which more recent types have been developed out of
+    older ones. For thirty years Geology has been gradually establishing, by evidence the
+    fulness and accuracy of which are truly amazing, the regularity in the sequence of
+    the geological formations, and distinguishing, with ever-increasing precision, the
+    specific differences of the animals and plants contained in these accumulations of
+    past ages. These results bear living testimony to the wonderful progress of the
+    kindred sciences of Geology and Pal&aelig;ontology in the last half-century; and the
+    development-theory has but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to
+    strengthen itself by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of
+    which, in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument of its
+    upholders.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page349" id="page349"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 349]</span>
+    <h2>THE NEW SANGREAL.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Show me the Sangreal, Lord! Show me Thy blood!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Thy body and Thy blood! Give me the Quest!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Lord, I am faint and tired; my soul is sick
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of all the falseness, all the little aims,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The weary vanities, the gasping joys,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The slow procession of this satiate world!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Dear Lord, I burn for Thee! Give me Thy Quest!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Down through the old reverberating time,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I see Thy knights in wonderful array
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Go out to victory, like the solemn stars
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fighting in courses, with their conquering swords,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Their sad, fixed lips of purity and strength,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Their living glory, their majestic death.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          He lay upon a mountain's rocky crest,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So high, that all the glittering, misty world,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All summer's splendid tempests, lay below,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And sudden lightnings quivered at his feet;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So still, not any sound of silentness
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Expressed the silence, nor the pallid sun
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Burned on his eyelids; all alone and still,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Save for the prayer that struggled from his lips,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Broken with eager stress. Then he arose.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But always, down the hoary mountain-side,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Through whispering forests, by soft-rippled streams,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          In clattering streets, or the great city's roar,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Still from his never sated soul went up,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Through all the land there poured a trumpet's clang,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And when its silvery anger smote the air,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Men sprang to arms from every true man's home,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And followed to the field. He followed, too,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All the mad blood of manhood in his veins,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All the fierce instincts of a warring race
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Kindled like flame in every tingling limb,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And raging in his soul on fire with war.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He heard a thousand voices call him on:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Lips hot with anguish, shrieking their despair
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From swamps and forests and the still bayous
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          That hide the wanderer, nor bewray his lair:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From fields and marshes where the tropic sun
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Scorches a million laborers scourged to work;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From homes that are not homes; from mother-hearts
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Torn from the infants lingering at their breasts;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From parted lovers, and from shuddering wives;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From men grown mad with whips and tyranny;
+        </div>
+        <a name="page350" id="page350"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 350]</span>
+        <div class="line">
+          From all a country groaning in its chains.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Nor sleep, nor dream beguiled him any more;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He leaped to manhood in one torrid hour,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And armed, and sped to battle. Now no more
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He cried or prayed,&mdash;"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          So in the front of deadly strife he stood;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The glorious thunder of the roaring guns,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The restless hurricane of screaming shells,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The quick, sharp singing of the rifle-balls,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The sudden clash of sabres, and the beat
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of rapid horse-hoofs galloping at charge,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Made a great chorus to his valorous soul,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The dreadful music of a grappling world,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          That hurried him to fight. He turned the tide,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But fell upon its turning. Over him
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fluttered the starry flag, and fluttered on,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          While he lay helpless on the trampled sward,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          His hot life running scarlet from its source,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And all his soul in sudden quiet spent,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          As still as on the silent mountain-top;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So still that from his quick-remembering heart
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Burst that old cry,&mdash;"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Then a bright mist descended over him,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And in its central glory stood a shape,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Wounded, yet smiling. With His bleeding hands
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Stretched toward that bleeding side, His eyes divine
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Like a new dawn, thus softly spake the Lord:&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "The blood poured out for brothers is my blood;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The flesh for brothers broken is my flesh;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          No more in golden chalices I dwell,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          No longer in a vision, angel-borne:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Here is the Sangreal, here the Holy Quest.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Thy prayer is heard, thy soul is satisfied:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Come, my belov&egrave;d! I am come for thee.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          As first I broke the bread and poured the wine,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So have I broken thee and poured thy life,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So do I bless thee and give thanks for thee,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So do I bear thee in my wounded hands."
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Smiling, He stooped, and kissed the tortured brow,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And over all its anguish stole a smile;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The blood-sealed lips unclosed; the dying breath
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Sighed, like the rain-sound in a summer wind,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Sobbing, but sweet,&mdash;"I see the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <a name="page351" id="page351"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 351]</span>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THOMAS DE QUINCEY.</h2>
+    <p>In the notice of so memorable a man, even the briefest prelusive flourish seems
+    uncalled for; and so indeed it would be, if by such means it were meant simply to
+    justify the undertaking. In regard to any of the great powers in literature there
+    exists already a prevailing interest, which cannot be presumed to slumber for one
+    moment in any thinking mind.<a id="footnotetag5" name="footnotetag5"
+    href="#footnote5"><sup>5</sup></a> By way of notification, there is no need of
+    prelude. Yet there are occasions, as, for example, the entrances of kings, which
+    absolutely demand the inaugural flourish of arms,&mdash;which, like the rosy flood of
+    dawn, require to be ushered in by a train of twilight glories. And there are lives
+    which proceed as by the movements of music,&mdash;which, must therefore be heralded
+    by overtures: majestic steppings, heard in the background, compel us, through mere
+    sympathy with their pomp of procession, to sound the note of preparation.</p>
+    <p>Else I should plunge <i>in medias res</i> upon a sketch of De Quincey's life; were
+    it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the important ceremony of
+    prelibation, and that at a banquet to which, implicitly, gods are invited. The reader
+    will assuredly unite with me in all such courtesies,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Neu desint epulis ros&aelig;";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
+    incantations,&mdash;only the heralding of certain precise claims will this monarch
+    listen to as the just <i>inferi&aelig;</i>, the fitting sacrifice or hecatomb of our
+    homage.</p>
+    <p>The key-note of preparation, the claim which pre&euml;minently should be set forth
+    in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of hierophants, or of pontifical
+    hierarchs, as regards all those profound mysteries which from the beginning have
+    swayed the human heart, sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it
+    upwards to an altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with
+    the shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
+    hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as concrete
+    incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open light the everlasting
+    symbols, universally intelligible when once disclosed, which <a name="page352"
+    id="page352"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 352]</span> are folded in the involutions
+    of dreams and of those meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner
+    of these revelations, no Roman <i>pontifex maximus</i>, were it even C&aelig;sar
+    himself, could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.</p>
+    <p>The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated. It was
+    his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain secret recesses of
+    human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along that border-line by which the
+    glimmerings of consciousness are, as by the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil,
+    separated from the regions of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked
+    familiarly and with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
+    inscribed meanings did he&mdash;this Champollion, defying all human enigmas, this
+    Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms and yawning abysses
+    of human astronomy&mdash;resolve into orderly constellations, that, once and for all,
+    through his telescopic interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and
+    commensurable amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
+    psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life, two of which
+    are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition towards meditation,
+    constituting him, in the highest sense of the word, a poet. Secondly, the peculiar
+    qualities which this singular mental constitution derived from his use of
+    opium,&mdash;qualities which, although they did not increase, or even give direction
+    to his meditative power, at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual
+    capacity, and creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
+    concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a degree of
+    psychological interest which belongs to no other on record. Nor is this all. The
+    reader knows how often a secondary interest will attach to the mightiest of
+    conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns, who is not merely in himself, and through
+    his own deeds, magnificent, but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by
+    numerous reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
+    doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and
+    a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of the Turkish Solyman, as by some
+    subtile connection of fate sympathetic with his own. A secondary interest of this
+    nature belongs to the life of De Quincey,&mdash;a life which inclosed, as an island,
+    a whole period of English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
+    unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of Wordsworth,
+    Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. His connection
+    with very many of these was not simply that of co&euml;xistence, but also of familiar
+    intercourse.</p>
+    <p>Between De Quincey's life and his writings it is impossible that there should be
+    any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two interwoven: in this case more
+    so than in that of any known author. Particularly is this true of his more
+    impassioned writings, which are a faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life.
+    Hierophant we have called him,&mdash;the prince of hierophants,&mdash;having
+    reference to the matter of his revelations; but in his <i>manner</i>, in his style of
+    composition, he is something more than this: here he stands the <i>monarch</i>
+    amongst rhapsodists. In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of his
+    life and genius.</p>
+    <p>But, besides these, there is a large section of his works, the aim of which is
+    purely intellectual, where feeling is not at all involved; and surely there is not,
+    in either ancient or modern literature, a section which, in the same amount of space,
+    exhibits the same degree of intense activity on the part of the analytic
+    understanding, applied to the illustration of truth or to the solution of vexed
+    problems. This latter class is the more remarkable from its polar antithesis to the
+    former; just as, in his life, it is a most remarkable characteristic of the man, <a
+    name="page353" id="page353"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 353]</span> that, rising
+    above all other men through the rhapsodies of dreams, he should yet be able truly to
+    say of himself that he had devoted a greater number of hours to intellectual pursuits
+    than any other man whom he had seen, heard of, or read of. A wider range is thus
+    exhibited, not of thought merely, but also of the possible modes of expressing
+    thought, than is elsewhere to be found, even in writers the most skilled in
+    rhetorical subtilty. The distance between these two opposites De Quincey does not
+    traverse by violent leaps; he does not by some feat of legerdemain evanish from the
+    fields of impassioned eloquence, where he is an unrivalled master, to appear
+    forthwith in those of intellectual gymnastics, where, at least, he is not surpassed.
+    He is familiar with every one of the intervening stages between the rhapsody and the
+    demonstration,&mdash;between the loftiest reach of aspirant passion, from which, with
+    reptile instinct, the understanding slinks downwards to the earth, and that fierce
+    antagonism of naked thoughts, where the crested serpent "mounts and burns." His
+    alchemy is infinite, combining light with warmth in all degrees,&mdash;in pathos, in
+    humor,<a id="footnotetag6" name="footnotetag6" href="#footnote6"><sup>6</sup></a> in
+    genial illumination. Let the reader, if he can, imagine Rousseau to have written
+    "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in both of which great
+    erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as nothing when compared to the
+    faculty of recombining into novel forms what previously had been so grouped as to be
+    misunderstood, or had lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To
+    have written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or, moving
+    into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to have been the author
+    of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts": that would mount a new plume in
+    Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to be reminded of another little paper,
+    numbering about six pages, entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give
+    him <i>that</i>, too. Why, the <a name="page354" id="page354"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 354]</span> little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
+    consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of this nature,
+    which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse, that the two writers are
+    often mentioned as on the same level, and with no appreciation of that unlimited
+    range of power which belongs to De Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one
+    of the trophies which we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a
+    single volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one imperial
+    column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,&mdash;alas for Rousseau!&mdash;two
+    other <i>spolia opima</i> by which the French master is, in his own field, proved not
+    the first, nor even the second,&mdash;<i>proximus, sed non secundus</i>,&mdash;so
+    wide is the distance between De Quincey and <i>any</i> other antagonist. These two
+    are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan of Arc," and "The English
+    Mail-Coach."</p>
+    <p>It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I have
+    undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about which the
+    thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De Quincey's childhood, and his
+    opium-experiences.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Thomas de Quincey&mdash;hierophant, rhapsodist, philosopher&mdash;was born at
+    Greenhay, then a suburb of Manchester, in Lancashire County, England, on the 15th of
+    August, 1785. According to his own account, the family of the De Quinceys was of
+    Norwegian origin; and after its transfer to France, in connection with William the
+    Norman, it received its territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in
+    Normandy. Thence, at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
+    where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not merely in
+    connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but chiefly on account of
+    valuable services rendered to the State, and conferring preeminence in baronial
+    privilege and consideration.</p>
+    <p>So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the point of his
+    descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French extraction, that, even
+    into the ears of George III. (that king having, in an accidental interview with him
+    at Frogmore, suggested the possibility of his family having come to England at the
+    time of the Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
+    protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon his purely
+    Norman blood,&mdash;blood that in the baronial wars had helped to establish the
+    earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that had flowed from knightly
+    veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De Quincey came into England with William
+    the Conqueror, uniting with whose fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal
+    baron, founding the line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
+    evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,&mdash;that his armorial device was
+    inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of eminent
+    distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St. Paul's.</p>
+    <p>And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily diverted
+    to the American branch of this family, at the head of which stands the Hon. Josiah
+    Quincy, (the aristocratic <i>De</i> being omitted,)&mdash;a branch which fled from
+    England in the early part of the seventeenth century, to avoid a strife which had
+    then become too intense and fiery to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a
+    few years after their withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the
+    inevitableness of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
+    critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,&mdash;as indicating how surely
+    the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will continue to track our
+    flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of ocean, that ought, if anything
+    could, to interpose an effectual barrier between us and all pursuers, and, having
+    caught up with us in our fancied <a name="page355" id="page355"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 355]</span> retreat, will precipitate upon our devoted heads its
+    accumulated violence,&mdash;as demonstrating thus the melancholy persistence with
+    which that ugly Sphinx who impersonates Justice in our human affairs doggedly insists
+    on having her questions answered, and, coming by a circuitous route upon those who by
+    good luck have escaped her direct path, through an incarnation of unusual terror
+    compels her dread alternative,&mdash;it is interesting to note how this same family,
+    separated by over seven generations from one political revolution, the momentous
+    crisis of which was by them successfully evaded, are now, after an interval of
+    unsound and hollow peace, compelled to witness the precise reiteration of that storm,
+    in the very land to which they fled for refuge,&mdash;a reiteration that repeats,
+    only on a different stage, and under an aggravation of horror as to minute details,
+    not merely two antagonistic races corresponding on either side to those which met in
+    battle on Marston Moor, but also interests far outweighing any that could possibly
+    attach to a conflict between royalty and democracy.</p>
+    <p>But the Earls of Winchester, in England, whatever may have been their prosperity
+    during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came suddenly to an abrupt
+    termination, abutting at length on some guilty traitor in the line, who, like a
+    special Adam for the family, involved in his own ruin that prosperity which would
+    else have continued to his successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal
+    estate, however, remained in possession of separate members of the family, as De
+    Quincey tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last vestige
+    slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together with the name, held
+    also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above the diluvial wreck of the
+    Winchester estates there has arisen an estate far more royal and magnificent, and
+    beneath a far-reaching bow of promise, sealed in magical security against a similar
+    disaster. For just here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the
+    family freshly grounded upon a second heritage,&mdash;one sublime in its order above
+    that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever imperishable,&mdash;namely, the
+    large domain which the gigantic intellect of Thomas De Quincey has absolved from
+    aboriginal darkness and brought under distinct illumination for all time to come.
+    These are the vast acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,&mdash;acres
+    that have been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into the
+    mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some measure bridged over
+    infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have extended the fluctuating
+    boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey himself, in view of that monumental
+    structure which rises above the shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above
+    the mummied dust of Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought
+    in their lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that, possibly,
+    by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been robbed of an
+    earldom,&mdash;or even that, during a life which by some years overlapped the average
+    allotment to humanity, and through which were daily accumulating the most splendid
+    results in the very highest departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations
+    nevertheless went on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in
+    all Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these years, as
+    formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and to Sir William
+    Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of such merely <i>nominal</i>
+    titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in them little that is monumental, and
+    the pretty tinsel, with which they gild monuments already based on substantial worth,
+    is easily, and without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
+    the loving remembrances of human hearts.</p>
+    <p>But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal conditions
+    <a name="page356" id="page356"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 356]</span> in the case
+    of De Quincey,&mdash;though, assuredly, there was never a man upon earth whom these
+    conditions, considered as a&euml;rial hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and
+    magnificence, would more consistently fit,&mdash;we cannot thus easily set aside
+    those other outward conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their
+    presence or absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
+    earliest tendencies and impulses,&mdash;in that season of immature preparation when
+    the channels of habit are in the process of formation, and while yet a marvellous
+    uncertainty hangs and broods over the beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet
+    yet dandled and tended by its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain
+    elements which rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for
+    instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the force and
+    swiftness of a torrent,&mdash;yet how shifting are the mountain-winds, chilling into
+    frosty silence or quickening with Favonian warmth, and how shifting the flying
+    clouds, which, whether marshalled in mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a
+    real conflict, forever sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced
+    childhood, do the scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably,
+    to determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely material,
+    and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in conjunction with
+    heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in this period, with which above
+    all others we associate influences the most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory,"
+    those influences which are purely material are the most efficiently operative.
+    Against the former, adult man, in whom reason is developed, <i>may</i> battle, though
+    ignobly, and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he
+    <i>must</i> struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
+    for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields him from all
+    conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though, because impotent and
+    unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to material circumstance,&mdash;a slavery
+    which he cannot escape, and which, during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his
+    very blood, bone, and nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child
+    succumbs; on the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
+    weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and fortunate indeed
+    it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our first years is thus a gentle
+    dealing with us, fertilizing our powers with the rich juices of an earthly
+    prosperity. And in this respect De Quincey <i>was</i> eminently fortunate. The powers
+    of heaven and of earth and&mdash;if we side with Milton and <i>other</i> pagan
+    mythologists in attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty&mdash;the
+    dark powers <i>under</i> the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in his
+    behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his name they
+    postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him the happiest of all
+    childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining whatever substantial benefits in
+    constitutional temperament and susceptibilities <i>could</i> be thence derived,
+    although lacking, as Pope also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy
+    heralding of this distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of
+    aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely against the
+    assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any one in tolerably
+    comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most trivial hint of possible
+    want,&mdash;against all necessity of limitation or retrenchment in any normal line of
+    expenditure.</p>
+    <p>He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine, died, leaving
+    to his family&mdash;a wife and six children&mdash;an estate yielding annually an
+    income of sixteen hundred pounds. And as at his father's death De Quincey was seven
+    years old, we may reasonably infer, that, during this previous period, while his
+    father was still living, and adding to this <a name="page357" id="page357"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 357]</span> fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains,
+    (which to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the
+    family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly realization of
+    between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time when Napoleon had not as
+    yet meddled with the financial affairs of Europe, nor by his intimidations caused
+    even pounds and shillings to shrink into less worth and significance than they
+    formerly had,&mdash;in view of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great
+    (as in a famous anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the
+    "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" in the way of crowns and a few dozen sceptres,
+    what a heinous charge must be brought against this Corsican as universal pickpocket!
+    This pecuniary depreciation De Quincey himself realized some years later, when,
+    determining to quit school, he thought himself compelled<a id="footnotetag7"
+    name="footnotetag7" href="#footnote7"><sup>7</sup></a> to cut off all communication
+    with his guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh mountains,
+    wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most scanty means of
+    support,&mdash;for just then the Allies were in full rig against France, and the
+    shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's pocket became palpably evident in view
+    of the increased price of his dinner.</p>
+    <p>The time <i>did</i> come at length when the full epos of a remarkable prosperity
+    was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the unseen future. To the
+    child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of
+    flowers into the fruitless waste abroad. Poverty, want, at least so great as to
+    compel the daily exercise of his mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing
+    from the rear; but the sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening
+    years of luxurious opulence and ease.</p>
+    <p>I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's earliest
+    surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice merely as an
+    accident,) because, although not a <i>potential</i> element, capable of producing or
+    of adding one single iota to the essential character of genius, it is yet a negative
+    condition&mdash;a <i>sine qua non</i>&mdash;to the displays of genius in certain
+    directions and under certain aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be
+    intensified. So may it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of
+    power, there still remains a question as to its <i>kind</i>. So deep is the sky: but
+    of what <i>hue</i>, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol but
+    what the <i>mellowness</i>? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite force: but
+    of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister to Moloch, or to Apollo?
+    Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa? Why, the simple fact that the rich
+    blue sky over-arches this earth of ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our
+    veins, is sufficient to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the
+    question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from outward
+    circumstances, but what coloring, what mood. Here it is that a Mozart differs from a
+    Mendelssohn. The important difference which obtains, in this respect, between great
+    powers in literature, otherwise co&ouml;rdinate, will receive illustration from a
+    comparison between De Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a
+    degree rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should say,
+    of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this general office they
+    stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal purple; both have caused to rise
+    between earth and heaven miracles of grandeur, such as never Cheops <a name="page358"
+    id="page358"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 358]</span> wrought through his myriad
+    slaves, or Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
+    <i>modus operandi</i>, of their architecture, they stand apart <i>toto coelo</i>.
+    Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or humanity; but
+    they are those elements only which are allied to gloom, for he builds in suspicion
+    and distrust, and upon the basis of a cynicism that has been nurtured in his very
+    flesh and blood from birth; he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens
+    all human hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
+    archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the bright hopes
+    and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have originated such a Pandemonian
+    monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative
+    power, and nearly the most striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to
+    the sea, in "Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
+    susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And <i>how</i>? Is it
+    through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the movements of
+    destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of the ruin itself,&mdash;ruin
+    revealed upon a scale so vast and under conditions of terror the most
+    appalling,&mdash;ruin wrought under the semblance of an almighty passion for revenge
+    directed against the human race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea
+    maintains toward man, we have the following passage of &AElig;schylian grandeur, but
+    also of &AElig;schylian gloom:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Thou dost arise
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And send'st him, shivering in thy <i>playful</i> spray,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;His petty hope in some near port or bay,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of darkness
+    the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such lamentable lack of faith
+    in the purity and soundness of human affections, have given utterance to a sentiment
+    like this:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        An <i>unseen</i> seraph we believe in thee"?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>or the following:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Who loves, raves,&mdash;'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>and again:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Few&mdash;<i>none</i>&mdash;find what they love or could have loved,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &gt;Necessity of loving having removed
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Antipathies"?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,&mdash;the removal of all
+    antipathies! But even these</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"recur erelong,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And circumstance&mdash;that unspiritual god
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And miscreator&mdash;makes and helps along
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Whose touch turns hope to dust,&mdash;the dust which all have trod."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis
+    for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or
+    of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and
+    tempest, typified in the outside world,&mdash;but never for one instant did he seek
+    alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or,
+    on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a
+    single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy
+    with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and
+    that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking
+    recantations solely for the purposes of scorn.</p>
+    <p>Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace back to the
+    first haunts of childhood the steps <a name="page359" id="page359"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 359]</span> of these two fugitives, each of whom has passed
+    thence, the one into a desert <i>mirage</i>, teeming with processions of the
+    gloomiest falsities in life, and the other&mdash;also into the desert, but where he
+    is yet refreshed and solaced by an unshaken faith in the genial verities of life,
+    though separated from them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where,
+    however apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels, and
+    no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their overmastering
+    seductions to</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Allure, or terrify, or undermine."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by itself.
+    But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with which the conditions
+    of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine the main temper and disposition of
+    our lives. For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious
+    efforts, born of reason, and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial
+    stand-point, seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the
+    undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled and nurtured
+    with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our
+    specific choices of certain directions and aims among all opposite directions and
+    aims, and which, although we rarely recognize its important functions, is in all
+    cases the arbiter of our destiny. And in the very word <i>disposition</i> is
+    indicated the finality of its arbitraments as contrasted with all
+    <i>proposition</i>.</p>
+    <p>Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but it is the
+    external structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood,&mdash;to
+    shelter or imprison,&mdash;which, more than all else, gives it its determinate
+    character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly
+    obliterated, or replaced by its opposite,&mdash;porcelain by clay, or clay by
+    porcelain,&mdash;yet will the tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway
+    almost uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that preside
+    over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial
+    temperament,&mdash;one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward a
+    centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of strife; secondly,
+    profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence, which, although of all three
+    it is the most negative, the most material condition, is yet practically the most
+    important, because of the degree in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited
+    prosperity of the other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of
+    temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to tender years,
+    or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents' hearts, check the free play
+    of domestic love!&mdash;and in all cases where such limitations are present, even in
+    the gentlest form, there must be a cramping up of the human organization and
+    individuality somewhere; and everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be
+    sensibly felt the absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections
+    of home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a sunshine
+    which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the soul.</p>
+    <p>As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was prosperous;
+    afterwards, vicissitudes came,&mdash;mighty changes capable of affecting all other
+    transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the inwrought grace of a
+    pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's childhood was, in all these
+    elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his mother's heart by the faithless
+    desertion of her husband, after the desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted
+    upon him, and intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
+    outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift himself out of
+    the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been thrust, any more than Vulcan
+    could have cured that crooked gait of his, which dated from <a name="page360"
+    id="page360"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 360]</span> some vague infantile
+    remembrances of having been rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements,
+    one summer's day,&mdash;for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
+    "Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        <i>A summer's day</i>."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all his other
+    early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian god. Among the
+    guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that, receiving an ample place in his
+    victim's heart, stood demoniacally his ground through life, transmuting love to hate,
+    and what might have been benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on
+    the contrary, a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
+    teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest hours of life:
+    an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images of which, and their echoed
+    festivals, far outlasted the splendor of their material substance.</p>
+    <p>"We,&mdash;the children of the house,&mdash;" says De Quincey, in his
+    "Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social
+    scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur&mdash;'Give me neither
+    poverty nor riches'&mdash;was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither
+    too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of
+    self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of
+    solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with <i>extra</i>
+    means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand
+    we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of
+    privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by privileges too aspiring, we
+    had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am,
+    that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of
+    diet,&mdash;that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And
+    if (after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to
+    Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would
+    single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I lived in a rural solitude; that
+    this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of
+    sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful
+    and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."</p>
+    <p>Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let him suppose,
+    for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of seven, and having now at
+    least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his peace, could annul his own infancy, and
+    in its place substitute that of one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same
+    age, (and many such could be found,) among those with whom daily the military
+    predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable conflict. Instead of
+    the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be substituted the cotton-dust of the
+    Lancashire mills. The contrast, even in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the
+    irrepressible fires of human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these
+    instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the instance of
+    Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been
+    nourished by bears or by she-wolves. Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman
+    nurture. The Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of
+    violets,&mdash;if we may believe the Pindaric odes,&mdash;set over them a divine
+    watch, and fed them with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.</p>
+    <p>And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect
+    <i>leisure</i>. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective
+    relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection with these has the
+    element just introduced any value, since leisure, which <a name="page361"
+    id="page361"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 361]</span> is the atmosphere, the
+    breathing-place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool. In relation to power,
+    it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow
+    into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of
+    thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility <i>had</i>
+    been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister,
+    his favorite and familiar playmate,&mdash;a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in
+    speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and
+    thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this
+    overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to
+    meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the
+    halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
+    childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself,
+    not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of
+    meditative power." His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace.</p>
+    <p>In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be
+    given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a striking peculiarity in his
+    life. If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's
+    attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no
+    sufficient, at least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
+    cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and just in that
+    ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself, No stream can rise
+    above the level of its source. No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its
+    beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of
+    interest. This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others
+    on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
+    repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,&mdash;but with what marvellous
+    transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future
+    course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No longer does it flow along its natural
+    path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Through caverns measureless to man,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Down to the sunless sea."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the
+    saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless
+    peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font
+    of death. Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted,
+    both in his conscious reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams,
+    from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its
+    earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life,
+    was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies
+    that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the
+    dream which Milton<a id="footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"
+    href="#footnote8"><sup>8</sup></a> gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and
+    tired:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"There he slept,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        He saw the prophet also, how he fled
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Into the desert, and how there he slept
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        He found his supper on the coals prepared,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And eat the second time after repose,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe necessities of
+    the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus solicited and baffled even in
+    dreams,&mdash;if, by the lowest of mortal appetites, <a name="page362"
+    id="page362"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 362]</span> they could be so humiliated
+    and eclipsed as to revel in the shadowy visions of merely human plenty,&mdash;then by
+    how much more must the human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of
+    sorrow and of dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
+    revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands, be carried
+    back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy, flower-strewn fields of some
+    far happier place and time!</p>
+    <p>The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is as natural,
+    therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral antiphonies. Henceforth, as the
+    reader already understands, we are not permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised
+    life, unless we draw aside a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of
+    Isis or the poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this <i>papaverian</i> mask it is likely to
+    be best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater" that he is
+    most generally recognized. It was through his Opium-Confessions, popular both as to
+    matter and style, that he first conciliated and charmed the reading public,&mdash;and
+    to such a degree that great expectations were awakened as to anything which
+    afterwards he might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case
+    it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the public, without
+    its being aware of the nauseating potion, or experiencing any uncomfortable
+    consequences. The flood of popularity produced by the Opium-Confessions among that
+    large intellectual class of readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet
+    insist upon the graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving
+    interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of heavier
+    freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.</p>
+    <p>The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey <i>personally</i> is also
+    very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an opium-eater willing to
+    breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of his situation and its hidden
+    mysteries, or "<i>suspiria de profundis</i>." This interest is partly of that vulgar
+    sort which connects itself with all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in
+    the human mind, with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied
+    with a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a philosophical order,
+    inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal development. It is rarely the
+    case that human vision is especially or deliberately directed to the sun or the moon,
+    except at the marvellous season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty
+    of the appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual nature of
+    the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the people inhabiting this
+    globe are excited by something which calls off their attention from terrestrial
+    trifles to that which connects them with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos,
+    we should, at such times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating
+    monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best, through horrid
+    yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a tremendous counter-irritation upon
+    the earth that should tell mightily on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the
+    heavens. But since we are neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any
+    sort, we take defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is
+    only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of courtesy, to foreign
+    worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come within the circle of human
+    knowledge or notice, which is it that may be said to enjoy the most continuous round
+    of attentions, and to live in excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It
+    is the comet, which no sooner gets out of reach of <i>our</i> flying compliments than
+    she becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth deprecating
+    murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder brother, who, from all
+    such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible under the paternal <a name="page363"
+    id="page363"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 363]</span> wings of the Sun. No one of
+    these erratic visitors can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere
+    in the universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would not have
+    been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict <i>prima donnas</i>.</p>
+    <p>Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that which we
+    manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or the eccentric comet that
+    bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this interest, considered in its vulgar aspects,
+    De Quincey would suffer gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I
+    am certain that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about
+    him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his long
+    sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever description, no
+    tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been able to vie with him in the
+    picturesque <i>d&eacute;shabill&eacute;</i> of the whole "turnout." Picture to
+    yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and patches"&mdash;for, to the outward
+    sense, he seems that now&mdash;has been "at large" for days, perhaps for two or three
+    weeks; he has been unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no
+    restraint upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with
+    panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain impressive
+    recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a trifle too uncanny even
+    for them. As to his subsistence during these rambles, it would be very difficult to
+    say how he managed that affair, at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be
+    that the prophetic limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of
+    his return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,&mdash;that he has made
+    plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his waistcoat-pocket. Like
+    Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering purposely and at his own sweet will, or
+    rather where his feet have taken him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever
+    sleep may have chanced to find him.</p>
+    <p>The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the matted hair,
+    the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what gives the finishing touch to
+    this grotesque picture is his utter unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his
+    situation, as they appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an
+    &AElig;son-like rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that
+    anxiously await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in
+    the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this transformation is
+    effected, let us suppose the case of his being set down in the streets of London,
+    somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside. What an eddying of stragglers about this
+    new-found focus of attraction! what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if,
+    indeed, he be find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests,
+    some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian or not,
+    neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster such a rabble at his
+    heels, supposing <i>him</i> to appear on Cheapside!</p>
+    <p>In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar notice as
+    from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of him in such situations,
+    except for the purpose of showing that he had very much in his outward habit that
+    would readily attract such a notice. In the same light we are to regard some
+    illustrations which J. Hill Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features
+    in his character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for, although
+    they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a book-form, they are still
+    unpublished to many of my readers.</p>
+    <p>Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he was
+    seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained novel
+    and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius. The festivities of the
+    afternoon are far on, when a commotion is heard in the hall, as if some <a
+    name="page364" id="page364"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 364]</span> dog or other
+    stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the
+    arrival; he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
+    street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very
+    threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the
+    fragments of a party-colored belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes,
+    covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers,&mdash;some one
+    suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that
+    Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey, led
+    on by the current of his own thoughts,&mdash;though he was always too courteous to
+    absorb the entire conversation,&mdash;talks on "till it is far into the night, and
+    slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation and home-going. The
+    topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilization, the effect of habit on men in
+    all ages, and the power of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the
+    specials, he could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
+    other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he
+    knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or wouldn't hear him,
+    so he scrambled over a wall, and, having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to
+    testify to the extreme unpleasantness of such a couch?"</p>
+    <p>"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore, he glided
+    in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing on him with round eyes
+    of astonishment, and suggesting that he should get a penny and go home,&mdash;a
+    proposal which he subjected to some philosophical criticism very far wide of its
+    practical tenor. How far he had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even
+    whether he had eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
+    articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to be refreshed
+    was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the hard he could not eat.
+    Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent to which he
+    had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that there were some fifty cases
+    of acute toothache to be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops!
+    nonsense! If the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal
+    size, there was no risk,&mdash;and so the weary is at rest for a time.</p>
+    <p>"At early morn, a triumphant cry of '<i>Eureka!</i>' calls me to his place of
+    rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a considerable
+    heap of them around him. That one which specially claims his attention&mdash;my
+    best-bound quarto&mdash;is spread upon a piece of bedroom-furniture readily at hand,
+    and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor,
+    with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which
+    Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had
+    discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very
+    important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book
+    with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it occurred to me that I had
+    seen something like the scene in Dutch paintings of the Temptation of St.
+    Anthony."</p>
+    <p>I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example, illustrative of
+    the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered merely the immediate and
+    pressing exigencies of the present. "He arrives very late at a friend's door, and on
+    gaining admission,&mdash;a process in which he often endured impediments,&mdash;he
+    represents, with his usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity
+    of his being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
+    realm,&mdash;the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very
+    freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or fancying he
+    discovers, that his eloquence is likely <a name="page365" id="page365"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 365]</span> to prove unproductive, he is fortunately reminded,
+    that, should there be any difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of
+    the loan, he is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to
+    deposit with the lender,&mdash;a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove any
+    feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could experience in the
+    circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which develops miscellaneous and
+    varied, but as yet by no means valuable, possessions, he at last comes to the object
+    of his search, a crumpled bit of paper, and spread it out,&mdash;a fifty-pound
+    bank-note! All sums of money were measured by him through the common standard of
+    immediate use; and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the
+    bank-note, might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had
+    hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to him at the
+    time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in negotiating a loan
+    of two-pence."</p>
+    <p>These pictures, though true to certain phases of De Quincey's outward life, are
+    yet far from personally representing him, even to the eye. They satisfy curiosity,
+    and that is about all. As to the real character of the man, they are negative and
+    unessential; they represent, indeed, his utter carelessness as to all that, like
+    dress, may at pleasure be put on or off, but "the human child incarnate" is not thus
+    brought before us. For, could we but once look upon his face in rest, then should we
+    forget these inferior attributes; just as, looking upon the Memnonian statues, one
+    forgets the horrid nicknames of "Shandy" and "Andy" which they have received from
+    casual travellers, observing merely their grotesque features. Features of this latter
+    sort "dislimn" and yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the
+    divine countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De Quincey's
+    face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as with an Homeric antiquity;
+    arid it is, and sallow, as parchment. Through a certain Bedouin-like
+    conformation,&mdash;which, however, is idealized by the lofty, massive forehead, and
+    by the prevailing subtilty of the general expression,&mdash;it seems fitted to desert
+    solitudes; and in this respect it is truly Memnonian. In another respect, also, is it
+    Memnonian,&mdash;that, whenever should rest upon its features the morning sunlight,
+    we should surely await its responsive requiem or its trembling <i>jubilate</i>. By a
+    sort of instinctive palmistry (applied, not to the hands, but to the face) we
+    interpret symbols of ineffable sorrow and of ineffable peace. These, too, are
+    Memnonian,&mdash;as is also that infinite distance which seems to interpose between
+    its subtile meanings and the very possibility of interpretation. This air of
+    remoteness, baffling the impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which
+    has gathered for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply
+    sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises from that
+    childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle undulations of the
+    features,&mdash;undulations as of happy wavelets set in motion ages since, and that
+    cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born of a dream-like, brooding eternity of
+    speculation, which we can trace neither to the eye alone, nor to the mouth, but
+    rather to the effect which both together produce in the countenance.</p>
+    <p>This is the face which for more than half a century opium veiled to mortal eyes,
+    and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the most fugitive and
+    impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of mystery from which mere curiosity
+    stands aloof. This is the head which we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a
+    triple wreath of glory: the laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his
+    impassioned dreams, and roses for his most gentle and loving nature.</p>
+    <p>How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium? Very little as to
+    quality, but very much as to the <a name="page366" id="page366"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 366]</span> degree and the peculiar manner in which original
+    qualities and dispositions are developed, for here it is that the only field of
+    influence open to abnormal agencies lies. Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only
+    individual worthy of notice in the same connection. Had <i>he</i> also confessed, it
+    is uncertain what new revelations might have been made. It is certain that opium
+    exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his dose that his
+    remarkable intellectual displays occurred. These displays were mostly confined to his
+    conversations, which were usually long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a
+    continued series of abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending
+    upon a sort of poetic construction. A pity it is that we must content ourselves with
+    empty descriptions of this nature. Here, doubtless, if anywhere, opium was an
+    auxiliary to Coleridge. For a laudanum negus, whatever there may be about it that is
+    pernicious, will, to a mind that is metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares
+    of thought which are raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead
+    into the region of the shadowy. Show us the man who habitually carries pills of
+    <i>any</i> sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and we can
+    assure you that that man is an <i>a&euml;robat</i>,&mdash;that somehow, in one sense
+    or another, he walks in the air above other men's heads. Whatever disturbs the
+    healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to metaphysics, because it
+    attracts the mental attention to the organism through which thought is carried on.
+    Numerous are the instances of men who would never have been heard of as thinkers or
+    as reflective poets, if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against
+    their teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the
+    superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.<a id="footnotetag9"
+    name="footnotetag9" href="#footnote9"><sup>9</sup></a> If Tacitus had fared in any
+    sort like his brother,&mdash;if there had been anything like an equitable division
+    between them of muscle and brain, it is more than probable that we should have lost
+    the illustrious historian.</p>
+    <p>Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was increased by
+    opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured Coleridge's poetic
+    faculties; which probably was the case, since in genuine poetry the mind is
+    prominently realistic, its motions are all outward, and therefore excessive indolence
+    must of necessity be fatal.</p>
+    <p>De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to opium: it
+    demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No temptation so strong
+    <i>could</i> have been presented to Coleridge. De Quincey really craved the drug. His
+    stomach was deranged, and was still suffering from the sad results of his youthful
+    wanderings in London. It seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course
+    into which he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
+    gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place to a specific
+    one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like the daughters of the
+    horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the last, this craving became, in De
+    Quincey's solemn <a name="page367" id="page367"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    367]</span> belief, an animal incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the
+    following fashion:&mdash;It is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either
+    for the fact of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
+    conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion of each meal
+    as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller, just as a voracious Greek or
+    Roman would have attributed no small part of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as
+    eating by proxy through the mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case
+    reported of Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever he
+    ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his left leg.</p>
+    <p>No less was De Quincey <i>psychologically</i> preconformed to opium. The
+    prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the narcotic
+    despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader sees from this how much
+    depends upon predispositions as to the effect of opium. De Quincey himself says that
+    the man whose daily talk is of oxen will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams.
+    Opium originates nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a
+    certain direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
+    energies and velocities. What was De Quincey <i>without</i> opium? is, therefore, the
+    question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in him was due to opium. This
+    question has already been answered in the remarks made concerning his childhood. His
+    meditative tendencies were especially noticed as most characteristic. There was
+    besides this a natural leaning toward the mysterious,&mdash;the mysterious, I mean,
+    as depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which excites gloom
+    or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable as moving in darkness. Take,
+    for example, the idea of a grand combination of human energies mustered together in
+    secret, and operating through invisible agencies for the downfall of
+    Christianity,&mdash;an idea which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through
+    the Abb&eacute; Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing
+    throughout Europe: this was the sort of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
+    thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful grandeur in
+    his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great cities such as London,
+    which he call the "Nation of London," where even Nature is mimicked, both in her
+    strict regularity of results, and in the seeming unconsciousness of all her outward
+    phases, hiding all meaning under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this
+    effect it was absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
+    standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance; there must
+    have been more than this,&mdash;namely, a network of occult influences, a vast
+    organization, wheeling in and out upon itself, gyrating in mystic cycles and
+    epicycles, repeating over and again its dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a
+    never-ending variety of shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the
+    most inviting. It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
+    history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved: for the demon
+    that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all others had been pronounced
+    undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was to his eye that for the first time there
+    seemed to be an unknown element that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented
+    by the religious sect among the Hebrews entitled the <i>Essenes</i>. Admitting the
+    character and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it no
+    special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey that the general
+    assumption was the farthest removed from the truth,&mdash;than there was an unknown
+    <i>x</i> in the problem, which could be satisfied by no such meagre
+    hypothesis,&mdash;that, to meet the urgent demands of the case, there must be
+    substituted for this Jewish <a name="page368" id="page368"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 368]</span> sect an organization of no less importance than the
+    Christian Church itself,&mdash;that this organization, thus suddenly brought to
+    light, was one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
+    from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very name, to
+    itself only in secret recesses of silence:&mdash;from the moment that all this was
+    revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit to his profound interest. Two
+    separate essays he wrote on this subject,<a id="footnotetag10" name="footnotetag10"
+    href="#footnote10"><sup>10</sup></a> of which he seemed never to tire.</p>
+    <p>"Klosterheim" is from beginning to end only the development, through regular
+    stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile nature. Oftentimes De
+    Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder; but the mere fact of a murder,
+    however shocking, was not sufficient to arrest him. With the celebrated Williams
+    murders, on the contrary, he was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in
+    accordance with designs not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the
+    skill of a decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony. Here were murders that
+    revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and that at every
+    stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden mysteries of universal human
+    nature. I know of no writer but De Quincey who invests mysteries of this tragic order
+    with their appropriate drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the
+    full measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.</p>
+    <p>This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their very
+    existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material limitations of
+    every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal <i>proscenium</i>; their <i>dramatis
+    person&aelig;</i>, however familiar nominally, and however much derived from material
+    suggestions, are yet in all their motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as
+    is possible to the ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves.
+    We should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency towards
+    this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his "Autobiographic
+    Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of seven, and before he knew of even
+    the existence of opium, the least material hint which bordered on the shadowy was
+    sufficient to lift him up into a&euml;rial structures, and to lead his infant
+    footsteps amongst the clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were
+    furnished by certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
+    the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus introduced mere
+    fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they were self-sustained and
+    majestic.</p>
+    <p>The natural effects of opium were concurrent with pre&euml;xisting tendencies of
+    De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he had been
+    indolent,&mdash;if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it invited a Titanic
+    energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it as simply dark or
+    obscure,&mdash;if his natural subtilty of reflection had been less, or if he had been
+    endowed with inferior powers in the sublime architecture of impassioned
+    expression,&mdash;then might he as well have smoked a <a name="page369"
+    id="page369"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 369]</span> meerschaum, taken snuff or
+    grog or any other stimulant, as to have gone out of his way for the more refined
+    pleasures of opium.</p>
+    <p>The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at this point,
+    by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two heads: first, the
+    <i>external</i>, and, secondly, the <i>internal</i>. Properly speaking, all the
+    <i>positive</i> effects of opium must be internal; for all its movements are inward
+    in their direction, being refluent upon the focal centres of life. Thus, one of the
+    most noticeable phenomena connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting
+    back upon the heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
+    most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very reflux of
+    sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which are purely negative.
+    This latter class of effects Homer has indicated with considerable accuracy, in the
+    ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he notices specifically an air of carelessness
+    regarding external things,&mdash;carelessness as to the mutual interchange of
+    conversation by question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
+    disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more fully developed in
+    Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        To each; but whoso did receive of them,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And music in his ears his beating heart did make."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium deepens the
+    consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes and connections that in
+    ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if new materials were found for a
+    history of the individual life,&mdash;materials which, like freshly discovered
+    records, sound the deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the
+    past. Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll which
+    hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,&mdash;symbols which are not
+    sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even syllables of words, since the most
+    trivial hint or whisper of them has hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it
+    is that even the still more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only
+    images and echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
+    enlarged.</p>
+    <p>There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis between his
+    every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius. In the latter, there is
+    beautiful order, as in a symphony of Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from
+    without, all seems confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind;
+    but here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire the
+    <i>en</i>centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw forth
+    laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same agencies which
+    undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked the earth with desert sands;
+    and De Quincey's outward life was thus masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue
+    heaven in which he revelled might be infinitely exalted.</p>
+    <p>Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with transcendent
+    sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the generous margins of a
+    splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious words, that might perhaps have found
+    some more fit vehicle to the composer's eye, could have found no deeper place in our
+    hearts. We look at the hatless sleeper among the mountains: his face seems utterly
+    blank and meaningless, and to all intents and purposes he seems as good as dead; but
+    let us ascend with him in his dreams, and we shall soon forget that under God's
+    heavens there exists mortality <a name="page370" id="page370"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 370]</span> or the commonplace uses of mortality.</p>
+    <p>As we ascend from grotesque features to such as are more intellectual, that
+    peculiarity of his character which most strikes us is his inimitable courtesy. Mr.
+    F.,&mdash;to whom I am indebted for the most novel and interesting portions of this
+    memorial,&mdash;from his own personal interviews with the man, among many other
+    things, retains this chiefly in remembrance,&mdash;that De Quincey was the perfectest
+    gentleman he had ever seen.</p>
+    <p>I take the liberty here of particularizing somewhat in regard to one visit which
+    this friend of De Quincey's paid him, particularly as it introduces us to the man
+    towards the last of his life (1851). Mr. F., curious as it may seem, found but one
+    person in Edinburgh who could inform him definitely as to De Quincey's whereabouts.
+    In return to a note, giving De Quincey information of his arrival, etc., the latter
+    replies in a letter which is very characteristic, and which may well be highly
+    prized, so rarely was it that any friend was able to obtain from him such a memento.
+    The style, perhaps, is as familiar as it was ever his habit to indulge in; and it
+    shows how impossible it was for him, even on the most temporary summons, to dispense
+    with his usual regularity of expression or with any logical nicety of method. The
+    letter runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p><i>Thursday evening, August 26, 1851</i>.</p>
+      <p>"My dear Sir,&mdash;The acccompanying billet from my daughter, short at any rate
+      under the pressure of instant engagements, has been cut shorter by a sudden and
+      very distressing headache; I, therefore, who (from a peculiar nervousness connected
+      with the act of writing) so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the
+      letter-writing department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say
+      mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for other people's.
+      Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute refusal on the part of the
+      Commissioner to grant me a certificate of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a
+      necessity not to be evaded, I am affecting the large bounties of supererogation. I
+      appear to be vaporing in a spirit of vainglory; and yet it is under the mere
+      coercion of '<i>salva necessitas</i>' that I am surprised into this unparalleled
+      instance of activity. Do you walk? That is, do you like walking for four hours
+      '<i>on end</i>'&mdash;(which is our archaic expression for <i>continuously</i>)? If
+      I knew <i>that</i>, I would arrange accordingly for meeting you. The case as to
+      distance is this. The Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley station, brings you to
+      Esk Bank. That is its nearest approach,&mdash;its <i>perihelion</i>, in relation to
+      ourselves; and it is precisely two and three-quarters miles distant from <i>Mavis
+      Bush</i>,&mdash;the name of our cottage. Close to us, and the most noticeable
+      object for guiding your inquiries, is <i>Mr. Annandale's Paper-Mills</i>.</p>
+      <p>"Now, then, accordingly as you direct my motions, I will&mdash;rain being
+      supposed absent&mdash;join you at your hotel in Edinburgh any time after 11 A.M.
+      and walk out the whole distance, (seven miles from the Scott monument,) or else I
+      will meet you at Esk Bank; or, if you prefer coming out in a carriage, I will await
+      your coming here in that state of motionless repose which best befits a
+      philosopher. Excuse my levity; and believe that with sincere pleasure we shall
+      receive your obliging visit.</p>
+      <p>"Ever your faithful servant,</p>
+      <p>"THOMAS DE QUINCEY."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>In order to appreciate the physical powers of him who proposed a walk of the
+    distance indicated in the letter, we must remember that he was then just sixty-six
+    years <i>plus</i> ten days old. He was now living with his daughters, in the utmost
+    simplicity. On his arrival, Mr. F. found De Quincey awaiting him at the door of his
+    cottage,&mdash;a short man, with small head, and eyes that were absolutely
+    indescribable as human features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but
+    with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till <a name="page371"
+    id="page371"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 371]</span> dark, the time is spent in
+    conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this
+    humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now
+    in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring
+    before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was
+    the friend of Wilson,&mdash;and&mdash;what furnishes a more sublime
+    suggestion&mdash;this is he that knows by heart the mountain-fells and the mysterious
+    recesses of hidden valleys for miles around; and we think, if he could convey us from
+    the haunts of this Lasswade of his old age to those which glorified the Grasmere of
+    his youth, what new chords he might touch,&mdash;of human love, for there it was that
+    the sweetness of his wedded life had been buried and embalmed in a thousand outward
+    memorials of happy hours long gone by,&mdash;and of human sadness, for there it was
+    that he had experienced the reversal of every outward fortune, and the alienations of
+    friendships which he most highly valued. But the remembrances of Grasmere and of
+    youth seem now to have been removed as into some other life: the man of a past
+    generation walks alone, and amid other scenes. And yonder is the study in which he
+    spends hours that are most holy,&mdash;hours consecrated to what specific employments
+    is known to none, since across its threshold no feet save his have passed for years.
+    Now and then some grand intellectual effort proceeds forth from its sacred precincts;
+    but that only happens when pecuniary necessities compel the exertion. How is it that
+    the time not thus occupied is spent?&mdash;in what remembrances, in what hidden
+    thoughts, what passing dreams?</p>
+    <p>As it grows dark, De Quincey's guest, having spent most precious moments which he
+    feels ought never to cease, signifies the necessity of his taking his departure. To
+    take leave of this strange man, however, is not so easy a matter as one might rashly
+    suppose. There is a genius of procrastination about him. Was he ever known to make
+    his appearance at any dinner in season, or indeed at any entertainment? Yes, he did
+    <i>once</i>, at the recital of a Greek tragedy on the Edinburgh stage; but that
+    happened through a trick played on him by an acquaintance, who, to secure some remote
+    chance of his seeing the performance, told him that the doors opened at half-past
+    six, whereas, in fact, they opened at seven. How preposterous, then, to suppose that
+    he would let an opportunity pass for procrastinating other people, and putting all
+    manner of snares about their feet! It is dangerous with such a man to hint of late
+    hours; for just that lateness is to him the very jewel of the thing. In mentioning
+    the circumstance, you only suggest to him the infinite pleasure connected with the
+    circumstance. Perhaps he will deliberately set to work to prove that candle-light is
+    the one absolutely indispensable condition to genial intercourse,&mdash;which would
+    doubtless suggest a great contrast, in that respect, between the ancient and modern
+    economy,&mdash;and where, then, <i>is</i> there to be an end? All attempts to
+    extricate yourself by unravelling the net which is being woven about you are
+    hopelessly vain; you cannot keep pace with <i>him</i>. The thought of delay enchants
+    him, and he dallies with it, as a child with a pet delicacy. Thus, he is at the house
+    of a friend; it storms, and a reasonable excuse is furnished for his favorite
+    experiment. The consequence is, that, once started in this direction, the delay is
+    continued for a year. Late hours were particularly potent to "draw out" De Quincey;
+    and, understanding this, Professor Wilson used to protract his dinners almost into
+    the morning, a tribute which De Quincey doubtless appreciated.</p>
+    <p>So that it is better to be on the sly about saying "Good bye" to this host of
+    yours. When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De Quincey forthwith
+    insisted on accompanying his guest. What, then, was to be done? Ominously the sky
+    looked down upon them, momently threatening a storm. No resource was there but to
+    give the man his way, and accept his offer of companionship <a name="page372"
+    id="page372"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 372]</span> for a short distance,
+    painfully conscious though you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must,
+    during this same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your side,
+    who now lacks barely four years of life's average allotment. Thus you move on: and
+    the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer approaches, warnings of which
+    propagate themselves all around you in every sound of the wind and every rustle of
+    the forest-leaves. Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of
+    your companion: every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for conversation.
+    Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and your guide stops to tell you
+    that in this house may have been committed most strange and horrible murders, that,
+    in spite of the tempestuous mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be
+    specially and solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a perfect
+    stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side, takes off his
+    hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her passage,&mdash;and you, poor
+    astonished mortal that you are, lest you should yourself seem scandalously
+    uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise. In this incident we see what infinite
+    majesty invested the very semblance of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and
+    something of the same remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who
+    uniformly addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every one
+    of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.</p>
+    <p>Onward you proceed,&mdash;one,&mdash;two,&mdash;three miles, and you can endure no
+    longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus at every
+    step the burden of his journey back. You have, reached the Esk bank and the bridge
+    which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage
+    against all unsheltered mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you
+    good-bye,&mdash;to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever
+    enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm,
+    of human tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close. It is a
+    source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very disagreeable thing
+    to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic justice; for assuredly he was in
+    the habit of saying all the malicious things <i>he</i> could about his friends. If
+    there was anything in a man's face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De
+    Quincey for noticing <i>that</i>. Even Wordsworth he could not let off without a
+    Parthian shot at his awkward legs and round shoulders; Dr. Parr he rated soundly on
+    his mean proportions; and one of the most unfortunate things which ever happened to
+    the Russian Emperor Alexander was to have been seen in London by De Quincey, who,
+    even amid the festivities of national and international congratulation on the fall of
+    Napoleon, could not forget that this imperial ally was a very commonplace-looking
+    fellow, after all. But, in regard to physical superiority, De Quincey lived in a
+    glass house too fragile to admit of his throwing many stones at his neighbors. The
+    very fact that he valued personal appearance at so low an estimate takes away the
+    sting from his remarks on the deformities of other people: he could not have meant
+    any detraction, but simply wished to present a perfect picture to the eye, preserving
+    the ugly features with the faultless, just as we all insist on doing in regard to
+    those we love. De Quincey and myself, therefore, are likely to part good friends.
+    Surely, if there was anything which vexed the tender heart of this man, it was "the
+    little love and the infinite hate" which went to make up the sum of life. If morbid
+    in any direction, it was not in that of spite, but of love; and as an instance of
+    almost unnatural intensity of affection, witness his insane grief over little Kate
+    Wordsworth's grave,&mdash;a grief which satisfied <a name="page373"
+    id="page373"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 373]</span> itself only by reasonless
+    prostrations, for whole nights, over the dark mould which covered her from his
+    sight.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>It only remains for us to look in upon De Quincey's last hours. We are enabled to
+    take almost the position of those who were permitted really to watch at his bedside,
+    through a slight unpublished sketch, from the hand of his daughter, in a letter to an
+    American friend. I tremble almost to use materials that personally are so sacred; but
+    sympathy, and the tender interest which is awakened in our hearts by such a life, are
+    also sacred, and in privilege stand nearest to grief.</p>
+    <p>During the few last, days of his life De Quincey wandered much, mixing up "real
+    and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things." He complained, one night, that his
+    feet were hot and tired. His daughter arranged the blankets around them, saying, "Is
+    that better, papa?" when he answered, "Yes, my love, I think it is; you know, my dear
+    girl, these are the feet that Christ washed."</p>
+    <p>Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children. He aroused
+    one day, and said suddenly,&mdash;"You must know, my dear, the Edinburgh cabmen are
+    the most brutal set of fellows under the sun. I must tell you that I and the little
+    children were all invited to supper with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great
+    honor. I thought I must buy new dresses for the little ones; and&mdash;would you
+    believe it possible?&mdash;when I went out with the children, these wretches laughed
+    at their new dresses."</p>
+    <p>"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those that are alive,
+    as if they were his own brothers. One night he said, when I entered the
+    room,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"'Is that you, Horace?'</p>
+    <p>"'No, papa.'</p>
+    <p>"'Oh, I see! I thought you were Horace; for he was talking to me just now, and I
+    suppose has just left the room.'"</p>
+    <p>Speaking of his father, one day, suddenly and without introduction, he
+    exclaimed,&mdash;"There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know my dear
+    father better; for I am sure a better, kinder, or juster man could never have
+    existed."</p>
+    <p>When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that a telegram should be
+    sent to the eldest daughter,<a id="footnotetag11" name="footnotetag11"
+    href="#footnote11"><sup>11</sup></a> who resided in Ireland, but he forbade any
+    mention of this fact to the patient. De Quincey seemed to have a prophetic feeling
+    that she was on her way to him, saying, "Has M. got to that town yet, that we stopped
+    at when we went to Ireland? How many hours will it be before she can be here? Let me
+    see,&mdash;there are eight hours before I can see her, and three added to that!" His
+    daughter came sooner than the family expected; but the time tallied very nearly with
+    the computation he had made. On the morning his daughter arrived occurred the first
+    intimation his family had seen that the hand of death was laid upon him. He had
+    passed a quiet, but rather sleepless night, appearing "much the same, yet more than
+    ordinarily loving." After greeting his child, he said, "And how does mamma's little
+    girl like her leaving her?" "Oh, they were very glad for me to come to grandpapa, and
+    they sent you this kiss,&mdash;which they did of their own accord." He seemed much
+    pleased. It was evident that M. presented herself to him as the mother of children,
+    the constant theme of his wanderings. Once when his daughter quitted the room, he
+    said, "They are all leaving me but my <i>dear</i> little children." "I heard him
+    call, one day, distinctly, 'Florence! Florence! Florence!'&mdash;again, 'My dear,
+    dear mother!'&mdash;and to the last he called us 'my love,' and it sounded like no
+    other <a name="page374" id="page374"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 374]</span> sound
+    ever uttered. I never heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every tone of his
+    voice. It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all understanding."</p>
+    <p>During the next night he was thought dying, "but he lingered on and on till half
+    past nine the next morning. He told me something about 'to-morrow morning,' and
+    something about sunshine; but the thought that he was talking about what he would
+    never see drove the exact idea out of my head, though I am sure it was morning in
+    another world he was talking of."</p>
+    <p>"There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both for some time
+    before and after death. He looked more like a boy of fourteen, and very beautiful. We
+    did not like to let in the morning light, and the candle was burning at nine o'clock,
+    when the post brought the following letter, which my sister and myself glanced over
+    by the candle-light, just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the
+    moment it did not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
+    coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"'<i>Brighton, Dec. 7th, 1859</i>.</p>
+      <p>"'My Dear De Quincey,&mdash;Before I quit this world, I most ardently desire to
+      see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than sixty years ago, we were
+      school-fellows together and mutually attached; nay, I remember a boyish paper ("The
+      Observer") in which we were engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career,
+      mine far from brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological student. It seems
+      a pity we should not once more recognize one another before quitting the stage. I
+      have often read your works, and never without remembering the promise of your
+      talents at Winkfield. My life has been almost a domestic tragedy. I have four
+      children in lunatic-asylums. Thank God, it is now drawing to a close; but it would
+      cheer the evening of my days to receive a line from you, for I am, with much
+      sincerity,</p>
+      <p>"'Your old and attached friend,</p>
+      <p>"'E.H.G.'</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>"I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward constantly recurred in
+    his wanderings.</p>
+    <p>"Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last pathetic sighs,
+    so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor, worn-out garment laid aside."
+    Just before he died, he looked around the room, and said very tenderly to the nurse,
+    the physician, and his daughters, who were present, "Thank you,&mdash;thank you all!"
+    Sensible thus to the very last of kindness, he breathed out his life in simple
+    thanks, swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy that had ruled his
+    life.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page375" id="page375"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 375]</span>
+    <h2>MRS. LEWIS.</h2>
+    <center>
+      A STORY IN THREE PARTS.
+    </center>
+    <center>
+      PART I.
+    </center>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>"Here's something Gus Lewis would like to send by you, mother," said my hasty boy
+    John, plunging into the room at nine in the evening, and stumbling over two trunks,
+    three valises, and bandboxes countless.</p>
+    <p>The floor was strewn with bundles, and the mantel-piece adorned with letters,
+    directed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and New York.</p>
+    <p>"Oh! ah! yes. Any packages, if not too large," said I, wistfully eying the box, (a
+    foot square,) full of fresh maple-sugar, with its card of direction to "<i>Mrs. Lulu
+    L., by the politeness of Mrs. Prince</i>." Boy-like.</p>
+    <p>"First of all, my John, go you to bed, where Charley has been this half-hour, and
+    say good-bye, for we shall be off before you are up."</p>
+    <p>"See, then, father, if you are!" retorted the wide-awake youth, going out of the
+    room in ground and lofty tumbling, and up-stairs in somersets.</p>
+    <p>"I don't see," said I, pettishly, "how I <i>am</i> to get this bundle into my
+    trunk, nor where in the world this great box of sugar is to go. See! not a direction!
+    but I suppose she is in New York somewhere."</p>
+    <p>"We shall see her at all events, which is something. I should like to know what
+    she is like,&mdash;not to look after her boy for two mortal years," said the
+    Dominie.</p>
+    <p>"I hope not like Gus. He'd make an ugly woman, with his black hair and heavy
+    eyebrows, and his big, black eyes always staring. He don't look like an American
+    child."</p>
+    <p>"If we could only say what an American type is. At present, it is a little of
+    everything."</p>
+    <p>"I mean a New-Englander,&mdash;an original American."</p>
+    <p>"Well, he don't.&mdash;What do you say to these trunks? Shall we try again to
+    compress the gigantic genie into the copper vessel? I thought it was a dangerous
+    move, that last one of yours, taking out Tirzah White's quilted coat. And what's to
+    be done with these three packages?"</p>
+    <p>"Well! we can't sit here!" said I, briskly; "half-past nine already, and only one
+    trunk packed! Never mind. You can put these three bundles in with your clothes."</p>
+    <p>"Bursting the lock, now."</p>
+    <p>"How easy 'tis to pack other people's things! But what, then, have you in
+    there,&mdash;I mean, besides your shirts, etc.?"</p>
+    <p>"<i>Imprimis</i>. Eight volumes of Scott's Commentaries, brought by Deacon
+    Boardman. I am to exchange them. They are imperfect. <i>Item</i>. A dozen of 'Sinbad
+    the Sailor,' sent by mistake to the Association, instead of Doddridge. These books
+    won't press nor give, more than sound doctrine; and I must have room for my gown,
+    without which I am nothing."</p>
+    <p>The clock struck ten, and we were still struggling with unabated ardor to compress
+    Lorana Briggs's shawl, and the flat packages from Burt's, into the largest
+    carpet-bag, that there might be room for the seventeen letters on top of the
+    minister's luggage, inside the sanctuary of his silk gown.</p>
+    <p>"We can carry a good deal in your coat-pocket, my dear," said I, cheerfully; for
+    really we seemed to be coming to daylight, a little.</p>
+    <p>"Full."</p>
+    <p>The knocker sounded.</p>
+    <p>"My galoches at last! Deacon, I can't ask you to come in, we are so untidy; but I
+    couldn't pack as I meant to, this afternoon."</p>
+    <p>How we dreaded his coming in,&mdash;half deacon, half shoemaker, and two-thirds <a
+    name="page376" id="page376"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 376]</span> missionary,
+    with his "Panoplist" sticking out of his coat-pocket, and his ears evermore pricked
+    up for the latest news from Bombay! and how angry I had been for three weeks because
+    I couldn't get those indispensable galoches!</p>
+    <p>It seemed as if he never would go from the half-open door. He reckoned the York
+    folks would stare to see so many patches; he expected ministers down to York warn't
+    quite so carfle and troubled about many things, as they be to Weston; but he added,
+    with a grim joyfulness,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"We took up a good collection, though, last Sabbath! eight dollars and fifteen
+    cents, clear!"</p>
+    <p>"Yes, Deacon," responded the minister, with as much heartiness as he could muster,
+    between the pushings, puffings, and pressings at the carpet-bag; "a cup of cold water
+    shall in no wise lose its reward, we're told.&mdash;These carpet-bags stretch
+    well!"</p>
+    <p>"Them poor, dear heathen!" groaned the Deacon.</p>
+    <p>"Oh, dreadful!" chimed I; "give me that biggest shawl, will you?&mdash;no, the
+    other,&mdash;Ursula Drury's! Shall we ever finish packing?"</p>
+    <p>"S'pose ye'll see th' A.B.C.F.M.!&mdash;Lucina Rand's put in 'the avails of a
+    hen,'&mdash;and Semela Briggs sold the silver thimble her aunt gin her. 'T all helps
+    the good work. I told the Widow Rand she'd ough' to do somethin' for the heathen, so
+    she's gone to raisin' mustard. She said she hadn't more 'n a grain o' that to spare,
+    she was so poor; but I told her 't would be blest, I guessed. Widow Rand's rather
+    worldly-minded, I'm afraid."</p>
+    <p>A minute more and we should have had Hindostan, Harriet Newell, and Juggernaut.
+    Happily, somebody came for the Deacon, and we were left to our packing again.</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <p>This was the second week in May, in the year 1830. We were a promising country,
+    but had not yet performed. Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor cheap postage had been
+    established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked their fingers in garrets, waiting for
+    the good time coming; and philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain,
+    in Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose, their fine
+    sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of eloquence, and fell flat
+    to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled by stage-coaches; and postage for over
+    a hundred miles rose to eighteen cents. Not a lover's sigh for a cent less; and it
+    took a fortune for persons of sensibility to exchange sentiments.</p>
+    <p>The consequence to country-people of this last-mentioned fact was, that everybody
+    who went anywhere took everybody's letters, and, as there were no expresses, added,
+    of course, everybody's packages and messages. And the consequence of this was, that
+    everybody made everybody's purchases, whether gowns, books, bonnets, or what not. It
+    mattered little who did errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one
+    store-keeper bought our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods,
+    and our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter weather. I
+    remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the &aelig;sthetic conversation
+    at one of our parties, where Art was on the <i>tapis</i>, made a comical mistake, but
+    one natural enough, too,&mdash;stating that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes
+    for ten dollars. We were not thinking of exactly the same kind of Vandyke that he
+    was.</p>
+    <p>Many a time have I carried in my trunk more letters than the mail-bag did to
+    Boston, and conscientiously finished all the parish's business before touching my
+    own.</p>
+    <p>A certain amount of self-complacency and satisfaction is felt, and laudably
+    earned, by being intrusted with commissions; and I flatter myself few persons ever
+    set off for New York with such an array of them as I did on this occasion.</p>
+    <a name="page377" id="page377"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 377]</span>
+    <p>Looking over my list, I must confess to a flush of real enjoyment at finding
+    <i>carte blanche</i> for a scarf. "Now, that is something like!" said I. "I can see
+    now how pleasantly an artist feels, or would feel, at an order for a
+    picture,&mdash;'your own subject,&mdash;your own terms.' Miss Patty Jones knows what
+    is what, and shall be my patroness."</p>
+    <p>And did I not vindicate triumphantly Miss Patty's confidence? I knew better than
+    to buy her a gray and brown thing, merely because she, too, was gray and brown. I
+    wreathed her with lilies and hyacinths and French green leaves, and she blossomed
+    under it like a rose. If she were not the garland, she wore it, and so borrowed bloom
+    and gay freshness. She extolled my taste to all Weston.</p>
+    <p>Then Mrs. Eben Loring had concluded on the whole that I should buy her a hat, in
+    Maiden Lane, at the very tip-top milliner's. The thought of my return was somewhat
+    embittered by the prospective necessity of carrying two very large bandboxes in my
+    lap, in case of rain. Rain might not unreasonably be expected in the course of a
+    three days' journey. Think of all the bandboxes that in such a case would be put in
+    at the coach-window by the driver, to be held in the hapless laps of the nine
+    passengers! Almost I was persuaded to leave my own black satin bonnet, and
+    perambulate the streets of New York in my travelling-calash, which looked exactly
+    like, and was nearly of the size of, a "bellows-top shay."</p>
+    <p>I was thinking of this last sacrifice, when my husband said, in a dreamy,
+    bewildered way,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Here are five boxes, mother, two bundles, and the rest of these books. I give
+    up!"</p>
+    <p>"Give up? Not I! Now, where a man's energies are exhausted, a woman's just begin
+    to show themselves. First and foremost, lock this trunk, and let me put the key in my
+    pocket. That's one thing done, and can't be undone."</p>
+    <p>He stepped back from the trunk.</p>
+    <p>"What's this? all your clothes on the floor!"</p>
+    <p>"Well, yes, my dear, most of 'em. You see, I couldn't leave Zipporah Haven's shawl
+    out, which she sends to her grandmother; and I must put in these bundles of the
+    Burts's, and Mary Skinner's box of linen thread. If my own things are lost, why, they
+    must be replaced, you know, my dear; that is all."</p>
+    <p>"And we must keep a good lookout, ourselves, that our bandboxes and bundles don't
+    fall off behind," replied the Dominie, faintly.</p>
+    <p>"Yes; and you can put the small trunk under my feet, and the big basket under your
+    own, and you will keep an eye on my red shawl,&mdash;and pray don't lose the
+    umbrella, nor your great-coat, nor your cane. I will, on my part, see to these three
+    small bundles, and my parasol. Doubtless we shall go on smoothly as need be, only I
+    am afraid you won't be able to think up many sermons on the highway. There! I forgot
+    the jar of currant-jelly to go to Ruth Hoyt's aunt! However, we must manage somehow.
+    You are sure our names are down at the stage-office?"</p>
+    <p>But, like Charles XII., "after Pultowa's dreadful day," when the tale-teller
+    listened for his sympathy,</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "The king had been an hour asleep."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>I am ashamed to say that I must have lost myself after that, though I thought I
+    was only thinking of the Day of Judgment. But I must have dreamed it, or how should I
+    have thought it the last trumpet, when it was only the stage-driver's warning
+    knock?</p>
+    <p>It was delightful to hear the knock, and the simultaneous clang of pots and pans
+    which assured us, that, though night had been no night to us, the dark morning would
+    usher in our breakfast with coffee by the faithful Polly. The driver coming in again
+    before we had finished, we seduced him without scruple into taking a cup of boiling
+    comfort, while we guiltily collected the waifs and strays of our multifarious
+    luggage. Many a time I have waited, myself, in the coach, while similar orgies were
+    going on among the unready, <a name="page378" id="page378"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 378]</span> so I know just how vexed and impatient the passengers
+    were. But what use to go on without the driver? At last we squeezed into the full
+    stage.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>No sooner in than out, however. I was determined not to die before my time, as I
+    was sure to do on the back-seat of an overloaded stage, with nine passengers, besides
+    numerous, because gratuitously earned, children. "For who," as it was sometimes
+    pertinently asked, "would charge anything for a poor little innocent child?" The
+    younger, the more innocent, of course, and the more numerous.</p>
+    <p>"If you'll set up here 'long o' me, Miss Prince, there's a plenty o'
+    room,&mdash;and for you, too, Parson," said the good-natured driver.</p>
+    <p>Extricating ourselves from the Black Hole, we delightedly clambered to the heights
+    above, regardless of risk, and catching at wheel and step like Alpine hunters. How
+    comfortable the seat was, with the fresh, early morning air blowing freely in our
+    faces! How small the horses looked in the dim light of three o'clock! How oddly the
+    wheel-horses looked, all backs and no legs!&mdash;and how mysteriously many were the
+    reins that were tied round and round the iron lantern-rod!</p>
+    <p>"Just let me put the mail-bag under your feet, Miss Prince. Here we are, now, all
+    right, and nothin' to do but go along!"</p>
+    <p>"Now, then!"</p>
+    <p>"Come up! come! come!"</p>
+    <p>But in vain were caresses; in vain were chirrups, duckings, and kisses, wafted to
+    the nigh leader. Like the rebellious South of to-day, he had taken his attitude, and
+    stood now on four legs, now on two, pawing only the dark air, and regardless of the
+    general welfare behind him.</p>
+    <p>"Now what will you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally afraid of
+    horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence: partly in the staid, heavy
+    mass of determination beside me, who looked so calm and good-natured; and partly in
+    the queer, elfin look of the beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary
+    connection with our safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to
+    get on with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the
+    occasion by plunges, rearings, and kickings.</p>
+    <p>Still gathering the reins lightly in his large hand, the stable and sure
+    intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his long whip at
+    the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping galled his proud neck! How
+    his black back curved, and his small head tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce,
+    but just pawed like a fairy horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or
+    to herald in the morning.</p>
+    <p>"He'll start by-'m-by,&mdash;he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos start,"
+    remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness, the unerring switch
+    every half minute.</p>
+    <p>What acted on the capricious thing at last,&mdash;whether the Inevitability behind
+    him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the "beautiful disdain" left
+    his black back and tossing mane in a moment, and he buckled down to his work with an
+    energy worthy of the cause, and with a good-will that was an example to the other
+    three.</p>
+    <p>"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin' wantin' but
+    the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I won't never drive 'em
+    together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He says they'd run till they dropped
+    down dead. I guess they would. He's a putty critter enough, and well made, but
+    dreadful ugly. Now, I like that 'ere wheeler!"&mdash;he pointed his whip towards the
+    horse below my foot. "She's kind,&mdash;that mare is; and she's fast enough, and
+    handsome. Broad back,&mdash;short legs,&mdash;goes like a duck!"</p>
+    <p>In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
+    own?&mdash;a man of means,&mdash;owning his team,&mdash;and with more knowledge of
+    his district than most members of Congress have? <a name="page379"
+    id="page379"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 379]</span> Indeed, I believe he's in
+    Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody knows a hill by
+    experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green Mountains are full of
+    comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns their highest and tallest tops; but
+    the hills of New Hampshire are Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the
+    roads of old time made by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no
+    circuitous, soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
+    deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the shortest
+    air-line between places.</p>
+    <p>Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a steep
+    place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the foot of a long hill,
+    of a two-mile stretch, the driver generally stopped, to indicate the propriety of the
+    male passengers, at least, ascending the hill on foot. And often the whole stage-load
+    gladly availed itself of the permission. It was handy for the owners of bandboxes, to
+    pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now and then; and the four
+    beasts, like those in Revelation, said "Amen" to the kindly impulse of humanity that
+    lightened their load, and left them to scramble comfortably from one side to the
+    other of the still ascending path. When they did get to the top of some of those
+    Walpole hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the
+    far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!</p>
+    <h3>IV.</h3>
+    <p>We had the mails to change at the post-offices, and a seemingly inexhaustible
+    store, intrusted to the care and courtesy of the driver, and surrounding him like a
+    rampart,&mdash;of newspapers, bundles, cans, pillow-cases full of dried apples, and
+    often letters.</p>
+    <p>At the red house near the mill below Surrey, a sweet-looking girl ran out, as we
+    passed, holding her hand forward for a letter, which our driver pretended to drop
+    half a dozen times, on purpose to tantalize her. It was pretty to see her blushing,
+    sparkling face, as the blood danced to her brow with hope, and back with the baffled
+    expectancy to her heart.</p>
+    <p>"Neouw, Sil, be still! give to me, yeouw!"</p>
+    <p>If it hadn't been Yankee, it was soft and melodious enough for an Italian peasant.
+    As picturesque, too, was her short, blue woollen petticoat, and white short-gown,
+    that "half hid and half revealed" the unconstrained grace of healthy mountain-nature;
+    and more modest the happy look with which she received the letter at last, and flew
+    with it like a bird back to the red nest.</p>
+    <p>"A love-letter, I suppose," said I, answering the twinkle of the driver's
+    good-natured eye.</p>
+    <p>"Wal, I expect 's likely. They've been sparking now over a year. And it's a pity,
+    too, such a real clever girl as that is! She a'n't so dreadful bright, but she's real
+    clever, and ough' to hev a better chance 'n Jim Ruggles."</p>
+    <p>"A bad match for her?"</p>
+    <p>"Wal, Jim's a good feller enough, but he drinks. I don't mean to say nothin' agin
+    moderate drinkin'. I drink myself moderately. But Jim's a real sponge. He'd drink all
+    day hard and never show it, without it is bein' cross, maybe, and paler 'n common.
+    Now I say,&mdash;and I a'n't no 'reformed inebriate,' nor Father Matthew
+    sort,&mdash;but I do say, and will hold to it, such a man at twenty-one makes a poor
+    beginnin'. If he lives, he'll be a poor shote, and no mistake. I'm sorry for the
+    gal."</p>
+    <p>"Somebody ought to tell her. Why not you?"</p>
+    <p>"Wal, what's the good on 't? She wouldn't hear a word. When a woman's once sot her
+    mind, don't do no good to talk. For that matter, talkin' never did do much, I'm
+    thinkin',&mdash;exceptin' preachin'. We're bound to hear that, Parson," he added,
+    laughing, and with a nod which might seem respectful.</p>
+    <p>In three hours we had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this of a <a
+    name="page380" id="page380"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 380]</span> warm day, and
+    with a full complement of passengers. We had watched the sun rise over Walpole hills,
+    and the specks in the distance where the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The
+    breaking day, the bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the
+    welcoming day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are all
+    sharp for the ready breakfast, at six o'clock.</p>
+    <p>Then, as I am talking of the past, and not of the present, there was time enough:
+    time enough for the comfortable discussion of breakfast, for the changing of raiment
+    among the babies, for chatting in the bar-room, for the interchange of news among the
+    men, and even for glasses of milk-punch. Tell it not in modern Gath that even the
+    Dominie spiced his half-mug of flip with an anecdote, and that every man and woman
+    took cider as well as coffee.</p>
+    <p>How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during this journey
+    of three days and a half to New York? Modern travellers, who are, or are not, as it
+    happens, run off the track, smashed up, or otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed
+    of, have little notion of our successive and amusing accidents, and of how they
+    diversified and occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the <i>ennui</i> which
+    comes from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one of
+    accident.</p>
+    <p>That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,&mdash;that one of the leaders had
+    fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our driver, who was
+    in hopes the critter wouldn't have 'em that day,)&mdash;that the coach wholly
+    collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into a promiscuous heap of
+    unbroken bones,&mdash;this, and such as this, will be easily believed by any
+    New-England traveller who remembers thirty years back. But how we fell so softly that
+    the brains were never damaged,&mdash;why falling into ditches at night wasn't an
+    unhealthy process,&mdash;and, above all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps,
+    strings, and nails should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully
+    adapted to every emergency,&mdash;that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
+    amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that almost think,
+    and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted his natural tact, expediency,
+    and invention. With string and nail in his pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus
+    to get away from a Yankee, or his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only
+    been a Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered with
+    roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own powers, knew all
+    about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the light of a pine-knot in his
+    father's kitchen. This rude culture is the commonest fact among our mountaineers.</p>
+    <p>We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their bright,
+    concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like to know who would stop
+    anywhere now to see anything! One might as well be put into a gun and fired off to
+    New York as go there now by steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not
+    unlike a "resonant steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the
+    other.</p>
+    <p>But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as <i>was</i> a
+    journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you entered their hearts and
+    took lodgings,&mdash;sometimes for life.</p>
+    <p>Then the country! You saw that, too,&mdash;not the poorest part of it, scooting
+    round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole way flat, and are glad
+    to shut your eyes and listen to the engine, rather than have them ache with seeing
+    everything you would never wish to look at!</p>
+    <p>All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we leave the
+    Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long, dreary reaches of unfertile
+    pastures, and its wealth of stone <a name="page381" id="page381"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 381]</span> wall,&mdash;so abundant that travellers wonder where
+    the stones came from to build it, seeing no lack in the road or field,&mdash;from the
+    time we enter on trim, well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new
+    interest and beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
+    ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and enter for
+    the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of fine landscape,
+    maturity. With and under the old oaks and birches rest the sad-colored houses that
+    have held life and experience,&mdash;birth, death, and old historic adventure.</p>
+    <p>Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and
+    Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of Indian
+    struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in caves, or bursting out
+    like white spirits to lead and avenge. The air is peopled with traditions far back
+    from the present, but with which the grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems
+    still to sympathize.</p>
+    <p>In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire spring into the
+    exultant richness of the winged butterfly,&mdash;into white, fragrant fields of
+    blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.</p>
+    <p>In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in ever
+    varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my fellow-passengers, and,
+    except in listening to some communicative old women, might really, as far as society
+    was concerned, as well have been travelling in the style of to-day. Beyond the casual
+    acquaintances I made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who
+    interested me until we reached Springfield. There, at the top of the first short hill
+    outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing in the river-mist
+    like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody whom my prophetic soul announced
+    as a companion, looking wholly unlike a ghost, and very unlike a mist. He raised his
+    hand, just as we were about passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver
+    suddenly reined in his team.</p>
+    <p>A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest, showed us a
+    traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.</p>
+    <p>He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for himself just
+    above us among the countless boxes.</p>
+    <p>"Don't let me disturb you, Madam All right. Just room for my bag. Go on,
+    driver."</p>
+    <p>"Fine day," said we.</p>
+    <p>"A warm morning. I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,&mdash;but the sun
+    is too hot for me."</p>
+    <p>He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his broad brow
+    with his handkerchief. Then he looked at us with clear blue eyes, and tossed back his
+    curling brown hair. He had a gray travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but
+    which was then a novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson
+    lips, and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
+    American. So much the better.</p>
+    <h3>V.</h3>
+    <p>I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of investigating, at
+    least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once, evidently. A country-parson and
+    his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I will promise faithfully that it shall be the
+    last time I will refer to myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be
+    absolutely necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this man
+    and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the next five years.
+    Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with my husband, and nodding from
+    time to time gravely at me, as If to take me into the conversation,&mdash;little
+    thought I of the shadow he <a name="page382" id="page382"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 382]</span> would one day cast over both of our lives!</p>
+    <p>He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten minutes,
+    toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's cooking-stove six inches
+    square, a curious invention, new then, and a wonderful convenience.</p>
+    <p>"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good bread and
+    sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often walk fifty miles
+    together."</p>
+    <p>We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the world nobody
+    walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if not a chaise; and he must
+    be miserable indeed who did not own at least one horse. Nobody in his sober senses
+    demeaned himself to walking. Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers
+    instituted the custom, to be as unlike the British as possible,&mdash;as they did of
+    making their houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.</p>
+    <p>This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with fresh air,
+    jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We looked at his six feet of
+    height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained
+    supernatural vigor from natural contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free
+    step, as a child approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the
+    topics he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
+    connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops, of great
+    walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath; never of the solemn
+    hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing or whispering: no, all about him
+    sounded like the free, dashing, rushing water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry
+    lips, and wind-crimsoned cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly
+    to the outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort of
+    purposeless activity,&mdash;energy for its own sake. While his energies harmonized
+    with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of knowledge, one felt that he would
+    have much power for good. But suppose his activities to take a wrong direction, all
+    his powers would help him to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would
+    have the same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
+    balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure; yet,
+    according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to have elevated and
+    refined him far more than it had done.</p>
+    <p>Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was good-natured,
+    impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,&mdash;that he loved himself and his own enjoyment
+    too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress another. There is a little difference
+    between this and kindness. No matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he
+    looks sharply enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
+    continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would walk
+    rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them bleeding under his
+    heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had lived at least thirty-five
+    years, and was too old to be made over into anything else by any experience.</p>
+    <p>His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he said. He
+    had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite sure, that, if he had
+    lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth century, he would have ruined
+    himself twenty times over for a favorite bulb, even without being a Dutchman.</p>
+    <p>His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without scruple every
+    other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in professing a similar passion, on
+    purpose to confound him with a description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of
+    jessamine and Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
+    azaleas <a name="page383" id="page383"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 383]</span> and
+    gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers, and hollyhocks.</p>
+    <p>"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I had said,
+    that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for day-lilies or tulips; "promise
+    me that I may show you my tulips, and I will promise you that you shall like botany
+    hereafter."</p>
+    <p>We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which I said I
+    would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs he gave me on the top
+    of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in the taste of Weston; and some
+    climbing plants, from his house afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have
+    displaced the old glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston,
+    which happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine clambering
+    over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were extinguished forever.</p>
+    <p>I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not matter at all.
+    He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for introduction. We met freely
+    on that platform, and it was pleasant to us to talk on so many subjects outside of
+    personal interest. He had travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way,
+    of much that he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.</p>
+    <p>Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Halloo, old boy, get up here!"</p>
+    <p>He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so attenuated
+    that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean against, and removed a cane
+    and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his bones.</p>
+    <p>It was about half an hour before I saw that the new man was not at all an invalid,
+    but of the natural gaunt frame and pallid complexion of my countrymen. My eyes had
+    become so full of the fresh, rosy life of the Englishman's face, that the new man's
+    face was bleached and unhealthy to me. I happened to glance back from him to the
+    Dominie, and saw, that, allowing for green spectacles, they were both of a color. We
+    were so arranged on the top of the coach, that with reasonable twisting of necks we
+    were able to maintain an animated conversation, and soon found our account in the new
+    element.</p>
+    <p>"Well, Remington!"</p>
+    <p>"Well, Lewis!"</p>
+    <p>"Where from now?"</p>
+    <p>"From Niagara, and home by the White Hills."</p>
+    <p>"And what of the last, or of both?"</p>
+    <p>"Miss Rugg has fallen into the one, and Miss Somebody has been to the top of the
+    other. Had to be brought down, though. Women shouldn't climb mountains."</p>
+    <p>"There has been some talk of a road, or practicable path at least, to the top of
+    Mount Washington."</p>
+    <p>"Never'll be done. Impossible on the face of the thing."</p>
+    <p>"Nothing is impossible to Yankees, Remington."</p>
+    <p>"This is. And now, Lewis, whence come you, and whither go?"</p>
+    <p>"From Weston, and to New York."</p>
+    <p>Here was a <i>denouement!</i> We looked at him with new interest, and saw at once,
+    such was the force of imagination, the very eyes and eyebrows of Gus Lewis. However,
+    it proved afterwards to be only imagination. When we told him we came from Weston
+    only two days and a half before, the conversation assumed the native style of New
+    England, and for the next quarter of an hour we talked of each other and each other's
+    affairs.' Mr. Lewis was delighted to see us, had stayed only an hour in Weston, and
+    there heard of our trip from Auguste,&mdash;profanely called Gus,&mdash;took the box
+    of maple-sugar in charge at once, laughed at the boy-like direction without even a
+    surname, and ended with recommending us to go at once to Miss Post's, on Broadway,
+    where himself and his wife were at present boarding. All the particulars of life,
+    character, and relative interests were discussed between ourselves <a name="page384"
+    id="page384"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 384]</span> and Mr. Lewis with the relish
+    and zest of compatriots. I had forgotten how close a tie was that of Yankee birth,
+    and how like an unknown tongue our talk was to the Englishman, till we stopped and
+    turned to him to say something, and found him fast asleep. Then I was glad that he
+    hadn't heard my satirical description of "donation-parties" at Weston, nor the
+    account I gave of our two boys, our salary of five hundred dollars, and the various
+    comical shifts we had to make to live comfortably on that sum and support aged
+    parents and graceless relations. Little touches told Mr. Lewis the whole story. I
+    knew very well that Mr. Remington would be entirely abroad about such a social
+    existence as ours in Weston, travel he ever so long or widely.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Lewis had black eyes and hair, and bent like an habitual student. He had a
+    scar on his right eyebrow, which he had got by a fall, and by which he had saved the
+    life of Mr. Remington, who was a connection of his wife's. This he told us,
+    afterwards, and I amused myself with drawing parallels between his face and his mind.
+    One side was gentle, sweet-humored, sentimental, with a touch of melancholy. The
+    other, disfigured with the scar, seemed to have been turned harsh, suspicious, proud,
+    reserved, and unrelenting. These were many qualities, all to depend on a scar, to be
+    sure; but they generally herd together, and he might be one man or another, as life
+    presented its dark or sunny side to him. To me, he was very interesting, from the
+    first; and my husband was delighted with him. The Dominie starved in Weston for
+    congenial intellectual nutriment. Nobody but myself could tell what a drain it was on
+    him always to impart, always to simplify, to descend, to walk on the ground with
+    wings folded flat to his back, and the angel in him habitually kept out of view. The
+    most he could do was to insinuate now and then a thought above the farming interest,
+    and in a direction aside from Bombay. More than that exposed him to suspicion, and
+    hindered his usefulness in Co&ouml;s County.</p>
+    <p>Somehow, we got talking of Mr. Remington, which we might well do, seeing him there
+    before us, sleeping like a baby.</p>
+    <p>"That he could always do, like Napoleon," said Mr. Lewis, "and so can accomplish
+    much without fatigue."</p>
+    <p>"Is he married?" said I.</p>
+    <p>"Yes. His wife is in delicate health."</p>
+    <p>I was surprised to hear that he was married.</p>
+    <p>"He hasn't a married look, has he?"</p>
+    <p>"You are talking about me," said Remington, waking up. "I felt it mesmerically.
+    And, to give you a good opportunity, I will walk a mile or two. Give me a good
+    character, Lewis. Hold up, driver!"</p>
+    <p>Springing down, he went on, laughing, before us, now and then calling back to ask
+    if we were nearly through?</p>
+    <p>"He has not the 'subdued domestic smile upon his features mild', that marks the
+    man who has a wife at home," said I.</p>
+    <p>"No. He is a man, however, born under a lucky star, and his cup filled with
+    good-fortune to the brim. His self-lordship has been to him no heritage of woe, thus
+    far."</p>
+    <p>"A certain happiness, but necessarily of a poor quality, comes from being able to
+    gratify our wishes. If he has no more, it is poor enough."</p>
+    <p>"Do you mean that pleasure must be an outgrowth of pain to be properly
+    appreciated?" said Mr. Lewis.</p>
+    <p>"Somewhat,&mdash;mostly," said the minister; "since the insensibility that
+    protects one from pain prevents also delicate picture. I think, indeed, a rational
+    being must suffer in order to enjoy, after infancy."</p>
+    <p>"His eyes don't look as if they had been in training of any sort," said I, without
+    knowing what my words implied, till I saw the harsh expression on Mr. Lewis's
+    face.'</p>
+    <p>"I mean that they have a sort of undisciplined expression, as if he had never been
+    tamed by suffering or sorrow of any sort," said I.</p>
+    <p>"That sadness is the true human look," said the minister, "the look that redeems
+    <a name="page385" id="page385"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 385]</span> us from the
+    mere animal expression of enjoyment. It is the stamp God puts on those He loves. He
+    chastens them; after that, they are no more servants, but sons of the house."</p>
+    <p>I saw by Mr. Lewis's eyes that he understood and felt this. Also, that from his
+    nature he bought his enjoyments every step of the way of life. How differently his
+    cousin laid hold on the cornucopia of enjoyment, and covered himself with bountiful
+    beauty, drinking in at every sense pleasure! The former, as could be seen too, held
+    his title to happiness by the most uncertain tenure; the nervous quiver betraying,
+    and the sensitive blood witnessing, how keenly he felt and how dearly he paid for
+    every passing pleasure. I remember, as I saw his purple, thrilling face, that I hoped
+    his home-life was happy, feeling that to such a man it must be everything. Yet I was
+    sure, from what he did not say, with eye or lips, that he had not learned religious
+    trust. Still, he did not listen to the mere minister, but to the friend; and there
+    sprang up between the two the corresponding interest and respect belonging to natures
+    kindred in depth and sensibility, though of widely differing experience. In
+    after-years, he who had already attained was able frequently to hold out a helping
+    hand to his younger brother; but now, only a smile and a look told much. This
+    acquaintance of the soul is very fascinating. In the two or three steps we take
+    together, with cognizance and measure of each other, what a long path opens before us
+    of alternate shade and sunshine, and how imagination borders every step of the way
+    with richest heart-blossoms! In friendship, all is glowing and enriching. As it has
+    not the depth of love, it neither anticipates nor requires sacrifice. We do not think
+    of doing or suffering for a friend; but the friend ministers to our weakness, and
+    exalts our strength. He sympathizes gently with our self-love, he magnifies every
+    excellence. He is perpetually charmed, alike with the novelty and the similarity of
+    our experience, and unwearied in comparing thoughts and balancing opinions. All, and
+    more, that he gives us, he receives; and so an incipient friendship is one of the
+    most intoxicating delights of life. What long leaps in acquaintance we took during
+    our first hour, and while Mr. Remington still walked up-hill before us!</p>
+    <p>"You will probably have an opportunity to see and judge for yourselves of Mr.
+    Remington, as we are together a great deal, and he is a cousin of Mrs. Lewis's. This
+    will be better than for me to attempt a description, I think, and, on the whole, more
+    satisfactory. He annoys me, and offends me frequently; and then I am not just to him,
+    of course. But he is a fine fellow, honorable and agreeable; and with a love of
+    natural science that leads him, for the time, like a dog. Just now, he is wild with
+    floriculture. Last year, it was geology. You will see."</p>
+    <p>And then, as if he feared to trust himself with his cousin's character, or that it
+    was a distasteful subject for some reason, he turned to the minister, and began
+    talking about Cherry Mountain and the scenery in Co&ouml;s.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Remington called out, at the top of the hill,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Now it is my turn! Let me ride, and I will give your character!"</p>
+    <p>"Oh! we don't need it, I assure you," said I; "we understand him entirely."</p>
+    <p>"Not a bit of it!" said he, shaking his brown curls; "I am the transparent
+    one."</p>
+    <p>He stepped up on the wheel-hub to get his bag, and to say he should strike off for
+    Middleton on foot. He would see us very soon in New York, and claim our promise to
+    visit him.</p>
+    <p>Being relieved from the fascination of personal beauty and presence, with only the
+    impression of character remaining, I was a little ashamed to find how much I had
+    liked, without being at all able to esteem him. It was with a very different feeling
+    that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually
+    transfigured with emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he
+    impressed one as a living soul; <a name="page386" id="page386"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 386]</span> and this inward light gave a translucent beauty to
+    the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal advantages of form
+    and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes of un-sounded depth, and a voice
+    whose rich cadences had an answering rhythm in the inward man, showed what his
+    attractions might be, or were, to a woman. We became curious to see Mrs. Lewis, of
+    whom we gained no idea from his casual references to her.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>LYRICS OF THE STREET.</h2>
+    <h3>VI.</h3>
+    <h3>PLAY.</h3>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          From yon den of double-dealing,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;With its Devil's host,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Come I, maddened out of healing:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          So the false wine cannot blind me,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Nor the braggart toast;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But I know that Hell doth bind me:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Where the lavish gain attracts us,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;And the easy cost,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          While the damning dicer backs us,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Blest the rustic in his furrows,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Toil- and sweat-embossed;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Blest are honest souls in sorrows.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Wifely love, the closer clinging
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;When men need thee most,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Shall I come, dishonor bringing?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Babe in silken cradle lying,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;To low music tossed,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Will they wake thee for my dying?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Yonder where the river grimly
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Whitens, like a ghost,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Must I plunge and perish dimly;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page387" id="page387"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 387]</span>
+    <h2>INTERESTING MANUSCRIPTS OF EDMUND BURKE.</h2>
+    <p>Macaulay opens his most remarkable article on Milton by saying, "The dexterous
+    Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint, till they have
+    awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of
+    him,&mdash;a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood." If
+    we were in the mood, we might take advantage of interesting manuscripts of Edmund
+    Burke, which are now before us, to say something of this remarkable character. But we
+    shall confine ourselves for the present to a passing glance at the manuscripts which
+    have strayed across the Atlantic.<a id="footnotetag12" name="footnotetag12"
+    href="#footnote12"><sup>12</sup></a></p>
+    <p>The authentic manuscripts of Burke have passed through several hands. On his
+    death, they were intrusted to the eminent civilian, Dr. French Lawrence, of Doctors'
+    Commons, and to Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. To these two gentlemen we
+    are indebted for the first eight volumes of the London octavo edition of Burke's
+    Works. The career of Dr. Lawrence was cut short by death in 1809. His associate had
+    the exclusive charge of the papers till 1812, when the venerable widow of Burke died
+    at Beaconsfield, and by her last will gave to Earl Fitzwilliam, the Bishop of
+    Rochester, and the Right Honorable William Elliott the entire direction of the
+    printing and publishing of such parts of the works of her late husband as were not
+    published before her decease,&mdash;bequeathing to them all the printed and
+    manuscript papers for this purpose. Eight more volumes were published by the Bishop,
+    who died in 1828, a few months after the publication of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+    volumes. Mr. Elliott had already died in 1818. The papers now came into the sole
+    possession of Earl Fitzwilliam, the distinguished nobleman associated with the latter
+    portion of Burke's life, from whom they descended to his son, the late Earl
+    Fitzwilliam, who, in conjunction with Sir Richard Bourke, published, in 1844, the
+    four volumes of correspondence, with a few notes of unpublished speeches.</p>
+    <p>We have personal reason to know that there are yet other unpublished manuscripts
+    of Burke in the hands of Lord Fitzwilliam, some of which it was our fortune many
+    years ago to inspect. Mr. Macknight, it appears, applied to the present Earl for
+    permission to publish some of those which are preserved in the archives of Wentworth
+    House, but, "out of obedience to the expressed wish of his father, who published all
+    he thought necessary, he declined to sanction any further publication of these
+    documents."<a id="footnotetag13" name="footnotetag13"
+    href="#footnote13"><sup>13</sup></a></p>
+    <p>There are also letters of Burke which from time to time have seen the light, as
+    they were communicated by their possessors. Among these none equals in interest that
+    addressed to Pitt with regard to his pension, which has been printed recently by Lord
+    Stanhope, in his small, but rich and rare collection, entitled "Miscellanies." This
+    important letter came to light among the papers of Pitt, and has been described by
+    Macaulay as "interesting and very characteristic."</p>
+    <p>The manuscripts now before us are none of these. They have a history of their
+    own.</p>
+    <p>They constitute a thin volume in folio, neatly bound, having a book-mark, and arms
+    with the name of <i>Fillingham</i>. Here are four familiar autograph-letters from
+    Burke to his amanuensis, Swift, all of them written from Margate, on the sea-shore,
+    <a name="page388" id="page388"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 388]</span> and bearing
+    Burke's frank as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a
+    member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the superscription,
+    while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower corner. But English law, while
+    the privilege of franking existed, required also that the name of the place where the
+    letter was pasted, and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should
+    appear in the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in
+    this collection:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Margate July seventeenth, 1791<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;"Mr Swift,<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Mr Burke's Chambers<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"4 Stone Buildings<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Lincoln's Inn<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"London.<br />
+       "Edm. Burke."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of them that
+    "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest dependants with whom he
+    was thrown into any human relationship"; they also "show the statesman, when at the
+    height of literary fame, as busy and anxious in sending his sheets through the press,
+    and making corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs";
+    and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as illustrations of
+    Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to the Nagles in former years." It
+    seems that the amanuensis to whom they were addressed had at his death other similar
+    letters in his possession; but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately
+    committed them to the names, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr.
+    Macknight adds, in a note,&mdash;"These letters I owe to the kindness of John
+    Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the originals."<a
+    id="footnotetag14" name="footnotetag14" href="#footnote14"><sup>14</sup></a></p>
+    <p>Of one of these letters there is an accurate <i>fac-simile</i>, which will be
+    found in the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of Burke.</p>
+    <p>But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript of the
+    "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the <i>identical copy</i> from
+    which the surreptitious publication was made which disturbed the last hours of Burke.
+    The body of it is in the handwriting of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters
+    were addressed; but it shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute
+    and elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of these
+    pages there is an accurate <i>fac-simile</i> in the third volume of Mr. Macknight,
+    who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister, after his death, to the
+    gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect it." <a id="footnotetag15"
+    name="footnotetag15" href="#footnote15"><sup>15</sup></a></p>
+    <p>These manuscripts&mdash;both the letters and the Observations&mdash;all concern
+    the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between himself and Fox,
+    to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate their value, we must glance at
+    the scene by which the memorable friendship of these men was closed.</p>
+    <p>Few political events in English history are read with more interest than the
+    separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but the French
+    Revolution, which separated so many persons in France, reached across the Channel to
+    separate them. They differed so radically with regard to this portentous, undeveloped
+    movement, that their relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed.
+    Burke, in the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most earnestly
+    inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet in me at my time of
+    life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to friends to desert me." Fox whispered,
+    "There is no loss of friends." Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes,
+    there is a loss of friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my <a
+    name="page389" id="page389"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 389]</span> duty at the
+    expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished, Burke walked
+    across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between Pitt and Dundas on the
+    Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears streamed down his face. In the course
+    of his remarks he intimated that Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious
+    terms. Burke at once said that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox
+    replied, "My right honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of
+    his mind. Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish a
+    recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and
+    forgotten."</p>
+    <p>But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth again. "I
+    complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my defence by the right
+    honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was brought to me and evinced the most
+    promising talents, which I used my best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has
+    arrived at the maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever
+    existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of my
+    principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend", but as "the
+    right honorable gentleman", and said, in a taunting style, that "all he had to do was
+    to repent, and his friends would be ready to receive him back and love him as they
+    had previously done". Burke was indignant. He said,&mdash;"I have gone through my
+    youth without encountering any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so
+    unfortunate as to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's
+    friendship, nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the other."
+    <a id="footnotetag16" name="footnotetag16" href="#footnote16"><sup>16</sup></a> This
+    most important and historic friendship was at an end.</p>
+    <p>The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke turned away
+    from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly productions of his pen,
+    entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in
+    the collection before us, addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last
+    corrections of this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is
+    the letter of which a <i>fac-simile</i> is given by Mr. Macknight.</p>
+    <p>Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed and intense.
+    The Whig Club declared, "that their confidence in Mr. Fox was confirmed,
+    strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against him." Burke and some forty-five
+    noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the club. It was then that Burke, in
+    justification of himself and his friends, took the pen, and drew up what his
+    biographer Prior calls the "famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of
+    the Minority, particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke
+    of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third volume of
+    Bonn's edition of his Works.</p>
+    <p>This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections to the
+    course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of that distinguished
+    gentleman. But it was not intended for publication, at least at that time. It was
+    transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with a letter, asking that it might not even be
+    read at once, but that the Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his
+    library-table, and when a day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn
+    to it. Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if not
+    always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the amanuensis whom
+    Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This was none other than Swift, to
+    whom the familiar letters were addressed. Unknown to his employer, he had
+    appropriated to himself a copy in his own handwriting, with corrections and additions
+    by Burke, which seems to have come between the original rough draught and the final
+    copy transmitted <a name="page390" id="page390"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    390]</span> to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke was in his
+    last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless scrivener communicated this
+    copy to an equally faithless publisher, by whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four
+    Articles of Impeachment against the Eight Honorable C.J. Fox." When this was seen by
+    Mrs. Burke, she felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband,
+    that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was relieved so far as
+    it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by the affidavit of Mr. Rivington,
+    succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the publisher on the very day when the
+    tract appeared. But two thousand copies had already stolen abroad.</p>
+    <p>It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to her husband,
+    learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two o'clock in the afternoon
+    of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to him his newspapers and correspondence
+    for the past week. He was less disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does
+    vex me," he said; "but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at
+    anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more exact and full.
+    Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion
+    that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish
+    publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But
+    he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that
+    the Duke of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and
+    incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr. Lawrence,
+    about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to deliver back. He had
+    forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and corrected by himself.</p>
+    <p>This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated to attract
+    attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his last words. Pitt read it
+    with delight, and declared it to be a model in that style of composition. But his
+    latest biographer says of it, that "it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever
+    wrote the 'Observations on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least
+    pleasing of all his compositions."<a id="footnotetag17" name="footnotetag17"
+    href="#footnote17"><sup>17</sup></a> In style, it is direct, terse, and compact,
+    beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended for the
+    public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the manuscript now before
+    us exhibits the minute care with which it was executed. Here also may be traced
+    varieties of expression, constituting the different forms which a thought assumed,
+    not unlike the various drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.</p>
+    <p>But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now dealing with
+    this relic.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page391" id="page391"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 391]</span>
+    <h2>HARVARD'S HEROES.</h2>
+    <p>The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London cannot fail to
+    notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the choir. It is composed of
+    rare and costly marbles and other precious stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it
+    is, its greatest value lies in the circumstance which placed it there. It is a
+    memorial, the tribute of affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms
+    to a noble officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a [Greek:
+    kt&ecirc;ma es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller
+    in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches, in stately
+    cathedrals,&mdash;wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be arrested, whereever the
+    pride of country is most deeply stirred, wherever the sentiment of loyalty is
+    consecrated by religion,&mdash;the Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names
+    of his honored dead. There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense
+    local pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the scenes
+    of their early lives.</p>
+    <p>"It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo; "think what
+    they will say of us at home!"&mdash;and this simple sentence went straight to the
+    heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home is the prevailing thought in
+    each young soldier's heart as he goes into his first fight. And "home" does not mean
+    for him so much broad England as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the
+    school where he was trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in
+    times gone by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory!
+    whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after the morning
+    service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be for him the memorial window
+    through whose blazoned panes the sunlight will fall softly across the "squire's pew,"
+    where as a boy he knelt and worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the
+    marble effigies of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a
+    place among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the school-room at
+    Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,&mdash;that future boys, playing where he played,
+    shall talk of him whom they never knew as "one of ours." For he is well aware that he
+    is making fame not for himself alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most
+    loved and happiest.</p>
+    <p>We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the intense
+    working of such influences upon a people in whom the local association and sentiment
+    are ingrained. We are but just beginning where Englishmen began eight centuries and
+    more ago. Hence our glorifying of the past has been a little indiscriminate, and
+    withal has sought to commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years
+    have taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated energy,
+    compress the work of years into days, and which mark the water-sheds of history. The
+    United States of 1865 will be as unlike the same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike
+    the child. Life is measured by action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first
+    Persian invasion was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule,
+    and "fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look back upon a
+    past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be but natural, as it will be
+    most wise, that we take heed of those elements which have ever been so potent in
+    strengthening national character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet
+    it may be undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole country
+    cannot <a name="page392" id="page392"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 392]</span>
+    participate, which will not for the remainder of this century be thought of by one
+    section without shame and confusion of face, and which will only tend to keep alive
+    the sad old jealousies and hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental
+    columns upon the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon
+    the slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is ended, and
+    the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of the returning citizens
+    to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to level the earthworks of Vicksburg and
+    Port Hudson. In the city where mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law,
+    no one cares to keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade,
+    though they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for they
+    witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly forget. The only
+    memorial that a wise and high-souled nation <i>can</i> erect after this war will be
+    the single monument which shall commemorate the hour of peace restored.</p>
+    <p>But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting than brass
+    the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we are doubly bound in
+    gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who have deserved well of their country
+    in the hour of utmost need. We ought to do this also in that temper which shall look
+    most singly to the noble end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future
+    land. I know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in New-England's
+    foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself, the starry roll of its
+    heroes links it with all the fortunes of our history. Men who sat in the Long
+    Parliament, and who may have seen the Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their
+    early degrees upon Harvard's first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King
+    Philip, were colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of
+    Wolfe and Amherst, and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight years'
+    struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence. Alumni still survive
+    who did military duty in the second war with England. The men of Harvard were with
+    Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec
+    capital. Of these the only record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of
+    the "Triennial."</p>
+    <p>For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid aside the
+    gown for the sash and shoulder-strap, who, first in the bloodless triumphs of the
+    regatta and in "capital training" for the great race of life where literary and
+    professional fame are the prizes, went forth to venture all for honor and country,
+    the Alma Mater surely should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because
+    of her high responsibility in the education of "ingenuous youth," she can do no less.
+    I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal thousands of her
+    surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as he reads the story of her
+    children amid their "baptism of fire." There is a notable peculiarity about this the
+    most purely New-England of our colleges,&mdash;the continual recurrence of familiar
+    patronymics. I take up the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five
+    hundred names I can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots,
+    Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells,&mdash;they come with every
+    Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a hundred and
+    fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent of nobility in this,
+    such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the coronet which marks the union of
+    birth and worth. We cannot, we, the Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep
+    unhonored. Those who shall come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old
+    Harvard, shall occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and
+    Holworthy, have a right not only to count <a name="page393" id="page393"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 393]</span> the academic wreaths which have been won in past days
+    by their namesakes, but also to be taught the inspiring lesson of holy love of
+    country, of highest courage and truth and soldierly virtue.</p>
+    <p>And how shall this be done? Let these few remaining lines suggest at least one
+    plan. Harvard's chief want is a hall for her Alumni, one worthy, in architecture and
+    convenience, of her children's fame, which Harvard Hall is not. That long, awkward
+    room, very hot and cramped to dine in at midsummer, hotter and more cramped still for
+    the Class-day dances, is just fit for one purpose,&mdash;the declamation-exercises of
+    the Sophomore year. Let us have a hall fit for Commencements, for Alumni and Phi-Beta
+    orations, for our annual dinners, worthy of the "Doctor's" poems and the "General's"
+    speeches, with a wainscot, not of vulgar plaster, but of noble oak, against which
+    Copley's pictures and Story's busts may properly be placed.</p>
+    <p>Then let its windows be filled, as in the glorious halls and chapels of England,
+    with memorial glass. Let one of these, if no more, be formed, of the costliest and
+    most perfect workmanship our art can compass, to the memory of the Heroes of Harvard.
+    It shall be the gift of every class which counts among its members one of these.
+    There, amid the gorgeous emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year,
+    their battles.</p>
+    <p>Or, if this may not be, because our Alma Mater is still too poor or too humble to
+    offer to her returning children such banqueting-place,&mdash;if there is no Wykcham
+    or Waynflete or Wolsey to arch for us the high-embowed roof, let us place our
+    memorial in the Library, along its shaded alcoves and above its broad portals. There
+    the bright shadows shall sleep and pass with the sliding day, where the young
+    scholars mused and studied. There the future student, as he walks, shall read as
+    noble a lesson as he can glean from any of the groaning shelves and dusty tomes.
+    There shall be for Harvard her <i>Libro d'Oro</i> wherein she has written the names
+    of her best-beloved.</p>
+    <p>Some token let us have that they are unforgotten. It was no quarrel of vulgar
+    ambition in which they fell. It was the sacred strife for which the mother armed them
+    when she sent them forth. For her they fought, for culture, generous learning, noble
+    arts, for all that makes a land great and glorious, against the barbarism of anarchy
+    and the baseness of a system founded upon wrong and oppression. We cannot, indeed,
+    forget them while we live to come up to our annual gathering, and see the vacant
+    places amid familiar ranks. There will then be question and reply, saddening, but
+    proud. "He fell at Port Hudson, cheering on the forlorn hope." "He lies beneath the
+    forest-trees of Chancellorsville." "He was slain upon the glacis of Fredericksburg."
+    "He died in the foul prisons of Richmond." We cannot forget them, and we would fain
+    leave the memorial of them to future generations. Their fame belongs to Harvard; for
+    what they learned there could not be other than noble, inspiring, manly. Let Harvard
+    make the plan, and give the call, and all of us, from our distant homes and according
+    to our ability, will offer our gifts with gladness. Let the graduates who have
+    leisure and taste and means, and who are still dwelling under the pleasant shades of
+    the Cambridge elms, come together and take up the matter while love and gratitude and
+    pride are fresh.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page394" id="page394"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 394]</span>
+    <h2>WHO IS ROEBUCK?</h2>
+    <p>An inquiring American mind, seeking the solution of this momentous question, would
+    naturally turn to Appleton's "New Cyclop&aelig;dia," Vol. XIV., page 131. The
+    inquiring mind would be enlightened in a somewhat bewildering manner by the
+    description there laid down of a little animal, some of whose qualities are thus set
+    forth in the first article on the page indicated above:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"ROEBUCK. A small European deer of the genus <i>Capreolus</i>.... The skull has
+      a very small, shallow suborbital pit, ... tear-bag indistinct, hoofs narrow and
+      triangular.... The color in summer is reddish brown, in winter olive, with paler
+      shades; inside of the ears fulvous, and a black spot at the angles of the mouth....
+      It is about four feet long.... The horns are used for knife-handles.... They
+      congregate in small families, but not in herds.... From their strong scent they are
+      easily hunted; though they frequently escape by their speed, doublings, springing
+      to cover, and other artifices.... The roebucks are represented in North America by
+      the Virginia deer."</p>
+      <p>Inquiring mind, not wishing for researches in the direction of Natural History,
+      albeit the subject of parallelisms is a somewhat curious study and in special cases
+      infinitely amusing, passes on to the next article in the Cyclop&aelig;dia.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>It is sufficiently obvious that it requires neither fame nor greatness to excite
+    public curiosity. A notorious criminal or an unusually eccentric lunatic frequently
+    gives rise to a larger share of newspaper-comment and general discussion than the
+    wisest and most virtuous of mankind. It must be well remembered by those who have
+    read Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon that a dwarf was attracting thousands to the
+    Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, while the historical painter, stung to madness
+    by the neglect of the frivolous crowd, committed the hideous and ghastly suicide
+    which threw a tragic darkness over the close of his strange and troubled existence.
+    The desperate and dangerous frequently succeed in placing themselves on a bad
+    eminence, from which they are conspicuous enough; and if to be talked of and pointed
+    at be the sole object of their ambition, they can, of course, be congratulated on
+    their success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand quiet
+    firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread widely, and the
+    tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any public man or politician, whose
+    taste is so morbidly depraved and whose aim in life is so debased as to prefer
+    notoriety to honest, useful service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being
+    the especial theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that
+    so many of our fellow-countrymen are at this moment asking the question with which we
+    head these pages,&mdash;"Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <p>An unhappy culprit, who combined with an innocent taste for green peas a thievish
+    method of acquiring their usual savory accompaniment, is reported to have been
+    addressed by an English judge in the following felicitous terms:&mdash;"Prisoner at
+    the bar, Providence has endowed you with health and strength, <i>instead of which</i>
+    you go about the country stealing ducks." Providence has endowed John Arthur Roebuck,
+    member of the Parliament of Great Britain, with fair talents and some power of
+    speech, <i>instead of which</i> (to use the accurate judicial ellipsis) he goes about
+    using violent and vulgar words of menace against those who have never offended him,
+    and scattering firebrands as if there were no gun-powder anywhere to ignite and
+    explode. This would be a mean and mischievous occupation for the dullest man; but for
+    one who has proved by his very failures <a name="page395" id="page395"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 395]</span> that he is not devoid of intellect or energy, it is a
+    monstrous perversion of mental gifts, even if they are small.</p>
+    <p>A portion of the fiery heat of his nature may be traced, perhaps, to the fact that
+    he was born at Madras; but as on the mother's side he is descended from the poet
+    Tickell, the friend of Addison, it would not be altogether unreasonable to have
+    expected in him some few of the amenities of the <i>liter&aelig; humaniores</i>. He
+    soon, however, exchanged the torrid scenes of Oriental life for the snows of Canada,
+    where he received his education; and when we remember what the bizarre oddities of
+    his subsequent career have been, it might be interesting, if we had the materials for
+    the purpose, to inquire what that education was. The British Provinces, however, were
+    not deemed a sufficiently ample theatre of action for the energy of the capacious
+    soul that dwelt in that not over-capacious body; and so, at the age of twenty-three,
+    he repaired to England and commenced his studies for the profession of the law.</p>
+    <p>He was called to the bar in 1832. He had, however, by no means paid an exclusive
+    attention to the study of the law, or his success in his profession might have been
+    greater, and the world might have had a good lawyer instead of a bad politician. The
+    period of his Inner-Temple student-life was a very stirring time in England. Old
+    principles were dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider
+    theories of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian rushed
+    with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most reckless and noisy
+    debating-club spouters of the day. In speaking of the Reform Bill at a meeting at a
+    tavern in London, he said, that, if the bill did not pass, he for one should like to
+    "wade the streets of the capital knee-deep in blood." It was consoling to reflect,
+    even at the time, that the atrocious aspiration was mitigated by the reflection that
+    it would not require a deluge of gore to reach the knees of such a Zacch&aelig;us as
+    Roebuck. "Pretty wicious that for a child of six!" said the amiable Mr. Squeers on
+    one occasion; and pretty sanguinary that, say we, for a rising little demagogue of
+    thirty.</p>
+    <p>As England was at that time in a seething ferment of excitement, men who were
+    unscrupulous in their language were at a premium in the political market, and the
+    respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place of Bath, in Somersetshire,
+    elected the fierce little man as their representative in the Imperial Parliament.
+    This was a great start in life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated
+    his overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation and honest
+    adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful position, and been saved, at
+    least, from the indignity of fetching and carrying for the Emperor of Austria, and
+    from the impertinence of intruding himself into the august presence of Mr. Kinglake's
+    amiable and virtuous friend, the Emperor of France. The English nation might then
+    possibly have pointed to his portrait in their historical gallery as that of an
+    efficient public servant who had deserved well of his country, and he might have
+    escaped a ludicrous immortality as the Dog Tear-'em, in the recent admirable sketch
+    in "Punch."</p>
+    <p>But, in the words of a political song,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;"There weren't no such luck
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;For John A. Roebuck,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And he thought he would teach the whole nation
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;That the Tories were fools,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And the Whigs only tools,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        But Roebuck was England's salvation."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>And he, according to this programme, set himself to reform the Constitution and
+    protect the Colonies.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>he was an eclectic in politics,&mdash;acknowledged no leader, had himself no
+    followers. A chief without a party, an apostle without disciples, a critic without
+    the merest ordinary penetration, a cynic whose bitterness was not enlivened by wit or
+    humor, a spouter whose arguments, when he had any, were usually furnished from the
+    mint, John Arthur Roebuck was for many <a name="page396" id="page396"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 396]</span> years that impersonation of terrific honesty, glaring
+    purity, and indignant virtue, known in English politics as an INDEPENDENT member of
+    Parliament. When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are disposed to be
+    unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they win or retain place and
+    power, such a position, occupied with judgment and fortified by modesty and good
+    sense, is a most powerful and a most beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on
+    by one whose obtrusive egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any
+    serious or permanent influence on his fellow-men. When a Pocket-Diogenes rolls his
+    little tub into the House of Commons, and complains that everybody is standing
+    between him and the sun,&mdash;why, in an assembly of educated and sensible men the
+    sham is soon discovered, the pseudo-cynic seen through, and his affected misanthropy
+    deservedly gains for him universal derision and scorn. Some years after he entered
+    Parliament, Mr. Disraeli, with whom he had many encounters, in which he was
+    invariably worsted, made the House roar with laughter by taunting Roebuck with his
+    "Sadler's Wells sarcasms and melodramatic malignities," and drew a most amusing
+    picture of him as "a solitary sentinel pacing round the deserted citadel of his own
+    opinions."</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "He who surpasses or subdues mankind
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Must look down on the hate of those below";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>but as Mr. Roebuck has done neither the one nor the other, his only chance of not
+    being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated, by his contemporaries, is
+    to continue his work of mischief, and merely change the object of his puny attacks as
+    one becomes more prominent than another, and as he can manage to maintain his own
+    quasi-importance by attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike
+    for this country; so far from that, he admired and praised us, as by an extract from
+    one of his books we will presently prove; but since he has become a self-appointed
+    lackey, has donned imperial livery, and as a volunteer does the dirty work of
+    despots, he must have lost all sympathy with and all regard for an independent, free,
+    and brave people. We hope and believe that this country vastly prefers his censure to
+    his praise, and, as far as it has leisure at the present crisis for any serious
+    consideration of his erratic pranks, would rather have his enmity than his
+    friendship. <i>Non tali auxilio!</i></p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But we must recur to his inconsistent and rather uninteresting career, and so
+    satisfy, and perhaps weary, the curiosity of any reader who is still disposed to ask
+    the momentous question, "Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <p>In 1835, he was appointed the agent&mdash;the <i>paid</i> agent&mdash;of the House
+    of Assembly of Lower Canada, during the dispute then raging between the Executive
+    Government and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially plume themselves on
+    the fact that the members of their legislative bodies are unremunerated, it is
+    somewhat difficult to understand how this exception was made in John Arthur's favor.
+    As a precedent it is to be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious
+    that such an arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members,
+    might throw grave suspicions on the purity of public men, and introduce a wholesale
+    venality into public life. If such a system is permitted, any foreign monarch or any
+    foreign government may secure the services of a British senator as his agent and
+    representative. It is quite appalling to think that the chivalrous Earl of Derby or
+    the conscientious Mr. Gladstone should be shocked by the offer of a handsome annual
+    salary paid quarterly, (not deducting the income-tax,) made by the King of Dahomey
+    for an eloquent defence of his humane and enlightened rule, or by an equally
+    munificent donative from the famous and merry monarch of the Cannibal Islands for the
+    support of himself and his loyal subjects in their copious consumption of human
+    flesh. We should be sorry wantonly to raise so dreadful a suspicion; but if British
+    M.P.s are permitted, <a name="page397" id="page397"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    397]</span> according to the Roebuck precedent, to be PAID agents, why has not
+    Southern money found its way into senatorial pockets? Greedy Mr. Laird, and
+    unscrupulous, money-loving Mr. Lindsay,<a id="footnotetag18" name="footnotetag18"
+    href="#footnote18"><sup>18</sup></a> always resolutely grubbing for the main chance,
+    are perhaps sufficiently paid by indirect, though heavy gains in shipbuilding. Needy
+    Mr. Roebuck may be salaried by the Emperor of Austria, though there is nothing to
+    prove, except his own open-mouthed and loud-tongued professions of purity, that he is
+    not "<i>paid</i> agent" of the Confederate Government. The indulgence of the evil
+    feelings of malice and uncharitableness may, however, sufficiently recompense him;
+    and to him, perhaps, his virtue may be its own reward. But if paid agencies are not
+    permitted, a very serious suspicion fastens on that hard-mouthed, rising lordling,
+    Robert Cecil, son of the Marquis of Salisbury, and one of the most active and
+    energetic champions of the slave-mongers of the South. The young lord, it is well
+    known, stepped down from the lofty pedestal of a bad pedigree to marry the fair, but
+    portionless daughter of an English judge; his father is proverbially mean and stingy,
+    and the young lord himself proportionately poor; and in the intervals of his
+    strenuous advocacy of the claims of the Rebels to European recognition he laudably
+    ekes out his very narrow income by writing articles for the London newspapers and
+    reviews; and rumor says that he communicates gossiping letters, full of piquant and
+    satirical sketches of the proceedings of the House of Commons to two or three of the
+    provincial papers. He is under these circumstances peculiarly open to suspicion. If
+    the proceeding in question is a usual one, why does he not openly avow it? If it is
+    unusual or improper, why does he not deny the soft impeachment so much credited both
+    in this country and in his own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck,
+    after being the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become such
+    a <i>purist</i> as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the Commons, and
+    scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he had touched the yellow and
+    handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable Indian princes and rajahs who come to
+    England with complaints of grievances, sometimes real, and sometimes fictitious,
+    against the British Government.</p>
+    <p>During the period of the "paid agency" Roebuck was tolerably industrious with his
+    pen; but in literature and journalism he proved his utter incapacity for joining in
+    any combined action. Such was his dogged self-assertion and indomitable egotism that
+    none of the ordinary channels would answer his purpose; and so he issued a series of
+    political papers, entitled "Pamphlets for the People," to which the curious may
+    sometimes refer, but which have now lost all their significance and interest. His
+    quarrels with editors and publishers were notorious; and an altercation with Mr.
+    Black, the well-known editor of the "Morning Chronicle," eventuated in a duel so
+    bloodless as to be ridiculous. David's pebble did not reach Goliath, and Goliath was
+    equally merciful to David. In these pamphlets he violently assailed the whole body of
+    editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the papers of any note. And the
+    more accustomed he became to the House of Commons, the greater liberties did he take
+    with the conventional fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility
+    were so indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most
+    unpopular member of the House.</p>
+    <p>In 1837 he lost his election for Bath, <a name="page398" id="page398"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 398]</span> but was reelected in 1841. In a subsequent contest at
+    Bath he was successfully opposed by Lord Ashley, the present Earl of Shaftesbury. On
+    this occasion he exhibited even more than his usual bad temper and bad taste. He
+    declined to accept Lord Ashley's proffered hand; and in the chagrin and vexation
+    occasioned by unexpected defeat he uttered a rabid invective against the
+    Non-Conformist ministers of the place, to whose influence he rightly attributed his
+    rival's success. Lord Ashley was a well-known philanthropist, and his consistent
+    support and patronage of many religious and charitable societies had naturally given
+    him popularity among the Protestant clergy of all denominations,&mdash;a popularity
+    heightened in the case of the Evangelical and Calvinistic ministers by his Lordship's
+    strict Sabbatarianism and his belief in cold dinners on Sunday. On the other hand,
+    Mr. Roebuck was openly accused of private professions of skepticism in matters of
+    religion; and this report, so dangerous to the repute of any public man in England,
+    (where theology and politics so frequently cross each other,) considerably damaged
+    his chance of success. Lord Ashley, however, was in no way responsible for the rumor;
+    and the difference between the conduct of the two during the contest was this, that
+    Lord Ashley behaved like a gentleman and Mr. Roebuck did not.</p>
+    <p>During his retirement into private life, after this defeat in 1847, he wrote his
+    work entitled "The History of the Whig Ministry of 1830,"&mdash;a book in the
+    preparation of which he is said to have received considerable and valuable assistance
+    from no less a person than Lord Brougham. Despite the aid that he received, it is
+    amusing to find in his preface a characteristic vaunting of his entire difference
+    with Lord Brougham about the character of King William IV. "Lord Brougham," he
+    writes, "is accustomed to describe William IV as frank, just, and straightforward. We
+    believe him to have been very weak and very false, a finished dissembler, and always
+    bitterly hostile to the Whig Ministry and their great measure of Reform." This is
+    Roebuck all over. He would infinitely rather argue that white was black than quietly
+    coincide in any generally received opinion.</p>
+    <p>While on the subject of his writings, we will mention the book in which he
+    vouchsafed to praise those whom he now so elaborately vilifies. In 1849 he published
+    an octavo volume of two hundred and forty-eight pages on "The Colonies of England."
+    Speaking (page 84) of the vast and rapid progress made by this country, he
+    says:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"We are led to inquire by what machinery, by what favoring circumstances, such a
+    result has been brought about. The people, be it remarked, are the same as
+    ourselves,&mdash;the original Thirteen States were the work of Englishmen. English
+    heads, English hearts, English hands brought those new communities into existence. No
+    longer connected by government with us, they nevertheless retained the
+    characteristics of the race from which they sprang, and proceeding in the great work
+    to which they were destined, they strode across the continent, the fairest portion of
+    which they could now call their own. In planting new settlements they were aided by
+    our own people,&mdash;the very elements <i>out of which we endeavor to frame
+    colonies, and with which we do produce sickly, miserable communities that can only be
+    said to exist, and to linger on in a sort of half-life</i>, without the spirit of a
+    young, or the amenities and polish of an old community, and, above all, <i>without
+    any spirit of independence</i>."</p>
+    <p>Again, speaking of colonization In this country as opposed to Canada and other
+    English colonies, he writes (page 88):&mdash;"Certain adventurous persons, the
+    'pioneers' of civilization, wishing to make new settlements beyond the boundaries of
+    Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands belonging to the United States, made
+    formal application to the Government of the United States at Washington, who, being
+    bound to afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land surveyed
+    and laid out <a name="page399" id="page399"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 399]</span>
+    into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are also indicated, and at once the law
+    exists; and security, guarantied by the authority of the United States, immediately
+    follows, both for person and property; and all the machinery known to the Common Law,
+    and needed for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law's
+    decrees, is at once adopted. A municipal authority comes into existence; a
+    court-house, a jail, a school-room, arise in the wilderness; and although these
+    buildings be humble, and the men who exercise authority in them may appear to be in
+    some degree rude, yet is the law there in all its useful majesty. To it a reverent
+    obedience is rendered; and the plain magistrate, who, in a hunter's frock, may, in
+    the name of the United States, pronounce the law's decree, commands an obedience as
+    complete and sincere as that which is paid to the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court
+    at Washington, or to the ermined judge who presides in the courts of our Lady the
+    Queen in Westminster Hall."</p>
+    <p>This in 1849; but what a very different tone has he thought fit to adopt now! Was
+    any agency then expected which has not been forthcoming? Or, having degenerated from
+    being a supporter of liberal opinions in his youth to being the fond and fatuous
+    admirer of autocrats in his old age, does he think that it is absolutely necessary
+    that the firm friend of Austrian despotism should be the malignant assailant of the
+    Government and people of the United States? The man is consistent in nothing but his
+    spiteful vindictiveness and love of mischief. He is now the general object of
+    deserved ridicule and contempt for his flunkyistic attendance at the Tuileries. At
+    the time of Louis Napoleon's visit to London, Roebuck raved and ranted about his
+    "perjured lips having kissed the Queen of England."</p>
+    <p>He has, on some occasions, put himself prominently forward, and in such a way as
+    to make himself an influential member of Parliament. He moved the vote of confidence
+    in the Whig Government in 1850, when the great debate ensued in which the late Sir
+    Robert Peel made his last speech, and they were kept in office by a poetical majority
+    of nine. But the speech with which Roebuck introduced the motion was entirely
+    eclipsed by the magnificent declamation of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the present
+    Lord-Chief-Justice of England. On another great occasion, in January, 1855, he
+    brought forward in the House of Commons a motion for inquiry into the conduct of the
+    Crimean War. Lord Aberdeen's Government was defeated by an immense majority, and, of
+    course, resigned. Mr. Roebuck was chairman of the Committee of Inquiry; but the
+    cabinet that came in discreetly declined to give him any official post in their
+    ranks. They knew too well the terrible uncertainty and inconsistency of the man's
+    conduct. They could place no reliance either on his temper or his discretion. In 1855
+    he was one of the numerous candidates for the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Board
+    of Works, but failed to inspire the electors with any confidence in his capacity for
+    the post. In the following year he became the chairman of the Administrative Reform
+    Association, and although the league had at first been highly successful, and aided
+    much in awaking public attention to the miscarriages and mismanagement in the Crimea,
+    yet, under this fatal presidency, it became speedily and ingloriously defunct. This
+    was his last great failure, before abdicating all his early liberal principles. He
+    has of late years endeavored to solace himself for the now irretrievable blunders of
+    his career by an exaggerated indulgence in his idiosyncratic waywardness, paradox,
+    and eccentricity. He is proud of being considered the acquaintance of the Emperor of
+    Austria, and rather pleased than otherwise at being assailed on this account. He
+    affects the society and friendship of conservative members of the House of Commons.
+    He has become tolerant of lords. He may be seen sitting next to Lord Robert Cecil,
+    indulging in ill-natured jocosities, from which his Lordship probably borrows when <a
+    name="page400" id="page400"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 400]</span> he indites
+    ill-natured articles for the misguided "Saturday Review."<a id="footnotetag19"
+    name="footnotetag19" href="#footnote19"><sup>19</sup></a> He hates the Manchester
+    school of politicians, because their liberality and their sympathy with the cause of
+    freedom and civilization in this country remind Roebuck of his own deflection from
+    the right path.</p>
+    <p>His private undertakings have not been more fortunate than his public acts. He was
+    chairman of a bank, which was unsuccessful, to say the least of it. He has been
+    connected with other enterprises, which soon courted and obtained failure.</p>
+    <p>What he has recently said and done in reference to this country is too fresh in
+    our memories to require that we should recite or recapitulate it here. His past
+    career, as we have reviewed it, may account for the now intolerable acerbity of
+    temper and the ludicrous vanity which disgrace him. Never was a Nemesis more just
+    than that which has for the present consigned him to a melancholy obscurity. The
+    political extinguisher has certainly dropped upon his head, and this burning and
+    shining light has gone out with an unpleasant odor into utter darkness.</p>
+    <p>In summing up his character, it is evident that excessive vanity is his besetting
+    sin. He is not too clever or too honest to act in union with other people, but he is
+    too <i>vain</i>. He is by no means too good for the rest of the world; but he is too
+    conceited and self-opinionated to condescend to co&ouml;perate with them. As, at some
+    of the minor theatres, a single actor may play an army, so, in the House of Commons,
+    Roebuck is a host in himself,&mdash;is his own party, and leads it. His occasional
+    popularity in his own country is due to the fact, that, in his own character, he, to
+    a certain extent, represents and crystallizes a few of the good and many of the bad
+    qualities of Englishmen. He has their courage and audacity, their independence and
+    pride, their generally defiant front to the rest of the world; but he is also vain,
+    obstinate, bigoted, prejudiced, narrow in his views, and boastful in his language.
+    His vulgar swagger, for instance, about the navy sweeping the seas, would have been
+    condemned here, if it had been addressed by the most violent of demagogues to the
+    most ignorant of Irish mobs.</p>
+    <p>We have heard him speak in the House of Commons in his palmier days, before he was
+    as decrepit in mind as he is in body. He had great fluency, some power of invective,
+    and a vast stock of assurance. We listened to him upon one occasion, when, without
+    the slightest provocation, he used the most undignified personalities to the late Sir
+    Robert Peel,&mdash;to which Sir Robert, very wisely, never replied.</p>
+    <p>We cannot say that we feel any profound interest as to his future. He has compared
+    himself to a dog,&mdash;but, on behalf of that faithful and valued companion of man,
+    we protest against the similitude. He has the kind of pugnacity which prompts a cur
+    or a puppy to attack a Newfoundland or a mastiff. He has not the fidelity and many
+    other good qualities of the canine race. At any rate, he has become a mischievous
+    dog,&mdash;and a dull dog,&mdash;and will soon be a "sad dog."</p>
+    <p>We would venture to suggest, that he should at once be raised to the peerage,
+    under the title of Baron Tear-'em. He might then aid the good cause of the
+    slave-mongers of the South, and act in unison with that just, generous, moral, and
+    virtuous nobleman, the Marquis of Clanricarde.</p>
+    <p>We ought to apologize to our readers for so lengthy an account of so undeserving a
+    person,&mdash;but, at any rate, they ought by this time to know "Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page401" id="page401"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 401]</span>
+    <h2>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>Six Months in the Federal States</i>. By EDWARD DICEY. In Two Volumes. London
+      and Cambridge: Macmillan &amp; Co.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>This is a very <i>gentlemanly</i> book. Whatever excellence of commendation
+    belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr. Dicey. And it is
+    ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British tourists who have preceded him. For,
+    to make no mention of the vulgar buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that
+    neither the exalted and irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the
+    cleverish magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony
+    Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition. It is no mean praise
+    to say that the word <i>gentlemanly</i> naturally applies itself to a traveller's
+    work. And it is necessary to allow that the majority of Americans who have printed
+    their impressions of a scamper over Europe have fallen as hopelessly below it as a
+    few have risen far above it. Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the
+    sterling sentences of "English Traits"; some epithet of more rare and subtile
+    significance is suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with
+    which Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the "Atlantic." But after the
+    manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would emphatically
+    credit as an American <i>gentleman</i> might speak of six months in England, so has
+    Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal States.</p>
+    <p>And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or
+    "stereographic" descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us which Mr. Dicey
+    offers to his countrymen. To such loyal Americans as these volumes may reach they
+    will give a heart not to be found in Dr. Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the
+    dashing effects of popular Mr. Trollope, nor even&mdash;making all allowance for the
+    sanative influence of counter-irritation&mdash;in the weekly malignity of that
+    <i>ex</i>-Moral Minstrel whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent
+    slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out what petty
+    enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly, English way of accepting
+    the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis he came to study. He seldom gets
+    entangled in trivial events, but knows how to use them as illustrations of great
+    events. It is really refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily
+    delivered from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is not
+    called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the hardships of
+    indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of New-York hackmen. There is
+    scarcely an offence against good taste or good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and
+    whatever American homes may have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more
+    readily than to most publishing tourists from the mother-land.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Dicey clearly exhibits the bearing of the Rebellion upon the fate of the
+    servile population of the South, and confesses that his deep sympathy with the
+    Federal cause came from the conviction that the supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was
+    intimately connected with the success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the
+    necessity that was upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their
+    society, he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign
+    well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the Free States.
+    He has the sagacity to perceive that the genius and development of the graduates of
+    Northern school-houses are totally opposed to a military rule. Mr. Dicey cordially
+    recognizes the democratic idea which sanctifies our convulsion, and displays a
+    careful observation in noting "the self-restraint, the moderation, and the patience
+    of the American people in the conduct of the people's war." He is not over-disturbed
+    because this same people loved law and order more than freedom itself, and with few
+    murmurs committed high principles to the championship of whatever petty men happened
+    to represent them. Indeed, one of the best sayings he reports is that of an old
+    Polish exile, who congratulates himself that there will be no saviours of society, no
+    fathers of their country, <a name="page402" id="page402"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 402]</span> to be provided for when the war is over.</p>
+    <p>Throughout these two volumes British readers may discern something more than the
+    barren facts of our struggle: they may catch glimpses of its energy and movement;
+    they may see it as reflected from the most generous American minds. For it seems to
+    have been Mr. Dicey's good fortune in this country to have gained admission to the
+    society of men and women of high intelligence, in whom the religious sentiment was
+    living and powerful; and he appears to estimate the full weight of testimony such
+    persons offered in sending their loved ones to Virginia to fall beneath the rifle of
+    some Southern boor. It is this silent public opinion of the North which our foreign
+    critics have generally failed to comprehend. They have been so long accustomed to
+    parody the rhetorical elation of our third-rate political speakers, and to represent
+    this as a universal American characteristic, that they signally failed to estimate
+    the genuine emotion with which it is never connected. When the cherished barbarism of
+    slaveholders arose and threatened our Western civilization, those who most felt and
+    have best wrought for their country were cautious in their speech. They knew that the
+    principle underlying the struggle must submit itself to the checks and counter-checks
+    of constitutional law. While the fire of liberty burned at the heart of citizens of
+    abiding loyalty, it seemed best, that, like the Psalmist, they should hold their
+    peace even from good words. Many thought it an act of necessary self-restraint to
+    dwell only upon the Union as a symbol of that universal freedom which they felt the
+    Union must finally represent. The dread of overleaping the restraints of law, which,
+    perchance, has prolonged the conflict, has been most creditable to the genuine
+    democracy we have represented. We are proud to remember many intelligent soldiers who
+    used no language of passionate denunciation towards the guilty institution which
+    called them to the field, yet who knew the end when they gave their lives to a cause
+    utterly antagonistic to its despotic claims.</p>
+    <p>By the representations of Secessionists encountered in the Free States, as well as
+    from disloyal newspapers which the "Lincoln despotism" never sought to suppress, Mr.
+    Dicey was convinced that the sole purpose of the Rebellion was to get possession of
+    the vast regions which lie west of the Mississippi, wherein to establish Slave States
+    and Territories. "The North," he declares, "is fighting against, the South is
+    fighting for, the power of extending slavery across the American continent; and if
+    this was all that could be said, it is clear on which side must be the sympathies of
+    any one who really and honestly believes that slavery is an evil and a sin." But it
+    is not here that Mr. Dicey rests the case of the North as appealing to the Christian
+    sentiment of the world. He shows that the inexorable logic of facts must work the
+    overthrow of slavery where it now exists. The suppression of the slave-trade, the
+    recognition of Hayti, abolition in the District of Columbia, and finally the
+    Proclamation of January have one tendency and can have but one result. We state these
+    views as one more confirmation of the fact, that, whether agreeable to us or not, the
+    sympathies of liberal men in Europe are to be had on the sole ground that ours is an
+    anti-slavery war.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although discriminating,
+    estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored to serve their country by
+    leaving the level commonplaces of respectable citizenship. It is no slight praise to
+    say that his chapter upon the New-England Abolitionists is clear and just. Their
+    points of disagreement with the Republican party are stated with no common accuracy.
+    Careful sentences give the precise position of Garrison and his adherents: the
+    intrinsic essence of the movement of these reformers is divested of the subordinate
+    and trivial facts so often put forward to misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey
+    endeavors not to commit himself upon the vital differences in the agitation of
+    anti-slavery sentiments by the Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very
+    evident that he inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of
+    disunion, acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical
+    compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense conviction of the
+    national sin.</p>
+    <p>We have dwelt thus upon Mr. Dicey's views of the war, and of the great moral
+    question with which it is connected, because these portions of his volumes are <a
+    name="page403" id="page403"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 403]</span> most pertinent
+    to us, as well as creditable to him. His sketches of public characters are good
+    common-sense grasps at them, which generally get their externals, and occasionally
+    something more. The description of the President is forcible, though a little too
+    graphic for perfect courtesy. Caleb Cushing impresses the traveller as one of the
+    ablest of our public men, and Wendell Phillips as by far the most eloquent speaker he
+    ever heard. General Butler, however, is not to Mr. Dicey's taste. Indeed, he is
+    hardly behind the "Saturday Review" in the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man
+    who he acknowledges "was associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms,
+    and by some means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost of
+    either men or money." It is rather late to renew discussion about the notorious order
+    relating to the women of the subjected city. But Mr. Dicey chooses to express his
+    belief in an infamous intention of General Butler at the time of its
+    issue,&mdash;though he declares that "the strictest care was taken lest the order
+    should be abused," and that the "Southern ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their
+    behavior to the Union soldiers, using <i>language and gestures</i> which, in a city
+    occupied by troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, <i>without
+    orders</i>, to the coarsest retaliation." To which we have only to reply, that
+    General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool. Nobody doubts
+    that he has military or civil aspirations for the future, and, for such ends, if for
+    nothing else, wishes the approbation of his loyal countrymen. Now Mr. Dicey testifies
+    to "the almost morbid sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to
+    women": he tells us that "it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female
+    influences"; also, that this same "sentiment" among us "protects women from the
+    natural consequences of their own misconduct." These characteristics of his
+    countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler as they are patent to Mr. Dicey;
+    and we hold it to be simply incredible that one who is at least a very shrewd
+    politician used language which <i>he intended</i> should convey a meaning that must
+    necessarily consign his future career to privacy and infamy. It is perhaps not
+    wonderful that men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system
+    which consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil
+    interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to <i>acts</i> which, in civilized
+    States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one purpose. Neither is it
+    very astonishing that such persons as have been employed to pump the New-York sewers
+    into the <i>cloaca maxima</i> which sets towards us from Printing-House Square should
+    share the sensitive chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do. But
+    it is passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey, one so
+    appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of its representatives,
+    should join in an accusation whose absurdity is only lost in its infinite
+    offence.</p>
+    <p>There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of carelessness or
+    repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances allowed time for revision,
+    might have been avoided. It would require the "Pathfinder" himself to discover
+    "Fremont Street" in the city where we write; the "Courier" is <i>not</i> "the most
+    largely circulated of any Boston paper"; and our Ex-Mayor "Whiteman" requires no
+    fanciful orthography to free his name from the obloquy of an over-devotion to the
+    interests of colored citizens. These are local illustrations of mistakes which are
+    excusable in view of the commendable expedition with which the work was
+    issued,&mdash;for, in the late crisis of our affairs, an Englishman who had any good
+    words to give us fulfilled the proverb by giving twice in giving quickly. But,
+    whatever trifling details might be subjected to criticism, the total impression of
+    what Mr. Dicey has written bears honorable testimony to the accuracy of his
+    observation, as well as to his powers of comparison and judgment.</p>
+    <p>As has been already remarked, we cannot be blind to the fact that our only
+    supporters in England are those men who recognize at the heart of our contest that
+    genuine principle of Liberty which is not to be limited to caste or to race. And it
+    is only by hastening to justify their confidence that we can win to our cause the
+    great people they address. If we cannot gain the national sympathy of England, we
+    must do without the true sympathy of any nation. It was, indeed, remarked by De
+    Tocqueville, that, "in the eyes of the English, the cause which is most useful to <a
+    name="page404" id="page404"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 404]</span> England is
+    always the cause of justice." But the rare insight of the philosopher assigns the
+    phenomenon, not to a political Machiavelism, but to a "laudable desire to connect the
+    actions of one's country with something more stable than interest." The English have
+    a peculiar gift of fixing their whole attention upon certain traits or single
+    circumstances which they desire to see. We doubt not that a portion of their sympathy
+    with the energy and endurance of those in arms against their country is estimable
+    according to its light. But as the dignity of our mission in this struggle becomes
+    more and more apparent, the moral intelligence of England will be forced to unite
+    itself with the Government of the United States. Let that day come when it will,
+    posterity will remember its obligations to those Englishmen who did so much to avert
+    the hideous calamity of a war between the two liberal powers of the world. And to us
+    of this present generation it is grateful to know that our brave and generous young
+    men have not died wholly unrecognized in the land of their ancestors. Mill, Ellison,
+    Hughes,&mdash;what need to name the rest?&mdash;have stood up to report them and
+    their cause aright to the unsatisfied: in which roll of the honorable and honored we
+    are glad to write the name of Edward Dicey.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>Hospital Transports</i>. A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded
+      from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Compiled and published at the
+      Request of the Sanitary Commission. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>If pure benevolence was ever organized and utilized into beneficence, the name of
+    the institution is the Sanitary Commission. It is a standing answer to Samson's
+    riddle, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." Out of the very depths of the agony
+    of this cruel and bloody war springs this beautiful system, built of the noblest and
+    divinest attributes of the human soul. Amidst all the heroism of daring and enduring
+    which this war has developed, amidst all the magnanimity of which it has shown the
+    race capable, the daring, the endurance, and the greatness of soul which have been
+    discovered among the men and women who have given their lives to this work shine as
+    brightly as any on the battle-field,&mdash;in some respects even more brightly. They
+    have not the bray of trumpets nor the clash of swords to rouse enthusiasm, nor will
+    the land ever resound with their victories. Theirs is the dark and painful side, the
+    menial and hidden side, but made light and lovely by the spirit that shines in and
+    through it all. Glimpses of this agency are familiar to our people; but not till the
+    history of its inception, progress, and results is calmly and adequately written out
+    and spread before the public will any idea be formed of the magnitude and importance
+    of the work which it has done. Nor even then. Never, till every soldier whose last
+    moments it has soothed, till every soldier whose flickering life it has gently
+    steadied into continuance, whose waning reason it has softly lulled into quiet, whose
+    chilled blood it has warmed into healthful play, whose failing frame it has nourished
+    into strength, whose fainting heart it has comforted with sympathy,&mdash;never,
+    until every full soul has poured out its story of gratitude and thanksgiving, will
+    the record be complete; but long before that time, ever since the moment that its
+    helping hand was first held forth, comes the Blessed Voice, "Inasmuch as ye have done
+    it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."</p>
+    <p>An institution asking of Government only permission to live and opportunity to
+    work, planting itself firmly and squarely on the generosity of the people, subsisting
+    solely by their free-will offerings, it is a noble monument of the intelligence, the
+    munificence, and the efficiency of a free people, and of the alacrity with which it
+    responds when the right chord is rightly touched. It is, however, not unnatural that
+    doubts should exist as to the success of a plan so far-reaching in its aims and
+    hitherto so untried. Stories have been circulated of a mercenary disposition of its
+    stores and trickery among its officers. Where these stories have found considerable
+    credence, they have been tracked to their source and triumphantly refuted; but it
+    would indeed be hardly less than miraculous, if an institution ramifying so widely,
+    with agents so numerous, and resources so extensive, should have no knaves among its
+    servants, and no waste in its circulation. The wonder is, that more <a name="page405"
+    id="page405"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 405]</span> leakage has not been proved
+    than has ever been suspected. All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to
+    convince all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all
+    hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of what it has
+    done, is doing, and purposes to do. This information the Commission has, at different
+    times, and by piecemeal, furnished: necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book
+    justly remarks, the immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its
+    operations in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in the
+    reading as in the performance. In this little volume we have, photographed, a single
+    phase of its operations. It consists simply of extracts from letters and reports.
+    There is no attempt at completeness or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate
+    grouping would probably fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work
+    and its ways as these unpretending fragments. It delights us to see the&mdash;we can
+    hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the "self-sacrifice" which
+    benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about&mdash;but, rather, the gay, lively,
+    merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold of. Men and women seem to
+    have gone into the service with good-will and hearty love and buoyant spirits. It
+    refreshes and strengthens us like a tonic to read of their taking the wounded,
+    festering, filthy, miserable men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and
+    beef-tea, and putting them abed and asleep. There is not a word about "devotion" or
+    "ministering angels," (we could wish there were not quite so much about "ladies,")
+    but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains and quick hands, now
+    bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be rewarded with one grateful smile from
+    the parting soul,&mdash;now standing in the way of a procession of the slightly
+    wounded, to pour a little brandy down their throats, or put an orange into their
+    hands, just to keep them up till they reach food and rest,&mdash;now running up the
+    river in a steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they
+    go,&mdash;now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents of rain,
+    into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, "calling back to life those in
+    despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again catching for mother or wife the
+    last faint whispers of the dying,"&mdash;now leaving their compliments to serve a
+    disappointed colonel instead of his dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by
+    dragging away the stove with its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood
+    pot-holes;&mdash;and let the sutler's name be wreathed with laurel who not only
+    permitted this, but offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and
+    would take no pay!</p>
+    <p>The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of thousands who
+    love their country and their kind, rest upon those who originated, and those who
+    sustain, this noble work. Let the people's heart never faint and its hand never
+    weary; but let it, of its abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed
+    down, shaken together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen,
+    its divine footsteps may follow,&mdash;that, wherever the red hand of war is lifted
+    to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,&mdash;that its work may never cease
+    until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or until peace once more reigns
+    throughout the land. And even then, gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory,
+    shall never die out of the hearts of the American people.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all Churches,
+      Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith</i>. By WILLIAM HOWITT.
+      Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott &amp; Co.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>There has been a great change of late years in connection with the science of
+    Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it. There was a revolution of opinion on
+    this subject in the middle of the last century; there is a counter-revolution
+    to-day.</p>
+    <p>The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during the course
+    of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclop&aelig;dism of French philosophy. The
+    grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the supernatural were fiercely
+    attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove the insufficiency of such grounds were
+    assumed to prove more than lack of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs,
+    that, in the nature of things, there <a name="page406" id="page406"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 406]</span> is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
+    the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of mortals,
+    except that which relates to the physical,&mdash;to this earth, as the only phase of
+    existence,&mdash;to the vital body, as the all of the human being. Emotional and
+    intellectual phenomena were but results of material organization, as heat is the
+    result of combustion: they exhibited themselves so long as vitality continued; they
+    disappeared when death supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the
+    cessation of combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
+    phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but the mere fancy
+    of an excited imagination.</p>
+    <p>Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this materialistic
+    influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and, more or less, of the rest
+    of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it. The tendency, all over the civilized
+    world, was towards unbelief, not merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual.
+    Science, with her strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
+    direction.</p>
+    <p>It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the Encyclop&aelig;dian
+    school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an insufficient argument is
+    brought forward to prove it. It does not appear to have occurred to skeptical
+    physicists that there may be laws of Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as
+    fixed, as invariable, as those which decide the succession of geological phenomena
+    and the products of chemical combinations.</p>
+    <p>Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God adapts the
+    proofs of that which it is important that man should know to the intellectual
+    progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same evidence which sufficed for the
+    foundation of religious faith five hundred years ago will suffice equally well
+    to-day? Truths are eternal; laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts
+    there is a childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
+    arguments suited to various stages of progress.</p>
+    <p>Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the economy of
+    human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present phase, (that phase being
+    but the preparation for another and a higher,) may it not be, that, as the world
+    advances, men may gradually be permitted, occasionally and to a limited extent, to
+    become aware of influences exerted from a more advanced phase of existence over this?
+    May it not be that the links connecting the two phases of existence are gradually to
+    become more numerous and apparent?</p>
+    <p>Such are the general views which William Howitt's work is intended to illustrate
+    and enforce. He selects, as a title-page motto, an axiom from Butler's
+    "Analogy,"&mdash;"There are two courses of Nature: the ordinary and the
+    extraordinary." By the supernatural he does not mean phenomena out of the course of
+    Nature, but such comparatively rare phenomena as are governed by laws with which we
+    are unacquainted, and as are, therefore, to us something extraordinary, something to
+    be wondered at,&mdash;miracles.</p>
+    <p>The author travels over a vast extent of ground,&mdash;more, we think, than can be
+    properly explored in the compass of two duodecimo volumes. All ages, all countries,
+    all faiths, furnish their quota towards his collection. It is curious, interesting,
+    suggestive, rather than conclusive. It exhibits more industry than logic. It consists
+    rather of abundant materials for others to use, than of materials worked up by the
+    collector. It gives evidence of learning, research, and a comprehensive study of the
+    subject. It is a <i>thesaurus</i> of pneumatological knowledge, collected with German
+    assiduity. It will set many to thinking, though it may convince but few, except of
+    the one truth, that the faith in the supernatural has been a universal faith,
+    pervading all nations, persisting through all ages.</p>
+    <p>The number of those who take an interest in the subject treated of in Mr. Howitt's
+    book, and who believe that great truths underlie popular superstitions, increases day
+    by day; and the work will probably have a wide circulation.</p>
+    <hr class="full" />
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote1" name="footnote1"></a> <b>Footnote 1</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag1">return</a>)
+      <p>The "Florestan" of the "Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is Clara herself;
+      "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote2" name="footnote2"></a> <b>Footnote 2</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag2">return</a>)
+      <p>See Dwight's <i>Journal of Music</i>, Vol. VIII. No. 3.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote3" name="footnote3"></a> <b>Footnote 3</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag3">return</a>)
+      <p>How d' y' do?</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote4" name="footnote4"></a> <b>Footnote 4</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag4">return</a>)
+      <p>Among the other facts showing that Kirkdale Cave had been the den of these
+      animals, and not tenanted as their home by any of the other creatures whose remains
+      occurred there, were the excrements of the Hyenas found in considerable quantity by
+      Dr. Buckland, and identified as such by the keeper of a menagerie. Any one who may
+      wish to read the whole history of Dr. Buckland's investigations of this matter,
+      showing the patience and sagacity with which he collected and arranged the
+      evidence, will find a full account of Kirkdale Cave and other caverns containing
+      fossil bones in his "Reliqui&aelig; Diluvian&aelig;."</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote5" name="footnote5"></a> <b>Footnote 5</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag5">return</a>)
+      <p>"<i>In any thinking mind</i>." Yet it must be confessed that there <i>does</i>
+      exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey in quarters from which
+      better things might be expected. Misappreciation it cannot be called, where no
+      trouble has been taken to estimate claims that needed only to be weighed to be
+      truly valued. Up to this time, there has never been published in England a single
+      essay on the life or the genius of De Quincey that indicated even a good
+      acquaintance, on the part of the writer, with that author's works; and in such a
+      case, of course, not much could be looked for in the way of just interpretation.
+      Gilfillan did him gross injustice: indeed, from what he condescended to say of the
+      man, it would be difficult to conjecture that a greater than Gilfillan was there.
+      And, will the reader believe it? in Professor Craik's "English Literature"&mdash;a
+      work of great excellence&mdash;the name of De Quincey is not mentioned! "Sam
+      Johnson," says Craik, "was the last king that sat upon the throne of English prose
+      literature." Let it be that Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De
+      Quincey was legitimately his successor. First, in the matter of time: Sam died in
+      1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the regal line.
+      What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors? Was it learning? De
+      Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is no writer in the language who in
+      that matter may look down on De Quincey.</p>
+      <p>If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De Quincey. Some
+      stupid writer for the London "Athen&aelig;um," for instance, dared to compliment
+      the poor "opium-chewer" after the following style:&mdash;"He possessed taste, but
+      <i>he lacked creative energy</i>; and his subtle and highly refined intellect was
+      ingenious and acute rather than powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once
+      passed upon Shakspeare by a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had
+      considerable genius, but very little taste!</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote6" name="footnote6"></a> <b>Footnote 6</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag6">return</a>)
+      <p>Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that it always reminded him
+      of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without any doubt, an elephant could dance
+      after an elephantine fashion; but surely you would never catch him going through
+      the movements of a jig or a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he
+      is an elephant. So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from
+      <i>his</i> humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
+      you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a tragedy of
+      pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.</p>
+      <p>There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen Aristophaneses.
+      There was something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque
+      features of the old Greek master. I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance
+      from each. In Aristophanes's "Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the
+      Socratic <i>Phrontisterium</i>, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs
+      his pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the moon
+      only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm about his ears with
+      lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks paid, or refused to pay, regularly
+      on the last day of the month,)&mdash;and here it is that the opportunity is offered
+      for a monstrous stroke of humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim,
+      "Some magic is it, O Socrates, about the moon? Well! since you are up to that sort
+      of thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old monster
+      out of her course for a generation or so?" Now for the parallel case from De
+      Quincey. It is from his paper on "California," a politico-economical treatise. The
+      author's object is to illustrate the fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its
+      non-existence, but to the difficulty of obtaining it. "Emeralds and sapphires,"
+      says he, "are lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no
+      policeman is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from
+      pocketing as many as we please. We are also at perfect liberty to pocket the
+      anchors of Her Majesty's ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty guns,) and to
+      sell them for old iron. Pocket them by all means, and I engage that the magistrate
+      sitting at the Thames police-office will have too much respect for your powers to
+      think of detaining you. If he does, your course is to pocket the police-office, and
+      all which it inherits. The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer,
+      but not a customer to be sneezed at." This strikes us as very similar to
+      Strepsiades's bagging the moon.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote7" name="footnote7"></a> <b>Footnote 7</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag7">return</a>)
+      <p>But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was only by the lack on
+      his part of that frankness which the kindness of his guardians deserved that he had
+      brought so much misery upon himself in after-life. His younger brother,
+      Richard,&mdash;the Pink of the "Autobiographic Sketches,"&mdash;made the same
+      mistake, a mistake which in his case was never rectified, but led to a life of
+      perilous wanderings and adventures.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote8" name="footnote8"></a> <b>Footnote 8</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag8">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Paradise Regained</i>, Book II.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote9" name="footnote9"></a> <b>Footnote 9</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag9">return</a>)
+      <p>It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's immortality, that
+      frequently, as physical power declines, the mind exhibits unusual activity. But the
+      argument moves in the opposite direction. For of what sort is this unusual
+      activity? That which results from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that
+      not only are the physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause
+      has impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is
+      manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as,
+      for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of
+      his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the
+      exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts.
+      And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a
+      triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian
+      faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary glimmerings
+      of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same purpose.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote10" name="footnote10"></a> <b>Footnote 10</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag10">return</a>)
+      <p>Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without being distinctly
+      conscious of having written a previous one. It was no uncommon thing for him to
+      forget his own writings. In one case it is known that for a long time he persisted
+      in disowning his production. His American editor&mdash;a fact which is little
+      known&mdash;selected, from among the mass of periodical writings in the various
+      magazines for which De Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide
+      him than, their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey's pen.
+      In one instance,&mdash;as to the "Traditions of the Rabbins,"&mdash;after
+      considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De Quincey, to
+      set himself right. The latter disowned the essay: he had forgotten it. Mr. F.,
+      however, after another examination, concluded, that, notwithstanding De Quincey's
+      denial of the fact, he <i>must</i> have written it; accordingly, at his own risk,
+      he published it. Afterwards De Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all
+      disputed cases of this nature to his Boston publishers.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote11" name="footnote11"></a> <b>Footnote 11</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag11">return</a>)
+      <p>De Quincey, at his death, had two sons and three daughters. The, eldest of the
+      daughters became the wife of Robert Craig of Ireland. It was this one, and the
+      youngest, who were present during his last hours. The second daughter, Florence,
+      was with her husband (a colonel of the British army) in India. The two sons were
+      both absent: one in India, a captain in the army; the other, a physician, in
+      Brazil.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote12" name="footnote12"></a> <b>Footnote 12</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag12">return</a>)
+      <p>These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Hon. Charles Sumner, who is
+      also the fortunate owner of the <i>Album Amicorum</i> containing the autograph of
+      John Milton.&mdash;ED.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote13" name="footnote13"></a> <b>Footnote 13</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag13">return</a>)
+      <p>Macknight's <i>Life of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 737.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote14" name="footnote14"></a> <b>Footnote 14</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag14">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Life of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 410.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote15" name="footnote15"></a> <b>Footnote 15</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag15">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Lifo of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 700.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote16" name="footnote16"></a> <b>Footnote 16</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag16">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Parliamentary History</i> Vol. XXIX. p. 426.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote17" name="footnote17"></a> <b>Footnote 17</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag17">return</a>)
+      <p>Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote18" name="footnote18"></a> <b>Footnote 18</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag18">return</a>)
+      <p>Lindsay's fawning, plastic sycophancy is well known this side the water. After
+      shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from Northern business-transactions, he
+      now turns about, kicks his old friends, who always half suspected his knavish
+      propensities, bows, cap in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some
+      honest pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion. A
+      "fool's gudgeon" will surely reward his laborious endeavors for Southern gold, that
+      article growing beautifully less every day.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote19" name="footnote19"></a> <b>Footnote 19</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag19">return</a>)
+      <p>This journal is now owned by Mr. Alexander James Beresford Beresford-Hope, (we
+      dare not omit any portion of this august name,) who has ample means to enlist the
+      talents of reckless, "smart" young men in search of employment for any work he may
+      require, no matter how unprincipled the job in hand.</p>
+    </div>
+
+  <div>*** END OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK 13631 ***</div>
+</body>
+</html>
+
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+This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements,
+metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be
+in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES.
+
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+Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for
+eBook #13631 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/13631)
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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI.
+       A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: October 5, 2004 [EBook #13631]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. XII. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, the PG Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team, and Cornell University
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+VOL. XII.--SEPTEMBER, 1863.--NO. LXXI.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE PURITAN MINISTER.
+
+
+It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen
+hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest
+settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness
+recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an
+ever remoter distance,--not yet so far but that a stout wooden gate at
+each end of the village street indicates that there is something outside
+which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
+thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness
+which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the
+smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these
+abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock
+yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
+Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the
+consummation of the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In
+which settlement of the Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to
+pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, the warning drum is
+beating its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem
+village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag
+is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
+auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without
+money and beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham
+Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour, a service
+for which Abraham, each year, receives a half-pound of pork from every
+family in town.
+
+Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to
+this important building, the centre of the village, the one public
+edifice,--meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in
+one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a
+half-mile from it. And yet the people ride to meeting, short though the
+distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her
+husband;--and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine
+of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern
+ones, young gentlemen.
+
+We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is
+the pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a
+terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house
+is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their
+horses, provided it be not done too near the passage-way. For at that
+opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted
+black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears
+also a heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the
+ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his
+bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin
+cartridge-boxes.
+
+The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself,
+the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat
+roof and battlements,"--a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel
+down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned
+pounds, and carefully expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside
+with clay, and finished with clay-boards, larger than our clapboards,
+outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet square, with a chimney half
+the width of the building, and projecting four feet above the thatched
+roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
+hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on
+each of the two sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with
+oiled paper only, part glazed in numerous small panes. And between the
+windows, on the outside, hang the heads of all the wolves that have been
+killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers think that the
+wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's clothing.
+
+The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four
+vergers bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who
+have just arrived from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and
+left to stay quietly in the Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines,
+and the liberty of a private walk in the garden. The sexton has just
+called for the minister, as is his duty twice every Sunday, and,
+removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
+minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black
+skull-cap, and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better
+handling of his manuscript. He looks round upon his congregation, a few
+hundred, recently _seated_ anew for the year, arranged according to rank
+and age. There are the old men in the pews beneath the pulpit. There are
+the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with ruffs, showy belts,
+gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots. There
+are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs,"
+"embroidered or needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut
+works,"--a mystery,--"slash apparel,"--another mystery,--"immoderate
+great vayles, long wings," etc.,--mystery on mystery, but all recorded
+in the statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate.
+There are the wives of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the
+grammar-school master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the
+mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still
+too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also;
+for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
+presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday
+meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and
+gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements
+of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the shrinking form of some
+humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the principal aisle,
+bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to the
+garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.
+
+Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets
+in! "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one
+writer, triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be
+short," which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no
+authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one
+thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will
+sometimes pray an hour each,--one with confession, one with private
+petitions, a third with petitions for church and kingdom, and a fourth
+with thanksgiving,--neither part of the quartette being for an instant
+confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
+hour-glass, may say,--but that he will not anticipate the levity to be
+born in a later century with Mather Byles,--"Now, my hearers, we will
+take another glass."
+
+In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe
+to any one who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the
+statute, "If any one interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of
+worship, they shall be reproved by the magistrate, and on repetition
+shall pay £5, or stand two hours on a block four feet high, with this
+inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone, but the
+law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It
+is but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely
+whipped for declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H----'s
+preaching,--since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes
+for declaring that Mr. H---- preached lies, and that his instruction was
+the doctrine of devils,--since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was
+sentenced to pay five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same
+Mr. H---- sent abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and
+lambs. Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
+reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
+there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
+unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
+stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.
+
+But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
+congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
+Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
+backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
+famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
+Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
+be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
+some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
+and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
+Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
+thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
+separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
+Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
+Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
+glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
+tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
+is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
+lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
+audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
+irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
+by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
+full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
+emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
+magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
+were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
+to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
+sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
+why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
+he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
+undoubtedly the larger share.
+
+The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose
+sleepy eyes have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand
+of the constables,--the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is
+kept for the smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,--look up thoroughly
+awakened now. Bright eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for
+a little interlude is coming. Many things may happen in this pause after
+the sermon. Questions may be asked of the elders now, which the elders
+may answer,--if they can. Some lay brother may "exercise" on a text of
+Scripture,--rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns out. Candidates
+for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be the
+proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The
+last town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage
+may be published. Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending
+magistrate may be required to stand upon a bench, in his worst garments,
+with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes, and acknowledge his sins
+before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.
+
+These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is
+time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely
+offer." Then the people in the galleries come down and march two
+abreast, "up one ile and down the other," passing before the desk, where
+in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of these holds a
+moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
+varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and
+good-will. Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other
+valuables, such as "a fair gilt cup, with a cover," for the
+communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some
+one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
+These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten
+tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the
+words, "Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and
+then the benediction.
+
+And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the
+aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom
+stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses,
+each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance,
+and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.
+
+Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two
+centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing
+prove wearisome in the delineation now. It needed all this accumulation
+of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England
+church-going have changed since those early days. But what must have
+been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
+service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious
+and painful preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old
+Watertown graveyard;--"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He
+relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding
+his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on
+Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.
+He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned
+as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when
+he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
+this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly
+had three sermons a day,--one after every meal. He was "an universal
+scholar and a walking library,"--he studied twelve hours a day, and
+said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went
+to sleep.
+
+A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous
+life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have
+survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the
+Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at
+thirty,--especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge
+to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr.
+Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture,
+"wherein he largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most
+entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis."
+
+For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to
+have for each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable
+duty for each. He must visit families during several afternoons in every
+week, sending previous notice, so that children and domestics might be
+ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for counsel" in his own
+home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of conscience,
+ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
+unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring
+towns, a kind of religious dissipation which increased so fast that the
+Legislature at last interfered to restrict it. He must have five or six
+separate seasons for private prayer daily, devoting each day in the week
+to special meditations and intercessions,--as Monday to his family,
+Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to other
+societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He
+must have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and
+whole nights prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself
+starved," unless he fasted once a month at farthest, while he often did
+it twice in a week. Then there were public fasts quite frequently,
+"because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought, grasshoppers,
+caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
+Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the
+neighborhood, and the minister must expound it as "symbolizing the
+conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor people," the latter being the
+mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military expedition, the minister
+might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a muster, he
+must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
+officiate instead.
+
+One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on
+weddings and funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make
+a usage seem ancestral, or to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now
+remembers that our progenitors for more than a century disused religious
+services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates alone could perform
+the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the monopoly
+quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
+Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin
+at Geneva, by John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the
+Westminster Assembly, and by the French Huguenots. The bell might ring,
+the friends might walk, two and two, to the grave; but there must be no
+prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions of the English and
+Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said King
+James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear
+shoes and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit
+of eating salt fish on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that
+Roman Catholics eat it on Friday.
+
+But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were
+sermons. Mr. John Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral
+sermon in immortal verse:--
+
+  "On Sabbath day he went his way,
+      As he was used to do,
+  God's house unto, that they might know
+      What he had for to show;
+
+  God's holy will he must fulfil,
+      For it was his desire
+  For to declare a sermon rare
+      Concerning Madam Fryer."
+
+The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
+century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
+startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
+to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
+have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
+father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
+sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
+which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
+pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
+certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
+not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
+came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
+devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
+lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
+another.
+
+The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
+a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
+enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
+themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
+controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
+vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
+malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
+imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
+permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
+orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
+democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
+government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
+first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
+is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
+afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
+government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
+by theological controversy.
+
+In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
+late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
+on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
+the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
+state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
+the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
+of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
+his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
+among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
+still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
+block among its branches now.
+
+One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
+would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
+consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
+severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational
+provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and
+retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a
+day. Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger
+Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no
+such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But
+the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to
+death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after the age of
+sixteen;--not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
+statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with
+murder,--though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and
+the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service,
+at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in
+Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
+the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel"
+punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a
+ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running
+water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced
+with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in 1649, was
+sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
+shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes
+offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to
+the elders." And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young
+female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the
+County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology
+for the word "courting."
+
+An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the
+ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and
+powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave
+Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil
+authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty,
+they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally
+referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him
+in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated,
+and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard,
+was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his
+head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and
+one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and
+one said that they had _prayed_ the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it
+seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they came
+out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought
+in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,"
+in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which
+certainly gives a singular impression of the style of gospel prevailing
+inside the meeting-house that day. But it is good to know, on the other
+side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared
+an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become afterwards
+convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
+already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the
+order from being rescinded.
+
+These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives
+without relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have
+little to joy in in this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think
+so, to read the dismal diaries, printed or manuscript, of those days. "I
+can compare with any man living for fears," said Hooker. "I have sinned
+myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay
+down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the
+suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
+introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who
+drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of
+white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the
+Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to
+the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge," in 1644? Did the famous
+Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew cosmology, upon
+the waters,--strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians who
+would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is
+startling to remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public
+funeral, that "some person be appointed to look after the burning of the
+wine and the heating of the cider," and to hear that on this occasion
+there were thirty-two gallons of wine and still more of cider, with one
+hundred and four pounds of that ensnaring accessory, sugar. Francis
+Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
+England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave
+convincing proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the
+very relaxations of the Puritan minister were more spiritual than
+spirituous, and to send forth a good Nineteenthly from his own lips was
+more relishing than to have the best Double X go in.
+
+In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only
+Elders for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days.
+The commonalty bore the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of
+Roger William's offences was his wishing to limit these terms to those
+who gave some signs of deserving them. The name "Mr." was allowed to
+those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and also to
+professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of
+vessels, and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs."
+Mr. Josiah Plastow, when he had stolen four baskets of corn from the
+Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah. "Mr." seems to have meant
+simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir" merely, a title
+given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to the
+time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the
+idolatry of saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes
+designated as Sir Paul, Sir Peter, and Sir James.
+
+In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is
+humiliating to find that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin.
+The highest compensation I can find recorded is that of John Higginson
+in 1671, who had £160 voted him "in country produce," which he was glad,
+however, to exchange for £120 in solid cash. Solid cash included
+beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and musket-balls, value one
+farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had £60, and Mr.
+Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in money and
+half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap
+in New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather
+says, most salaries were less than £100, which he thinks "might account
+for the scanty harvests enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton
+both tell the story of a town where "two very eminent ministers were
+only allowed £30 per annum" and "the God who will not be mocked made
+them lose £300 worth of cattle that year." The latter also complains
+that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
+rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the
+stars, would shine without earthly contributions.
+
+He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words,
+"Synecdotical Pay,"--in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a
+part is used for the whole. And apparently various causes might produce
+this Synecdoche. For I have seen an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the
+Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young ministers have often
+occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of the
+wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
+considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
+entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
+path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
+period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
+own sins.
+
+However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
+rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
+could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
+likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
+sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
+trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
+1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
+are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
+different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
+day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
+are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
+at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
+monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
+the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
+was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
+beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
+was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
+the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
+Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
+the minister's grounds in order.
+
+Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
+Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I
+have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
+family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
+brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
+Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
+have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
+bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
+for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
+the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
+gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
+love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
+"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
+a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
+prayer to wean him at last.
+
+He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
+strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
+at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
+general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
+delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
+wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
+manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
+of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
+She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
+his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
+formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
+theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
+infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
+hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
+he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
+heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart
+and "Thine forever."
+
+Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
+First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
+followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
+separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
+doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
+penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
+Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
+open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
+to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
+for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
+third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
+through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
+They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
+town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
+miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
+was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
+fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
+among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
+and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
+be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
+should find rest there.
+
+Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
+and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
+must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
+since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
+missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
+in New England might be walking to execution with their male
+companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
+hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
+every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
+hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
+hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
+utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
+now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
+with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
+when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
+that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
+last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.
+
+It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat
+of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
+wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
+the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
+just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
+days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
+asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
+be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
+the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
+legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
+doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
+the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
+persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
+therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
+professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
+intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
+blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
+largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
+of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
+death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
+alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
+their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
+were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
+death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.
+
+Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
+theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
+Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
+no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
+possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
+modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
+approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
+Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
+would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
+Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
+dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
+feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
+fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
+vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
+Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
+so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
+the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
+Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
+Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
+imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
+persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
+
+Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the
+majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as
+these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and
+grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal
+but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou
+whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion!
+thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth!
+thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine
+epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton
+Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even
+Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and
+Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be
+tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so
+comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major
+Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
+
+There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the
+Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends
+wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his
+marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying
+into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break
+from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou
+shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
+England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the
+resolution, the Puritan historian says, _so far_ as going into the
+Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the
+ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
+
+With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the
+astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It
+must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or
+peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediæval
+laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
+England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
+Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
+Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
+judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
+this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
+thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
+Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
+was burnt alive in Würtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
+wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
+in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
+were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
+added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
+
+John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
+a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
+evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
+the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
+which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
+Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
+conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
+list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
+that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
+vindication of their strong measures.
+
+It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
+other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
+authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
+precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When
+Goody E---- testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a
+witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was
+still lame from it,--when her daughter testified that she rode on the
+same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,--when the
+grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another
+stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,--when W. B----, aged
+forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem
+Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried
+round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the
+minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and
+"then all would be well,"--when one woman summoned her three children
+and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that
+she was a witch and so were they all,--what could be done for such
+prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty?
+It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the
+convictions.
+
+One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
+us,--though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not
+yet unfolded,--was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it.
+Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and
+labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of
+their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand
+fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent
+sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
+thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed
+discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears
+start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"--or worse yet,
+"Parson, your sermon is too long,"--or most embarrassing of all,
+"There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit."
+But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
+stern discipline in such cases made and provided.
+
+But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female
+tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the
+unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders,
+naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous
+ribbons,"--these were the things which tried men's souls in those days,
+and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
+inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel"
+seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one
+slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited
+from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and
+"immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty,
+part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
+condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each
+and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another
+for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a
+silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds,
+escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged
+with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was
+fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.
+
+The question of veils seems to have rocked the Massachusetts Colony to
+its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th,
+1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils,
+regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural
+degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural
+extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
+Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such
+cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr.
+Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his
+chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a
+custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting
+without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding
+visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.
+
+Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what
+was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done
+much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with
+something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the
+time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair
+like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
+made into periwigs;--and by some women wearing borders of hair, and
+their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does
+this hint at puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially
+among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,--"divers of the
+elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in
+this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy,
+was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they
+usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the
+tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused
+communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought
+they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous
+Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them
+resemble the Locusts that came out of y'e Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,
+8,--and as an eminent Divine calls them, _Horrid Bushes of Vanity_; such
+strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord
+to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."
+
+Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a
+community where every man was expected to have a current supply of
+religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain
+hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much
+trouble; and E.F.,--for they mostly appear by initials,--who, coming to
+New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken
+for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane,
+and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh,"
+Cotton Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally
+stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher,--less
+innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one
+bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath
+appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,--though,
+indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship
+among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
+this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who
+knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly
+asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in
+one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied
+his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--"Sam the
+Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them. Finally, "this eminent
+worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his
+parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting
+this among other fire at them:--'I see, no longer pipe, no longer
+dance,'--so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had
+never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly
+neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and
+Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been
+the worst penalty the man suffered.
+
+It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan
+ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and
+have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the
+regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a
+sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent
+heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say
+one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept
+Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to
+crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened
+to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some
+village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists;
+thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that
+extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by
+her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and
+converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
+Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who
+proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and
+hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the
+ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and
+chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that
+the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these,
+and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans,--who
+claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is
+the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to
+be at anchor?
+
+Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with
+the leadership of the New-England colonies,--Cotton, Hooker, Norton,
+Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an
+obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the
+"Magnalia":--Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than
+snow";--Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an
+eagle";--Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
+children might pluck";--Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a
+very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family
+and he taught his family as if it had been his church";--Warham, the
+first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt
+respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
+stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
+hour.
+
+These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
+than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
+most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
+disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
+successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
+family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
+might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
+so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
+and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
+another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
+right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
+as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
+God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
+formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
+blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
+Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
+in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
+testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?
+
+These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
+evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
+negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
+women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
+behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
+chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
+Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
+the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
+the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
+"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
+of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
+"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
+body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
+him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
+came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,"
+and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"--"I
+know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently
+added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once
+reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a
+passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts all
+one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man,
+finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to
+apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.
+
+What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness
+and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their
+shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since
+supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he
+was "a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in
+his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
+a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
+flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
+Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
+and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
+hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
+one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
+others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
+with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
+do, and not African tribes alone.
+
+There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
+every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
+habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
+who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
+even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
+victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
+democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
+thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
+separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
+his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
+minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
+slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
+theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
+the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
+recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
+men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
+asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
+leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
+little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan
+ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
+discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and
+musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the
+heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their
+grape-shot:--"My fathers and brethren," said John Higginson, "this is
+never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation
+of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as
+are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over
+since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end
+and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man
+among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a
+man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet
+of a sincere Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THOREAU'S FLUTE.
+
+
+  We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
+    His pipe hands mute beside the river;--
+    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+  But Music's airy voice is fled.
+  Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
+    The bluebird chants a requiem;
+    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
+  The Genius of the wood is lost."
+
+  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+    There came a low, harmonious breath:
+    "For such as he there is no death;--
+  His life the eternal life commands;
+  Above man's aims his nature rose:
+    The wisdom of a just content
+    Made one small spot a continent,
+  And tuned to poetry Life's prose.
+
+  "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
+    Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
+    To him grew human or divine,--
+  Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
+  Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
+    And yearly on the coverlid
+    'Neath which her darling lieth hid
+  Will write his name in violets.
+
+  "To him no vain regrets belong,
+    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+    Gave to the world no poor lament,
+  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+  O lonely friend! he still will be
+    A potent presence, though unseen,--
+    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
+  Seek not for him,--he is with thee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.
+
+
+The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of
+acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their
+nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque.
+Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from
+the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a smile
+rather than a sigh.
+
+Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it
+became necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon
+S----.
+
+Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had
+lingered about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many
+sweet memories of Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in
+the neighborhood of Gramley Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels,
+and the plenty of a country tea-table,--not averse to strawberry
+short-cake, or the snowy delights of cottage-cheese.
+
+It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful
+welcome, a bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled
+me with curiosity and amazement.
+
+  "Was it a man?
+  A devil infernal?
+  An angel supernal?"
+
+Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and,
+as I cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in
+the singular form,--stooping, squatting, and groping before me.
+
+The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics
+upon the ground,--smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy,
+too silent to be mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at
+nightfall with a maniac, and I was not sorry when my nearer approach
+resolved these strange phenomena into a well-dressed pedestrian on
+all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.
+
+He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride
+his handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly
+bewildered. I looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay
+shining at me from the very spot where he had been so industriously
+peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him, fitted his treasure
+into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle said,--
+
+"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
+circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"So do I."
+
+We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,--I
+too tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again;
+but when, at last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's
+door-step, he turned suddenly to me and asked,--
+
+"Are you fond of the country?"
+
+"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.
+
+"Ah, you are an artist!"
+
+"I hope to be one."
+
+"Its a bad business," said he, testily,--"a very bad business. If I were
+you, I would give it up."
+
+"Have you ever tried it?"
+
+"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,--"yes, and
+everything else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I
+would give you the benefit of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and
+make a good story of it to your wife."
+
+"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."
+
+"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true
+artist, who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite
+relations, who penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the
+silent sanctuaries of the mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man.
+He must be a happy man,--happy in a sweet and natural way. A man whose
+life is passed in a daily delight that gently stirs without feverish
+excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He _ought_ to
+marry."
+
+"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.
+
+"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
+commencing,--
+
+  'O thou earthly sea,
+  Every person thinks of thee,--
+  The sailor, and the busy bee,
+  And the Chinese drinking tea!'
+
+I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they
+seemed good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they
+struck others."
+
+He smiled pleasantly.
+
+"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding
+your history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with
+your experience."
+
+"Take warning, then, if need be.
+
+"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of
+a ready writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a
+young miss of her first conquest.
+
+"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just
+rising into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my
+condescension. It was a charity, indeed, to give my support to this
+fledgling, and I sent to it a long article, entitled, 'The Cultivated,
+as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts were returned, with
+this quiet bit of advice:--'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other
+reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from
+having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I
+determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to
+despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of
+the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent
+periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
+almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for
+publication.
+
+"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now
+Mrs. Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings
+in ten melancholy stanzas, beginning,--
+
+  'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'
+
+These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
+'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'
+
+"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the
+plot of which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left
+to my hero, who forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but,
+fearful lest the beloved object should worship his money more than his
+merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor
+to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her
+acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and,
+in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin,
+Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science,
+and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into
+the surf, where both are drowned.
+
+"This, you see, was quite new."
+
+"Quite," I replied, laughing.
+
+"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive
+the first remittance for this truly original work.
+
+"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable
+'Märchen,' and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's
+Legacies,' a series of children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of
+poetry, pleasantry, and information. I sent them to 'The Juvenile
+Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted with a profusion
+of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
+expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.
+
+"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a
+small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He
+seemed the personification of _nonchalance_, impudence, and conceit. As
+I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a
+woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on
+my mentioning my name, he rose and extended a very dirty hand.
+
+"'Glad to see you, Sir,--hope you'll continue your contributions,--Uncle
+Job,--good idea, Sir,--love the little ones? So do we, Sir,--work very
+hard for them,--don't pay at all,--poor business,--pure charity,--that's
+all.'
+
+"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are
+expected to work from charity?'
+
+"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,--more
+contributions than we can use,--best authors in the country write for
+us,--pure love for the little ones, I assure you.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to
+bestow my time and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer
+them to others who do.'
+
+"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he
+growled. 'We don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most
+of the articles ourselves.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end
+to the interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.
+
+"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'
+
+"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than
+the first, emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'
+
+"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall
+take measures that you will not at all relish. If you will not _give_ me
+my manuscripts, I shall _take_ them'; and, suiting the action to the
+word, I snatched them from a shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and
+carried them off without further parley.
+
+"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet
+spirit within me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote
+a sentimental tale, full of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft
+epithets. It was accepted by a well-known monthly, then supposed to be
+in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of comfort, and I
+looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and renown,
+when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my
+story, and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the
+magazine had been sold to pay her debts.
+
+"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it
+to 'The Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it
+was published, praised, and further contributions requested. Several
+weeks passed away. I indited a poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or,
+Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in print, and my thirst for
+fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note reached me from
+'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to pay
+me in _back numbers of the magazine_. I wrote no more."
+
+"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"
+
+"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist,
+and was thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I
+took for my motto; and, hiring a small studio in ---- Street, I bought a
+large canvas, on which I sketched out a picture which cost me much
+money, more time, and many anxious thoughts.
+
+"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a
+marriage was being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people,
+in anomalous costumes, was gathered round a youth supposed to be a
+rejected and despairing lover, who had fallen on the ground in a swoon.
+It was very affecting, I thought.--it would be very effective. Were
+_she_ to see it, she would be stung with remorse,--she would behold the
+probable effects of her present indifference,--she would relent.
+
+"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it
+was a complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio,
+draping before a cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing
+for my men, until the last touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was
+all ready for the Spring Exhibition. Then came doubts and speculations.
+Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all? Would Ellen like it? How
+would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to look at it?
+Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?
+
+"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name
+sent my picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it,
+by some strange chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington.
+The juxtaposition gave me a new idea. I saw at once what a villanous
+daub mine was, and went away oppressed with shame and a new-found
+modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the Exhibition, in
+the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
+coming out.
+
+"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I _must_
+turn back, and show you the _funniest_ picture! So theatrical! So
+distorted!'
+
+"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'
+
+"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are
+such a good critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art
+you ever saw?'
+
+"Can you imagine my feelings?"
+
+"I think I can."
+
+"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken
+studio, previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully
+packing my materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and
+an elderly, shrewd-looking man walked into the room.
+
+"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.
+
+"'I am a friend of his.'
+
+"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number ----?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'How much does he ask for it?'
+
+"'How much are you willing to give?'
+
+"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'
+
+"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'
+
+"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio.
+Twenty-five dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture?
+I looked at the card:--
+
+    'PARKER J. SPERRY,
+    '_Yankee Pie Depot_,
+    '126 ---- Street.'"
+
+"Did you ever paint again?"
+
+"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in
+a gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning,
+when she was out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the
+wall. I turned it round. Directly across the mouth was pasted a white
+label, on which I saw neatly printed in India-ink,--'Queen of the
+Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in my library as a
+lesson to me for all future time.
+
+"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard
+my experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing
+business, and make a handsome income for my wife and two children.
+To-morrow I go to New York, to bring them into these wilds for change of
+air. And now, good night."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.
+
+FLORESTAN'S STORY.
+
+
+I.
+
+In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are
+sacred persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you,
+staining the pane through which their light shone with their own images,
+but who became perfectly transparent to the word they uttered, the song
+they sang, or the work they did. Such a sacred person to me is the
+gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's Albums. Many years
+ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in the
+half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
+rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had
+been awaiting its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was
+a listener, and, hastily brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a
+far corner of the room, away from his _répertoire_. She confessed, that,
+afterward, when he was not present, she had looked on that which he
+evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in pencil, upon it,
+"Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but no
+"Sternenkranz" was found,--the word was evidently her master's own
+fancy; so she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto
+complained of her indifference to the pieces he set before her, and
+informed him that she should perish at his feet, unless he would give
+her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr Otto, in
+a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
+treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to
+which he had given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to
+each soul that could receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower
+of Lilies to another. It was the same as with that white stone which the
+Seer of Patmos saw,--within it "a name written which no man knoweth,
+saving he that receiveth it."
+
+This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was
+known among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day,
+next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert
+Schumann's works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not
+as universal, it is just as fervent. Many silent and holy hours have I
+sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their
+Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of
+romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his
+sorrow, and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to
+know of him,--of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I
+came to know, in the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to
+relate.
+
+A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to
+accommodate a certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold
+winds from over the Lakes made me wish that the Modern Athens had kept
+its lecture-system at home; for it has always seemed to me, that,
+wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it. Such ugly
+thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from
+the face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed
+out of me by the glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which
+animated the coziest of rooms. Why has not some poet celebrated the
+experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of the thawee responds
+to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release until
+all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from
+the Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet
+nothing-at-all thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to
+life.
+
+Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into
+the room, soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls.
+Confused, I started up; and it was some moments before I understood that
+the music proceeded from the room adjoining mine in the hotel. Not
+altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess of whom I have spoken
+had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was appointed to
+stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"
+
+As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave.
+Whether the musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a
+terrible termination was in the music, I knew not: the latter was quite
+probable, for, alas! such fearful Icarus-falls are not rare in poor
+Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long, but, rising quickly,
+passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next room.
+
+"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.
+
+Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was
+so swart that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once
+imagined that a stream of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from
+some more Oriental race. I stammered out an apology for my intrusion,
+but told him how irresistible were such subtile threads as Schumann's
+"Carnival" had projected through the walls which separated our rooms.
+
+"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."
+
+Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which,
+having for bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the
+ice-dragon coiled about him, is suddenly filled with the warm spread of
+the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he said,--
+
+"In me, wanderer that I am,--in me, with the _Heimweh_ in my heart never
+to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,--you see
+Florestan."
+
+"Louis Boehner!"
+
+Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little
+piece of paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand.
+On it these words were written:--
+
+
+     "_Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never
+     want for such a friend as thou hast been to_
+
+     ROBERT SCHUMANN."
+
+I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when,
+at this moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a
+living halo.
+
+Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before
+them the fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention
+some facts connected with Schumann's "Carnival, or _Scènes Mignonnes_,
+on Four Notes." Not by any means representing the pure depths of
+Schumann's soul, this strange medley is yet pregnant with historic
+associations. The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing
+twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a
+town of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts
+frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there
+interesting to his sensitive soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must
+be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or
+_es_ for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift für Musik" was begun and
+for ten years edited by Schumann,--in what spirit we may gather from his
+own words:--"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very
+encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
+Hünten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since
+Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star
+was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole,
+Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One
+day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,--Let us not
+idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art
+shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of
+music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at
+which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the _Philistines_,
+which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc.,
+for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.
+"Young Germany" was making itself felt in all coördinate directions:
+forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,--a sharp and
+spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and
+Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
+revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality
+brought together in Kühne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who
+talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz
+Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the
+friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was
+the _Davidsbund_, or League of David (the last of the "Scènes Mignonnes"
+is named "Marche des _Davidsbündler_ contre les Philistines"). An
+agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a fine
+sketch of this company, which we will quote.
+
+"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle
+age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty
+remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians
+around him, who all listened to his observations with profound
+attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and
+suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly
+promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain
+consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl
+of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole
+world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her
+native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of
+twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg,
+he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and
+was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
+liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be
+melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote
+himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been
+obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as
+uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for
+the career of a _virtuoso_, and was pursuing the study of the piano with
+an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
+consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career
+forever. He did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate
+for him in the end, by directing him to his true vocation, composition.
+Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of love, in the garb of admiration
+for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and
+dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric
+Louis Boehner,[A] who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
+Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession,
+but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the
+indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,--now, in his capacity
+of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just
+returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true
+secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master
+is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and
+industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as many more
+young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."[B]
+
+[Footnote A: The "Florestan" of the "Scènes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is
+Clara herself; "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.]
+
+[Footnote B: See Dwight's _Journal of Music_, Vol. VIII. No. 3.]
+
+Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood
+that sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of
+so many future sorrows and glories.
+
+"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys
+together at Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day,
+which since has blessed hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone;
+this breast held his sorrows and his hopes, when he was struggling to
+reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his madness he cast
+himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
+eyelids when they were closed in death."
+
+Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.
+
+At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out,
+and was informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had
+been waiting nearly fifteen minutes!
+
+
+II.
+
+Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room,
+listening to that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And
+first he told me the story of Schumann's love.
+
+The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously
+than judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have
+survived the tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no
+childhood: at the piano she was kept through all the bright days, roving
+only from scale to scale, when she should have been roving from flower
+to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she entered into
+her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
+and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which
+were mosses beneath them. From this training she came before the best
+audience in Germany, and stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen
+summers, and by acclamation was crowned the Queen of the Piano. Franz
+Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and many years afterward
+wrote in his extravagant way,--"When we heard Clara Wieck in Vienna,
+fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
+to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks
+and lifted by delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets."
+At her performance of Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was
+inspired to write the following verses:--
+
+  "A weird magician, weary of the world,
+  In sullen humor locked his charms all up
+  Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
+  And threw the key into the sea, and died.
+  The manikins here tried with all their might;
+  In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
+  His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
+  A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
+  Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
+  Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
+  She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
+  And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
+  Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
+  The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
+  The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
+  All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
+  To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
+  Who with white fingers guides them in her play."
+
+The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child
+was the young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first
+appearance, he wrote,--"Others make poetry,--she is a poem." And soon
+afterward,--"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
+up,--the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."
+
+From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young
+composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one
+caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask,
+"Whither?" he poured out before this child the half-revealed hopes
+striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her ingenuous and
+earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
+due time they were to be rather _clenched_, through pain. It was under
+this baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first
+sonata,--"Florestan and Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all
+from whom fame was graceful.
+
+In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those
+wonderful little "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without
+it their meaning is as strange as their names. Often did he say,--"I can
+write only where my life is in unison with my works." "Listen now to
+these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and struck the piano;
+"these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with song, "My
+peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
+written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged
+aspirant released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But
+faster than planets through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased,
+and there was a long silence; and then he told the unspeakable portion
+of his story by performing these two: "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has
+ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed the pathos of the
+latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath that
+crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts
+with the terrible questioning, _Wherefore?_
+
+Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each
+other, the shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was
+coming to pass. He had educated this girl to be an artist to bring _him_
+fame; alas, it must be confessed that he thought also of certain
+prospective thalers. Willing as he was that all Leipsic should admire
+his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the "Zeitschrift." He
+then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who, when
+he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally
+the poor soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst
+have known that it is Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!
+
+The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all
+acquaintance, forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating
+at once Clara's career as a _virtuoso_, he took her to Vienna.
+
+No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess
+of Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up
+to Beethoven. Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the
+"Schwärmibriefe of Eusebius to Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the
+general reader of the "Zeitschrift," who, doubtless, fancied that its
+editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
+Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.
+
+"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out
+an angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou
+not with us? (_Warum!_) And how thou wilt have thought of us last
+night, from the 'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major
+symphony! I also thought of thee then, Chiara, pure one, bright one,
+whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither thy longing draws thee,
+but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."
+
+At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's
+"Myrthen," whose dedication, _Seiner geliebten Braut_, breaks forth in
+the passionate and beautiful song,--"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"
+
+But this word _Braut_ means Bride in the German sense of "affianced";
+and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the
+breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his
+glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of
+Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two
+passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of bitter Marahs.
+"But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the right
+to know, from these,"--his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."
+
+Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces
+when they ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.
+
+
+III.
+
+But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to
+have revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I
+sought Boehner, and asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded
+to the one subject that bound us together, I requested him to tell me,
+what had not yet been given to the world, the details of Schumann's
+insanity and death.
+
+Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:--
+
+"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings
+so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in
+extremes, was as if you gave an Æolian harp to be swept now by a cold
+north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines
+of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled. Under
+his grief he seemed stronger; but when his joy came, when Clara was his
+own, and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices
+within, which, to him, had been unutterable,--then we saw that the
+emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
+gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
+devastating torrent.
+
+"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or
+six years before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times
+he imagined himself again cruelly separated from the patient and tender
+being who never left his side; and he would write pieces full of
+distractions, in the midst of each of which, however, some touchingly
+beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through seething
+seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
+which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a
+wearing persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice
+aside gently, saying,--'A long life is before me; but it must be lived
+in a few years.' And, indeed, the works which have reached farthest into
+hearts that loved him most deeply date from these times. I remember,
+that, when he sat down to compose his last symphony, he said,--'It is
+almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion needs another chamber.'
+
+"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word:
+'Hasten.' I left all my affairs, and came to watch for many months
+beside this beloved one. It was not a wild delirium which had taken
+possession of him; the only fit of that kind was that in which he tried
+to drown himself in the Rhine,--at the time when the papers got hold of
+the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his conviction that
+he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
+manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
+power,--would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest
+discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till
+night,--during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance.
+Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories
+of his earlier works.
+
+"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
+own:--'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be
+understood here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.'
+Then, turning to me, he said,--'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my
+last prayer for you,'--handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and
+now leave us, to come again and kiss me when I am cold.'
+
+"Then I left him alone with his Clara.
+
+"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis
+Boehner, and said, as my voice would let me.--"Take this paper, and when
+you would have a friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come
+and help me to be that friend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.
+
+
+Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is,
+Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is,
+Will they fight for their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must
+be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent
+security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the theses of philosophers
+or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not
+likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
+paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have
+not industry sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present
+development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities
+likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from
+disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure,
+because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
+lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like
+all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full
+recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to
+be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world
+as we find it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent
+to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art,
+literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to
+glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes.
+No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight
+to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers
+like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may
+have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these
+fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the
+world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
+appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like
+the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree
+with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to
+ordinary humanity.
+
+It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise
+it, to make a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but
+it can do little either in directing or deterring. There is nothing in
+the gloomy vaticinations of Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is,
+which should be permitted to darken our future. The mediæval antagonisms
+of races, when Christianity threw but a partial light over mankind, and
+before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests among people of
+diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
+richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results
+of emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they
+may be, afford any measure of the progress which opens before our
+enfranchised masses. The insular and contracted life of the colonies,
+cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism, has no parallel in
+the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through the
+continent on which our problem is to be solved.
+
+In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report
+truthfully upon the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the
+name. Civilization, in its career, may often be traced in the
+nomenclatures of successive periods. These people were first called
+contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were next
+introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally
+referred to as freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and
+they are yet to be lost in the better and more comprehensive designation
+of citizens, or, when discrimination is convenient, citizens of African
+descent.
+
+The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at
+Port Royal has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of
+Europe, as well as the best friends of the United States, like Cairnes
+and Gasparin, have testified much interest in its progress. An English
+periodical of considerable merit noticed at some length "Mr. Pierce's
+Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in its
+incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in
+American affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number,
+characterizes the colony as "that small pacific army, far more important
+in the history of civilization than all the military expeditions
+despatched from time to time since the commencement of the civil war."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No little historical interest covers the region to which this account
+belongs. Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas,
+Georgia, and Florida, involving the rival pretensions of Spain and
+France, were made in the first half of the sixteenth century. They were
+conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and Soto, in search of
+the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
+discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was
+attempted until 1562.
+
+In that year,--the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and
+ten years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the
+most illustrious victim,--Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief,
+anxious to found beyond the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots,
+fitted out the expedition of Jean Ribault, which, after a voyage of over
+three months across the ocean and northward along the coast, cast anchor
+on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the name which it
+retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for another
+and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark
+and perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John Hawkins
+sailed for Africa in quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to
+the New World. The expedition of Ribault was the first visit of
+Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South Carolina, and the
+garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices ever
+made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to
+detail here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their
+abandonment of the post, the terrible voyage homeward, or the
+perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose. Nor is it within the
+compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
+garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins
+in 1565 with timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his
+sad fate, the ferocity of Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and
+the avenging chivalry of Dominic de Gourges. The student is baffled in
+attempts to fix localities for the deeds and explorations of this
+period, even with the help of the several accounts and the drawings of
+Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
+permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been
+abandoned by the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for
+trade or adventure.
+
+Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other
+commissioners to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the
+country with reference to an emigration thither. Hilton's Narration,
+published in London the year after, mentions St. Ellens as one of the
+points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including the Sea
+Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish
+words, and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be
+alarmed by it. The commissioners, whose explorations were evidently
+prompted by motives of gain, close a somewhat glowing description of the
+country by saying, "And we could wish that all they that want a happy
+settlement of our English nation were well transported thither."
+
+Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But,
+relieved of her civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek
+colonial empire on the southern coast of North America. In 1663, Charles
+II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk, Shaftsbury,--each famous in
+the conflicts of those times,--and to their associates, as proprietors
+of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for philosophy than
+affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,--an idle work, as it
+proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle,
+arrived at Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed
+probably with apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they
+removed to the banks of the Ashley, and, after another change of site,
+founded Charleston.
+
+In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port
+Royal, but was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent
+settlement of the Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until
+1700. This district is divided into four parishes, St. Peter's, St.
+Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being fifty-eight miles long and
+thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St. Helena parish
+includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a few
+smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district
+occupied by our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands
+is St. Helena, being fifteen miles long and six or seven broad,
+containing fifty plantations and three thousand negroes, and perhaps
+more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is two-thirds or
+three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
+Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and
+Coosaw, Morgan, Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort
+is the largest town in the district of that name, and the only one at
+Port Royal in our possession. Its population, black and white, in time
+of peace may have been between two and three thousand. The first lots
+were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in 1720. Its
+library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
+hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about
+thirty-five hundred.
+
+The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since
+to an island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to
+a sound, a parish, and an island, originated probably with the
+Spaniards, and was given by them in tribute to Saint Helena, the mother
+of Constantine the Great, whose day in the calendar is August 18th.
+Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given by Ribault.
+Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
+Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely
+to have been so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord
+proprietors, while Carolina was a province of Great Britain.
+
+The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable
+Revolutionary romance. In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent
+two hundred troops with a howitzer and two field-pieces to Beaufort.
+Four companies of militia from Charleston with two field-pieces,
+reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
+off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and
+are said to have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port
+Royal Islands.
+
+There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands.
+One of these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is
+claimed by some antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault.
+There are the well-preserved walls of one upon the plantation of John J.
+Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles south of Beaufort, now called
+Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel Higginson's regiment. It
+is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to it as a
+Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site
+of Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and
+other points.
+
+The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of
+the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present
+a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of
+French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points,
+affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the
+buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy
+mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen
+bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of
+ginned cotton to the acre,--quite different from the plantations in
+Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred
+pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one
+finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks,
+furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton peculiar
+to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the
+action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks
+which permeate the land in all directions. The seed of this cotton,
+planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser
+texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a
+like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department secured
+eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
+including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in
+storehouses, when our military occupation began.
+
+The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
+lignum-vitæ, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in
+diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the
+long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,--and the palmetto,
+shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by
+vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the
+summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
+coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and
+white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil
+is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These
+interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which the cassena is
+the most distinguished variety, and faced with ditches, make the
+prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in March
+and April with the yellow jessamine, (_jelseminum_,)--the cross-vine
+(_bignonia_,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,--the Cherokee rose,
+(_loevigata_,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,--and, two
+months later, the palmetto royal, (_yucca gloriosa_,) which protects the
+fence with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its
+pyramid-like clusters of white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs
+serve a utilitarian end in art and medicine. The live-oak is famous in
+shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto, as it is called,
+resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
+employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British
+fleet; and the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The
+moss (_tillandsia usneoides_) served to calk the rude vessel of the
+first French colonists, longing for home. It may be used for bedding
+after its life has been killed by boiling water, and for the subsistence
+of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a powerful
+diuretic.
+
+The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and
+to the pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described
+in Eliot's book. Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to
+fishing for devil and drum.
+
+The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first
+and second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a
+free circulation of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built
+under the supervision of a professional architect. Those on the
+plantations, designed for the planters or overseers, were, with a few
+exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving mechanic in New
+England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards are
+without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of
+orange-trees. One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed,
+they are not well enough built to last long. The estates upon Edisto
+Island are of a more patrician character, and are occasionally
+surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees fancifully
+trimmed.
+
+The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although
+some may be traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from
+the religious persecutions of France.
+
+The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious
+periodicals, mainly Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern
+life has been elsewhere observed in the progress of our army.
+Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal and ruinous was
+found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
+South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's
+collection. Another was Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and
+tribute to its distinguished examples, translated by Warden in 1810.
+These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to see the infinite
+wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
+sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the
+moral basis of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who
+distrusts the rightfulness of his daily conduct, has resolved to persist
+in it, and therefore hates most of all the prophet who comes to confront
+him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them to mankind.
+
+Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice
+without being sought for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out,
+still showing the place where it was worn by the rope which bound the
+sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own quarters were was a woman
+who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of maternity as to
+crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
+daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the
+unwilling witness. She declared to her parents and sisters that it was
+hell to live in such a place. She was accustomed to advise the negroes
+how best to avoid being whipped. When the war began, she assured them
+that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to send them
+to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
+girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds
+which marriage and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell
+on these painful scenes of the past, constant and authentic as they are;
+and they hardly concern the practical question which now presses for a
+solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need of injustice or
+exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
+persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are
+fortunate slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides,
+there was less labor exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely
+managed plantations of the Sea Islands than in other districts where
+slave-labor was better and more profitably organized and directed.
+
+The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th,
+1861, was followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea
+Islands. In the latter part of December, the Secretary of the Treasury,
+Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman and humane disposition
+naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a special agent to
+visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition of
+the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of
+suggesting some plan for the organization of their labor and the
+promotion of their general well-being. The agent, leaving New York
+January 13th, 1862, reached that city again on his way to Washington on
+the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a large number of
+the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their cabins.
+The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the
+people, their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the
+best mode of administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a
+report. The plan proposed by him recommended the appointment of
+superintendents to act as guides of the negroes and as local
+magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
+Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the
+same agent. The agent presented the subject to several members of
+Congress, with whom he had a personal acquaintance, but, though they
+listened respectfully, they seemed either to dread the magnitude of the
+social question, or to feel that it was not one with which they as
+legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself,
+and Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone
+seemed to grasp it, and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is
+doubtful if any member of the Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any
+interest in the enterprise, though it has since been fostered by the
+Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the President
+appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
+under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then
+said, somewhat impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be
+troubled with such details,--that there seemed to be an itching to get
+negroes into our lines; to which the agent replied, that these negroes
+were within them by the invitation of no one, being domiciled there
+before we commenced occupation. The President then wrote and handed to
+the agent the following card:--
+
+"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion
+give Mr. Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as
+may seem judicious.
+
+"A. LINCOLN.
+
+"Feb. 15, 1862."
+
+The President, so history must write it, approached the great question
+slowly and reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the
+proclamations he was to issue in the September and January following.
+Perhaps that slowness and reluctance were well, for thereby it was given
+to this people to work out their own salvation, rather than to be saved
+by any chief or prophet.
+
+Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no
+funds wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission,"
+organized in Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief
+Association," organized in New York on the 20th of the same month,
+gallantly volunteered to pay both superintendents and teachers, and did
+so until July 1st, when the Government, having derived a fund from the
+sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the Rebels,
+undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies,
+together with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and
+called the "Port Royal Relief Committee," providing for the support of
+the teachers.
+
+When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an
+enterprise which otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance
+had been given as to the legal condition of the negroes. The Secretary,
+in a letter to the agent, had said, that, after being received into our
+service, they could not, without great injustice, be restored to their
+masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
+citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private,
+that negroes who were within our lines, and had been employed by the
+Government, should be protected in their freedom. No official assurance
+of this had, however, been given; and its absence disturbed the
+societies in their formation. At one meeting of the Boston society
+action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
+gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people,
+when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A
+public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken
+up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a
+regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the
+probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do
+what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in
+the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be
+found base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it
+should be stated, have been managed by persons of much consideration in
+their respective communities, of unostentatious philanthropy, but of
+energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one of whom has ever filled
+or been a candidate for a political office.
+
+There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be
+mentioned. The venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first
+year, hearing of the enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of
+it. I went to his chamber, where he had been confined to his bed for
+many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a patriot who read the
+hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not been
+given to protect the enterprise,--said that but for his disability he
+should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the
+postscript of his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty
+benediction to the work and to myself. Restored in a measure to
+activity, he is still spared to the generation which fondly cherishes
+his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
+read to his fellow-citizens, gathering close about him and hanging on
+his speech, words of counsel and encouragement.
+
+On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of
+superintendents and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were
+women, left the harbor of New York, on board the United States
+steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on the 9th. It was a
+voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange, and it
+was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store
+for us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal
+to our responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South
+Carolina, they were addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the
+little he had learned of their duties, enjoined patience and humanity,
+impressed on them the greatness of their work, the results of which were
+to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps, one way or the
+other, the social problem of the age,--assuring them that never did a
+vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when
+she conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written
+history which should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful
+to their trust, there would come to them the highest of all recognitions
+ever accorded to angels or to men, in this life or the next,--"Inasmuch
+as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."
+
+This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed
+during the first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its
+close they had all reached their appointed posts. They took their
+quarters in the deserted houses of the planters. These had all left on
+the arrival of our army, only four white men, citizens of South
+Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except one,
+who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not
+interfered with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be
+so. The negroes had, in the mean time, been without persons to guide and
+care for them, and had been exposed to the careless and conflicting talk
+of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were also brought in
+connection with some _employés_ of the Government, engaged in the
+collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were doing
+anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing
+the plantations and the negroes upon them as _adscripti gleboe_ looking
+forward to their restoration to their masters at the close of the war.
+They were uncertain as to the intentions of the Yankees, and were
+wondering at the confusion, as they called it. They were beginning to
+plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant cotton,
+regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except
+one at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one
+bearing the name of John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr.
+Peck. This is not the place to detail the obstacles we met with, one
+after another overcome,--the calumnies and even personal violence to
+which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early period of our
+struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
+likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they
+deserve, and let others of better natures, who were then blind, but now
+see, not be taunted with their inconsiderate acts. The nickname of
+Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may, however, be fitly remembered.
+It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of Puritan and
+Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
+disposed to coöperation. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our
+most important operations were in the district under the command of
+Brigadier-General Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were
+not supposed to be favorable to the enterprise, and who, during the
+political contest of 1860, had been the chairman of the National
+Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and his
+sense of the duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government,
+that his personal courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He
+received his mortal wound at Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of
+September following, and a braver and abler officer has not fallen in
+the service.
+
+Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other
+hindrances occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some
+eight thousand acres of esculents,--a fair supply of food,--and some
+four thousand five hundred acres of cotton (after a deduction for
+over-estimates) were planted. This was done upon one hundred and
+eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty people,
+of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands,
+made up of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual
+classification and estimate of the productive capacity of laborers, to
+three thousand eight hundred and five and one-half full hands. The
+cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand pounds of
+ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred
+thousand pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod,
+resulting from the lateness of the planting, exposed it to the ravages
+of the frost and the worm. Troops being ordered North, after the
+disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated in the middle
+of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
+hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished,
+were abandoned. In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty
+tons of corn-fodder and seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the
+ear, for army-forage. These are but some of the adverse influences to
+which the agricultural operations were subjected.
+
+It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the
+superintendents and teachers commissioned by the associations. There was
+as high a purpose and devotion among them as in any colony that ever
+went forth to bear the evangel of civilization. Among them were some of
+the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard, Yale, and
+Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,--men of
+practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was
+scarce worthy, and to whom, whether they are among the living or the
+dead, I delight to pay the tribute of my respect and admiration.
+
+Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at
+Boston, April 25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work,
+which he was obliged to leave six months before his death. He was a
+faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so many months had passed
+since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he dwelt
+fondly upon them in his last days.
+
+The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St.
+Helena Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,--and
+though not fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of
+a superintendent, yet even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He
+was an evangelist, also, and he preached with more unction than any
+other the gospel of freedom,--always, however, enforcing the duties of
+industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but always buoyant and
+trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
+company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to
+Beaufort,--being assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a
+month, and was a remote and exposed point; but he went fearlessly and
+without question. The evacuation of Edisto in July, the heat, and the
+labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at the village
+on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where
+were some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive
+exertions brought on malarious fever. This produced an unnatural
+excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot sun, he rode about to attend to
+his people. He died,--men, women, and children, for whom he had toiled,
+filling the house with their sobs during his departing hours. His
+funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers which they
+and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
+native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church
+of Dorchester. Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth
+can live fourscore years in a little more than one score. One high
+privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear of the immortal edict of
+the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his people was
+to be secured for all time to come.
+
+Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he
+never advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the
+Episcopal Church. He was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the
+quality as well as adding to it by self-discipline. He had good
+business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences, was humane, yet
+not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
+unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was
+recently asking the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who
+first taught them their letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr.
+Phillips." He was at home in the autumn for a vacation, was at the
+funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time in imperfect
+health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
+Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate
+return necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,--but his health
+never came back to him. His quarters were in the same house where
+Barnard had died, and in a few days, on the 5th of December, he followed
+him. He was tended in his sickness by the negroes, and one day, having
+asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the words, "Thank
+God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the same
+funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North
+to bereaved relatives.
+
+Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
+Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his
+professional studies at the summons of Christian duty. He labored
+faithfully as a superintendent, looking after the physical, moral, and
+educational interests of his people. He had a difficult post, was
+overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of taking as
+good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came
+home in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the
+citizens and students of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill,
+and, again coming North, died October 30th, a few days after reaching
+New York. The young woman who was betrothed to him, but whom he did not
+live to wed, has since his death sought this field of labor; and on my
+recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
+teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had
+guided to freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed
+away!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal
+having been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the
+charge of the freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus
+Saxton, a native of Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the
+free air of the valley of the Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane
+nature; and under his wise and benevolent care they still remain. The
+Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in Florida, are
+within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
+eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.
+
+The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject
+race, more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The
+native African was of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and
+untamable. The master was obliged to abate something of the usual rigor
+in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner, now at Port
+Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
+African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would
+perpetually insist on doing his work in his own way, and being asked the
+threatening question, "A'n't you going to mind?" would answer, with
+spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master desisted! Severe discipline
+drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a mutilation of person
+which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816, eight
+hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades
+of Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the
+early part of the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on
+farms, and raising cattle. They had two hundred and fifty men fit to
+bear arms, led by chiefs brave and skilful. The story of the Exiles of
+Florida is one of painful interest. The testimony of officers of the
+army who served against them is, that they were more dangerous enemies
+than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the longest.
+The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of
+Charleston during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark
+Vesey, relates that one of the native Africans, when called to answer to
+the charge against him, haughtily responded,--"_I was a prince in my
+country, and have as much right to be free as you!_" The Carolinians
+were so awe-struck by his defiance that they transported him. Another,
+at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade about to speak, and
+said, "_Die silent, as I do!_" and the man hushed. The early newspapers
+of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned by
+these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the
+third generation reduced to obedient slaves.
+
+Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood
+been carried so far as on these Sea Islands,--a deterioration due to
+their isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the
+constant surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with
+each other, involving a physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature
+punishes disobedience to her laws. The population with its natural
+increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the soil under existing
+modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is found
+pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
+Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had
+been carried so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration,
+in January, 1862, was obliged to confess the existence of a general
+disinclination to military service on the part of the negroes; though it
+is true that even then instances of courage and adventure appeared,
+which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to be
+developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it
+has been. You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a
+subject race; but in vain will you attempt to study it until the burden
+is lifted. The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while the
+bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She soothes us with her
+deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing in pain,
+is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the
+spirit the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not
+even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the
+capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
+transmuted to a man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It
+was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their
+posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen,
+and to note the progress they had made. There were interesting scenes to
+fill the days. I saw an aged negro, Cæsar by name, not less than one
+hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.
+The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,--a free savage in the
+wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long
+years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the
+President,--his life covering an historic century. A faithful and
+industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival,
+rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of
+pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don Carlos,
+whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon
+Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last
+hours,--now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a
+slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the
+daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston. He talked
+intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
+known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and
+accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion
+of their preparatory studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C.
+Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private
+tutor.
+
+Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,--an old woman, with much
+power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had
+formerly been. The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If
+you're as long beating Secesh everywhere as you have been in taking the
+town, guess it'll take you some time!" Indeed, the negroes had somewhat
+less confidence in our power than at first, on account of our not having
+followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The same quaint
+old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
+of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"
+
+I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of
+Trescot, formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom
+Russell describes in his "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when
+Russell saw it. Its large library is deposited in the Smithsonian
+Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the first and second
+stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families of
+negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see
+a cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the
+plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name,
+linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.
+
+The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are
+usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees,
+perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred
+graves, marked only by sticks eighteen inches or two feet high and about
+as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones in a negro graveyard
+at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather illiterate
+inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
+not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and
+that was in a burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the
+head of the grave, shaped something like an ordinary gravestone, about
+three feet high and six inches wide. The inscription was as follows:--
+
+  OLd Jiw
+  de PArt his
+  Life on the
+  2 of WAY
+  Re st frow
+  LAuer
+
+On the foot-board were these words:--
+
+  We ll
+  d OW N.
+
+The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also
+write a little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He
+said that he used to carry his father in his arms in his old age,--that
+the old man had no pain, and, as the son expressed it, "sunk in years."
+I inquired of Kit concerning several of the graves; and I found, by his
+intelligent answers, that their tenants were disposed in families and
+were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing,
+are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a
+faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned
+with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.
+
+There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African
+origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as
+evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can
+cure. They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a
+sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking,
+until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
+They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and
+they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby
+be brought on.
+
+But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing
+directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most
+consideration.
+
+And, first, as to _education_. There are more than thirty schools in the
+territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are
+commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and
+Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association. They have an
+average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less
+frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range in
+the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their
+letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being
+taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to, which had
+been going on for a few weeks. Very many did not have the opportunity
+for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the spring and
+summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
+much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times
+some of the teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a
+brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home,
+leaving the schools to be broken up. It was not until October or
+November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and
+they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is as
+yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds
+wherewith to provide one.
+
+I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.
+There were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the
+town of Beaufort,--ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of
+sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the
+plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in
+some cases but two or three, and in others none.
+
+The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages
+in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader,
+Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had
+enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or
+learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on
+an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness
+for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
+had not abated.
+
+On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on
+St. Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with
+the long, pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading
+branches, and surrounded by the gravestones of the former proprietors,
+which bear the ever-recurring names of Fripp and Chaplin. This school
+was opened in September last, but many of the pupils had received some
+instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were present on
+my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
+few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened
+at noon and closed at three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the
+children to work in the field or perform other service in which they
+could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page 70th in
+Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before,
+and they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had
+recited the first thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the
+multiplication-table as high as fives, and were commencing the sixes. A
+few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come latest to the
+school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
+recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring
+prompting at the beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much
+spirit hymns which had been taught them by the teachers, as,--
+
+  "My country, 'tis of thee,
+  Sweet land of liberty";
+
+also,--
+
+  "Sound the loud timbrel";
+
+also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the
+closing stanzas of which are,--
+
+  "The very oaks are greener clad,
+    The waters brighter smile;
+  Oh, never shone a day so glad
+    On sweet St. Helen's Isle!
+
+  "For none in all the world before
+    Were ever glad as we,--
+  We're free on Carolina's shore,
+    We're all at home and free!"
+
+Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the
+highest beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service
+than to write the songs of praise for these little children, chattels no
+longer, whom the Saviour, were he now to walk on earth, would bless as
+his own.
+
+The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by
+the way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white
+soldiers, particularly when the singers roll out,--
+
+  "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"
+
+The children also sang their own songs, as,--
+
+  "In de morning' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?[A]
+  In de mornin' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.
+
+[Footnote A: How d' y' do?]
+
+Also,--
+
+  "I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go,
+  I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go.
+
+  "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+    Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
+  Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "Dere's room enough," etc.
+
+Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down
+in the lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my
+home." Russell's "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard
+them in his evening row over Broad River, on his way to Trescot's
+estate.
+
+One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from
+Philadelphia. Another is from Newport, Rhode Island, where she had
+prepared herself for this work by benevolent labors in teaching poor
+children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of olive
+complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of
+gentle address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with
+an overwrought consciousness of her race. She had read the best books,
+and naturally and gracefully enriched her conversation with them. She
+had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had been a pupil in the
+Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that city,
+then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had
+received only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their
+parents,--and let this be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She
+had refused a residence in Europe, where a better social life and less
+unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she would not dissever
+herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a superficial
+sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
+elevation.
+
+At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a
+young woman from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of
+parents passed into the skies," whose lives have both been written for
+the edification of the Christian world. She teaches two schools, at
+different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars in each.
+One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on
+a review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being
+questioned as to the subjects of the lessons, they answered
+intelligently. They recited the twos of the multiplication-table,
+explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard, and wrote
+letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining
+district, a graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian
+clergyman of Providence, Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which
+a class of three pupils was about finishing Ellsworth's First
+Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had just finished
+Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
+Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two
+schools. He exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence
+to be repeated with different tones and inflections, and one could not
+but remark the excellent imitations.
+
+In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto
+refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were
+engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had
+picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave. One
+class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St.
+John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They stumbled a little
+on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they got
+along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July,
+1862, Ned, who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus,
+a man of seventy, who also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty
+children into two schools, and taught them as best they could for five
+months until teachers were provided by the societies. Ned has since
+received a donation from one of the societies, and is now regularly
+employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this
+school for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to
+bed. She had become interested in learning by hearing her younger sister
+read when she came home from school; and when she asked to be taught,
+she had learned from this sister the alphabet and some words of one
+syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are, however, learning.
+
+On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a
+small church on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from
+Kingston, Massachusetts. She had manifested much persistence in going to
+this field, went with the first delegation, and still keeps the school
+which she opened in March, 1862. She taught the pupils their letters.
+Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of ten pupils
+read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
+Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read
+so rapidly that she had to be checked,--the only case of such fast
+reading that I found. She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners
+to a corner of the room and exercising them upon an alphabet card,
+requiring them to give the names of letters taken out of their regular
+order, and with the letters making words, which they were expected to
+repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
+Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states,
+lakes, and large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the
+different continents on the map of the world, as they were called. I saw
+the teacher of this school at her residence, late in the afternoon,
+giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and girls, all but two
+being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the Book
+of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St.
+John. Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly
+at the teacher, and whispered,--"he's putting me in the book"; and as
+Elsie guessed, so I do. The teacher was instructing her pupils in some
+dates and facts which have had much to do with our history. The
+questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were these:--
+
+"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"
+
+"Virginia."
+
+"When?"
+
+"1620."
+
+"Who brought them?"
+
+"Dutchmen."
+
+"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"
+
+"Pilgrims."
+
+"Did they bring slaves?"
+
+"No."
+
+A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given
+in a loud tone by the whole school:--
+
+"What country do you live in?"
+
+"United States."
+
+"What State?"
+
+"South Carolina."
+
+"What island?"
+
+"Port Royal."
+
+"What town?"
+
+"Beaufort."
+
+"Who is your Governor?"
+
+"General Saxton."
+
+"Who is your President?"
+
+"Abraham Lincoln."
+
+"What has he done for you?"
+
+"He's freed us."
+
+There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited,
+each having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and
+each provided with two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But
+it is unnecessary to describe them, as they were very much like the
+others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an industrial school, which meets
+two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with
+some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I
+visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
+age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others
+with aprons, pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.
+
+Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations
+to address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the
+pupils with questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I
+have rarely heard children answer with more readiness and spirit. We had
+a dialogue substantially as follows:--
+
+"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"
+
+"Going to work, Sir."
+
+"On what?"
+
+"Cotton and corn, Sir."
+
+"What are you going to do with the corn?"
+
+"Eat it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the cotton?"
+
+"Sell it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"
+
+One boy answered in advance of the rest,--
+
+"Put it in my pocket, Sir."
+
+"That won't do. What's better than that?"
+
+"Buy clothes, Sir."
+
+"What else will you buy?"
+
+"Shoes, Sir."
+
+"What else are you going to do with your money?"
+
+There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,--
+
+"What are you going to do Sundays?"
+
+"Going to meeting."
+
+"What are you going to do there?"
+
+"Going to sing."
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Hear the parson."
+
+"Who's going to pay him?"
+
+One boy said,--"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,--
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people
+do, and you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with
+them?"
+
+There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,--
+
+"Send 'em to school, Sir."
+
+"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any
+natural incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years
+the ideas and habits of good citizens.
+
+The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved,
+except that it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking.
+They are joyous, and you can see the boys after school playing the
+soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory is very susceptible in
+them,--too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the reasoning faculty.
+
+The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the
+parents being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and
+cultivating their crops, and it not being thought best to allow the
+teaching to interfere in any way with industrious habits.
+
+A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading,
+have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially
+detracts from their usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have
+already been mentioned. The latter, a man of earnest piety, has died
+since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on Hilton Head Island last
+summer and autumn, being paid at first by the superintendents, and
+afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he enlisted in the
+negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
+Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were
+brought to St. Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to
+the school at the Baptist Church, saying to the teachers there that she
+could carry them no farther. They could read their letters and words of
+one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on Wadmelaw Island, a
+kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only citizen
+of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South
+Carolina, stood up boldly for his official and personal protection.
+Hettie had been taught to read by his daughter; and let this be
+remembered to the honor of the young woman.
+
+Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The
+most advanced classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can
+read simple stories and the plainer passages of Scripture; and they
+could even pursue self-instruction, if the schools were to be suspended.
+The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated. They could
+read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and
+adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not
+bounded north by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and
+east by the sea, with dim visions of New York on this planet or some
+other,--about their conception of geography when we found them. They are
+acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of
+life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their schools;
+remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a
+letter, and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their
+race; then contemplate what is now transpiring, and you have a scene
+which prophets and sages would have delighted to witness. It will be
+difficult to find equal progress in an equal period since the morning
+rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I have
+never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel
+Angelo has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor
+souls struggling in darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the
+upper and better light transcends in moral grandeur anything that has
+ever come from mortal hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to _industry_. The laborers, during their first year under the
+new system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of
+wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same
+thing. The notion that they were to raise no more cotton has passed
+away, since work upon it is found to be remunerative, and connected with
+the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were at first
+particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
+collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of
+their masters, the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and
+ginned the cotton on the promise of wages. Except upon plantations in
+the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more immediately
+remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
+disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the
+only penalty for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for
+the tenement and land adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not
+exceeding two dollars per month. Both the Government and private
+individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land by the
+recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which
+may, by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by
+noon; and the same was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on
+very many of the plantations. As I was riding through one of Mr.
+Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty persons at work who
+belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the first
+delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent
+contributions for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the
+tax-sales, and combining a fine humanity with honest sagacity and close
+calculation, no man is so well fitted to try the experiment. He bought
+thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and cultivated eight
+hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and ninety-nine
+and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,--a larger
+increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due
+mainly to prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal
+Wand said to me,--"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the
+negroes to take land for cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton
+Head Island said, that on that island the negroes had, besides adequate
+corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four acres of cotton to a
+hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it, except near
+the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
+going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had
+charge of the refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena
+village, and who had cleared and fenced patches for gardens, felling the
+trees for that purpose.
+
+The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might
+do; but they do about as much as he himself would do, after a residence
+of a few years in the same climate, and when he had ceased to work under
+the influence of Northern habits. Northern men have sometimes been
+unjust to the South, when comparing the results of labor in the
+different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
+tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing
+latitude. There has been less complaint this year than last of "a pain
+in the small of the back," or of "a fever in the head,"--in other words,
+less _shamming_. The work has been greatly deranged by the draft, some
+features of which have not been very skilfully arranged, and by the
+fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the military
+authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by
+the women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that
+field-work does not become women in the new condition; and so it may
+seem to some persons of just sympathies who have not yet learned that no
+honest work is dishonorable in man or woman. But this matter may be left
+to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation, may not be consistent
+with the finest feminine culture or the most complete womanliness; but
+it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
+development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country
+of Europe; and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this
+generation, when the American negroes become the peers of the Swiss
+peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than without it, when she is not
+yet fitted for the needle or the book.
+
+The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply
+capital to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my
+faithful guide and attendant, who had done for me more service than any
+white man could render," with funds of his own, and some borrowed money,
+bought at the recent tax-sales a small farm of three hundred and
+thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was to plant
+sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one
+and a half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my
+last day in the territory, and one-third of his crop was then in.
+Besides some servant's duty to an officer, for which he is well paid, he
+does the work of a full hand on his place. He hires one woman and two
+men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters hand. He has
+two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
+likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he
+said, "She's the best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with
+her hoe as I know her to be with her tongue, Harry's estimate must be
+right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and blind in both eyes, whom
+he guides with a rope,--carrying on farming, I thought, somewhat under
+difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
+delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor.
+He has promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an
+account of the progress of his crop. He has had much charge of
+Government property, and when Captain Hooper, of General Saxton's staff,
+was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany him; but at
+last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
+all two to leave together."
+
+Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The
+Government is building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen
+feet by fourteen, with two rooms, each provided with a swinging
+board-window, and the roof projecting a little as a protection from
+rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have fifty
+cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the
+direction of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a
+month. Rarely have I talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was
+my great regret that I had not time to visit the village of improved
+houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
+extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of
+his last days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to the _development of manhood_. This has been shown, in the
+first place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not
+appear upon our first introduction to these people, and they did not
+seem to understand us when we used to tell them that we wanted them to
+own land. But it is now an active desire. At the recent tax-sales, six
+out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them, comprising two
+thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one hundred
+and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
+superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United
+States. One of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The
+other five were made by the negroes on the plantations combining the
+funds they had saved from the sale of their pigs, chickens, and eggs,
+and from the payments made to them for work,--they then dividing off the
+tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit, before
+mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands,
+who are equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are
+cultivating sixty-three acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes,
+with as many more to be planted, four and a half of cow-peas, three of
+pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These facts are most significant.
+The instinct for land--to have one spot on earth where a man may stand,
+and whence no human being can of right drive him--is one of the most
+conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any
+fair degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.
+
+This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness
+of rights, and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed
+by white men. The former slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a
+resident of New York when the war broke out, have generally left the
+plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying that they will not be his
+bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if they remain
+on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
+during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to
+Coosaw Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken
+belonging to a negro. The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from
+the corporal, to whom the soldier had handed it, thinking that the
+negroes would not take it from an officer. They then carried it to the
+superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was given
+for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but
+these are sufficient.
+
+Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the
+comforts and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society,
+for the purpose of maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St.
+Helena Island, which is under the charge of Friend Hunn, of the good
+fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in Delaware three thousand
+dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he now harbors
+and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
+which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of
+the world's people. In this store alone--and there are others on the
+island, carried on by private enterprise--two thousand dollars' worth of
+goods are sold monthly. To be sure, a rather large proportion of these
+consists of molasses and sugar, "sweetening," as the negroes call it,
+being in great demand, and four barrels of molasses having been sold the
+day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for plates, knives,
+forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
+Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,--in
+short, the distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform
+allowance,--are very generally rejected. But there is no article of
+household-furniture or wearing apparel, used by persons of moderate
+means among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the
+opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South would
+open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops
+astir. Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the
+various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few
+coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters.
+Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The indisposition
+to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
+superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed
+and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future,
+the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children, and the
+convictions of duty. These all exist in the negro, in a state of greater
+or less development. To give one or two examples. One man brought
+Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
+obtained from selling pigs and chickens,--thus providing for the future.
+Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same
+officer, intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred
+dollars, to be transmitted by him to their wives, and this besides what
+they had sent home in other ways,--showing the family-feeling to be
+active and strong in them. They have also the social and religious
+inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of Hilton Head,
+they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
+for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the
+Government longer to provide them. The result was a contribution of two
+dollars and forty-eight cents. They had just fled from their masters,
+and had received only a small pittance of wages, and this little sum was
+not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the treasury. Another
+collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena Island,
+upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses
+of worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,--not a bad collection for
+some of our Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are
+said to be lowest, and sad indeed are some features of their lot, yet
+with all earnestness and confidence I enter my protest against the
+wicked satire of Carlyle.
+
+Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste
+which has troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer
+be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of
+them as freemen. Your Irishman, who now works as a day-laborer, honestly
+thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have
+no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
+household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or
+to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our
+prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system,
+readily accommodate themselves to our interests, even without much aid
+from the moral sentiments.
+
+Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public
+trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive
+in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must
+be addressed. All the elements of human nature must be appealed to,
+physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious. Imperfect indeed
+is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers wages, but does
+not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars or
+thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to
+bind both parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.
+
+There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them,
+and truth requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good
+deal of petty pilfering among them, although they are faithful to
+trusts. This is the natural growth of the old system, and is quite
+likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present
+disturbed and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the
+rigid virtues. But inferences from this must not be pressed too far.
+When I was a private soldier in Virginia, as one of a three-months'
+regiment, we used to bide from each other our little comforts and
+delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
+disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
+characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom
+to the conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And
+what inferences might not one draw, discreditable to all traders and
+manufacturers, from the universal adulteration of articles of food!
+These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood in order to get
+rations and small benefits,--a natural vice which comes with slavery,
+and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
+demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed,
+hypocritical, but satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and
+indulgence in emotion,--psychological manifestations which one may find
+in more advanced communities. They show no special gratitude to us for
+liberating them from bonds. Nor do they ordinarily display much
+exhilaration over their new condition,--being quite unlike the Italian
+revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the forum, and
+personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
+chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their
+excitement when an attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while
+the assault on Charleston was going on, and in their desire to get their
+friends and relatives away from the Rebels,--an appreciation of freedom,
+if not ostentatious, at least sensible.
+
+But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races
+to self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and
+conceited, Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of
+one other nation are sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these
+therefore be slaves? And where is that model race which shall sway them
+all? A people may have grave defects, but it may not therefore be
+rightfully disabled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different
+occasions, to note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment,
+known as the First Regiment of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General
+Hunter's first regiment was mainly made up of conscripts, drafted May
+12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months afterwards, there
+being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going home
+to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On
+the 10th of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent
+authority to raise five thousand colored troops, began to recruit a
+regiment. His authority from the War Department bore date August 25th,
+and the order conferring it states the object to be "to guard the
+plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
+This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise
+a negro regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words
+in the instructions of Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the
+original expedition went to Port Royal, authorizing him to organize the
+negroes into companies and squads for such services as they might be
+fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for military service.
+Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to General
+Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
+payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General
+Saxton, numbered four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson
+took command of it on the 1st of December; and on the 19th of January,
+1863, it had increased to eight hundred and forty-nine. It has made
+three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,--one before Colonel Higginson
+assumed the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the women of
+England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in
+January up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which
+it occupied for a few days until an evacuation was ordered from
+head-quarters. The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty
+to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies.
+Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
+themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white
+regiments in skirmishing. In _morale_ they seemed very much like white
+men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent
+soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal, like Robert Sutton, whom
+Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of the whole
+expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
+capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said,
+addressing a meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights,
+thinking of the war and of his people,--that, when he heard of the
+regiment being formed, he felt that his time to act had come, and that
+it was his duty to enlist,--that he did not fight for his rations and
+pay, but for wife, children, and people.
+
+These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily
+depressed, and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have
+been reluctant to engage in military service,--their imagination
+investing it with the terrors of instant and certain death. But this
+reluctance has passed away with participation in active service, with
+the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the latent
+manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was
+of the first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,--a truthful man,
+and not given to rose-colored views,--"I did not have faith in arming
+negroes, when I visited the North last autumn, but I have now. They will
+be not mere machines, but real tigers, when aroused; and I should not
+wish to face them." One amusing incident may be mentioned. A man
+deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in the
+district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
+Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes,
+became excited with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a
+furlough on his return, went to the plantation where he had hid, and
+said he would not take five thousand dollars for his place.
+
+But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the
+change of feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a
+change due in part to the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the
+President's Proclamation of January 1st, which has done much to clear
+the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines, but more than all to
+the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
+expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the
+6th of April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty
+on Port Royal Island,--the first active duty it had performed on the Sea
+Islands,--and was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a
+march of ten miles, it reached the advanced picket-station, there were
+about two hundred soldiers of the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting
+orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a careless tone, to one of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's regiment as it
+stood in line,--
+
+"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"
+
+"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as
+I have to fight for them."
+
+A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting
+him as their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a
+soldier,--
+
+"What do you think of that regiment?"
+
+The answer was,--
+
+"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot the Rebels than have the Rebels
+shoot me"; and none of the by-standers dissented.
+
+As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station
+at the Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, just formed into line preparatory to marching to
+Beaufort. The countenances of the latter, which I watched, exhibited no
+expression of disgust, dislike, or disapprobation, only of curiosity.
+Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the hominy left from the
+morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command of the
+relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
+stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid
+desired. This was, it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways
+than one in which to perform even an official duty. I rode back to
+Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a captain of the First
+Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said "he
+wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our
+fighting." He pronounced the word as spelled with two _g_s; but I prefer
+to retain the good English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled
+regiment, most of whom were conscripts, said that on his return from
+Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men ashore in charge of some
+prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them approach from
+the wharf, one said,--
+
+"What are those coming?"
+
+"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the
+answer.
+
+"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.
+
+But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was
+inquired.
+
+"Why, some Secesh prisoners."
+
+"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then
+the response from all.
+
+So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had
+demonstrated their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember
+that such an unreasonable and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time
+existed; but it is never worth while to suppress the truth of history.
+This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free States; and one
+of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston, on
+the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the
+Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of
+negro soldiers which the Free States have sent to the war. On the day
+previous, May 27th, a far different scene transpired on the banks of the
+Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months before in
+Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and
+one with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge
+on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass,
+the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks
+and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and
+duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and
+leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves and their
+race.
+
+I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson.
+Devoting himself heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties,
+and bearing his oppressive responsibility as the leader of a regiment in
+which to a great extent are now involved the fortunes of a race, he adds
+another honorable name to the true chivalry of our time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again
+among the familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that
+Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the
+Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly
+pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished
+women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
+every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two
+good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing
+the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with
+implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had furnished.
+Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
+ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war,
+had been for a brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to
+one whom they remembered as the first to point them to freedom and cheer
+them with its prospect could hardly be received without emotion. But
+there is no time to linger over these scenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
+particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in
+doubt, is no longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a
+consummation. The negroes will work for a living. They will fight for
+their freedom. They are adapted to civil society. As a people, they are
+not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity, nor from the vices
+which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said to
+take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it
+may not be possible in a single generation to restore the pristine
+manhood. One who expects to find in emancipated slaves perfect men and
+women, or to realize in them some fair dream of an ideal race, will meet
+disappointment; but there is nothing in their nature or condition to
+daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to cheer and
+fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
+industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly
+fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and
+aspirations; and these qualities, when stirred and sustained by the
+incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the
+currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a
+benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them a
+constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the
+calamity of another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity
+of being again their oppressors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NO AND YES.
+
+
+  I watched her at her spinning;
+  And this was my beginning
+  Of wooing and of winning.
+
+  But when a maid opposes,
+  And throws away your roses,
+  You say the case forecloses.
+
+  Yet sorry wit one uses,
+  Who loves and thinks he loses
+  Because a maid refuses.
+
+  For by her once denying
+  She only means complying
+  Upon a second trying.
+
+  When first I said, in pleading,
+  "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
+  She heard me half unheeding.
+
+  When afterward I told her,
+  And blamed her growing colder,--
+  She dropped upon my shoulder.
+
+  Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
+  Her very look dispelled it,
+  I caught her hand, and held it.
+
+  Along the lane I led her,
+  And while her cheeks grew redder,
+  I sued outright to wed her.
+
+  Good end from bad beginning!
+  My wooing came to winning,--
+  And still I watch her spinning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MATHER SAFE.
+
+
+The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
+----College in New England procured me access to the library belonging
+to that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had
+previously enjoyed the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning
+for money to buy books for interment in this choice literary catacomb;
+nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction of an annual stare at them
+through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the effect that
+nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
+occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more
+to the select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the
+shelves, could really use the library, I demanded this favor of the
+gentleman who desired to recompense me for what I had done for him. The
+Librarian, who valued books as things capable of being locked up in
+cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion of
+rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my
+credentials. The authority, however, was not to be questioned;--I was to
+be admitted to the library at any hour of the day; and I took care to
+drop a civil expression to imply my estimation of the privilege and my
+purpose of enjoying it.
+
+Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a
+course of reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon
+Saturday afternoons, and finally to establish myself, with whatever
+authors I had selected, in a certain retired alcove devoted to the
+metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind Crawford's bust
+of the late President T----, and is nearly opposite the famous Mather
+Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
+of ---- College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
+word of the history of the spacious and ancient coffer to which
+allusion is made.
+
+The Mather Safe--which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily
+bound with that metal--is said to have been among the possessions of the
+author of the "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral
+descendant of the Mathers, an eccentric character, popularly known as
+Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor, and had the reputation of being
+enormously rich, the College authorities of his day were accustomed to
+treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I believe,
+as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic
+blandishments may have had upon their object cannot at present be
+determined. For when the day came for the long-expected will to be
+opened, it was found that the old gentleman had bequeathed to the
+College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let into the
+wood-work in one corner of the same,--which papers were not to be
+removed or opened for a hundred years.
+
+It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with
+the best grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for
+considerable expense necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in
+the library. Yet, not satisfied with this culpable negligence, Mr.
+Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the acceptance of his gift.
+He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather Safe, of which
+he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
+President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could
+have access to its contents except in the presence of the other.
+Moreover, he required that the Safe should be used only as a receptacle
+for packages which the depositors desired to keep from the world for at
+least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would have
+endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers
+left in the Safe,--these being considered instruments whereby immense
+possessions would finally come to the College. But, as their worthy
+friend, however niggardly in other respects, had taken care to save
+nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of disregarding his
+wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so, many
+years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the
+conditions already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so
+many persons appeared to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular
+legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had been consigned to various
+periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women. These were
+numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
+severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living
+person, perhaps to the future occupant of some professor's chair or
+metropolitan pulpit.
+
+It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite
+alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight
+thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I
+would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by
+this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was
+said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
+history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the
+world. There were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church
+and State, which their perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before
+their fellows, but which, in the bitterness of remorse, they had
+recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to future
+times,--thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
+should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was
+vague talk, also, of funds which had been deposited to found some
+professorship in the College, to furnish some instruction which the age
+was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too, there were intimations of
+endowments to establish scholarships for women, who,--so it was
+argued,--after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of years,
+would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In
+short, there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the
+blood, as this tough old ark, buffeting slowly through the years,
+entered its familiar night. If there was deficiency in the testimony
+which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there was, doubtless,
+sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
+interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.
+
+During the latter part of a certain August--my family being established
+at the seaside--I determined to devote a long day to the College
+Library. The fact was, that a trifling domestic incident--no other than
+the smoking of a kitchen-chimney--had turned my attention to the
+conditions of atmospheric changes. Certain phenomena I had observed
+seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in popular text-books. Indeed,
+as it appeared to me, modifications of a received theory--which might be
+determined by a diligent comparison of existing authorities--would
+suggest a household economy of great practical importance. Certain
+facts, which must have been noted by all the great voyagers of the
+world, might give me data from which to establish the suspected
+conclusion. I accordingly repaired to the library at a very early hour,
+and labored through the day in collecting and committing to writing what
+had been observed by many eminent navigators upon the point in question.
+Four o'clock in the afternoon found me too tired to apply any process of
+analysis to the observations obtained. I therefore retired to my
+accustomed seat, took down almost the first book which came to hand, and
+resigned myself to the impressions of a favorite author. I had passed
+about an hour in a delicious state of dreamy tranquillity, sometimes
+reading, sometimes pausing to color the faded page with the brilliant
+hues of more modern thought, when my attention was attracted by a
+familiar voice proceeding from the neighborhood of the Mather Safe.
+
+"The President and Treasurer were to have been here at five o'clock."
+
+"I have heard nothing of it," said the Librarian. "I am sure that the
+President is out of town for the day."
+
+"Strange! strange!" exclaimed the Reverend Mr. Clifton, in a very
+excited tone. "I wish to make a deposit of great importance in the
+Mather Safe. I had the assurance that the Safe should be opened at five
+this afternoon. Here, read the solemn promise upon which I have come
+from Foxden!"
+
+The Librarian glanced at an open letter which Clifton held out to him,
+and said, in a quiet manner,--
+
+"The President promises to meet you in the College Library on the
+afternoon of Thursday, the twenty-fourth instant; to-day is Wednesday,
+the twenty-third."
+
+"Is it possible?" muttered the clergyman, with a look of startled
+despair. "Pardon my disturbance. I have been hardly myself for these
+last weeks. Yet I can wait."
+
+I spoke to Mr. Clifton as he was about to leave the library. He blenched
+at hearing my voice, and strove to conceal the package beneath his arm.
+
+"How do my good friends in Foxden?" said I, inviting him into my alcove.
+"Is it true that Dr. Dastick has presented his cabinet of curiosities to
+the town?"
+
+"What are you reading?" said the clergyman, in a tone of curt authority
+very foreign to the mild persuasiveness of his usual professional
+accents.
+
+I exhibited the title of the book: it was the "Meditations of
+Descartes."
+
+"And do you follow those who vainly seek for truth through the inner
+world of man, not conforming themselves to the necessities of the
+outward world and the teachings of Revelation?"
+
+I defended the usefulness of some acquaintance with the original and
+powerful thinker, whose apologies are certainly profuse enough to
+satisfy the most orthodox.
+
+"Yes; I suppose you read Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, the Atheism of
+D'Holbach, Utilitarianism Systematized by Auguste Comte! Did you ever go
+fishing in a dory when the wind was off shore?"
+
+There was an alarm in the eye and manner of Mr. Clifton, a tremulous
+restlessness in his speech, which warned me to avoid discussion, and
+endeavor to soothe his agitation. It was only to the last interrogatory,
+therefore, that I made some light reply.
+
+"The sea sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an
+extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations
+some illustration which presents itself,--"the boat tosses on from wave
+to wave, for dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from
+shore, and throw the anchor. What auspicious expansion of soul and body!
+How we slide up and down the backs of great billows, and cast our lines
+with ever-varying success! But the night comes, and with it the
+necessity of rowing back against wind and tide. Ah, then how long the
+lonely ocean-leagues! How distant the time when we may hope to stand
+confused and giddy upon solid earth! Some never see the land again, but
+are swept out into the storm and darkness, and are lost,--_lost_!"
+
+"I presume I understand the significance of your similitude," I replied,
+a little annoyed at this inopportune indulgence of the pastoral
+privilege. "You would imply the dangerous tendency of a certain sort of
+philosophical speculation; and so far we doubtless agree. Yet I ought to
+say, that, in cases where personal investigation is possible, I would
+take neither popular clamor nor learned dogmatism as conclusive evidence
+against any writer's honesty and usefulness. With the vulgar, genius has
+always seemed a sort of madness; and should a man rise preeminent above
+the teachers of his generation, his wisdom would appear to them as
+foolishness."
+
+A change came over the face of Clifton as I said these words. It was as
+if a mask had fallen. Perchance he had wished to appear to me in that
+character of instructor which he desired some competent person to assume
+to him. Now, the relaxed muscles and averted eye only asked the sympathy
+of an equal. He spoke with forced, and almost grating, utterance.
+
+"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may
+bear into the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general
+perception, too pure for even exceptional recognition."
+
+"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says
+true, holds many mystic signals which the past and present could address
+only to the future,--signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but
+which the freemasonry of higher intelligence shall render plain in the
+time hereafter."
+
+"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,--"what if I had
+come to add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may
+be for other times? What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we
+common men, who find a life full of active duties presented to our
+acceptance,--should such as we, I say, receive this world as a pageant
+before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The conceit of
+external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
+element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind
+only an awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now
+tolerated, but an extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether
+wanting the perception, that, rising from the gross symbols of language,
+can know the subtile and precious emotion which in a more advanced state
+of being those symbols might suggest."
+
+As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous
+excitability, I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what
+he said, or even demand that it be made intelligible by further
+explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied in striving to identify
+this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance, the pastor
+of the First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had
+once been said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality
+popularly known as "The Transcendentalists." But this was many years
+ago; and the world always supposed that he had outgrown his early
+errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England, a more
+genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
+remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to
+resist the social influences into which they may be thrown. This was
+probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from
+the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life
+seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to
+contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which
+should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some moments,
+Clifton again addressed me.
+
+"Recollections of moments, months of excitement, of intense power, have
+returned! They may not fade again unspoken. You shall know my
+long-cherished secret. Younger in years, you may scarcely advise; but,
+at least, you may give sympathy that shall confirm my decision. I have
+engaged rooms at the neighboring hotel. Come and pass the evening--nay,
+the night--with me; for much must be read and thought and spoken before
+the black veil of personality can be lifted between us."
+
+It has already been observed that my family were at the seaside. This
+circumstance left me sole disposer of my time and localities. How, then,
+resist the inclination to see out the adventure upon which I had
+stumbled? Let me credit myself also with a worthier motive: I saw that
+my companion was in no state to be left to himself,--and, really, there
+was no mutual friend to whom I could consign him. Accordingly I offered
+my arm in a manner to imply acquiescence in his proposal.
+
+We soon reached the hotel, and ascended to a room in the remote corner
+of a spacious wing. Clifton at once turned the key, placed his package
+upon the table, and proceeded to employ a stray bit of carpet in
+stopping a ventilator which communicated with the entry. Having
+satisfied himself that this passage was rendered impervious to sound, he
+drew two chairs up to the table, motioned me into one, and planted
+himself in the other with the air of a man, in popular phrase, about to
+make a night of it.
+
+"Did you ever hear of Herbert Vannelle?" he asked, abruptly.
+
+It can hardly be necessary to say that a substitute is here placed for
+the name really mentioned.
+
+I replied in the negative, and asked where the gentleman lived.
+
+"He lives nowhere on earth; he is dead,--just dead."
+
+"A friend of yours?"
+
+"A master once; now a presence eluding, haunting, torturing. He left me
+this manuscript; it is a 'Philosophy of the Absolute.'" (Here Clifton
+drew from a curiously contrived case of parchment a cluster of pages.)
+"It has now twenty-two hours to appear in the present century. You shall
+devote the night to reading it, and tell me that I have acted well."
+
+A sultry August evening, a smoky boarding-house lamp, much skirmishing
+of mosquitoes, and--a manuscript system of philosophy! The prospect was
+not inviting. The reading of other people's manuscripts is surely the
+crucial test of a devoted benevolence. There are few ways in which I am
+so little ready to oblige my fellow-men. I had, indeed, at times, been
+induced to inspect sundry romances in blotted embryo; but, as yet,
+nobody had called upon me with a system of philosophy. _Printed_
+philosophy is none too easy reading. But to sit there, under the
+guardianship of Clifton, and spell out the dim dogmatism of some
+nebulous fanatic,--of course it was not to be thought of for a moment.
+With a _suave_ periphrasis of speech I questioned the expediency of the
+proposition.
+
+"I shall ring for candles that will burn during the night," said Mr.
+Clifton, heedless of my expostulation. "Also some refreshment. You take
+tea, I suppose? You shall read the first ten pages of Vannelle's
+writing. It is possible you may exercise self-control enough to abandon
+it unfinished. But you will not sleep tonight."
+
+There was a confidence in the minister's tone which gave rather
+unpleasant emphasis to this final prophecy. Still, I believed myself
+capable of the ten pages without establishing a hopelessly wakeful
+condition,--indeed, it was something to be guarantied against the
+opposite infirmity. The tea, accompanied by a few thin shavings of
+toast, presently arrived. The means of procuring light were also
+furnished us. Clifton's hand lay heavily upon the manuscript until the
+attendant had disappeared for the last time, and the door was locked
+behind him. He then opened the papers before me, and signified that the
+time had come. I braced myself as for a serious undertaking.
+
+Thus I accepted the task. How give words to the singular emotions which
+soon possessed me? As if some charm, some spell of magnetism, had been
+given to the paper, my whole consciousness was riveted upon it. I know
+not how to represent this bold, this startling attempt to establish a
+positive basis for metaphysical philosophy, an exact science of all
+things human and divine. Here was a man, perchance of more courage and
+conscience, perchance of more devilish recklessness, than any of his
+contemporaries. But how deal with what came to me from that wondrous
+writing in the ambiguities of common language? All thought--even
+supposing it embodied in a perfect form of speech--is subject to the
+limitations of the recipient mind. My own glimpses of the writer's
+meaning were necessarily most indistinct. I cannot attempt to transfer
+them. I was controlled by a force not my own. The shadow of a mysterious
+power was over me. The mists of sentimental pantheism were left far
+below the clear-cut summits whither the reader was invited to ascend.
+There was an interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the
+apparent letter than that of Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for
+a widely different purpose) what the Romish Church has ever
+declared,--that the Scriptures, recording spiritual truth, cannot be
+comprehensible to the natural understanding,--that, while the Sacred
+Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual
+verity only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was
+an idealism, it nevertheless manifested itself through the plainest
+realities. The solution of the problem seemed to come not from one
+point, but from all points. Certainly there was a tendency towards the
+supersensible; but this direction was taken through stern grappling with
+the actual. At one time I struggled against the august spirit that was
+borne in upon me; at another, I was utterly subdued by the lofty
+enthusiasm of the writer,--something within me capable of absolute
+cognition seemed responding to his appeals. But the pith and vitality of
+this marvel could be recognized only by long experience. And here the
+student was required to stake his soul upon a perilous cast. For, if not
+pursued and fathomed to full satisfaction, this view of things would be
+disturbing, paralyzing. With any half-acceptance a man might scarcely
+live. It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals
+into a musical instrument, and then every event in time might touch it
+to exquisite harmony. But the more ravishing the beauty which seemed
+offered through perfect realization of this knowledge, the more
+blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a
+selfish dilettanteism. For in certain passages were breathed faint
+suggestions, that moral codes held sacred by the people could not bind
+the initiated,--nay, that what seemed most evil might be so explained as
+to become wholly legitimate to the elect.
+
+It was far into the night. I had gone over about a third of the
+manuscript. Sharp questions assailed my ears. Was I bound to jeopard
+all the common good of life for the chance of--just failing to know
+existence from a higher plane? Could I ascend so far above the frailties
+of average men as to receive in purity and innocence the license which
+acceptance of this strange scheme would surely give? Dim-sighted as I
+was, it was necessary to rise and dispel this splendid phantasm. I
+shuddered in sudden alarm at the danger which threatened me. By a
+spasmodic movement, in which I failed to recognize any presence of my
+will, the manuscript was closed and handed to Clifton. Welcome existence
+under coarsest and harshest terms, rather than tamper with such fearful
+possibilities!
+
+For hours the minister had gazed into my face, partaking the excitement
+to which he had subjected me. He had lighted and trimmed the candles, as
+was necessary, but had never broken silence. And now there came from him
+the deep sigh of relief from an absorbing interest; he sighed as a
+little child when the fairytale is ended and the tense strain of
+attention may be relaxed.
+
+"What was this man?" I demanded, hurriedly.
+
+"What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be
+found out at all. What he was is not for me nor for you to know. It is
+possible that he may meet with competent judges hereafter, even among
+men. Look at this address."
+
+Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate
+disposition of the manuscript. It was to remain for eighty years in the
+Mather Safe, and was then to be consigned to the occupant of the Chair
+of Moral Philosophy in the College.
+
+"Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!" I
+exclaimed. "I doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession
+will feel disposed to abandon the market-worth of conventional
+acquirements, and set forth as a humble student of unpopular truth."
+
+The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration
+I had indicated.
+
+The darkest hour of the night had come. Every sound of human activity
+had long ago ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily
+probe an intense experience. I felt that more was to be
+known,--something which the minister longed to tell,--something to which
+what he had caused me to read was to serve as a prelude. I suspected how
+powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence of the Idea
+which he had carried. Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it
+might prevent all harmonious action,--it might ever goad the intellect,
+and crush the heart. As the confession trembled upon the lips of
+Clifton, I signified my profound sympathy. It is an awful moment, when a
+mature man tries to put off the solitariness of his life.
+
+What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person. The
+pathetic earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very
+phrases that he used; there can be few verbal changes as they now flow
+from the pen.
+
+
+II.
+
+NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.
+
+I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great
+bereavement, received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at
+that time about twelve years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome
+annuity, which he spent with the utmost liberality. As I was rather a
+thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was determined that I
+should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my
+seventeenth birthday,--an age somewhat later than the average at that
+time.
+
+Two years before me in college was the class of 18--. Upon the roll of
+its fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an
+orphan, inclined to thought and study beyond the limited academic range
+of those days, endowed with personal fascinations of a very rare and
+peculiar kind,--there seemed only one possible shadow to darken his
+career. In his family there had been said to exist a tendency to
+eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed
+for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college,
+had given much uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle
+with which he was socially connected. Upon the death of his wife he had
+retired to the Vannelle homestead in the northwestern part of
+Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he insisted
+upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and
+companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended
+his studies with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to
+accomplish him in the grace of physical power, at that time little
+recognized as a part of education.
+
+So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the
+young men of the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he
+left America on the day his class graduated. His connections with the
+other students had been very slight. He had never cared to acquire that
+fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon which college-rank
+depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value in his
+connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with
+the openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the
+bewildering sophistries of the school-philosophies, and their aimless
+wrangling over verbal conceits.
+
+At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting
+rounds upon the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often
+encountered Vannelle in search of some volume of which I had just
+possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I was soon fascinated by
+a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and persuaded by
+a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no
+other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that
+which the mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an
+interest in directing my inquiries along the paths to which they
+naturally tended, he never communicated the results of his own studies,
+or offered me the slightest assistance in generalizing my random
+observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he was
+influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the
+writings of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest
+notoriety, yet never for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights
+where those earnest spirits soared.
+
+Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the
+time that my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him
+during his absence was from the scattered notices of
+newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert possessed the
+privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for
+knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter
+dated from X----, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed
+almost a command, to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert
+had returned, and thus abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until
+the autumn the study of a profession, I promised to come to him for a
+few weeks,--a visit which might be extended, were it mutually agreeable.
+
+There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars,
+before arriving in the village of X----; there were also six rough miles
+of carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house
+by the damp river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there,
+Vannelle stood at the door to greet me.
+
+"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering
+himself of some studied speech,--"we have six months' concern together;
+then we may stand at the parting of the ways,--we may cleave to one
+another, or separate forever."
+
+A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and
+cedars. The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into
+dusty ridges. The wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the
+pine-trees without. Little oval mirrors distorting the human countenance
+within. In the living-room (so called by those able to live in it)
+loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral proportion,--a ghastly altar
+which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel fully justified in
+protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the house,
+had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused
+mass of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical
+apparatus about the floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to
+the ceiling;--at first I supposed them to be made of painted wood;
+afterwards I discovered they were of iron, and filled with rare books
+and manuscripts.
+
+"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He
+wished to get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is
+no escape in a New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our
+farmer, could never resist the feminine itch to put things to rights.
+She was always contriving to arrange papers and books in symmetrical
+piles where nothing could be found. My father could never turn his back
+but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were
+lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom
+of dust that hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this
+room, and kept the key of it, there was no more trouble."
+
+I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which
+I hardly dare to put into words must accompany them. All these
+surroundings, seen by me for the first time, had a fearful familiarity.
+In some occult state of spiritual existence I seemed to have known them
+all. I have learned that the soul may enter into communion with other
+minds otherwise than through the senses,--nay, more, it may thus take an
+inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had such
+proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this
+startling suspicion for the first time.
+
+"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the
+house. "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber
+projecting over the porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he
+wore at city club-houses and family-dinners,--but the man as you knew
+him _here_, how little does it resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet
+which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it
+is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be
+interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as
+corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious
+subjects and execrable drawing always put me."
+
+The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and
+said, slowly,--
+
+"Have you been here before?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned
+purity. It is as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."
+
+The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the
+study. I glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which
+seemed in strange contrast with the exquisitely neat and even
+fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of proud pity touched the
+lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as if I had
+read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:--
+
+"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of
+mankind, fret our souls at trifles,--we, who are to be instruments in
+marshalling the race from slavery and folly to wisdom and freedom?
+Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth shall be alike,
+and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as the
+highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to
+declare!"
+
+These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into
+my consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been
+uttered. It was with awe that this mystic correspondence between mind
+and mind was made plain to me. One man out of this myriad-bodied
+humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was never more to be
+alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in the
+potter's hands!
+
+At length Herbert spoke.
+
+"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to
+me,--not by my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till
+I go to join my father, with his great work more nearly completed than
+when it came to my hands. At that table he died, with some glimpses of
+the promised land whither he tended,--where he prayed that I might
+enter."
+
+There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,--no utterance of the heart,
+but rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered
+in the memory.
+
+"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,--you, whose career might
+be such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must
+know, the wonderful gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be
+ignorant of the fascination you might exercise over man and woman."
+
+"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise,"
+exclaimed Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,--if not through spiritual
+grace, then by some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you
+certain qualities of mind that may serve to regulate the equipoise of
+mine. I have the means to provide for us both during the high
+speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in this
+undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural
+from the spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of
+obtaining an absolute ground for the philosophy which should include all
+things human and divine. He passed onward before the inestimable gift he
+seemed to have won could be set forth in the symbols of the world. To
+see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular adaptation through
+which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express the
+truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such
+colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man
+has found out the knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos:
+shall he not perfect that knowledge in the Law which includes the divine
+element by which the universe is informed? How can we love with our
+whole heart what we do not know with our whole mind? Clifton, I declare
+to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and acts is
+possible to man!"
+
+I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been
+moved by utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the
+words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring
+courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was
+produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of
+some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst of the
+garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes
+shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
+
+I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly
+lores, that I at length came to think it possible he might be the
+appointed instrument of communicating the singular intelligence that he
+sought. He proposed to review the different systems built by human
+thought before applying himself to the problem of finding a system of
+philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from the
+extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position--when that
+position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious
+thinker--some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking
+from the conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after
+the inaccessible, but a definite effort so to place the soul and
+discipline the understanding that wisdom could be realized without
+process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for
+the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as
+finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He
+declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of
+speculative deism. Let me also say this for my friend,--that his
+directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but
+what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have
+called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow
+wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest
+self-culture only as a state of more passionate yearning for
+regeneration.
+
+What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble
+companionship? how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the
+feasibility of the object he strove to attain? We read together certain
+manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in which, wrapt in a gorgeous
+symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which, at times,
+could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints,
+apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored
+to grasp them, vanished like a vision.
+
+Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with
+Vannelle in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I
+knew an intellectual intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of
+spirit wholly delivered from the burden of the flesh. Vannelle talked
+like one inspired upon the higher problems of metaphysical research,
+showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations of the
+philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to
+have cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it
+from a position whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable
+oppressions marked the rhythm in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries
+of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of blessedness, were equally
+wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed impossible that any
+words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the thought
+which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding
+to what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of
+opinion man had known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and
+despair analogous to those which succeed physical intoxication. The
+grosser systems of antiquity were not only considered, but actually
+personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us to penetrate
+into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how
+nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how
+the noblest virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we
+learned to welcome these convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly
+bearing us onward towards our destined goal.
+
+--But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was
+the delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?)
+which has overhung my earthly life.
+
+Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,--partially
+broken. During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from
+friends once dear to me had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly
+valueless. On the eleventh of November I started,--as a black seal was
+to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last instalment of his
+annuity had been paid, and my little sister, an orphan and penniless,
+was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then
+hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put
+the letter into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him
+forever. Let me forget the bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged
+to provide for my sister from his own ample means, and even offered her
+an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient sanity to perceive
+the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither
+removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a
+condition to be sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would
+be confused, and finally petrified. Had this refined probing and
+questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was this the end of my Absolute
+Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of the conscience
+and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such
+questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have
+bantered aside. I seemed to realize the torture described in the dream
+of Dante,--two souls struggling together in one frail body. I had been
+applauding good and condemning evil when it cost me nothing but the
+sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose cracked and
+shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the
+victory have ached through my life.
+
+There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my
+bread; for how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and
+huckster through the world,--_I_, who had thought to condition the
+Spirit of the Universe? But there were metaphors faintly shadowing
+divine things, symbols adapted to the limitations of the popular mind,
+and with these I might do an honest work for the souls of men. _Honest?_
+Yes,--unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he declared that he spoke
+of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something than not
+to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the
+clergy this is the daily cross,--the necessity of maintaining a fixed
+position, and ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever
+yearning upward to be taught.
+
+It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by
+school-teaching, I achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to
+qualify for enrolment among the liberal clergy of New England. Until the
+time when my sister left me by marriage I was settled at N----, on the
+Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old Dr. P---- of Foxden, and I
+received a call to his vacant parish. I knew that the sort of society to
+be found in that place would minister to my most urgent need. I craved
+some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal
+spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might
+speak freely, and from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the
+years had led us! Sometimes there came a whisper that I had been
+snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls; sometimes my only
+opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead. I
+could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever
+was I controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant
+power. No occupation was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading
+presence of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary
+of the day that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a
+written sermon on those solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not
+of faith is sin." For the first time I shrank from the consciousness
+that the words uttered were true to me in a very different sense from
+that in which the congregation received them. I found it difficult to
+poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available
+representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously
+in the afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could
+perceive that my pulse and breathing were accelerated. A certain
+numbness of the brain seemed pierced with convulsive, fugitive shocks.
+An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral sympathy, seemed
+beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but could
+find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come
+incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:--
+
+"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and
+boisterous objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too
+nearly acquainteth us. More of these no man hath known than myself;
+which I confess I conquered, not in martial attitude, but on my knees."
+
+An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have
+said that I spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before.
+Indeed, I was conscious of a capacity to receive and convey such
+portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to their needs. To speak in
+figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued my soul.
+
+Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw
+myself upon a sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state
+where one far distant may make himself perceived and known. The occult
+power of foreknowing events, the delicate perception of forbidden
+things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the brain. I became
+conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I
+knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the
+night. One by one went out the scattered village-lights. Another
+consciousness of twenty years seemed compressed into those brilliant,
+bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort and supplied oil; it
+would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew that
+Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.
+
+A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul
+burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the
+face,--it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper: it was
+spectral,--blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted
+vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph! The old
+idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon my
+visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of
+time. His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself--and
+wait. At length the silence was broken.
+
+"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught!
+For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense.
+The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me.
+Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality. I
+have struggled fiercely. I have also conquered."
+
+The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some
+voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had
+cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would
+kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that
+chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand
+Vannelle had interpreted literally.
+
+"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction
+seized by effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity,
+and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me
+round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to
+anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of
+skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
+affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men?
+How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it
+alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you
+from this haze of thought and feeling,--I, who have even now discarded
+Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."
+
+"I hope to be pardoned," I said,--"the current of this life sets so in
+favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with
+sentiment,--why try to give them ideas?"
+
+"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties,"
+exclaimed Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the
+pardonable weakness of one who has done his best. You may be guiltless
+in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction."
+
+"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.
+
+"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in
+this manuscript the result of my life,--the result of two lives. Here is
+written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human
+language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the
+System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon
+Law."
+
+I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.
+
+"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
+manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may
+be brought to you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with
+the pride of inventing arguments and detecting analogies, if they have
+only given you the petty skill of a petty scholar, why then dally on
+with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments, and give others the
+blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."
+
+"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may
+have found, it is for your honor to promulgate."
+
+"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual
+manhood is indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters
+towards earth. My responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will
+now begin."
+
+A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid
+as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that
+Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble
+growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate
+excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I
+might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle
+seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable
+thirst that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the
+manuscript, and devoured page after page. Then I felt the approaches of
+a supreme despotism that might annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to
+be,--that might compel me to denounce all that I had taught, to hear all
+that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer at me as an impostor,
+an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited to come
+above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and
+encouraged by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself
+where the most earnest souls--unless a second birth could be granted
+them--would scoff with the ignorance and intolerance of the mass.
+
+At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.
+
+One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A
+physical emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the
+influence of the night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I
+closed the manuscript forever. Hereditary imperfections of body and mind
+confine me to a sphere of reputable usefulness. If I have sinned in the
+past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes suspect, I have thrust
+from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss through
+all eternity will be mine.
+
+In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+
+III.
+
+As the last words of his strange narration fell from Clifton's lips, he
+bowed his head and was greatly agitated. The vast theologic conception
+over which he had so long brooded, instead of lifting him on high, had
+crushed him to the earth. His moral consciousness had demanded a
+satisfaction which he lacked integrity of purpose to pursue and
+challenge. A fixed conviction of the dreariest pessimism would have been
+better for this man than the lofty uncertainty which had tortured his
+days; for in the belief that one may neither struggle nor aspire there
+is a certain practical drift. But how shall he do any good who bears
+about him a quick conscience, a skeptical understanding, sensitive
+religious affections, and a feeble will? Charles Clifton had neither the
+leisure, nor possibly the application, to follow the creeping advances
+of systematic knowledge. He had listened to a fatal persuasion, and at
+the same time had sought to satisfy contradictory principles of the
+human mind. The kindest thing I could do for him was soon perceived.
+
+"Reverend Sir," I said, "you must permit me to advise you. It is now six
+o'clock. In an hour the early train leaves for Foxden. You must take it
+and return home. Any further vacuum in your daily employment will
+produce a crushing pressure from without that might endanger reason
+itself. I solemnly promise to deposit this manuscript in the Mather
+Safe,--nay, I will not leave town until the President and Treasurer have
+met me this afternoon according to your agreement. I pledge you my honor
+that the parchment shall be consigned to its resting-place with every
+necessary formality."
+
+My companion gazed long upon vacancy before returning any answer. He
+strove to dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in
+shapeless beauty. He walked up and down the chamber, paused, threw open
+the window, and looked upon the street below. I felt that every petty
+detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful vividness upon
+the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he spoke to this
+effect: --
+
+"A grief has been lessened in giving it words. My deepest and most
+solitary moments have been revealed to human sympathy, and the relief is
+great. It may be that I have been created to some wholesome end,--that
+some truth may shine before the world through what seems the failure of
+my life. I will return at once to the sphere of the senses: it is, as
+you say, all that is left me. Let who will inquire into the significance
+and purpose of the Universe; it is for me to work in the bondage of the
+flesh, to be the humble tool of the age in which my lot is cast."
+
+Yet it was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the
+conclusion of the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar
+nervous temperament foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the
+precious legacy of his friend. It was only by addressing his reason in
+repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating my entire fidelity,
+that I induced him to yield.
+
+It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.
+
+I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding.
+Without acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by
+what I had read and heard. As Clifton emerged from the magical influence
+of Vannelle, was it not concentrated upon me? The impulse to return to
+the perusal of the manuscript was almost irresistible. Yet it was
+evident, that, failing to receive as my very life what was there
+written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and
+contradictions. A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my
+only safety.
+
+It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries
+tending to modify the received understanding of a certain natural law.
+During my morning in the College Library I had collected the records of
+many facts, which, laboriously compared, might confirm the hypothesis I
+had conceived. I now braced myself to the task of tracing an order in
+these random observations. I was soon stimulated by perceiving that my
+statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at
+first roused my suspicion. More and more plainly did man's experience
+respond to the results I had dared to predict. Trivial circumstances,
+noted in remote times and disconnected places, pointed in one direction,
+and there beat the regular pulse of Nature.
+
+It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards
+discovered, that the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been
+already conceived and passed upon by a not very eminent scientist in one
+of the Western States. But at that time absorption in the search for
+attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with very brief
+intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the
+afternoon-hour for visiting the library.
+
+The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o'clock.
+
+For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather
+Safe, wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular
+than the consignment about to be made to its keeping.
+
+"Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?" inquired the President.
+
+"I am here to represent him," I replied. "He made a strange mistake in
+the day of appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning.
+The package which he wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my
+hand."
+
+"_Lex Universalis Naturæ_; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE," exclaimed
+the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment. "Poh,
+poh! I thought that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to
+the limbo of fallacies."
+
+"By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for
+anything not transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has," I rejoined,
+somewhat tartly.
+
+"Come, come!" said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones;
+"since the days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians
+have generally been broken-down poets, and should be treated with the
+greatest tenderness. Some flighty minds will prefer dangerous trips to
+dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of figures; but the mass of our
+graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that only the
+mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers
+only natural philosophers are competent instructors."
+
+"Yet, Sir," I said, "you will remember that the time was when your
+natural philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State.
+Even the mathematician is defined by an old lexicographer to be '_Magus
+dæmonum invocator_'; and I cannot forget that all that is of honor and
+respect to-day is but the actual of a once despised ideal."
+
+I really marvelled at my own audacity in presuming to question the words
+of this distinguished and excellent gentleman. Indeed, it was
+particularly surprising, because (if I knew myself) I precisely agreed
+with him. But there is a certain waywardness in my composition, which
+loves to puncture an inflated conventionality, even when I myself am
+most conventional.
+
+In the mean time the Treasurer, taking the President's key with his own,
+had opened the Safe. I looked in and beheld coffers of lead and oak,
+nooks and pigeon-holes covered and sealed with the College seal, little
+cells of glass which appeared to hold documents of the utmost
+importance, and, in short, whatever might best defy the injuries of
+time. The weighty book which registered the contents of the Safe was
+opened before me. I was told to write the number assigned to the
+manuscript, to describe its present condition, and to indicate its
+destination. This I carefully did, and was about to confide my charge to
+its long oblivion.
+
+"Stay!" said the President. "You have forgotten the mottoes! Here is
+only one; and it is our rule that every deposit in the Mather Safe be
+distinguished by three, in as many languages.
+
+  '_Alteri Sæculo_.'
+
+The selection is good, though it has already been adopted by a
+Massachusetts statesman. It is now for you to supply two others."
+
+Singular as it may appear, this sudden call to perform a trifling office
+which I had not anticipated, filled me with a conflict of emotions. In
+choosing another's words, I seemed to indorse or repudiate the strange
+matter with which they were to be associated. I thought of Vannelle's
+wondrous language, of Clifton's exhilaration, and of the vivid buoyancy
+with which my spirit had striven to rise. I even groped for some phrase
+which might hint what delicate aërial impressions had tended to condense
+the soul on the supreme point of spiritual ecstasy. But memory was a
+blank when I demanded words for this seeming-glorious fact in the
+experience of humanity. Success was made impossible by the very
+intensity of the effort to summon an appropriate message to be dropped
+over the abyss of Time. I was confident that there were many apt things
+which might be said, if I could come at them, as it were, sideways. In
+order that I might take them at this advantage, I snatched a letter from
+my pocket, and began to read. My eye was soon caught by the impression
+of a seal that I had once given my wife. It was a good [woman's] motto,
+I jestingly told her; and now it was returned to me at my sorest need.
+Six little words of the good Pascal,--
+
+  "_Le plus sûr est de croire_."
+
+Something compelled me to write them, and a new freedom was with me when
+I had done so.
+
+"Make haste, make haste, for the prayer-bell is ringing!" cried the
+President "See, here is a copy of Plato's 'Phædrus,'--a work which our
+vapory brethren are fond of quoting, generally at second-hand; perhaps
+you may pick out a sentence that will prophesy with sufficient
+ambiguity."
+
+But it was not Plato or his "Phædrus" that then claimed my thoughts.
+There loomed a Rock graven with more august instruction than the sage of
+the Academy was privileged to communicate,--a Rock against which the
+heaving surface of human opinion had chafed and broken in vain. Tossed
+to and fro upon the tide of life, who has not sometimes listened to the
+wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical Interpretation," "Absolute
+Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has never been caught
+by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers,
+Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature,
+Clairvoyance, and Magnetic Currents? Happy those who are able to return
+to that one channel through which magnetic currents have indeed
+descended from an unseen sphere, and touched the noblest hearts! For
+there _is_ a certain mediation between the necessities and aspirations
+of man,--an assured deliverance from the gross and sordid surroundings
+of his earthly life. There came before me one simple period from a
+familiar Book. Most direct and confident is the solemn statement. I
+wrote it as the final motto.
+
+
+     "NOW THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTILE THAN ANY BEAST OF THE FIELD WHICH
+     THE LORD GOD HAD MADE."
+
+THE TERTIARY AGE, AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC ANIMALS.
+
+
+In entering upon the Tertiaries, we reach that geological age which,
+next to his own, has the deepest interest for man. The more striking
+scenes of animal life, hitherto confined chiefly to the ocean, are now
+on land; the extensive sheets of fresh water are filled with fishes of a
+comparatively modern character,--with Whitefish, Pickerel, Perch, Eels,
+etc.,--while the larger quadrupeds are introduced upon the continents so
+gradually prepared to receive them. The connection of events throughout
+the Tertiaries, considered as leading up to the coming of man, may be
+traced not only in the physical condition of the earth, and in the
+presence of the large terrestrial Mammalia, but also in the appearance
+of those groups of animals and plants which we naturally associate with
+the domestic and social existence of man. Cattle and Horses are first
+found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the Rosaceæ, with their
+variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the
+shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of
+man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil
+vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this
+point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those
+conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had
+already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn and winter, its
+seed-time and harvest, though neither sower nor reaper was there; the
+forests then, as now, dropped their thick carpet of leaves upon the
+ground in the autumn, and in many localities they remain where they
+originally fell, with a layer of soil between the successive layers of
+leaves,--a leafy chronology, as it were, by which we read the passage of
+the years which divided these deposits from each other. Where the leaves
+have fallen singly on a clayey soil favorable for receiving such
+impressions, they have daguerreotyped themselves with the most wonderful
+accuracy, and the Oaks, Poplars, Willows, Maples, Walnuts, Gum- and
+Cinnamon-trees, etc., of the Tertiaries are as well known to us as are
+those of our own time.
+
+It was an eventful day, not only for science, but for the world, when a
+Siberian fisherman chanced to observe a singular mound lying near the
+mouth of the River Lena, where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. During
+the warmer summer-weather, he noticed, that, as the snow gradually
+melted, this mound assumed a more distinct and prominent outline, and at
+length, on one side of it, where the heat of the sun was greatest, a
+dark body became exposed, which, when completely uncovered, proved to be
+that of an immense elephant, in so perfect a state of preservation that
+the dogs and wolves were attracted to it as by the smell of fresh meat,
+and came to feed upon it at night. The man knew little of the value of
+his discovery, but the story went abroad, and an Englishman travelling
+in Russia, being curious to verify it, visited the spot, and actually
+found the remains where they had been reported to lie, on the frozen
+shore of the Arctic Sea,--strange burial-place enough for an animal
+never known to exist out of tropical climates. Little beside the
+skeleton was left, though parts of the skin remained covered with hair,
+showing how perfect must have been the condition of the body when first
+exposed. The tusks had been sold by the fisherman; but Mr. Adams
+succeeded in recovering them; and collecting all the bones except those
+of one foot, which had been carried off by the wolves, he had them
+removed to St. Petersburg, where the skeleton now stands in the Imperial
+Museum. The inhabitants of Siberia seem to be familiar with this animal,
+which they designate by the name of _Mammoth_, while naturalists call
+it _Elephas primigenius_. The circumstance that they abound in the
+frozen drift of the great northern plain of Asia, and are occasionally
+exposed in consequence of the wearing of the large rivers traversing
+Siberia, has led to the superstition among the Tongouses, that the
+Mammoths live under ground, and die whenever, on coming to the surface,
+the sunlight falls upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Had this been the only creature of the kind found so far from the
+countries to which elephants are now exclusively confined, it might have
+been believed that some strange accident had brought it to the spot
+where it was buried. But it was not long before similar remains were
+found in various parts of Europe,--in Russia, in Germany, in Spain, and
+in Italy. The latter were readily accounted for by the theory that they
+must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the
+armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have
+been swept from India by some great flood, and stranded where they were
+found. It was Cuvier, entitled by his intimate acquaintance with the
+anatomy of living animals to an authoritative opinion in such matters,
+who first dared to assert that these remains belonged to no elephant of
+our period. He rested this belief upon structural evidence, and insisted
+that an Indian elephant, brought upon the waves of a flood to Siberia,
+would be an Indian elephant still, while all these remains differed in
+structure from any species existing at present. This statement aroused
+research in every direction, and the number of fossil Mammalia found
+within the next few years, and proved by comparison to be different from
+any living species, soon demonstrated the truth of his conclusion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Shortly after the discovery of fossil elephants had opened this new path
+of investigation, some curious bones were found by some workmen in the
+quarries of Montmartre, near Paris, and brought to Cuvier for
+examination. Although few in number, and affording but very scanty
+_data_ for such a decision, he at once pronounced them to be the remains
+of some extinct animal preceding the present geological age. Here, then,
+at his very door, as it were, was a settlement of that old creation in
+which he could pursue the inquiry, already become so important in its
+bearings. It was not long before other bones of the same kind were
+found, though nothing as yet approaching an entire skeleton. However,
+with such means as he had, Cuvier began a comparison with all the living
+Mammalia,--with the human skeleton first, with Monkeys, with the larger
+Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the smaller Mammalia, then with
+the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to find some
+resemblance. He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to
+the family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare
+all the living species, till he had collected ample evidence to show
+that the bones in question did not correspond with any species, and
+could not even be referred to any genus, now in existence. At length
+there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same
+animal,--next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole
+head with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with
+Cuvier's vast knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the
+whole skeleton. At about the same time, in the same locality, were found
+other bones and teeth also, differing from those first discovered, and
+yet equally unlike those of any living animal. The first evidently
+belonged to some stout and heavy animal, the others were more slender
+and of lighter build. From these fragments, ample evidence to him of his
+results, he drew the outlines of two animals: one which he called the
+Palæotherium, (old animal,) a figure of which is given in the above
+wood-cut, and the other Anoplotherium, (animal without fangs). He
+presented these figures with an explanatory memoir at the Academy, and
+announced them as belonging to some creation preceding the present,
+since no such animals had ever existed in our own geological period.
+Such a statement was a revelation to the scientific world: some looked
+upon it with suspicion and distrust; others, who knew more of
+comparative anatomy, hailed it as introducing a new era in science; but
+it was not till complete specimens were actually found of animals
+corresponding perfectly to those figured and described by Cuvier, and
+proving beyond a doubt their actual existence in ancient times, that all
+united in wonder and admiration at the result obtained by him with such
+scanty means.
+
+It would seem that the family of Pachyderms was largely represented
+among the early Mammalia; for, since Cuvier named these species, a
+number of closely allied forms have been found in deposits belonging to
+the same epoch. Of course, the complete specimens are rare; but the
+fragments of such skeletons occur in abundance, showing that these
+old-world Pachyderms, resembling the Tapirs more than any other living
+representatives of the family, were very numerous in the lower
+Tertiaries.
+
+There is, however, one animal now in existence, forming one of those
+singular links before alluded to between the present and the past, of
+which I will say a few words here, though its relation is rather with a
+later group of Tertiary Pachyderms than with those described by Cuvier.
+On the coast of Florida there is an animal of very massive, clumsy
+build, long considered to be a Cetacean, but now recognized, by some
+naturalists at least, as belonging to the order of Pachyderms. In form
+it resembles the Cetaceans, though it has a fan-shaped tail, instead of
+the broad flapper of the Whales. It inhabits fresh waters or shoal
+waters, and is not so exclusively aquatic as the oceanic Cetaceans. Its
+most striking feature is the form of the lower jaw, which is bent
+downward, with the front teeth hanging from it. This animal is called
+the Manatee, or Sea-Cow. There are three species known to
+naturalists,--one in Tampa Bay, one in the Amazon, and one in Africa. In
+the Tertiary deposits of Germany there has been found an animal allied
+in some of its features to those described by Cuvier, but it has the
+crown of its teeth folded like the Tapir, while the lower jaw is turned
+down with a long tusk growing from it. This animal has been called the
+Dinotherium. A part of the head, showing the heavy jaws and the
+formidable tusk, is represented in the subjoined wood-cut.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Its hanging lower jaw, with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly
+to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some
+resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison
+with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was
+found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit
+with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its
+position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. The Elephant was now examined;
+and in him also a rudimentary tooth appeared in the lower jaw, not cut
+through, but placed in the same relation to the jaw and the other teeth
+as that of the Mastodon. It would seem, then, that the Manatee makes one
+in this series of Dinotherium, Mastodon, and Elephant, and represents
+the aquatic Pachyderms, occupying the same relation to the terrestrial
+Pachyderms as the Seals bear to the terrestrial Carnivora, and, like
+them, lowest in structure among their kind.
+
+The announcement of Cuvier's results stimulated research, and from this
+time forward Tertiary Mammalia became the subject of extensive and most
+important investigations among naturalists. The attention of collectors
+once drawn to these remains, they were found in such numbers that the
+wonder was how they had been so long hidden from the observation of men.
+They remind us chiefly of tropical animals; indeed, Tigers, Hyenas,
+Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had their home in
+countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the
+climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present.
+Bones of many of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France,
+Italy, and England. Perhaps the story of Kirkdale Cave, where the first
+important discovery of this kind was made on English soil, may not be so
+well known to American readers as to forbid its repetition here.
+
+It was in the summer of 1821 that some workmen, employed in quarrying
+stone upon the slope of a limestone hill at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, came
+accidentally upon the mouth of a cavern. Overgrown with grass and
+bushes, the mouth of this cave in the hill-side had been effectually
+closed against all intruders, and it was not strange that its existence
+had never been suspected. The hole was small, but large enough to admit
+a man on his hands and knees; and the workmen, creeping in through the
+opening, found that it led into a cavern, broad in some parts, but low
+throughout. There were only a few spots where a man could stand upright;
+but it was quite extensive, with branches opening out from it, some of
+which have not yet been explored. The whole floor was strewn, from one
+end to the other, with hundreds of bones, like a huge dog-kennel. The
+workmen wondered a little at their discovery, but, remembering that
+there had been a murrain among the cattle in this region some years
+before, they came to the conclusion that these must be the bones of
+cattle that had died in great numbers at that time; and, having so
+settled the matter to their own satisfaction, they took little heed to
+the bones, but threw many of them out on the road with the common
+limestone. Fortunately, a gentleman, living in the neighborhood, whose
+attention had been attracted to them, preserved them from destruction;
+and a few months after the discovery of the cave, Dr. Buckland, the
+great English geologist, visited Kirkdale, to examine its strange
+contents, which proved indeed stranger than any one had imagined; for
+many of these remains belonged to animals never before found in England.
+The bones of Hyenas, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, and Hippopotamuses
+were mingled with those of Deer, Bears, Wolves, Foxes, and many smaller
+creatures. The bones were gnawed, and many were broken, evidently not by
+natural decay, but seemed to have been snapped violently apart. After
+the most complete investigation of the circumstances, Dr. Buckland
+convinced himself, and proved to the satisfaction of all scientific men,
+that the cave had been a den of Hyenas[A] at a time when they, as well
+as Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., existed in England in as great
+numbers as they now do in the wildest parts of tropical Asia or Africa.
+The narrow entrance to the cave still retained the marks of grease and
+hair, such as one may see on the bars of a cage in a menagerie against
+which the imprisoned animals have been in the habit of rubbing
+themselves constantly, and there were marks of the same kind on the
+floor and walls.
+
+[Footnote A: Among the other facts showing that Kirkdale Cave had been
+the den of these animals, and not tenanted as their home by any of the
+other creatures whose remains occurred there, were the excrements of the
+Hyenas found in considerable quantity by Dr. Buckland, and identified as
+such by the keeper of a menagerie. Any one who may wish to read the
+whole history of Dr. Buckland's investigations of this matter, showing
+the patience and sagacity with which he collected and arranged the
+evidence, will find a full account of Kirkdale Cave and other caverns
+containing fossil bones in his "Reliquiæ Diluvianæ."]
+
+It was evident that the Hyenas were the lords of this ancient cavern,
+and the other animals their unwilling guests; for the remains of the
+latter were those which had been most gnawed, broken, and mangled; and
+the head of an enormous Hyena, with gigantic fangs found complete, bore
+ample evidence to their great size and power. Some of the animals, such
+as the Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., could not have been brought into
+the cave without being first killed and torn to pieces, for it is not
+large enough to admit them. But their gnawed and broken bones attest,
+nevertheless, that they were devoured like the rest; and probably the
+Hyenas then had the same propensity which characterizes those of our own
+time, to tear in pieces the body of any dead animal, and carry it to
+their den to feed upon it apart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other
+caverns in Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a
+gigantic species of Bear. Their remains, mingled with those of the
+animals on which they fed, have been found in great numbers in the
+Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia. The subjoined wood-cut shows the
+head of this formidable beast, which must have exceeded in size any Bear
+now living. Indeed, although there were many smaller kinds, and the
+other types of the Animal Kingdom in the Tertiaries seem to approach
+very nearly both in size and general character their modern
+representatives, yet, on the whole, the earlier Mammalia were giants in
+comparison with those now living. The Mastodon and Mammoth, as compared
+with the modern Elephant, the Megatherium, as compared with the Sloths
+of present times, the Hyenas and Bears of the European caverns, and the
+fossil Elk of Ireland, by the side of which even the Moose of our
+Northern woods is belittled, are remarkable instances in proof of this.
+One cannot but be struck with the fact that this first representation of
+Mammalia, the very impersonation of brute force in power, size, and
+ferocity, immediately preceded the introduction of man, with whose
+creation intelligence and moral strength became the dominant influences
+on earth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the
+North-American continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The
+magnificent specimens preserved in this country are too well known to
+require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros occur also in the
+recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect
+skeletons have been found. The Edentata, now confined to South America
+and the western coast of Africa, were also numerous in the Southern
+States during that time; their remains have been found as far north as
+the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must not judge of the Tertiary
+Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the Armadillos, the
+Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but
+formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the
+Megalonyx, and the Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant,
+and others about the same size of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The
+subjoined wood-cut represents a Mylodon in the act of lifting himself
+against the trunk of a tree.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were clumsy brutes, and though their limbs were evidently built
+with reference to powerful movements, perhaps climbing, or at least
+rising on their hind quarters, the act of climbing with them cannot have
+had anything of the nimbleness or activity generally associated with it.
+On the contrary, they probably were barely able to support their huge
+bodies on their hind limbs, which are exceedingly massive, and on the
+stiff, heavy tail, while they dragged down with their front limbs the
+branches of the trees, and fed upon them at leisure. The Zoölogical
+Museum at Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates
+for a very fine set of casts taken from the Megatherium in the British
+Museum. They are now mounted, and may be seen in one of the
+exhibition-rooms of the building. Large Reptiles, but very unlike those
+of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of
+Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the
+Tertiary epochs. The wood-cut below represents a gigantic Salamander of
+the Tertiary deposits. It is a curious fact, illustrative of the
+ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that, when the
+remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first
+discovered toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were
+described by old Professor Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant
+destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually preserved, not for their
+scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and described in
+a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Homo Diluvii Testis." Among the Tertiary
+Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their
+size as well as by their extensive distribution. Their remains have been
+found both in the far West and in the East. The fossil Turtles of
+Nebraska are well known to American naturalists; but the Oriental one
+exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most gigantic representative
+of the order known thus far. A man could stand under the arch of the
+shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than
+the most cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed,
+they are so well known, and have been so fully represented in
+text-books, that I fear some of my readers may think even now that I
+have dwelt too long upon them. Monkeys were unquestionably introduced
+upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones have been
+found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the
+later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected
+in sufficient number to establish much more than the fact of their
+presence in the animal creation at that time. I do not offer any opinion
+respecting the fossil human bones so much discussed recently, because
+the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any decisive judgment
+concerning them. It becomes, however, daily more probable that facts
+will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far
+beyond any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human
+races, as of animals, have followed one another upon the earth. It may
+be the inestimable privilege of our young naturalists to solve this
+great problem, but the older men of our generation must be content to
+renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision of its fulfilment,
+we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not enter
+in and possess it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The other great types of the Animal Kingdom are very fully represented
+in the Tertiaries, and in their general appearance they approach much
+more closely those of the present creation than of any previous epochs.
+Professor Heer has collected and described the Tertiary Insects in great
+number and variety; and the Butterflies, Bugs, Flies, Grasshoppers,
+Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., described in his volumes, would hardly be
+distinguished from our own, except by a practised entomologist. Among
+Crustacea, the Shrimp-like forms of the earlier geological epochs have
+become much less conspicuous, while Crabs and Lobsters are now the
+prominent representatives of the class. Among Mollusks, the Chambered
+Shells, hitherto so numerous, have become, as they now are, very few in
+comparison with the naked Cephalopods. The Nautili, however, resemble
+those now living in the Pacific Ocean; and some fragments of the
+Paper-Nautilus have been found, showing that this delicate shell was
+already in existence. There is one very peculiar type of this class,
+belonging to the Tertiaries, which should not be passed by unnoticed. It
+partakes of the character both of the Cretaceous Belemnites and of the
+living Cuttle-Fish, and is known as the Spirulirostra. Another very
+characteristic group among the Tertiary Shells is that of the
+Nummulites, formerly placed by naturalists in immediate proximity with
+the Ammonites, on account of their internal partitions. This is now
+admitted to have been an error; their position is not yet fully
+determined, but they certainly stand very low in the scale, and have no
+affinity whatever with the Cephalopods. The subjoined wood-cut
+represents one of these Shells, so numerous in the Tertiaries that large
+masses of rock consist of their remains. The Univalve Shells or
+Gasteropods of the Tertiaries embraced all the families now living,
+including land and fresh-water Shells as well as the marine
+representatives of the type. Some of the latter, as, for instance, the
+Cerithium, are accumulated in vast numbers. The limestone quarries out
+of which Paris is chiefly built consist wholly of these Shells. The
+fresh-water basins were filled with Helices, one of which is represented
+in the following wood-cut, with Planorbis, Limnæus and other Shells
+resembling those now so common in all our lakes and rivers, and
+differing from the living ones only by slight specific characters. The
+Bivalves also have the same resemblance to the present ones, including
+fresh-water Mussels as well as the marine Clams and Oysters. Among
+Radiates, the higher Echini (Sea-Urchins) have become numerous, while
+the other Echinoderms of all families abound. Corals include, for the
+first time, the more highly organized Madrepores.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things,
+not only in the character of the animals and plants, but in the height
+of the mountains and in the distribution of land and sea.
+
+Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been
+following, and see what these more recent geological epochs have done
+for their completion. In Europe they have filled the basin in Central
+France, and converted all that region into dry land: they have filled
+also the channel between France and Spain; they have united Central
+Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
+greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the
+promontories of Italy and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at
+the foot of the Jura into the plain of Switzerland. But this fruitful
+period in the progress of the world, when the character of organic life
+was higher and the physical features of the earth more varied than ever
+before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees, the
+Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and
+Himalayas, were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or
+in the course of the Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant
+passage in her history, Europe acquired all her essential characters.
+There remained, it is true, much to be done in what is called by
+geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet finished
+when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
+stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued
+from the water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her
+soil was clothed with field and forest, processes by which her valleys
+were to be made more fruitful, her gulfs to be filled with the rich
+detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole surface to be
+rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess it.
+
+We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
+geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic,
+and Jurassic epochs little was added to the United States, though here
+and there deposits belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous
+epoch, however, large tracts of land were accumulated, chiefly in the
+South and West; and during the Tertiaries the continent was very nearly
+completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the neighborhood of
+St. Louis to be filled by modern detritus, and the peninsula of Florida
+to be built by the industrious Coral-Workers of our own period. The age
+of the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was
+probably raised at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that
+time, only the Laurentian Hills, the northern side of that mountainous
+triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were, of the United States,
+existed. The upheaval of the Alleghanies added its eastern side, raising
+the central part of the continent so as to form a long slope from the
+base of the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean; but it was not until the
+Tertiary Age that the upheaval of the great chain at the West completed
+the triangle, and transformed that wide westerly slope into the
+Mississippi Valley, bounded on one side by the Alleghanies, and on the
+other by the Rocky Mountains.
+
+It is my belief, founded upon the tropical character of the Fauna, that
+a much milder climate then prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere
+than is now known to it. Some naturalists have supposed that the
+presence of the tropical Mammalia in the Northern Temperate Zone might
+be otherwise accounted for,--that they might have been endowed with
+warmer covering, with thicker hair or fur. But I think the simpler and
+more natural reason for their existence throughout the North is to be
+found in the difference of climate; and I am the more inclined to this
+opinion because the Tertiary animals generally, the Fishes, Shells,
+etc., in the same regions, are more closely allied in character to those
+now living in the Tropics than to those of the Temperate Zones. The
+Tertiary age may be called the geological summer; we shall see,
+hereafter, how abruptly it was brought to a close.
+
+One word more as to the relation of the Tertiary Mammalia to the
+creation which preceded them. I can only repeat here the argument used
+before: the huge quadrupeds characteristic of these epochs make their
+appearance suddenly, and the deposits containing them follow as
+immediately upon those of the Cretaceous epoch, in which no trace of
+them occurs, as do those of the Cretaceous upon those of the Jurassic
+epoch. I would remind the reader that in the central basin of France, in
+which Cuvier found his first Palæotherium, and which afterwards proved
+to have been thickly settled by the early Mammalia, the deposits of the
+Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary epochs follow each other in
+immediate, direct, uninterrupted succession; that the same is true of
+other localities, in Germany, in Southern Europe, in England, where the
+most complete collections have been made from all these deposits; and
+there has never been brought to light a single fact leading us to
+suppose that any intermediate forms have ever existed through which more
+recent types have been developed out of older ones. For thirty years
+Geology has been gradually establishing, by evidence the fulness and
+accuracy of which are truly amazing, the regularity in the sequence of
+the geological formations, and distinguishing, with ever-increasing
+precision, the specific differences of the animals and plants contained
+in these accumulations of past ages. These results bear living testimony
+to the wonderful progress of the kindred sciences of Geology and
+Palæontology in the last half-century; and the development-theory has
+but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to strengthen itself
+by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of which,
+in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument of
+its upholders.
+
+THE NEW SANGREAL.
+
+
+  "Show me the Sangreal, Lord! Show me Thy blood!
+  Thy body and Thy blood! Give me the Quest!
+  Lord, I am faint and tired; my soul is sick
+  Of all the falseness, all the little aims,
+  The weary vanities, the gasping joys,
+  The slow procession of this satiate world!
+  Dear Lord, I burn for Thee! Give me Thy Quest!
+  Down through the old reverberating time,
+  I see Thy knights in wonderful array
+  Go out to victory, like the solemn stars
+  Fighting in courses, with their conquering swords,
+  Their sad, fixed lips of purity and strength,
+  Their living glory, their majestic death.
+  Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  He lay upon a mountain's rocky crest,
+  So high, that all the glittering, misty world,
+  All summer's splendid tempests, lay below,
+  And sudden lightnings quivered at his feet;
+  So still, not any sound of silentness
+  Expressed the silence, nor the pallid sun
+  Burned on his eyelids; all alone and still,
+  Save for the prayer that struggled from his lips,
+  Broken with eager stress. Then he arose.
+  But always, down the hoary mountain-side,
+  Through whispering forests, by soft-rippled streams,
+  In clattering streets, or the great city's roar,
+  Still from his never sated soul went up,
+  "Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Through all the land there poured a trumpet's clang,
+  And when its silvery anger smote the air,
+  Men sprang to arms from every true man's home,
+  And followed to the field. He followed, too,--
+  All the mad blood of manhood in his veins,
+  All the fierce instincts of a warring race
+  Kindled like flame in every tingling limb,
+  And raging in his soul on fire with war.
+  He heard a thousand voices call him on:
+  Lips hot with anguish, shrieking their despair
+  From swamps and forests and the still bayous
+  That hide the wanderer, nor bewray his lair:
+  From fields and marshes where the tropic sun
+  Scorches a million laborers scourged to work;
+  From homes that are not homes; from mother-hearts
+  Torn from the infants lingering at their breasts;
+  From parted lovers, and from shuddering wives;
+  From men grown mad with whips and tyranny;
+  From all a country groaning in its chains.
+  Nor sleep, nor dream beguiled him any more;
+  He leaped to manhood in one torrid hour,
+  And armed, and sped to battle. Now no more
+  He cried or prayed,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  So in the front of deadly strife he stood;
+  The glorious thunder of the roaring guns,
+  The restless hurricane of screaming shells,
+  The quick, sharp singing of the rifle-balls,
+  The sudden clash of sabres, and the beat
+  Of rapid horse-hoofs galloping at charge,
+  Made a great chorus to his valorous soul,
+  The dreadful music of a grappling world,
+  That hurried him to fight. He turned the tide,
+  But fell upon its turning. Over him
+  Fluttered the starry flag, and fluttered on,
+  While he lay helpless on the trampled sward,
+  His hot life running scarlet from its source,
+  And all his soul in sudden quiet spent,
+  As still as on the silent mountain-top;
+  So still that from his quick-remembering heart
+  Burst that old cry,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Then a bright mist descended over him,
+  And in its central glory stood a shape,
+  Wounded, yet smiling. With His bleeding hands
+  Stretched toward that bleeding side, His eyes divine
+  Like a new dawn, thus softly spake the Lord:--
+  "The blood poured out for brothers is my blood;
+  The flesh for brothers broken is my flesh;
+  No more in golden chalices I dwell,
+  No longer in a vision, angel-borne:
+  Here is the Sangreal, here the Holy Quest.
+  Thy prayer is heard, thy soul is satisfied:
+  Come, my belovèd! I am come for thee.
+  As first I broke the bread and poured the wine,
+  So have I broken thee and poured thy life,
+  So do I bless thee and give thanks for thee,
+  So do I bear thee in my wounded hands."
+  Smiling, He stooped, and kissed the tortured brow,
+  And over all its anguish stole a smile;
+  The blood-sealed lips unclosed; the dying breath
+  Sighed, like the rain-sound in a summer wind,
+  Sobbing, but sweet,--"I see the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+In the notice of so memorable a man, even the briefest prelusive
+flourish seems uncalled for; and so indeed it would be, if by such means
+it were meant simply to justify the undertaking. In regard to any of the
+great powers in literature there exists already a prevailing interest,
+which cannot be presumed to slumber for one moment in any thinking
+mind.[A] By way of notification, there is no need of prelude. Yet there
+are occasions, as, for example, the entrances of kings, which absolutely
+demand the inaugural flourish of arms,--which, like the rosy flood of
+dawn, require to be ushered in by a train of twilight glories. And there
+are lives which proceed as by the movements of music,--which, must
+therefore be heralded by overtures: majestic steppings, heard in the
+background, compel us, through mere sympathy with their pomp of
+procession, to sound the note of preparation.
+
+[Footnote A: "_In any thinking mind_." Yet it must be confessed that
+there _does_ exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey
+in quarters from which better things might be expected. Misappreciation
+it cannot be called, where no trouble has been taken to estimate claims
+that needed only to be weighed to be truly valued. Up to this time,
+there has never been published in England a single essay on the life or
+the genius of De Quincey that indicated even a good acquaintance, on the
+part of the writer, with that author's works; and in such a case, of
+course, not much could be looked for in the way of just interpretation.
+Gilfillan did him gross injustice: indeed, from what he condescended to
+say of the man, it would be difficult to conjecture that a greater than
+Gilfillan was there. And, will the reader believe it? in Professor
+Craik's "English Literature"--a work of great excellence--the name of De
+Quincey is not mentioned! "Sam Johnson," says Craik, "was the last king
+that sat upon the throne of English prose literature." Let it be that
+Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De Quincey was
+legitimately his successor. First, in the matter of time: Sam died in
+1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the
+regal line. What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors?
+Was it learning? De Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is
+no writer in the language who in that matter may look down on De
+Quincey.
+
+If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De
+Quincey. Some stupid writer for the London "Athenæum," for instance,
+dared to compliment the poor "opium-chewer" after the following
+style:--"He possessed taste, but _he lacked creative energy_; and his
+subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than
+powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by
+a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable
+genius, but very little taste!]
+
+Else I should plunge _in medias res_ upon a sketch of De Quincey's life;
+were it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the
+important ceremony of prelibation, and that at a banquet to which,
+implicitly, gods are invited. The reader will assuredly unite with me in
+all such courtesies,--
+
+  "Neu desint epulis rosæ";
+
+particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
+incantations,--only the heralding of certain precise claims will this
+monarch listen to as the just _inferiæ_, the fitting sacrifice or
+hecatomb of our homage.
+
+The key-note of preparation, the claim which preëminently should be set
+forth in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of
+hierophants, or of pontifical hierarchs, as regards all those profound
+mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart,
+sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an
+altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the
+shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
+hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as
+concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open
+light the everlasting symbols, universally intelligible when once
+disclosed, which are folded in the involutions of dreams and of those
+meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner of these
+revelations, no Roman _pontifex maximus_, were it even Cæsar himself,
+could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.
+
+The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated.
+It was his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain
+secret recesses of human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along
+that border-line by which the glimmerings of consciousness are, as by
+the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil, separated from the regions
+of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked familiarly and
+with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
+inscribed meanings did he--this Champollion, defying all human enigmas,
+this Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms
+and yawning abysses of human astronomy--resolve into orderly
+constellations, that, once and for all, through his telescopic
+interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and commensurable
+amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
+psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life,
+two of which are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition
+towards meditation, constituting him, in the highest sense of the word,
+a poet. Secondly, the peculiar qualities which this singular mental
+constitution derived from his use of opium,--qualities which, although
+they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power,
+at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and
+creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
+concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a
+degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record.
+Nor is this all. The reader knows how often a secondary interest will
+attach to the mightiest of conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns,
+who is not merely in himself, and through his own deeds, magnificent,
+but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by numerous
+reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
+doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the
+Netherlands, and a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of
+the Turkish Solyman, as by some subtile connection of fate sympathetic
+with his own. A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of
+De Quincey,--a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of
+English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
+unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and
+Keats. His connection with very many of these was not simply that of
+coëxistence, but also of familiar intercourse.
+
+Between De Quincey's life and his writings it is impossible that there
+should be any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two
+interwoven: in this case more so than in that of any known author.
+Particularly is this true of his more impassioned writings, which are a
+faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life. Hierophant we have called
+him,--the prince of hierophants,--having reference to the matter of his
+revelations; but in his _manner_, in his style of composition, he is
+something more than this: here he stands the _monarch_ amongst
+rhapsodists. In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of
+his life and genius.
+
+But, besides these, there is a large section of his works, the aim of
+which is purely intellectual, where feeling is not at all involved; and
+surely there is not, in either ancient or modern literature, a section
+which, in the same amount of space, exhibits the same degree of intense
+activity on the part of the analytic understanding, applied to the
+illustration of truth or to the solution of vexed problems. This latter
+class is the more remarkable from its polar antithesis to the former;
+just as, in his life, it is a most remarkable characteristic of the man,
+that, rising above all other men through the rhapsodies of dreams, he
+should yet be able truly to say of himself that he had devoted a greater
+number of hours to intellectual pursuits than any other man whom he had
+seen, heard of, or read of. A wider range is thus exhibited, not of
+thought merely, but also of the possible modes of expressing thought,
+than is elsewhere to be found, even in writers the most skilled in
+rhetorical subtilty. The distance between these two opposites De Quincey
+does not traverse by violent leaps; he does not by some feat of
+legerdemain evanish from the fields of impassioned eloquence, where he
+is an unrivalled master, to appear forthwith in those of intellectual
+gymnastics, where, at least, he is not surpassed. He is familiar with
+every one of the intervening stages between the rhapsody and the
+demonstration,--between the loftiest reach of aspirant passion, from
+which, with reptile instinct, the understanding slinks downwards to the
+earth, and that fierce antagonism of naked thoughts, where the crested
+serpent "mounts and burns." His alchemy is infinite, combining light
+with warmth in all degrees,--in pathos, in humor,[A] in genial
+illumination. Let the reader, if he can, imagine Rousseau to have
+written "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in
+both of which great erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as
+nothing when compared to the faculty of recombining into novel forms
+what previously had been so grouped as to be misunderstood, or had
+lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To have
+written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or,
+moving into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to
+have been the author of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts":
+that would mount a new plume in Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to
+be reminded of another little paper, numbering about six pages,
+entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give him _that_,
+too. Why, the little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
+consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of
+this nature, which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse,
+that the two writers are often mentioned as on the same level, and with
+no appreciation of that unlimited range of power which belongs to De
+Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one of the trophies which
+we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a single
+volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one
+imperial column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,--alas for
+Rousseau!--two other _spolia opima_ by which the French master is, in
+his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second,--_proximus,
+sed non secundus_,--so wide is the distance between De Quincey and _any_
+other antagonist. These two are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan
+of Arc," and "The English Mail-Coach."
+
+[Footnote A: Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that
+it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without
+any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but
+surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or
+a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he is an elephant.
+So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from _his_
+humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
+you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a
+tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.
+
+There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen
+Aristophaneses. There was something, too, in its order, by which it
+resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will
+illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's
+"Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic
+_Phrontisterium_, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his
+pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the
+moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm
+about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks
+paid, or refused to pay, regularly on the last day of the month,)--and
+here it is that the opportunity is offered for a monstrous stroke of
+humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim, "Some magic is
+it, O Socrates, about the moon? Well! since you are up to that sort of
+thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old
+monster out of her course for a generation or so?" Now for the parallel
+case from De Quincey. It is from his paper on "California," a
+politico-economical treatise. The author's object is to illustrate the
+fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its non-existence, but to the
+difficulty of obtaining it. "Emeralds and sapphires," says he, "are
+lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no policeman
+is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from
+pocketing as many as we please. We are also at perfect liberty to pocket
+the anchors of Her Majesty's ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty
+guns,) and to sell them for old iron. Pocket them by all means, and I
+engage that the magistrate sitting at the Thames police-office will have
+too much respect for your powers to think of detaining you. If he does,
+your course is to pocket the police-office, and all which it inherits.
+The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer, but not a
+customer to be sneezed at." This strikes us as very similar to
+Strepsiades's bagging the moon.]
+
+It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I
+have undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about
+which the thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De
+Quincey's childhood, and his opium-experiences.
+
+Thomas de Quincey--hierophant, rhapsodist, philosopher--was born at
+Greenhay, then a suburb of Manchester, in Lancashire County, England, on
+the 15th of August, 1785. According to his own account, the family of
+the De Quinceys was of Norwegian origin; and after its transfer to
+France, in connection with William the Norman, it received its
+territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in Normandy. Thence,
+at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
+where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not
+merely in connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but
+chiefly on account of valuable services rendered to the State, and
+conferring preeminence in baronial privilege and consideration.
+
+So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the
+point of his descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French
+extraction, that, even into the ears of George III. (that king having,
+in an accidental interview with him at Frogmore, suggested the
+possibility of his family having come to England at the time of the
+Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
+protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon
+his purely Norman blood,--blood that in the baronial wars had helped to
+establish the earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that
+had flowed from knightly veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De
+Quincey came into England with William the Conqueror, uniting with whose
+fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal baron, founding the
+line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
+evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,--that his armorial device
+was inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of
+eminent distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St.
+Paul's.
+
+And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily
+diverted to the American branch of this family, at the head of which
+stands the Hon. Josiah Quincy, (the aristocratic _De_ being omitted,)--a
+branch which fled from England in the early part of the seventeenth
+century, to avoid a strife which had then become too intense and fiery
+to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a few years after their
+withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the inevitableness
+of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
+critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,--as indicating how
+surely the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will
+continue to track our flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of
+ocean, that ought, if anything could, to interpose an effectual barrier
+between us and all pursuers, and, having caught up with us in our
+fancied retreat, will precipitate upon our devoted heads its
+accumulated violence,--as demonstrating thus the melancholy persistence
+with which that ugly Sphinx who impersonates Justice in our human
+affairs doggedly insists on having her questions answered, and, coming
+by a circuitous route upon those who by good luck have escaped her
+direct path, through an incarnation of unusual terror compels her dread
+alternative,--it is interesting to note how this same family, separated
+by over seven generations from one political revolution, the momentous
+crisis of which was by them successfully evaded, are now, after an
+interval of unsound and hollow peace, compelled to witness the precise
+reiteration of that storm, in the very land to which they fled for
+refuge,--a reiteration that repeats, only on a different stage, and
+under an aggravation of horror as to minute details, not merely two
+antagonistic races corresponding on either side to those which met in
+battle on Marston Moor, but also interests far outweighing any that
+could possibly attach to a conflict between royalty and democracy.
+
+But the Earls of Winchester, in England, whatever may have been their
+prosperity during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came
+suddenly to an abrupt termination, abutting at length on some guilty
+traitor in the line, who, like a special Adam for the family, involved
+in his own ruin that prosperity which would else have continued to his
+successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal estate, however,
+remained in possession of separate members of the family, as De Quincey
+tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last
+vestige slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together
+with the name, held also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above
+the diluvial wreck of the Winchester estates there has arisen an estate
+far more royal and magnificent, and beneath a far-reaching bow of
+promise, sealed in magical security against a similar disaster. For just
+here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the family
+freshly grounded upon a second heritage,--one sublime in its order above
+that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever
+imperishable,--namely, the large domain which the gigantic intellect of
+Thomas De Quincey has absolved from aboriginal darkness and brought
+under distinct illumination for all time to come. These are the vast
+acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,--acres that have
+been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into
+the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some
+measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have
+extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey
+himself, in view of that monumental structure which rises above the
+shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above the mummied dust of
+Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought in their
+lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that,
+possibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been
+robbed of an earldom,--or even that, during a life which by some years
+overlapped the average allotment to humanity, and through which were
+daily accumulating the most splendid results in the very highest
+departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations nevertheless went
+on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in all
+Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these
+years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and
+to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of
+such merely _nominal_ titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in
+them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they
+gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and
+without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
+the loving remembrances of human hearts.
+
+But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal
+conditions in the case of De Quincey,--though, assuredly, there was
+never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aërial
+hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more
+consistently fit,--we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward
+conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or
+absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
+earliest tendencies and impulses,--in that season of immature
+preparation when the channels of habit are in the process of formation,
+and while yet a marvellous uncertainty hangs and broods over the
+beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet yet dandled and tended by
+its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain elements which
+rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for
+instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the
+force and swiftness of a torrent,--yet how shifting are the
+mountain-winds, chilling into frosty silence or quickening with Favonian
+warmth, and how shifting the flying clouds, which, whether marshalled in
+mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a real conflict, forever
+sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced childhood, do the
+scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably, to
+determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely
+material, and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in
+conjunction with heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in
+this period, with which above all others we associate influences the
+most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory," those influences which are
+purely material are the most efficiently operative. Against the former,
+adult man, in whom reason is developed, _may_ battle, though ignobly,
+and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he _must_
+struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
+for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields
+him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though,
+because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to
+material circumstance,--a slavery which he cannot escape, and which,
+during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and
+nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on
+the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
+weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and
+fortunate indeed it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our
+first years is thus a gentle dealing with us, fertilizing our powers
+with the rich juices of an earthly prosperity. And in this respect De
+Quincey _was_ eminently fortunate. The powers of heaven and of earth
+and--if we side with Milton and _other_ pagan mythologists in
+attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty--the dark
+powers _under_ the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in
+his behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his
+name they postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him
+the happiest of all childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining
+whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and
+susceptibilities _could_ be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope
+also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this
+distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of
+aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely
+against the assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any
+one in tolerably comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most
+trivial hint of possible want,--against all necessity of limitation or
+retrenchment in any normal line of expenditure.
+
+He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine,
+died, leaving to his family--a wife and six children--an estate yielding
+annually an income of sixteen hundred pounds. And as at his father's
+death De Quincey was seven years old, we may reasonably infer, that,
+during this previous period, while his father was still living, and
+adding to this fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains, (which
+to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the
+family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly
+realization of between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time
+when Napoleon had not as yet meddled with the financial affairs of
+Europe, nor by his intimidations caused even pounds and shillings to
+shrink into less worth and significance than they formerly had,--in view
+of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great (as in a famous
+anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the
+"snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" in the way of crowns and a few
+dozen sceptres, what a heinous charge must be brought against this
+Corsican as universal pickpocket! This pecuniary depreciation De Quincey
+himself realized some years later, when, determining to quit school, he
+thought himself compelled[A] to cut off all communication with his
+guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh
+mountains, wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most
+scanty means of support,--for just then the Allies were in full rig
+against France, and the shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's
+pocket became palpably evident in view of the increased price of his
+dinner.
+
+[Footnote A: But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was
+only by the lack on his part of that frankness which the kindness of his
+guardians deserved that he had brought so much misery upon himself in
+after-life. His younger brother, Richard,--the Pink of the
+"Autobiographic Sketches,"--made the same mistake, a mistake which in
+his case was never rectified, but led to a life of perilous wanderings
+and adventures.]
+
+The time _did_ come at length when the full epos of a remarkable
+prosperity was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the
+unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy
+lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad.
+Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his
+mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the
+sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years of
+luxurious opulence and ease.
+
+I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's
+earliest surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice
+merely as an accident,) because, although not a _potential_ element,
+capable of producing or of adding one single iota to the essential
+character of genius, it is yet a negative condition--a _sine qua
+non_--to the displays of genius in certain directions and under certain
+aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be intensified. So may
+it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of power, there
+still remains a question as to its _kind_. So deep is the sky: but of
+what _hue_, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol
+but what the _mellowness_? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite
+force: but of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister
+to Moloch, or to Apollo? Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa?
+Why, the simple fact that the rich blue sky over-arches this earth of
+ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our veins, is sufficient
+to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the
+question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from
+outward circumstances, but what coloring, what mood. Here it is that a
+Mozart differs from a Mendelssohn. The important difference which
+obtains, in this respect, between great powers in literature, otherwise
+coördinate, will receive illustration from a comparison between De
+Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a degree
+rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should
+say, of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this
+general office they stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal
+purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of
+grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or
+Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
+_modus operandi_, of their architecture, they stand apart _toto coelo_.
+Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or
+humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom,
+for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a
+cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth;
+he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human
+hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
+archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the
+bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have
+originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The
+most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most
+striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in
+"Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
+susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And _how_? Is
+it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the
+movements of destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of
+the ruin itself,--ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under
+conditions of terror the most appalling,--ruin wrought under the
+semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human
+race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains
+toward man, we have the following passage of Æschylian grandeur, but
+also of Æschylian gloom:--
+
+                                "Thou dost arise
+  And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
+  For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
+  Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
+  And send'st him, shivering in thy _playful_ spray,
+  And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
+  His petty hope in some near port or bay,
+  And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"
+
+Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of
+darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such
+lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human
+affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this:--
+
+  "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,--
+  An _unseen_ seraph we believe in thee"?
+
+or the following:--
+
+  "Who loves, raves,--'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?
+
+and again:--
+
+  "Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved,
+  Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
+  Necessity of loving having removed
+  Antipathies"?
+
+This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all
+antipathies! But even these
+
+                     "recur erelong,
+  Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
+  And circumstance--that unspiritual god
+  And miscreator--makes and helps along
+  Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
+  Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."
+
+De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such
+hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity,
+repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal
+human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the
+outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the
+one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on
+the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be
+found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating
+even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or
+with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of
+human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for
+the purposes of scorn.
+
+Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace
+back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives,
+each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert _mirage_, teeming
+with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other--also
+into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an
+unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from
+them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however
+apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels,
+and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their
+overmastering seductions to
+
+  "Allure, or terrify, or undermine."
+
+Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by
+itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with
+which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine
+the main temper and disposition of our lives. For it is underneath the
+multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason,
+and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point,
+seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the
+undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled
+and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice,
+branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims
+among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely
+recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our
+destiny. And in the very word _disposition_ is indicated the finality of
+its arbitraments as contrasted with all _proposition_.
+
+Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but
+it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about
+childhood,--to shelter or imprison,--which, more than all else, gives it
+its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in
+after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its
+opposite,--porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain,--yet will the
+tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost
+uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that
+preside over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial
+temperament,--one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward
+a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of
+strife; secondly, profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence,
+which, although of all three it is the most negative, the most material
+condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree
+in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the
+other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of
+temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to
+tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents'
+hearts, check the free play of domestic love!--and in all cases where
+such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a
+cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and
+everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be sensibly felt the
+absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections of
+home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a
+sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the
+soul.
+
+As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was
+prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came,--mighty changes capable of
+affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the
+inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's
+childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his
+mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the
+desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and
+intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
+outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift
+himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been
+thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his,
+which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been
+rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer's
+day,--for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
+"Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:--
+
+  "From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve--
+  _A summer's day_."
+
+And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all
+his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian
+god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that,
+receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his
+ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been
+benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary,
+a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
+teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest
+hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images
+of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of
+their material substance.
+
+"We,--the children of the house,--" says De Quincey, in his
+"Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier
+in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
+Agur--'Give me neither poverty nor riches'--was realized for us. That
+blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were
+to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity;
+obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished
+with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means of health, of
+intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we
+knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the
+consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by
+privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for
+pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all
+things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of diet,--that we
+fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if
+(after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks
+to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation,
+these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I
+lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my
+infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by
+horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and
+loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."
+
+Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let
+him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of
+seven, and having now at least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his
+peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of
+one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age, (and many such
+could be found,) among those with whom daily the military
+predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable
+conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be
+substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even
+in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of
+human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these
+instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the
+instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that
+men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves.
+Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. The Greeks, on the
+contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,--if we may
+believe the Pindaric odes,--set over them a divine watch, and fed them
+with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.
+
+And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect
+_leisure_. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the
+subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection
+with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure,
+which is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and
+bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open
+heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian
+recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought,
+or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_
+been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss
+of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound,
+that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its
+presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely
+awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of
+sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the
+pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace
+of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
+childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and
+expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in
+abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was
+the felicity of this echoless peace.
+
+In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence
+should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a
+striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have
+seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a
+point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at
+least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
+cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and
+just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life
+itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which
+lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire
+course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of
+any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record,
+that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
+repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,--but with what
+marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed,
+when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No
+longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky,
+but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs
+
+  "Through caverns measureless to man,
+  Down to the sunless sea."
+
+Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and
+the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its
+inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet
+heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be
+seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious
+reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a
+life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity
+of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the
+fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary
+solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails
+above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which
+Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--
+
+                      "There he slept,
+  And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
+  Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
+  Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
+  And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
+  Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
+  Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
+  He saw the prophet also, how he fled
+  Into the desert, and how there he slept
+  Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
+  He found his supper on the coals prepared,
+  And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
+  And eat the second time after repose,
+  The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
+  Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
+  Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."
+
+[Footnote A: _Paradise Regained_, Book II.]
+
+If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe
+necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus
+solicited and baffled even in dreams,--if, by the lowest of mortal
+appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the
+shadowy visions of merely human plenty,--then by how much more must the
+human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of
+dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
+revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands,
+be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy,
+flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!
+
+The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is
+as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral
+antiphonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not
+permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside
+a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the
+poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this _papaverian_ mask it is likely to be
+best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater"
+that he is most generally recognized. It was through his
+Opium-Confessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first
+conciliated and charmed the reading public,--and to such a degree that
+great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he
+might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case
+it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the
+public, without its being aware of the nauseating potion, or
+experiencing any uncomfortable consequences. The flood of popularity
+produced by the Opium-Confessions among that large intellectual class of
+readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet insist upon the
+graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving
+interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of
+heavier freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.
+
+The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey _personally_ is
+also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an
+opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of
+his situation and its hidden mysteries, or "_suspiria de profundis_."
+This interest is partly of that vulgar sort which connects itself with
+all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in the human mind,
+with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied with
+a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a
+philosophical order, inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal
+development. It is rarely the case that human vision is especially or
+deliberately directed to the sun or the moon, except at the marvellous
+season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty of the
+appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual
+nature of the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the
+people inhabiting this globe are excited by something which calls off
+their attention from terrestrial trifles to that which connects them
+with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos, we should, at such
+times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating
+monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best,
+through horrid yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a
+tremendous counter-irritation upon the earth that should tell mightily
+on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the heavens. But since we are
+neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any sort, we take
+defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is
+only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of
+courtesy, to foreign worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come
+within the circle of human knowledge or notice, which is it that may be
+said to enjoy the most continuous round of attentions, and to live in
+excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It is the comet,
+which no sooner gets out of reach of _our_ flying compliments than she
+becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth
+deprecating murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder
+brother, who, from all such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible
+under the paternal wings of the Sun. No one of these erratic visitors
+can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere in the
+universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would
+not have been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict _prima
+donnas_.
+
+Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that
+which we manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or
+the eccentric comet that bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this
+interest, considered in its vulgar aspects, De Quincey would suffer
+gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I am certain
+that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about
+him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his
+long sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever
+description, no tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been
+able to vie with him in the picturesque _déshabillé_ of the whole
+"turnout." Picture to yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and
+patches"--for, to the outward sense, he seems that now--has been "at
+large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been
+unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint
+upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with
+panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain
+impressive recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a
+trifle too uncanny even for them. As to his subsistence during these
+rambles, it would be very difficult to say how he managed that affair,
+at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be that the prophetic
+limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of his
+return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,--that he has made
+plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his
+waistcoat-pocket. Like Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering
+purposely and at his own sweet will, or rather where his feet have taken
+him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever sleep may have chanced
+to find him.
+
+The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the
+matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what
+gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter
+unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they
+appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an Æson-like
+rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that anxiously
+await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in
+the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this
+transformation is effected, let us suppose the case of his being set
+down in the streets of London, somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside.
+What an eddying of stragglers about this new-found focus of attraction!
+what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if, indeed, he be
+find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests,
+some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian
+or not, neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster
+such a rabble at his heels, supposing _him_ to appear on Cheapside!
+
+In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar
+notice as from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of
+him in such situations, except for the purpose of showing that he had
+very much in his outward habit that would readily attract such a notice.
+In the same light we are to regard some illustrations which J. Hill
+Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features in his
+character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for,
+although they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a
+book-form, they are still unpublished to many of my readers.
+
+Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he
+was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who
+entertained novel and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of
+Apuleius. The festivities of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion
+is heard in the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced
+its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival;
+he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
+street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle
+great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to
+the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher
+handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a
+stormy winter night; and the trousers,--some one suggests that they are
+inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius
+never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey,
+led on by the current of his own thoughts,--though he was always too
+courteous to absorb the entire conversation,--talks on "till it is far
+into the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about
+separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of
+civilization, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of
+the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the specials, he
+could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
+other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his
+own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either
+couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having
+taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme
+unpleasantness of such a couch?"
+
+"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore,
+he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing
+on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should
+get a penny and go home,--a proposal which he subjected to some
+philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he
+had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even whether he had
+eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
+articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to
+be refreshed was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the
+hard he could not eat. Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of
+that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it
+might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to
+be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops! nonsense! If
+the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal
+size, there was no risk,--and so the weary is at rest for a time.
+
+"At early morn, a triumphant cry of '_Eureka!_' calls me to his place of
+rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a
+considerable heap of them around him. That one which specially claims
+his attention--my best-bound quarto--is spread upon a piece of
+bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him
+pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of
+attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according
+to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered
+a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a
+very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face
+from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it
+occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch
+paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony."
+
+I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example,
+illustrative of the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered
+merely the immediate and pressing exigencies of the present. "He arrives
+very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission,--a process in
+which he often endured impediments,--he represents, with his usual
+silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being
+then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
+realm,--the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he
+very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
+fancying he discovers, that his eloquence is likely to prove
+unproductive, he is fortunately reminded, that, should there be any
+difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he
+is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to
+deposit with the lender,--a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to
+remove any feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could
+experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which
+develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable,
+possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled
+bit of paper, and spread it out,--a fifty-pound bank-note! All sums of
+money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use;
+and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note,
+might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had
+hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to
+him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded
+in negotiating a loan of two-pence."
+
+These pictures, though true to certain phases of De Quincey's outward
+life, are yet far from personally representing him, even to the eye.
+They satisfy curiosity, and that is about all. As to the real character
+of the man, they are negative and unessential; they represent, indeed,
+his utter carelessness as to all that, like dress, may at pleasure be
+put on or off, but "the human child incarnate" is not thus brought
+before us. For, could we but once look upon his face in rest, then
+should we forget these inferior attributes; just as, looking upon the
+Memnonian statues, one forgets the horrid nicknames of "Shandy" and
+"Andy" which they have received from casual travellers, observing merely
+their grotesque features. Features of this latter sort "dislimn" and
+yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the divine
+countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De
+Quincey's face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as
+with an Homeric antiquity; arid it is, and sallow, as parchment. Through
+a certain Bedouin-like conformation,--which, however, is idealized by
+the lofty, massive forehead, and by the prevailing subtilty of the
+general expression,--it seems fitted to desert solitudes; and in this
+respect it is truly Memnonian. In another respect, also, is it
+Memnonian,--that, whenever should rest upon its features the morning
+sunlight, we should surely await its responsive requiem or its trembling
+_jubilate_. By a sort of instinctive palmistry (applied, not to the
+hands, but to the face) we interpret symbols of ineffable sorrow and of
+ineffable peace. These, too, are Memnonian,--as is also that infinite
+distance which seems to interpose between its subtile meanings and the
+very possibility of interpretation. This air of remoteness, baffling the
+impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which has gathered
+for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply
+sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises
+from that childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle
+undulations of the features,--undulations as of happy wavelets set in
+motion ages since, and that cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born
+of a dream-like, brooding eternity of speculation, which we can trace
+neither to the eye alone, nor to the mouth, but rather to the effect
+which both together produce in the countenance.
+
+This is the face which for more than half a century opium veiled to
+mortal eyes, and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the
+most fugitive and impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of
+mystery from which mere curiosity stands aloof. This is the head which
+we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a triple wreath of glory: the
+laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his impassioned
+dreams, and roses for his most gentle and loving nature.
+
+How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium? Very
+little as to quality, but very much as to the degree and the peculiar
+manner in which original qualities and dispositions are developed, for
+here it is that the only field of influence open to abnormal agencies
+lies. Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only individual worthy of
+notice in the same connection. Had _he_ also confessed, it is uncertain
+what new revelations might have been made. It is certain that opium
+exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his
+dose that his remarkable intellectual displays occurred. These displays
+were mostly confined to his conversations, which were usually
+long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a continued series of
+abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending upon a
+sort of poetic construction. A pity it is that we must content ourselves
+with empty descriptions of this nature. Here, doubtless, if anywhere,
+opium was an auxiliary to Coleridge. For a laudanum negus, whatever
+there may be about it that is pernicious, will, to a mind that is
+metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares of thought which are
+raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead into the
+region of the shadowy. Show us the man who habitually carries pills of
+_any_ sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and
+we can assure you that that man is an _aërobat_,--that somehow, in one
+sense or another, he walks in the air above other men's heads. Whatever
+disturbs the healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to
+metaphysics, because it attracts the mental attention to the organism
+through which thought is carried on. Numerous are the instances of men
+who would never have been heard of as thinkers or as reflective poets,
+if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against their
+teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the
+superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.[A] If Tacitus had
+fared in any sort like his brother,--if there had been anything like an
+equitable division between them of muscle and brain, it is more than
+probable that we should have lost the illustrious historian.
+
+[Footnote A: It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's
+immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind
+exhibits unusual activity. But the argument moves in the opposite
+direction. For of what sort is this unusual activity? That which results
+from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the
+physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has
+impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is
+manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane
+brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who
+occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile
+mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating
+smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it
+may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant
+vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian
+faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary
+glimmerings of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same
+purpose.]
+
+Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was
+increased by opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured
+Coleridge's poetic faculties; which probably was the case, since in
+genuine poetry the mind is prominently realistic, its motions are all
+outward, and therefore excessive indolence must of necessity be fatal.
+
+De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to
+opium: it demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No
+temptation so strong _could_ have been presented to Coleridge. De
+Quincey really craved the drug. His stomach was deranged, and was still
+suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London. It
+seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which
+he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
+gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place
+to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like
+the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the
+last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal
+incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It
+is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact
+of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
+conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion
+of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller,
+just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part
+of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the
+mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of
+Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever
+he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his
+left leg.
+
+No less was De Quincey _psychologically_ preconformed to opium. The
+prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the
+narcotic despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader
+sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of
+opium. De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen
+will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams. Opium originates
+nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain
+direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
+energies and velocities. What was De Quincey _without_ opium? is,
+therefore, the question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in
+him was due to opium. This question has already been answered in the
+remarks made concerning his childhood. His meditative tendencies were
+especially noticed as most characteristic. There was besides this a
+natural leaning toward the mysterious,--the mysterious, I mean, as
+depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which
+excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable
+as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand
+combination of human energies mustered together in secret, and operating
+through invisible agencies for the downfall of Christianity,--an idea
+which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through the Abbé
+Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing throughout
+Europe: this was the sort of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
+thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful
+grandeur in his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great
+cities such as London, which he call the "Nation of London," where even
+Nature is mimicked, both in her strict regularity of results, and in the
+seeming unconsciousness of all her outward phases, hiding all meaning
+under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this effect it was
+absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
+standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance;
+there must have been more than this,--namely, a network of occult
+influences, a vast organization, wheeling in and out upon itself,
+gyrating in mystic cycles and epicycles, repeating over and again its
+dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a never-ending variety of
+shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the most inviting.
+It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
+history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved:
+for the demon that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all
+others had been pronounced undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was
+to his eye that for the first time there seemed to be an unknown element
+that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented by the religious
+sect among the Hebrews entitled the _Essenes_. Admitting the character
+and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it
+no special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey
+that the general assumption was the farthest removed from the
+truth,--than there was an unknown _x_ in the problem, which could be
+satisfied by no such meagre hypothesis,--that, to meet the urgent
+demands of the case, there must be substituted for this Jewish sect an
+organization of no less importance than the Christian Church
+itself,--that this organization, thus suddenly brought to light, was
+one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
+from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very
+name, to itself only in secret recesses of silence:--from the moment
+that all this was revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit
+to his profound interest. Two separate essays he wrote on this
+subject,[A] of which he seemed never to tire.
+
+[Footnote A: Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without
+being distinctly conscious of having written a previous one. It was no
+uncommon thing for him to forget his own writings. In one case it is
+known that for a long time he persisted in disowning his production. His
+American editor--a fact which is little known--selected, from among the
+mass of periodical writings in the various magazines for which De
+Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide him than,
+their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey's pen.
+In one instance,--as to the "Traditions of the Rabbins,"--after
+considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De
+Quincey, to set himself right. The latter disowned the essay: he had
+forgotten it. Mr. F., however, after another examination, concluded,
+that, notwithstanding De Quincey's denial of the fact, he _must_ have
+written it; accordingly, at his own risk, he published it. Afterwards De
+Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all disputed cases of
+this nature to his Boston publishers.]
+
+"Klosterheim" is from beginning to end only the development, through
+regular stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile
+nature. Oftentimes De Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder;
+but the mere fact of a murder, however shocking, was not sufficient to
+arrest him. With the celebrated Williams murders, on the contrary, he
+was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in accordance with designs
+not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the skill of a
+decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony. Here were murders that
+revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and
+that at every stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden
+mysteries of universal human nature. I know of no writer but De Quincey
+who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate
+drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full
+measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.
+
+This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their
+very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material
+limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal
+_proscenium_; their _dramatis personæ_, however familiar nominally, and
+however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their
+motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the
+ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves. We
+should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency
+towards this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his
+"Autobiographic Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of
+seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least
+material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him
+up into aërial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the
+clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were furnished by
+certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
+the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus
+introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they
+were self-sustained and majestic.
+
+The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preëxisting tendencies
+of De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he
+had been indolent,--if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it
+invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it
+as simply dark or obscure,--if his natural subtilty of reflection had
+been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime
+architecture of impassioned expression,--then might he as well have
+smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to
+have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.
+
+The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at
+this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two
+heads: first, the _external_, and, secondly, the _internal_. Properly
+speaking, all the _positive_ effects of opium must be internal; for all
+its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the
+focal centres of life. Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena
+connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the
+heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
+most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very
+reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which
+are purely negative. This latter class of effects Homer has indicated
+with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he
+notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external
+things,--carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by
+question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
+disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more fully
+developed in Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":--
+
+  "Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
+  Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
+  To each; but whoso did receive of them,
+  And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
+  Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
+  On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
+  His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
+  And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
+  And music in his ears his beating heart did make."
+
+By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium
+deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes
+and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if
+new materials were found for a history of the individual
+life,--materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the
+deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.
+Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll
+which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,--symbols
+which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even
+syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has
+hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still
+more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and
+echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
+enlarged.
+
+There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis
+between his every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius.
+In the latter, there is beautiful order, as in a symphony of
+Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from without, all seems
+confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind; but
+here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire
+the _en_centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw
+forth laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same
+agencies which undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked
+the earth with desert sands; and De Quincey's outward life was thus
+masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue heaven in which he revelled
+might be infinitely exalted.
+
+Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with
+transcendent sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the
+generous margins of a splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious
+words, that might perhaps have found some more fit vehicle to the
+composer's eye, could have found no deeper place in our hearts. We look
+at the hatless sleeper among the mountains: his face seems utterly blank
+and meaningless, and to all intents and purposes he seems as good as
+dead; but let us ascend with him in his dreams, and we shall soon forget
+that under God's heavens there exists mortality or the commonplace uses
+of mortality.
+
+As we ascend from grotesque features to such as are more intellectual,
+that peculiarity of his character which most strikes us is his
+inimitable courtesy. Mr. F.,--to whom I am indebted for the most novel
+and interesting portions of this memorial,--from his own personal
+interviews with the man, among many other things, retains this chiefly
+in remembrance,--that De Quincey was the perfectest gentleman he had
+ever seen.
+
+I take the liberty here of particularizing somewhat in regard to one
+visit which this friend of De Quincey's paid him, particularly as it
+introduces us to the man towards the last of his life (1851). Mr. F.,
+curious as it may seem, found but one person in Edinburgh who could
+inform him definitely as to De Quincey's whereabouts. In return to a
+note, giving De Quincey information of his arrival, etc., the latter
+replies in a letter which is very characteristic, and which may well be
+highly prized, so rarely was it that any friend was able to obtain from
+him such a memento. The style, perhaps, is as familiar as it was ever
+his habit to indulge in; and it shows how impossible it was for him,
+even on the most temporary summons, to dispense with his usual
+regularity of expression or with any logical nicety of method. The
+letter runs thus:--
+
+
+     _Thursday evening, August 26, 1851_.
+
+     "My dear Sir,--The acccompanying billet from my daughter, short at
+     any rate under the pressure of instant engagements, has been cut
+     shorter by a sudden and very distressing headache; I, therefore,
+     who (from a peculiar nervousness connected with the act of writing)
+     so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the letter-writing
+     department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say
+     mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for
+     other people's. Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute
+     refusal on the part of the Commissioner to grant me a certificate
+     of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a necessity not to be evaded,
+     I am affecting the large bounties of supererogation. I appear to be
+     vaporing in a spirit of vainglory; and yet it is under the mere
+     coercion of '_salva necessitas_' that I am surprised into this
+     unparalleled instance of activity. Do you walk? That is, do you
+     like walking for four hours '_on end_'--(which is our archaic
+     expression for _continuously_)? If I knew _that_, I would arrange
+     accordingly for meeting you. The case as to distance is this. The
+     Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley station, brings you to Esk
+     Bank. That is its nearest approach,--its _perihelion_, in relation
+     to ourselves; and it is precisely two and three-quarters miles
+     distant from _Mavis Bush_,--the name of our cottage. Close to us,
+     and the most noticeable object for guiding your inquiries, is _Mr.
+     Annandale's Paper-Mills_.
+
+     "Now, then, accordingly as you direct my motions, I will--rain
+     being supposed absent--join you at your hotel in Edinburgh any time
+     after 11 A.M. and walk out the whole distance, (seven miles from
+     the Scott monument,) or else I will meet you at Esk Bank; or, if
+     you prefer coming out in a carriage, I will await your coming here
+     in that state of motionless repose which best befits a philosopher.
+     Excuse my levity; and believe that with sincere pleasure we shall
+     receive your obliging visit.
+
+     "Ever your faithful servant,
+
+     "THOMAS DE QUINCEY."
+
+In order to appreciate the physical powers of him who proposed a walk of
+the distance indicated in the letter, we must remember that he was then
+just sixty-six years _plus_ ten days old. He was now living with his
+daughters, in the utmost simplicity. On his arrival, Mr. F. found De
+Quincey awaiting him at the door of his cottage,--a short man, with
+small head, and eyes that were absolutely indescribable as human
+features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with the most
+urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is
+spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence
+is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of
+Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a
+solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a
+present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend
+of Wilson,--and--what furnishes a more sublime suggestion--this is he
+that knows by heart the mountain-fells and the mysterious recesses of
+hidden valleys for miles around; and we think, if he could convey us
+from the haunts of this Lasswade of his old age to those which glorified
+the Grasmere of his youth, what new chords he might touch,--of human
+love, for there it was that the sweetness of his wedded life had been
+buried and embalmed in a thousand outward memorials of happy hours long
+gone by,--and of human sadness, for there it was that he had experienced
+the reversal of every outward fortune, and the alienations of
+friendships which he most highly valued. But the remembrances of
+Grasmere and of youth seem now to have been removed as into some other
+life: the man of a past generation walks alone, and amid other scenes.
+And yonder is the study in which he spends hours that are most
+holy,--hours consecrated to what specific employments is known to none,
+since across its threshold no feet save his have passed for years. Now
+and then some grand intellectual effort proceeds forth from its sacred
+precincts; but that only happens when pecuniary necessities compel the
+exertion. How is it that the time not thus occupied is spent?--in what
+remembrances, in what hidden thoughts, what passing dreams?
+
+As it grows dark, De Quincey's guest, having spent most precious moments
+which he feels ought never to cease, signifies the necessity of his
+taking his departure. To take leave of this strange man, however, is not
+so easy a matter as one might rashly suppose. There is a genius of
+procrastination about him. Was he ever known to make his appearance at
+any dinner in season, or indeed at any entertainment? Yes, he did
+_once_, at the recital of a Greek tragedy on the Edinburgh stage; but
+that happened through a trick played on him by an acquaintance, who, to
+secure some remote chance of his seeing the performance, told him that
+the doors opened at half-past six, whereas, in fact, they opened at
+seven. How preposterous, then, to suppose that he would let an
+opportunity pass for procrastinating other people, and putting all
+manner of snares about their feet! It is dangerous with such a man to
+hint of late hours; for just that lateness is to him the very jewel of
+the thing. In mentioning the circumstance, you only suggest to him the
+infinite pleasure connected with the circumstance. Perhaps he will
+deliberately set to work to prove that candle-light is the one
+absolutely indispensable condition to genial intercourse,--which would
+doubtless suggest a great contrast, in that respect, between the ancient
+and modern economy,--and where, then, _is_ there to be an end? All
+attempts to extricate yourself by unravelling the net which is being
+woven about you are hopelessly vain; you cannot keep pace with _him_.
+The thought of delay enchants him, and he dallies with it, as a child
+with a pet delicacy. Thus, he is at the house of a friend; it storms,
+and a reasonable excuse is furnished for his favorite experiment. The
+consequence is, that, once started in this direction, the delay is
+continued for a year. Late hours were particularly potent to "draw out"
+De Quincey; and, understanding this, Professor Wilson used to protract
+his dinners almost into the morning, a tribute which De Quincey
+doubtless appreciated.
+
+So that it is better to be on the sly about saying "Good bye" to this
+host of yours. When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De
+Quincey forthwith insisted on accompanying his guest. What, then, was to
+be done? Ominously the sky looked down upon them, momently threatening a
+storm. No resource was there but to give the man his way, and accept his
+offer of companionship for a short distance, painfully conscious though
+you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must, during this
+same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your
+side, who now lacks barely four years of life's average allotment. Thus
+you move on: and the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer
+approaches, warnings of which propagate themselves all around you in
+every sound of the wind and every rustle of the forest-leaves.
+Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of your
+companion: every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for
+conversation. Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and
+your guide stops to tell you that in this house may have been committed
+most strange and horrible murders, that, in spite of the tempestuous
+mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be specially and
+solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a perfect
+stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side,
+takes off his hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her
+passage,--and you, poor astonished mortal that you are, lest you should
+yourself seem scandalously uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise. In
+this incident we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance
+of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and something of the same
+remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who uniformly
+addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every
+one of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.
+
+Onward you proceed,--one,--two,--three miles, and you can endure no
+longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus
+at every step the burden of his journey back. You have, reached the Esk
+bank and the bridge which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened
+begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here
+De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,--to you his last good-bye; and
+as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts,
+together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human
+tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.
+
+But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close.
+It is a source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very
+disagreeable thing to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic
+justice; for assuredly he was in the habit of saying all the malicious
+things _he_ could about his friends. If there was anything in a man's
+face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De Quincey for
+noticing _that_. Even Wordsworth he could not let off without a Parthian
+shot at his awkward legs and round shoulders; Dr. Parr he rated soundly
+on his mean proportions; and one of the most unfortunate things which
+ever happened to the Russian Emperor Alexander was to have been seen in
+London by De Quincey, who, even amid the festivities of national and
+international congratulation on the fall of Napoleon, could not forget
+that this imperial ally was a very commonplace-looking fellow, after
+all. But, in regard to physical superiority, De Quincey lived in a glass
+house too fragile to admit of his throwing many stones at his neighbors.
+The very fact that he valued personal appearance at so low an estimate
+takes away the sting from his remarks on the deformities of other
+people: he could not have meant any detraction, but simply wished to
+present a perfect picture to the eye, preserving the ugly features with
+the faultless, just as we all insist on doing in regard to those we
+love. De Quincey and myself, therefore, are likely to part good friends.
+Surely, if there was anything which vexed the tender heart of this man,
+it was "the little love and the infinite hate" which went to make up the
+sum of life. If morbid in any direction, it was not in that of spite,
+but of love; and as an instance of almost unnatural intensity of
+affection, witness his insane grief over little Kate Wordsworth's
+grave,--a grief which satisfied itself only by reasonless prostrations,
+for whole nights, over the dark mould which covered her from his sight.
+
+It only remains for us to look in upon De Quincey's last hours. We are
+enabled to take almost the position of those who were permitted really
+to watch at his bedside, through a slight unpublished sketch, from the
+hand of his daughter, in a letter to an American friend. I tremble
+almost to use materials that personally are so sacred; but sympathy, and
+the tender interest which is awakened in our hearts by such a life, are
+also sacred, and in privilege stand nearest to grief.
+
+During the few last, days of his life De Quincey wandered much, mixing
+up "real and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things." He complained,
+one night, that his feet were hot and tired. His daughter arranged the
+blankets around them, saying, "Is that better, papa?" when he answered,
+"Yes, my love, I think it is; you know, my dear girl, these are the feet
+that Christ washed."
+
+Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children. He
+aroused one day, and said suddenly,--"You must know, my dear, the
+Edinburgh cabmen are the most brutal set of fellows under the sun. I
+must tell you that I and the little children were all invited to supper
+with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great honor. I thought I
+must buy new dresses for the little ones; and--would you believe it
+possible?--when I went out with the children, these wretches laughed at
+their new dresses."
+
+"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those that
+are alive, as if they were his own brothers. One night he said, when I
+entered the room,--
+
+"'Is that you, Horace?'
+
+"'No, papa.'
+
+"'Oh, I see! I thought you were Horace; for he was talking to me just
+now, and I suppose has just left the room.'"
+
+Speaking of his father, one day, suddenly and without introduction, he
+exclaimed,--"There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know my
+dear father better; for I am sure a better, kinder, or juster man could
+never have existed."
+
+When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that a telegram
+should be sent to the eldest daughter,[A] who resided in Ireland, but he
+forbade any mention of this fact to the patient. De Quincey seemed to
+have a prophetic feeling that she was on her way to him, saying, "Has M.
+got to that town yet, that we stopped at when we went to Ireland? How
+many hours will it be before she can be here? Let me see,--there are
+eight hours before I can see her, and three added to that!" His daughter
+came sooner than the family expected; but the time tallied very nearly
+with the computation he had made. On the morning his daughter arrived
+occurred the first intimation his family had seen that the hand of death
+was laid upon him. He had passed a quiet, but rather sleepless night,
+appearing "much the same, yet more than ordinarily loving." After
+greeting his child, he said, "And how does mamma's little girl like her
+leaving her?" "Oh, they were very glad for me to come to grandpapa, and
+they sent you this kiss,--which they did of their own accord." He seemed
+much pleased. It was evident that M. presented herself to him as the
+mother of children, the constant theme of his wanderings. Once when his
+daughter quitted the room, he said, "They are all leaving me but my
+_dear_ little children." "I heard him call, one day, distinctly,
+'Florence! Florence! Florence!'--again, 'My dear, dear mother!'--and to
+the last he called us 'my love,' and it sounded like no other sound
+ever uttered. I never heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every
+tone of his voice. It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all
+understanding."
+
+[Footnote A: De Quincey, at his death, had two sons and three daughters.
+The, eldest of the daughters became the wife of Robert Craig of Ireland.
+It was this one, and the youngest, who were present during his last
+hours. The second daughter, Florence, was with her husband (a colonel of
+the British army) in India. The two sons were both absent: one in India,
+a captain in the army; the other, a physician, in Brazil.]
+
+During the next night he was thought dying, "but he lingered on and on
+till half past nine the next morning. He told me something about
+'to-morrow morning,' and something about sunshine; but the thought that
+he was talking about what he would never see drove the exact idea out of
+my head, though I am sure it was morning in another world he was talking
+of."
+
+"There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both for some
+time before and after death. He looked more like a boy of fourteen, and
+very beautiful. We did not like to let in the morning light, and the
+candle was burning at nine o'clock, when the post brought the following
+letter, which my sister and myself glanced over by the candle-light,
+just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the moment it did
+not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
+coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did.
+
+
+     "'_Brighton, Dec. 7th, 1859_.
+
+     "'My Dear De Quincey,--Before I quit this world, I most ardently
+     desire to see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than
+     sixty years ago, we were school-fellows together and mutually
+     attached; nay, I remember a boyish paper ("The Observer") in which
+     we were engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career, mine
+     far from brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological
+     student. It seems a pity we should not once more recognize one
+     another before quitting the stage. I have often read your works,
+     and never without remembering the promise of your talents at
+     Winkfield. My life has been almost a domestic tragedy. I have four
+     children in lunatic-asylums. Thank God, it is now drawing to a
+     close; but it would cheer the evening of my days to receive a line
+     from you, for I am, with much sincerity,
+
+     "'Your old and attached friend,
+
+     "'E.H.G.'
+
+"I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward constantly
+recurred in his wanderings.
+
+"Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last
+pathetic sighs, so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor,
+worn-out garment laid aside." Just before he died, he looked around the
+room, and said very tenderly to the nurse, the physician, and his
+daughters, who were present, "Thank you,--thank you all!" Sensible thus
+to the very last of kindness, he breathed out his life in simple thanks,
+swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy that had ruled
+his life.
+
+MRS. LEWIS.
+
+A STORY IN THREE PARTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Here's something Gus Lewis would like to send by you, mother," said my
+hasty boy John, plunging into the room at nine in the evening, and
+stumbling over two trunks, three valises, and bandboxes countless.
+
+The floor was strewn with bundles, and the mantel-piece adorned with
+letters, directed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and New York.
+
+"Oh! ah! yes. Any packages, if not too large," said I, wistfully eying
+the box, (a foot square,) full of fresh maple-sugar, with its card of
+direction to "_Mrs. Lulu L., by the politeness of Mrs. Prince_."
+Boy-like.
+
+"First of all, my John, go you to bed, where Charley has been this
+half-hour, and say good-bye, for we shall be off before you are up."
+
+"See, then, father, if you are!" retorted the wide-awake youth, going
+out of the room in ground and lofty tumbling, and up-stairs in
+somersets.
+
+"I don't see," said I, pettishly, "how I _am_ to get this bundle into my
+trunk, nor where in the world this great box of sugar is to go. See! not
+a direction! but I suppose she is in New York somewhere."
+
+"We shall see her at all events, which is something. I should like to
+know what she is like,--not to look after her boy for two mortal years,"
+said the Dominie.
+
+"I hope not like Gus. He'd make an ugly woman, with his black hair and
+heavy eyebrows, and his big, black eyes always staring. He don't look
+like an American child."
+
+"If we could only say what an American type is. At present, it is a
+little of everything."
+
+"I mean a New-Englander,--an original American."
+
+"Well, he don't.--What do you say to these trunks? Shall we try again to
+compress the gigantic genie into the copper vessel? I thought it was a
+dangerous move, that last one of yours, taking out Tirzah White's
+quilted coat. And what's to be done with these three packages?"
+
+"Well! we can't sit here!" said I, briskly; "half-past nine already, and
+only one trunk packed! Never mind. You can put these three bundles in
+with your clothes."
+
+"Bursting the lock, now."
+
+"How easy 'tis to pack other people's things! But what, then, have you
+in there,--I mean, besides your shirts, etc.?"
+
+"_Imprimis_. Eight volumes of Scott's Commentaries, brought by Deacon
+Boardman. I am to exchange them. They are imperfect. _Item_. A dozen of
+'Sinbad the Sailor,' sent by mistake to the Association, instead of
+Doddridge. These books won't press nor give, more than sound doctrine;
+and I must have room for my gown, without which I am nothing."
+
+The clock struck ten, and we were still struggling with unabated ardor
+to compress Lorana Briggs's shawl, and the flat packages from Burt's,
+into the largest carpet-bag, that there might be room for the seventeen
+letters on top of the minister's luggage, inside the sanctuary of his
+silk gown.
+
+"We can carry a good deal in your coat-pocket, my dear," said I,
+cheerfully; for really we seemed to be coming to daylight, a little.
+
+"Full."
+
+The knocker sounded.
+
+"My galoches at last! Deacon, I can't ask you to come in, we are so
+untidy; but I couldn't pack as I meant to, this afternoon."
+
+How we dreaded his coming in,--half deacon, half shoemaker, and
+two-thirds missionary, with his "Panoplist" sticking out of his
+coat-pocket, and his ears evermore pricked up for the latest news from
+Bombay! and how angry I had been for three weeks because I couldn't get
+those indispensable galoches!
+
+It seemed as if he never would go from the half-open door. He reckoned
+the York folks would stare to see so many patches; he expected ministers
+down to York warn't quite so carfle and troubled about many things, as
+they be to Weston; but he added, with a grim joyfulness,--
+
+"We took up a good collection, though, last Sabbath! eight dollars and
+fifteen cents, clear!"
+
+"Yes, Deacon," responded the minister, with as much heartiness as he
+could muster, between the pushings, puffings, and pressings at the
+carpet-bag; "a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose its reward, we're
+told.--These carpet-bags stretch well!"
+
+"Them poor, dear heathen!" groaned the Deacon.
+
+"Oh, dreadful!" chimed I; "give me that biggest shawl, will you?--no,
+the other,--Ursula Drury's! Shall we ever finish packing?"
+
+"S'pose ye'll see th' A.B.C.F.M.!--Lucina Rand's put in 'the avails of a
+hen,'--and Semela Briggs sold the silver thimble her aunt gin her. 'T
+all helps the good work. I told the Widow Rand she'd ough' to do
+somethin' for the heathen, so she's gone to raisin' mustard. She said
+she hadn't more 'n a grain o' that to spare, she was so poor; but I told
+her 't would be blest, I guessed. Widow Rand's rather worldly-minded,
+I'm afraid."
+
+A minute more and we should have had Hindostan, Harriet Newell, and
+Juggernaut. Happily, somebody came for the Deacon, and we were left to
+our packing again.
+
+
+II.
+
+This was the second week in May, in the year 1830. We were a promising
+country, but had not yet performed. Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor
+cheap postage had been established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked
+their fingers in garrets, waiting for the good time coming; and
+philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain, in
+Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose,
+their fine sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of
+eloquence, and fell flat to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled
+by stage-coaches; and postage for over a hundred miles rose to eighteen
+cents. Not a lover's sigh for a cent less; and it took a fortune for
+persons of sensibility to exchange sentiments.
+
+The consequence to country-people of this last-mentioned fact was, that
+everybody who went anywhere took everybody's letters, and, as there were
+no expresses, added, of course, everybody's packages and messages. And
+the consequence of this was, that everybody made everybody's purchases,
+whether gowns, books, bonnets, or what not. It mattered little who did
+errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one store-keeper bought
+our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods, and
+our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter
+weather. I remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the
+æsthetic conversation at one of our parties, where Art was on the
+_tapis_, made a comical mistake, but one natural enough, too,--stating
+that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes for ten dollars. We were not
+thinking of exactly the same kind of Vandyke that he was.
+
+Many a time have I carried in my trunk more letters than the mail-bag
+did to Boston, and conscientiously finished all the parish's business
+before touching my own.
+
+A certain amount of self-complacency and satisfaction is felt, and
+laudably earned, by being intrusted with commissions; and I flatter
+myself few persons ever set off for New York with such an array of them
+as I did on this occasion.
+
+Looking over my list, I must confess to a flush of real enjoyment at
+finding _carte blanche_ for a scarf. "Now, that is something like!" said
+I. "I can see now how pleasantly an artist feels, or would feel, at an
+order for a picture,--'your own subject,--your own terms.' Miss Patty
+Jones knows what is what, and shall be my patroness."
+
+And did I not vindicate triumphantly Miss Patty's confidence? I knew
+better than to buy her a gray and brown thing, merely because she, too,
+was gray and brown. I wreathed her with lilies and hyacinths and French
+green leaves, and she blossomed under it like a rose. If she were not
+the garland, she wore it, and so borrowed bloom and gay freshness. She
+extolled my taste to all Weston.
+
+Then Mrs. Eben Loring had concluded on the whole that I should buy her a
+hat, in Maiden Lane, at the very tip-top milliner's. The thought of my
+return was somewhat embittered by the prospective necessity of carrying
+two very large bandboxes in my lap, in case of rain. Rain might not
+unreasonably be expected in the course of a three days' journey. Think
+of all the bandboxes that in such a case would be put in at the
+coach-window by the driver, to be held in the hapless laps of the nine
+passengers! Almost I was persuaded to leave my own black satin bonnet,
+and perambulate the streets of New York in my travelling-calash, which
+looked exactly like, and was nearly of the size of, a "bellows-top
+shay."
+
+I was thinking of this last sacrifice, when my husband said, in a
+dreamy, bewildered way,--
+
+"Here are five boxes, mother, two bundles, and the rest of these books.
+I give up!"
+
+"Give up? Not I! Now, where a man's energies are exhausted, a woman's
+just begin to show themselves. First and foremost, lock this trunk, and
+let me put the key in my pocket. That's one thing done, and can't be
+undone."
+
+He stepped back from the trunk.
+
+"What's this? all your clothes on the floor!"
+
+"Well, yes, my dear, most of 'em. You see, I couldn't leave Zipporah
+Haven's shawl out, which she sends to her grandmother; and I must put in
+these bundles of the Burts's, and Mary Skinner's box of linen thread. If
+my own things are lost, why, they must be replaced, you know, my dear;
+that is all."
+
+"And we must keep a good lookout, ourselves, that our bandboxes and
+bundles don't fall off behind," replied the Dominie, faintly.
+
+"Yes; and you can put the small trunk under my feet, and the big basket
+under your own, and you will keep an eye on my red shawl,--and pray
+don't lose the umbrella, nor your great-coat, nor your cane. I will, on
+my part, see to these three small bundles, and my parasol. Doubtless we
+shall go on smoothly as need be, only I am afraid you won't be able to
+think up many sermons on the highway. There! I forgot the jar of
+currant-jelly to go to Ruth Hoyt's aunt! However, we must manage
+somehow. You are sure our names are down at the stage-office?"
+
+But, like Charles XII., "after Pultowa's dreadful day," when the
+tale-teller listened for his sympathy,
+
+  "The king had been an hour asleep."
+
+I am ashamed to say that I must have lost myself after that, though I
+thought I was only thinking of the Day of Judgment. But I must have
+dreamed it, or how should I have thought it the last trumpet, when it
+was only the stage-driver's warning knock?
+
+It was delightful to hear the knock, and the simultaneous clang of pots
+and pans which assured us, that, though night had been no night to us,
+the dark morning would usher in our breakfast with coffee by the
+faithful Polly. The driver coming in again before we had finished, we
+seduced him without scruple into taking a cup of boiling comfort, while
+we guiltily collected the waifs and strays of our multifarious luggage.
+Many a time I have waited, myself, in the coach, while similar orgies
+were going on among the unready, so I know just how vexed and impatient
+the passengers were. But what use to go on without the driver? At last
+we squeezed into the full stage.
+
+
+III.
+
+No sooner in than out, however. I was determined not to die before my
+time, as I was sure to do on the back-seat of an overloaded stage, with
+nine passengers, besides numerous, because gratuitously earned,
+children. "For who," as it was sometimes pertinently asked, "would
+charge anything for a poor little innocent child?" The younger, the more
+innocent, of course, and the more numerous.
+
+"If you'll set up here 'long o' me, Miss Prince, there's a plenty o'
+room,--and for you, too, Parson," said the good-natured driver.
+
+Extricating ourselves from the Black Hole, we delightedly clambered to
+the heights above, regardless of risk, and catching at wheel and step
+like Alpine hunters. How comfortable the seat was, with the fresh, early
+morning air blowing freely in our faces! How small the horses looked in
+the dim light of three o'clock! How oddly the wheel-horses looked, all
+backs and no legs!--and how mysteriously many were the reins that were
+tied round and round the iron lantern-rod!
+
+"Just let me put the mail-bag under your feet, Miss Prince. Here we are,
+now, all right, and nothin' to do but go along!"
+
+"Now, then!"
+
+"Come up! come! come!"
+
+But in vain were caresses; in vain were chirrups, duckings, and kisses,
+wafted to the nigh leader. Like the rebellious South of to-day, he had
+taken his attitude, and stood now on four legs, now on two, pawing only
+the dark air, and regardless of the general welfare behind him.
+
+"Now what will you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally
+afraid of horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence:
+partly in the staid, heavy mass of determination beside me, who looked
+so calm and good-natured; and partly in the queer, elfin look of the
+beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary connection with our
+safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to get on
+with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the
+occasion by plunges, rearings, and kickings.
+
+Still gathering the reins lightly in his large hand, the stable and sure
+intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his
+long whip at the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping
+galled his proud neck! How his black back curved, and his small head
+tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce, but just pawed like a fairy
+horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or to herald in
+the morning.
+
+"He'll start by-'m-by,--he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos
+start," remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness,
+the unerring switch every half minute.
+
+What acted on the capricious thing at last,--whether the Inevitability
+behind him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the
+"beautiful disdain" left his black back and tossing mane in a moment,
+and he buckled down to his work with an energy worthy of the cause, and
+with a good-will that was an example to the other three.
+
+"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin'
+wantin' but the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I
+won't never drive 'em together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He
+says they'd run till they dropped down dead. I guess they would. He's a
+putty critter enough, and well made, but dreadful ugly. Now, I like that
+'ere wheeler!"--he pointed his whip towards the horse below my foot.
+"She's kind,--that mare is; and she's fast enough, and handsome. Broad
+back,--short legs,--goes like a duck!"
+
+In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
+own?--a man of means,--owning his team,--and with more knowledge of his
+district than most members of Congress have? Indeed, I believe he's in
+Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody
+knows a hill by experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green
+Mountains are full of comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns
+their highest and tallest tops; but the hills of New Hampshire are
+Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the roads of old time made
+by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no circuitous,
+soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
+deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the
+shortest air-line between places.
+
+Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a
+steep place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the
+foot of a long hill, of a two-mile stretch, the driver generally
+stopped, to indicate the propriety of the male passengers, at least,
+ascending the hill on foot. And often the whole stage-load gladly
+availed itself of the permission. It was handy for the owners of
+bandboxes, to pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now
+and then; and the four beasts, like those in Revelation, said "Amen" to
+the kindly impulse of humanity that lightened their load, and left them
+to scramble comfortably from one side to the other of the still
+ascending path. When they did get to the top of some of those Walpole
+hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the
+far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!
+
+
+IV.
+
+We had the mails to change at the post-offices, and a seemingly
+inexhaustible store, intrusted to the care and courtesy of the driver,
+and surrounding him like a rampart,--of newspapers, bundles, cans,
+pillow-cases full of dried apples, and often letters.
+
+At the red house near the mill below Surrey, a sweet-looking girl ran
+out, as we passed, holding her hand forward for a letter, which our
+driver pretended to drop half a dozen times, on purpose to tantalize
+her. It was pretty to see her blushing, sparkling face, as the blood
+danced to her brow with hope, and back with the baffled expectancy to
+her heart.
+
+"Neouw, Sil, be still! give to me, yeouw!"
+
+If it hadn't been Yankee, it was soft and melodious enough for an
+Italian peasant. As picturesque, too, was her short, blue woollen
+petticoat, and white short-gown, that "half hid and half revealed" the
+unconstrained grace of healthy mountain-nature; and more modest the
+happy look with which she received the letter at last, and flew with it
+like a bird back to the red nest.
+
+"A love-letter, I suppose," said I, answering the twinkle of the
+driver's good-natured eye.
+
+"Wal, I expect 's likely. They've been sparking now over a year. And
+it's a pity, too, such a real clever girl as that is! She a'n't so
+dreadful bright, but she's real clever, and ough' to hev a better chance
+'n Jim Ruggles."
+
+"A bad match for her?"
+
+"Wal, Jim's a good feller enough, but he drinks. I don't mean to say
+nothin' agin moderate drinkin'. I drink myself moderately. But Jim's a
+real sponge. He'd drink all day hard and never show it, without it is
+bein' cross, maybe, and paler 'n common. Now I say,--and I a'n't no
+'reformed inebriate,' nor Father Matthew sort,--but I do say, and will
+hold to it, such a man at twenty-one makes a poor beginnin'. If he
+lives, he'll be a poor shote, and no mistake. I'm sorry for the gal."
+
+"Somebody ought to tell her. Why not you?"
+
+"Wal, what's the good on 't? She wouldn't hear a word. When a woman's
+once sot her mind, don't do no good to talk. For that matter, talkin'
+never did do much, I'm thinkin',--exceptin' preachin'. We're bound to
+hear that, Parson," he added, laughing, and with a nod which might seem
+respectful.
+
+In three hours we had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this
+of a warm day, and with a full complement of passengers. We had watched
+the sun rise over Walpole hills, and the specks in the distance where
+the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The breaking day, the
+bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the welcoming
+day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are
+all sharp for the ready breakfast, at six o'clock.
+
+Then, as I am talking of the past, and not of the present, there was
+time enough: time enough for the comfortable discussion of breakfast,
+for the changing of raiment among the babies, for chatting in the
+bar-room, for the interchange of news among the men, and even for
+glasses of milk-punch. Tell it not in modern Gath that even the Dominie
+spiced his half-mug of flip with an anecdote, and that every man and
+woman took cider as well as coffee.
+
+How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during
+this journey of three days and a half to New York? Modern travellers,
+who are, or are not, as it happens, run off the track, smashed up, or
+otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed of, have little notion of our
+successive and amusing accidents, and of how they diversified and
+occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the _ennui_ which comes
+from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one
+of accident.
+
+That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,--that one of the leaders
+had fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our
+driver, who was in hopes the critter wouldn't have 'em that day,)--that
+the coach wholly collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into
+a promiscuous heap of unbroken bones,--this, and such as this, will be
+easily believed by any New-England traveller who remembers thirty years
+back. But how we fell so softly that the brains were never damaged,--why
+falling into ditches at night wasn't an unhealthy process,--and, above
+all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps, strings, and nails
+should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully adapted to
+every emergency,--that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
+amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that
+almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted
+his natural tact, expediency, and invention. With string and nail in his
+pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus to get away from a Yankee, or
+his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only been a
+Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered
+with roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own
+powers, knew all about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the
+light of a pine-knot in his father's kitchen. This rude culture is the
+commonest fact among our mountaineers.
+
+We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their
+bright, concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like
+to know who would stop anywhere now to see anything! One might as well
+be put into a gun and fired off to New York as go there now by
+steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not unlike a "resonant
+steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the other.
+
+But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as
+_was_ a journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you
+entered their hearts and took lodgings,--sometimes for life.
+
+Then the country! You saw that, too,--not the poorest part of it,
+scooting round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole
+way flat, and are glad to shut your eyes and listen to the engine,
+rather than have them ache with seeing everything you would never wish
+to look at!
+
+All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we
+leave the Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long,
+dreary reaches of unfertile pastures, and its wealth of stone wall,--so
+abundant that travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it,
+seeing no lack in the road or field,--from the time we enter on trim,
+well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and
+beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
+ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and
+enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of
+fine landscape, maturity. With and under the old oaks and birches rest
+the sad-colored houses that have held life and experience,--birth,
+death, and old historic adventure.
+
+Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and
+Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of
+Indian struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in
+caves, or bursting out like white spirits to lead and avenge. The air is
+peopled with traditions far back from the present, but with which the
+grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems still to sympathize.
+
+In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire
+spring into the exultant richness of the winged butterfly,--into white,
+fragrant fields of blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.
+
+In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in
+ever varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my
+fellow-passengers, and, except in listening to some communicative old
+women, might really, as far as society was concerned, as well have been
+travelling in the style of to-day. Beyond the casual acquaintances I
+made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who interested
+me until we reached Springfield. There, at the top of the first short
+hill outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing
+in the river-mist like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody
+whom my prophetic soul announced as a companion, looking wholly unlike a
+ghost, and very unlike a mist. He raised his hand, just as we were about
+passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver suddenly reined
+in his team.
+
+A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest,
+showed us a traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.
+
+He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for
+himself just above us among the countless boxes.
+
+"Don't let me disturb you, Madam All right. Just room for my bag. Go on,
+driver."
+
+"Fine day," said we.
+
+"A warm morning. I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,--but
+the sun is too hot for me."
+
+He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his
+broad brow with his handkerchief. Then he looked at us with clear blue
+eyes, and tossed back his curling brown hair. He had a gray
+travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but which was then a
+novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson lips,
+and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
+American. So much the better.
+
+
+V.
+
+I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of
+investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once,
+evidently. A country-parson and his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I
+will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to
+myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely
+necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this
+man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the
+next five years. Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with
+my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take
+me into the conversation,--little thought I of the shadow he would one
+day cast over both of our lives!
+
+He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten
+minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's
+cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a
+wonderful convenience.
+
+"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good
+bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often
+walk fifty miles together."
+
+We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the
+world nobody walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if
+not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least
+one horse. Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.
+Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom,
+to be as unlike the British as possible,--as they did of making their
+houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.
+
+This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with
+fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We
+looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit
+limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural
+contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child
+approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics
+he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
+connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops,
+of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath;
+never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing
+or whispering: no, all about him sounded like the free, dashing, rushing
+water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned
+cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly to the
+outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort
+of purposeless activity,--energy for its own sake. While his energies
+harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of
+knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good. But suppose
+his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him
+to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would have the
+same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
+balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
+yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
+have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.
+
+Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
+good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
+and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
+another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
+matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
+enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
+continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
+walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
+bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
+lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
+anything else by any experience.
+
+His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
+said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
+sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
+century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
+bulb, even without being a Dutchman.
+
+His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without
+scruple every other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in
+professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a
+description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of jessamine and
+Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
+azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers,
+and hollyhocks.
+
+"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I
+had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for
+day-lilies or tulips; "promise me that I may show you my tulips, and I
+will promise you that you shall like botany hereafter."
+
+We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which
+I said I would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs
+he gave me on the top of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in
+the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house
+afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old
+glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which
+happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine
+clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were
+extinguished forever.
+
+I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not
+matter at all. He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for
+introduction. We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us
+to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest. He had
+travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that
+he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.
+
+Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,--
+
+"Halloo, old boy, get up here!"
+
+He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so
+attenuated that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean
+against, and removed a cane and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his
+bones.
+
+It was about half an hour before I saw that the new man was not at all
+an invalid, but of the natural gaunt frame and pallid complexion of my
+countrymen. My eyes had become so full of the fresh, rosy life of the
+Englishman's face, that the new man's face was bleached and unhealthy to
+me. I happened to glance back from him to the Dominie, and saw, that,
+allowing for green spectacles, they were both of a color. We were so
+arranged on the top of the coach, that with reasonable twisting of necks
+we were able to maintain an animated conversation, and soon found our
+account in the new element.
+
+"Well, Remington!"
+
+"Well, Lewis!"
+
+"Where from now?"
+
+"From Niagara, and home by the White Hills."
+
+"And what of the last, or of both?"
+
+"Miss Rugg has fallen into the one, and Miss Somebody has been to the
+top of the other. Had to be brought down, though. Women shouldn't climb
+mountains."
+
+"There has been some talk of a road, or practicable path at least, to
+the top of Mount Washington."
+
+"Never'll be done. Impossible on the face of the thing."
+
+"Nothing is impossible to Yankees, Remington."
+
+"This is. And now, Lewis, whence come you, and whither go?"
+
+"From Weston, and to New York."
+
+Here was a _denouement!_ We looked at him with new interest, and saw at
+once, such was the force of imagination, the very eyes and eyebrows of
+Gus Lewis. However, it proved afterwards to be only imagination. When we
+told him we came from Weston only two days and a half before, the
+conversation assumed the native style of New England, and for the next
+quarter of an hour we talked of each other and each other's affairs.'
+Mr. Lewis was delighted to see us, had stayed only an hour in Weston,
+and there heard of our trip from Auguste,--profanely called Gus,--took
+the box of maple-sugar in charge at once, laughed at the boy-like
+direction without even a surname, and ended with recommending us to go
+at once to Miss Post's, on Broadway, where himself and his wife were at
+present boarding. All the particulars of life, character, and relative
+interests were discussed between ourselves and Mr. Lewis with the
+relish and zest of compatriots. I had forgotten how close a tie was that
+of Yankee birth, and how like an unknown tongue our talk was to the
+Englishman, till we stopped and turned to him to say something, and
+found him fast asleep. Then I was glad that he hadn't heard my satirical
+description of "donation-parties" at Weston, nor the account I gave of
+our two boys, our salary of five hundred dollars, and the various
+comical shifts we had to make to live comfortably on that sum and
+support aged parents and graceless relations. Little touches told Mr.
+Lewis the whole story. I knew very well that Mr. Remington would be
+entirely abroad about such a social existence as ours in Weston, travel
+he ever so long or widely.
+
+Mr. Lewis had black eyes and hair, and bent like an habitual student. He
+had a scar on his right eyebrow, which he had got by a fall, and by
+which he had saved the life of Mr. Remington, who was a connection of
+his wife's. This he told us, afterwards, and I amused myself with
+drawing parallels between his face and his mind. One side was gentle,
+sweet-humored, sentimental, with a touch of melancholy. The other,
+disfigured with the scar, seemed to have been turned harsh, suspicious,
+proud, reserved, and unrelenting. These were many qualities, all to
+depend on a scar, to be sure; but they generally herd together, and he
+might be one man or another, as life presented its dark or sunny side to
+him. To me, he was very interesting, from the first; and my husband was
+delighted with him. The Dominie starved in Weston for congenial
+intellectual nutriment. Nobody but myself could tell what a drain it was
+on him always to impart, always to simplify, to descend, to walk on the
+ground with wings folded flat to his back, and the angel in him
+habitually kept out of view. The most he could do was to insinuate now
+and then a thought above the farming interest, and in a direction aside
+from Bombay. More than that exposed him to suspicion, and hindered his
+usefulness in Coös County.
+
+Somehow, we got talking of Mr. Remington, which we might well do, seeing
+him there before us, sleeping like a baby.
+
+"That he could always do, like Napoleon," said Mr. Lewis, "and so can
+accomplish much without fatigue."
+
+"Is he married?" said I.
+
+"Yes. His wife is in delicate health."
+
+I was surprised to hear that he was married.
+
+"He hasn't a married look, has he?"
+
+"You are talking about me," said Remington, waking up. "I felt it
+mesmerically. And, to give you a good opportunity, I will walk a mile or
+two. Give me a good character, Lewis. Hold up, driver!"
+
+Springing down, he went on, laughing, before us, now and then calling
+back to ask if we were nearly through?
+
+"He has not the 'subdued domestic smile upon his features mild', that
+marks the man who has a wife at home," said I.
+
+"No. He is a man, however, born under a lucky star, and his cup filled
+with good-fortune to the brim. His self-lordship has been to him no
+heritage of woe, thus far."
+
+"A certain happiness, but necessarily of a poor quality, comes from
+being able to gratify our wishes. If he has no more, it is poor enough."
+
+"Do you mean that pleasure must be an outgrowth of pain to be properly
+appreciated?" said Mr. Lewis.
+
+"Somewhat,--mostly," said the minister; "since the insensibility that
+protects one from pain prevents also delicate picture. I think, indeed,
+a rational being must suffer in order to enjoy, after infancy."
+
+"His eyes don't look as if they had been in training of any sort," said
+I, without knowing what my words implied, till I saw the harsh
+expression on Mr. Lewis's face.'
+
+"I mean that they have a sort of undisciplined expression, as if he had
+never been tamed by suffering or sorrow of any sort," said I.
+
+"That sadness is the true human look," said the minister, "the look that
+redeems us from the mere animal expression of enjoyment. It is the
+stamp God puts on those He loves. He chastens them; after that, they are
+no more servants, but sons of the house."
+
+I saw by Mr. Lewis's eyes that he understood and felt this. Also, that
+from his nature he bought his enjoyments every step of the way of life.
+How differently his cousin laid hold on the cornucopia of enjoyment, and
+covered himself with bountiful beauty, drinking in at every sense
+pleasure! The former, as could be seen too, held his title to happiness
+by the most uncertain tenure; the nervous quiver betraying, and the
+sensitive blood witnessing, how keenly he felt and how dearly he paid
+for every passing pleasure. I remember, as I saw his purple, thrilling
+face, that I hoped his home-life was happy, feeling that to such a man
+it must be everything. Yet I was sure, from what he did not say, with
+eye or lips, that he had not learned religious trust. Still, he did not
+listen to the mere minister, but to the friend; and there sprang up
+between the two the corresponding interest and respect belonging to
+natures kindred in depth and sensibility, though of widely differing
+experience. In after-years, he who had already attained was able
+frequently to hold out a helping hand to his younger brother; but now,
+only a smile and a look told much. This acquaintance of the soul is very
+fascinating. In the two or three steps we take together, with cognizance
+and measure of each other, what a long path opens before us of alternate
+shade and sunshine, and how imagination borders every step of the way
+with richest heart-blossoms! In friendship, all is glowing and
+enriching. As it has not the depth of love, it neither anticipates nor
+requires sacrifice. We do not think of doing or suffering for a friend;
+but the friend ministers to our weakness, and exalts our strength. He
+sympathizes gently with our self-love, he magnifies every excellence. He
+is perpetually charmed, alike with the novelty and the similarity of our
+experience, and unwearied in comparing thoughts and balancing opinions.
+All, and more, that he gives us, he receives; and so an incipient
+friendship is one of the most intoxicating delights of life. What long
+leaps in acquaintance we took during our first hour, and while Mr.
+Remington still walked up-hill before us!
+
+"You will probably have an opportunity to see and judge for yourselves
+of Mr. Remington, as we are together a great deal, and he is a cousin of
+Mrs. Lewis's. This will be better than for me to attempt a description,
+I think, and, on the whole, more satisfactory. He annoys me, and offends
+me frequently; and then I am not just to him, of course. But he is a
+fine fellow, honorable and agreeable; and with a love of natural science
+that leads him, for the time, like a dog. Just now, he is wild with
+floriculture. Last year, it was geology. You will see."
+
+And then, as if he feared to trust himself with his cousin's character,
+or that it was a distasteful subject for some reason, he turned to the
+minister, and began talking about Cherry Mountain and the scenery in
+Coös.
+
+Mr. Remington called out, at the top of the hill,--
+
+"Now it is my turn! Let me ride, and I will give your character!"
+
+"Oh! we don't need it, I assure you," said I; "we understand him
+entirely."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said he, shaking his brown curls; "I am the
+transparent one."
+
+He stepped up on the wheel-hub to get his bag, and to say he should
+strike off for Middleton on foot. He would see us very soon in New York,
+and claim our promise to visit him.
+
+Being relieved from the fascination of personal beauty and presence,
+with only the impression of character remaining, I was a little ashamed
+to find how much I had liked, without being at all able to esteem him.
+It was with a very different feeling that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose
+ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually transfigured with
+emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he impressed
+one as a living soul; and this inward light gave a translucent beauty
+to the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal
+advantages of form and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes
+of un-sounded depth, and a voice whose rich cadences had an answering
+rhythm in the inward man, showed what his attractions might be, or were,
+to a woman. We became curious to see Mrs. Lewis, of whom we gained no
+idea from his casual references to her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LYRICS OF THE STREET.
+
+
+  VI.
+
+  PLAY.
+
+  From yon den of double-dealing,
+      With its Devil's host,
+  Come I, maddened out of healing:
+             All is lost!
+
+  So the false wine cannot blind me,
+      Nor the braggart toast;
+  But I know that Hell doth bind me:
+             All is lost!
+
+  Where the lavish gain attracts us,
+      And the easy cost,
+  While the damning dicer backs us,
+             All is lost!
+
+  Blest the rustic in his furrows,
+      Toil- and sweat-embossed;
+  Blest are honest souls in sorrows.
+             All is lost!
+
+  Wifely love, the closer clinging
+      When men need thee most,
+  Shall I come, dishonor bringing?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Babe in silken cradle lying,
+      To low music tossed,
+  Will they wake thee for my dying?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Yonder where the river grimly
+      Whitens, like a ghost,
+  Must I plunge and perish dimly;
+             All is lost!
+
+INTERESTING MANUSCRIPTS OF EDMUND BURKE.
+
+
+Macaulay opens his most remarkable article on Milton by saying, "The
+dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a
+saint, till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors
+by exhibiting some relic of him,--a thread of his garment, a lock of his
+hair, or a drop of his blood." If we were in the mood, we might take
+advantage of interesting manuscripts of Edmund Burke, which are now
+before us, to say something of this remarkable character. But we shall
+confine ourselves for the present to a passing glance at the manuscripts
+which have strayed across the Atlantic.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Hon.
+Charles Sumner, who is also the fortunate owner of the _Album Amicorum_
+containing the autograph of John Milton.--ED.]
+
+The authentic manuscripts of Burke have passed through several hands. On
+his death, they were intrusted to the eminent civilian, Dr. French
+Lawrence, of Doctors' Commons, and to Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of
+Rochester. To these two gentlemen we are indebted for the first eight
+volumes of the London octavo edition of Burke's Works. The career of Dr.
+Lawrence was cut short by death in 1809. His associate had the exclusive
+charge of the papers till 1812, when the venerable widow of Burke died
+at Beaconsfield, and by her last will gave to Earl Fitzwilliam, the
+Bishop of Rochester, and the Right Honorable William Elliott the entire
+direction of the printing and publishing of such parts of the works of
+her late husband as were not published before her decease,--bequeathing
+to them all the printed and manuscript papers for this purpose. Eight
+more volumes were published by the Bishop, who died in 1828, a few
+months after the publication of the fifteenth and sixteenth volumes. Mr.
+Elliott had already died in 1818. The papers now came into the sole
+possession of Earl Fitzwilliam, the distinguished nobleman associated
+with the latter portion of Burke's life, from whom they descended to his
+son, the late Earl Fitzwilliam, who, in conjunction with Sir Richard
+Bourke, published, in 1844, the four volumes of correspondence, with a
+few notes of unpublished speeches.
+
+We have personal reason to know that there are yet other unpublished
+manuscripts of Burke in the hands of Lord Fitzwilliam, some of which it
+was our fortune many years ago to inspect. Mr. Macknight, it appears,
+applied to the present Earl for permission to publish some of those
+which are preserved in the archives of Wentworth House, but, "out of
+obedience to the expressed wish of his father, who published all he
+thought necessary, he declined to sanction any further publication of
+these documents."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight's _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 737.]
+
+There are also letters of Burke which from time to time have seen the
+light, as they were communicated by their possessors. Among these none
+equals in interest that addressed to Pitt with regard to his pension,
+which has been printed recently by Lord Stanhope, in his small, but rich
+and rare collection, entitled "Miscellanies." This important letter came
+to light among the papers of Pitt, and has been described by Macaulay as
+"interesting and very characteristic."
+
+The manuscripts now before us are none of these. They have a history of
+their own.
+
+They constitute a thin volume in folio, neatly bound, having a
+book-mark, and arms with the name of _Fillingham_. Here are four
+familiar autograph-letters from Burke to his amanuensis, Swift, all of
+them written from Margate, on the sea-shore, and bearing Burke's frank
+as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a
+member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the
+superscription, while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower
+corner. But English law, while the privilege of franking existed,
+required also that the name of the place where the letter was pasted,
+and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should appear in
+the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in
+this collection:--
+
+  "Margate July seventeenth, 1791
+  "Mr Swift,
+  "Mr Burke's Chambers
+  "4 Stone Buildings
+  "Lincoln's Inn
+  "London.
+
+  "Edm. Burke."
+
+These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of
+them that "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest
+dependants with whom he was thrown into any human relationship"; they
+also "show the statesman, when at the height of literary fame, as busy
+and anxious in sending his sheets through the press, and making
+corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs";
+and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as
+illustrations of Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to
+the Nagles in former years." It seems that the amanuensis to whom they
+were addressed had at his death other similar letters in his possession;
+but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately committed them to
+the names, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr.
+Macknight adds, in a note,--"These letters I owe to the kindness of John
+Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the
+originals."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 410.]
+
+Of one of these letters there is an accurate _fac-simile_, which will be
+found in the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of
+Burke.
+
+But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript
+of the "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the
+_identical copy_ from which the surreptitious publication was made which
+disturbed the last hours of Burke. The body of it is in the handwriting
+of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters were addressed; but it
+shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute and
+elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of
+these pages there is an accurate _fac-simile_ in the third volume of Mr.
+Macknight, who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister,
+after his death, to the gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect
+it." [A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Lifo of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 700.]
+
+These manuscripts--both the letters and the Observations--all concern
+the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between
+himself and Fox, to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate
+their value, we must glance at the scene by which the memorable
+friendship of these men was closed.
+
+Few political events in English history are read with more interest than
+the separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but
+the French Revolution, which separated so many persons in France,
+reached across the Channel to separate them. They differed so radically
+with regard to this portentous, undeveloped movement, that their
+relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed. Burke, in
+the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most
+earnestly inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet
+in me at my time of life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to
+friends to desert me." Fox whispered, "There is no loss of friends."
+Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes, there is a loss of
+friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the
+expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished,
+Burke walked across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between
+Pitt and Dundas on the Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears
+streamed down his face. In the course of his remarks he intimated that
+Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious terms. Burke at once said
+that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox replied, "My right
+honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of his
+mind. Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish
+a recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and
+forgotten."
+
+But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth
+again. "I complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my
+defence by the right honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was
+brought to me and evinced the most promising talents, which I used my
+best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has arrived at the
+maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever
+existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of
+my principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend",
+but as "the right honorable gentleman", and said, in a taunting style,
+that "all he had to do was to repent, and his friends would be ready to
+receive him back and love him as they had previously done". Burke was
+indignant. He said,--"I have gone through my youth without encountering
+any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so unfortunate as
+to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's friendship,
+nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the
+other." [A] This most important and historic friendship was at an end.
+
+[Footnote A:_Parliamentary History_ Vol. XXIX. p. 426.]
+
+The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke
+turned away from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly
+productions of his pen, entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old
+Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in the collection before us,
+addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last corrections of
+this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is the
+letter of which a _fac-simile_ is given by Mr. Macknight.
+
+Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed
+and intense. The Whig Club declared, "that their confidence in Mr. Fox
+was confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against
+him." Burke and some forty-five noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the
+club. It was then that Burke, in justification of himself and his
+friends, took the pen, and drew up what his biographer Prior calls the
+"famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority,
+particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke of
+Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third
+volume of Bonn's edition of his Works.
+
+This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections
+to the course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of
+that distinguished gentleman. But it was not intended for publication,
+at least at that time. It was transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with
+a letter, asking that it might not even be read at once, but that the
+Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his library-table, and when a
+day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn to it.
+Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if
+not always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the
+amanuensis whom Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This
+was none other than Swift, to whom the familiar letters were addressed.
+Unknown to his employer, he had appropriated to himself a copy in his
+own handwriting, with corrections and additions by Burke, which seems to
+have come between the original rough draught and the final copy
+transmitted to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke
+was in his last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless
+scrivener communicated this copy to an equally faithless publisher, by
+whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment against
+the Eight Honorable C.J. Fox." When this was seen by Mrs. Burke, she
+felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband,
+that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was
+relieved so far as it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by
+the affidavit of Mr. Rivington, succeeded in obtaining an injunction
+against the publisher on the very day when the tract appeared. But two
+thousand copies had already stolen abroad.
+
+It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to
+her husband, learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two
+o'clock in the afternoon of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to
+him his newspapers and correspondence for the past week. He was less
+disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does vex me," he said;
+"but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at
+anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more
+exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have
+been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He
+was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed
+that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to
+know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke
+of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and
+incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr.
+Lawrence, about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to
+deliver back. He had forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and
+corrected by himself.
+
+This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated
+to attract attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his
+last words. Pitt read it with delight, and declared it to be a model in
+that style of composition. But his latest biographer says of it, that
+"it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever wrote the 'Observations
+on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least pleasing of
+all his compositions."[A] In style, it is direct, terse, and compact,
+beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended
+for the public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the
+manuscript now before us exhibits the minute care with which it was
+executed. Here also may be traced varieties of expression, constituting
+the different forms which a thought assumed, not unlike the various
+drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.]
+
+But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now
+dealing with this relic.
+
+HARVARD'S HEROES.
+
+
+The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London
+cannot fail to notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the
+choir. It is composed of rare and costly marbles and other precious
+stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it is, its greatest value lies in
+the circumstance which placed it there. It is a memorial, the tribute of
+affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms to a noble
+officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a [Greek: ktêma
+es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller
+in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches,
+in stately cathedrals,--wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be
+arrested, whereever the pride of country is most deeply stirred,
+wherever the sentiment of loyalty is consecrated by religion,--the
+Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names of his honored dead.
+There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense local
+pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the
+scenes of their early lives.
+
+"It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo;
+"think what they will say of us at home!"--and this simple sentence went
+straight to the heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home
+is the prevailing thought in each young soldier's heart as he goes into
+his first fight. And "home" does not mean for him so much broad England
+as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the school where he was
+trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in times gone
+by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory!
+whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after
+the morning service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be
+for him the memorial window through whose blazoned panes the sunlight
+will fall softly across the "squire's pew," where as a boy he knelt and
+worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the marble effigies
+of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a place
+among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the
+school-room at Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,--that future boys,
+playing where he played, shall talk of him whom they never knew as "one
+of ours." For he is well aware that he is making fame not for himself
+alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most loved and
+happiest.
+
+We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the
+intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local
+association and sentiment are ingrained. We are but just beginning where
+Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago. Hence our glorifying of
+the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to
+commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years have
+taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated
+energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the
+water-sheds of history. The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the
+same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child. Life is measured by
+action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion
+was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and
+"fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look
+back upon a past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be
+but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those
+elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national
+character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet it may be
+undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole
+country cannot participate, which will not for the remainder of this
+century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of
+face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and
+hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the
+fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon the
+slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is
+ended, and the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of
+the returning citizens to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to
+level the earthworks of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. In the city where
+mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law, no one cares to
+keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade, though
+they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for
+they witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly
+forget. The only memorial that a wise and high-souled nation _can_ erect
+after this war will be the single monument which shall commemorate the
+hour of peace restored.
+
+But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting
+than brass the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we
+are doubly bound in gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who
+have deserved well of their country in the hour of utmost need. We ought
+to do this also in that temper which shall look most singly to the noble
+end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future land. I
+know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in
+New-England's foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself,
+the starry roll of its heroes links it with all the fortunes of our
+history. Men who sat in the Long Parliament, and who may have seen the
+Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their early degrees upon Harvard's
+first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King Philip, were
+colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of
+Wolfe and Amherst, and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight
+years' struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence.
+Alumni still survive who did military duty in the second war with
+England. The men of Harvard were with Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped
+Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec capital. Of these the only
+record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of the
+"Triennial."
+
+For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid
+aside the gown for the sash and shoulder-strap, who, first in the
+bloodless triumphs of the regatta and in "capital training" for the
+great race of life where literary and professional fame are the prizes,
+went forth to venture all for honor and country, the Alma Mater surely
+should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because of her
+high responsibility in the education of "ingenuous youth," she can do no
+less. I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal
+thousands of her surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as
+he reads the story of her children amid their "baptism of fire." There
+is a notable peculiarity about this the most purely New-England of our
+colleges,--the continual recurrence of familiar patronymics. I take up
+the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five hundred names I
+can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots,
+Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells,--they come with every
+Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a
+hundred and fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent
+of nobility in this, such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the
+coronet which marks the union of birth and worth. We cannot, we, the
+Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep unhonored. Those who shall
+come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old Harvard, shall
+occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and
+Holworthy, have a right not only to count the academic wreaths which
+have been won in past days by their namesakes, but also to be taught the
+inspiring lesson of holy love of country, of highest courage and truth
+and soldierly virtue.
+
+And how shall this be done? Let these few remaining lines suggest at
+least one plan. Harvard's chief want is a hall for her Alumni, one
+worthy, in architecture and convenience, of her children's fame, which
+Harvard Hall is not. That long, awkward room, very hot and cramped to
+dine in at midsummer, hotter and more cramped still for the Class-day
+dances, is just fit for one purpose,--the declamation-exercises of the
+Sophomore year. Let us have a hall fit for Commencements, for Alumni and
+Phi-Beta orations, for our annual dinners, worthy of the "Doctor's"
+poems and the "General's" speeches, with a wainscot, not of vulgar
+plaster, but of noble oak, against which Copley's pictures and Story's
+busts may properly be placed.
+
+Then let its windows be filled, as in the glorious halls and chapels of
+England, with memorial glass. Let one of these, if no more, be formed,
+of the costliest and most perfect workmanship our art can compass, to
+the memory of the Heroes of Harvard. It shall be the gift of every class
+which counts among its members one of these. There, amid the gorgeous
+emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year, their
+battles.
+
+Or, if this may not be, because our Alma Mater is still too poor or too
+humble to offer to her returning children such banqueting-place,--if
+there is no Wykcham or Waynflete or Wolsey to arch for us the
+high-embowed roof, let us place our memorial in the Library, along its
+shaded alcoves and above its broad portals. There the bright shadows
+shall sleep and pass with the sliding day, where the young scholars
+mused and studied. There the future student, as he walks, shall read as
+noble a lesson as he can glean from any of the groaning shelves and
+dusty tomes. There shall be for Harvard her _Libro d'Oro_ wherein she
+has written the names of her best-beloved.
+
+Some token let us have that they are unforgotten. It was no quarrel of
+vulgar ambition in which they fell. It was the sacred strife for which
+the mother armed them when she sent them forth. For her they fought, for
+culture, generous learning, noble arts, for all that makes a land great
+and glorious, against the barbarism of anarchy and the baseness of a
+system founded upon wrong and oppression. We cannot, indeed, forget them
+while we live to come up to our annual gathering, and see the vacant
+places amid familiar ranks. There will then be question and reply,
+saddening, but proud. "He fell at Port Hudson, cheering on the forlorn
+hope." "He lies beneath the forest-trees of Chancellorsville." "He was
+slain upon the glacis of Fredericksburg." "He died in the foul prisons
+of Richmond." We cannot forget them, and we would fain leave the
+memorial of them to future generations. Their fame belongs to Harvard;
+for what they learned there could not be other than noble, inspiring,
+manly. Let Harvard make the plan, and give the call, and all of us, from
+our distant homes and according to our ability, will offer our gifts
+with gladness. Let the graduates who have leisure and taste and means,
+and who are still dwelling under the pleasant shades of the Cambridge
+elms, come together and take up the matter while love and gratitude and
+pride are fresh.
+
+WHO IS ROEBUCK?
+
+
+An inquiring American mind, seeking the solution of this momentous
+question, would naturally turn to Appleton's "New Cyclopædia," Vol.
+XIV., page 131. The inquiring mind would be enlightened in a somewhat
+bewildering manner by the description there laid down of a little
+animal, some of whose qualities are thus set forth in the first article
+on the page indicated above:--
+
+"ROEBUCK. A small European deer of the genus _Capreolus_.... The skull
+has a very small, shallow suborbital pit, ... tear-bag indistinct, hoofs
+narrow and triangular.... The color in summer is reddish brown, in
+winter olive, with paler shades; inside of the ears fulvous, and a black
+spot at the angles of the mouth.... It is about four feet long.... The
+horns are used for knife-handles.... They congregate in small families,
+but not in herds.... From their strong scent they are easily hunted;
+though they frequently escape by their speed, doublings, springing to
+cover, and other artifices.... The roebucks are represented in North
+America by the Virginia deer."
+
+Inquiring mind, not wishing for researches in the direction of Natural
+History, albeit the subject of parallelisms is a somewhat curious study
+and in special cases infinitely amusing, passes on to the next article
+in the Cyclopædia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is sufficiently obvious that it requires neither fame nor greatness
+to excite public curiosity. A notorious criminal or an unusually
+eccentric lunatic frequently gives rise to a larger share of
+newspaper-comment and general discussion than the wisest and most
+virtuous of mankind. It must be well remembered by those who have read
+Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon that a dwarf was attracting thousands to the
+Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, while the historical painter, stung
+to madness by the neglect of the frivolous crowd, committed the hideous
+and ghastly suicide which threw a tragic darkness over the close of his
+strange and troubled existence. The desperate and dangerous frequently
+succeed in placing themselves on a bad eminence, from which they are
+conspicuous enough; and if to be talked of and pointed at be the sole
+object of their ambition, they can, of course, be congratulated on their
+success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand
+quiet firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread
+widely, and the tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any
+public man or politician, whose taste is so morbidly depraved and whose
+aim in life is so debased as to prefer notoriety to honest, useful
+service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being the especial
+theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that
+so many of our fellow-countrymen are at this moment asking the question
+with which we head these pages,--"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+An unhappy culprit, who combined with an innocent taste for green peas a
+thievish method of acquiring their usual savory accompaniment, is
+reported to have been addressed by an English judge in the following
+felicitous terms:--"Prisoner at the bar, Providence has endowed you with
+health and strength, _instead of which_ you go about the country
+stealing ducks." Providence has endowed John Arthur Roebuck, member of
+the Parliament of Great Britain, with fair talents and some power of
+speech, _instead of which_ (to use the accurate judicial ellipsis) he
+goes about using violent and vulgar words of menace against those who
+have never offended him, and scattering firebrands as if there were no
+gun-powder anywhere to ignite and explode. This would be a mean and
+mischievous occupation for the dullest man; but for one who has proved
+by his very failures that he is not devoid of intellect or energy, it
+is a monstrous perversion of mental gifts, even if they are small.
+
+A portion of the fiery heat of his nature may be traced, perhaps, to the
+fact that he was born at Madras; but as on the mother's side he is
+descended from the poet Tickell, the friend of Addison, it would not be
+altogether unreasonable to have expected in him some few of the
+amenities of the _literæ humaniores_. He soon, however, exchanged the
+torrid scenes of Oriental life for the snows of Canada, where he
+received his education; and when we remember what the bizarre oddities
+of his subsequent career have been, it might be interesting, if we had
+the materials for the purpose, to inquire what that education was. The
+British Provinces, however, were not deemed a sufficiently ample theatre
+of action for the energy of the capacious soul that dwelt in that not
+over-capacious body; and so, at the age of twenty-three, he repaired to
+England and commenced his studies for the profession of the law.
+
+He was called to the bar in 1832. He had, however, by no means paid an
+exclusive attention to the study of the law, or his success in his
+profession might have been greater, and the world might have had a good
+lawyer instead of a bad politician. The period of his Inner-Temple
+student-life was a very stirring time in England. Old principles were
+dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider theories
+of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian
+rushed with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most
+reckless and noisy debating-club spouters of the day. In speaking of the
+Reform Bill at a meeting at a tavern in London, he said, that, if the
+bill did not pass, he for one should like to "wade the streets of the
+capital knee-deep in blood." It was consoling to reflect, even at the
+time, that the atrocious aspiration was mitigated by the reflection that
+it would not require a deluge of gore to reach the knees of such a
+Zacchæus as Roebuck. "Pretty wicious that for a child of six!" said the
+amiable Mr. Squeers on one occasion; and pretty sanguinary that, say we,
+for a rising little demagogue of thirty.
+
+As England was at that time in a seething ferment of excitement, men who
+were unscrupulous in their language were at a premium in the political
+market, and the respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place
+of Bath, in Somersetshire, elected the fierce little man as their
+representative in the Imperial Parliament. This was a great start in
+life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated his
+overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation
+and honest adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful
+position, and been saved, at least, from the indignity of fetching and
+carrying for the Emperor of Austria, and from the impertinence of
+intruding himself into the august presence of Mr. Kinglake's amiable and
+virtuous friend, the Emperor of France. The English nation might then
+possibly have pointed to his portrait in their historical gallery as
+that of an efficient public servant who had deserved well of his
+country, and he might have escaped a ludicrous immortality as the Dog
+Tear-'em, in the recent admirable sketch in "Punch."
+
+But, in the words of a political song,--
+
+    "There weren't no such luck
+    For John A. Roebuck,
+  And he thought he would teach the whole nation
+    That the Tories were fools,
+    And the Whigs only tools,
+  But Roebuck was England's salvation."
+
+And he, according to this programme, set himself to reform the
+Constitution and protect the Colonies.
+
+  "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,"
+
+he was an eclectic in politics,--acknowledged no leader, had himself no
+followers. A chief without a party, an apostle without disciples, a
+critic without the merest ordinary penetration, a cynic whose bitterness
+was not enlivened by wit or humor, a spouter whose arguments, when he
+had any, were usually furnished from the mint, John Arthur Roebuck was
+for many years that impersonation of terrific honesty, glaring purity,
+and indignant virtue, known in English politics as an INDEPENDENT member
+of Parliament. When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are
+disposed to be unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they
+win or retain place and power, such a position, occupied with judgment
+and fortified by modesty and good sense, is a most powerful and a most
+beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on by one whose obtrusive
+egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any serious or
+permanent influence on his fellow-men. When a Pocket-Diogenes rolls his
+little tub into the House of Commons, and complains that everybody is
+standing between him and the sun,--why, in an assembly of educated and
+sensible men the sham is soon discovered, the pseudo-cynic seen through,
+and his affected misanthropy deservedly gains for him universal derision
+and scorn. Some years after he entered Parliament, Mr. Disraeli, with
+whom he had many encounters, in which he was invariably worsted, made
+the House roar with laughter by taunting Roebuck with his "Sadler's
+Wells sarcasms and melodramatic malignities," and drew a most amusing
+picture of him as "a solitary sentinel pacing round the deserted citadel
+of his own opinions."
+
+  "He who surpasses or subdues mankind
+  Must look down on the hate of those below";
+
+but as Mr. Roebuck has done neither the one nor the other, his only
+chance of not being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated,
+by his contemporaries, is to continue his work of mischief, and merely
+change the object of his puny attacks as one becomes more prominent than
+another, and as he can manage to maintain his own quasi-importance by
+attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike for
+this country; so far from that, he admired and praised us, as by an
+extract from one of his books we will presently prove; but since he has
+become a self-appointed lackey, has donned imperial livery, and as a
+volunteer does the dirty work of despots, he must have lost all sympathy
+with and all regard for an independent, free, and brave people. We hope
+and believe that this country vastly prefers his censure to his praise,
+and, as far as it has leisure at the present crisis for any serious
+consideration of his erratic pranks, would rather have his enmity than
+his friendship. _Non tali auxilio!_
+
+But we must recur to his inconsistent and rather uninteresting career,
+and so satisfy, and perhaps weary, the curiosity of any reader who is
+still disposed to ask the momentous question, "Who is Roebuck?"
+
+In 1835, he was appointed the agent--the _paid_ agent--of the House of
+Assembly of Lower Canada, during the dispute then raging between the
+Executive Government and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially
+plume themselves on the fact that the members of their legislative
+bodies are unremunerated, it is somewhat difficult to understand how
+this exception was made in John Arthur's favor. As a precedent it is to
+be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious that such an
+arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members,
+might throw grave suspicions on the purity of public men, and introduce
+a wholesale venality into public life. If such a system is permitted,
+any foreign monarch or any foreign government may secure the services of
+a British senator as his agent and representative. It is quite appalling
+to think that the chivalrous Earl of Derby or the conscientious Mr.
+Gladstone should be shocked by the offer of a handsome annual salary
+paid quarterly, (not deducting the income-tax,) made by the King of
+Dahomey for an eloquent defence of his humane and enlightened rule, or
+by an equally munificent donative from the famous and merry monarch of
+the Cannibal Islands for the support of himself and his loyal subjects
+in their copious consumption of human flesh. We should be sorry wantonly
+to raise so dreadful a suspicion; but if British M.P.s are permitted,
+according to the Roebuck precedent, to be PAID agents, why has not
+Southern money found its way into senatorial pockets? Greedy Mr. Laird,
+and unscrupulous, money-loving Mr. Lindsay,[A] always resolutely
+grubbing for the main chance, are perhaps sufficiently paid by indirect,
+though heavy gains in shipbuilding. Needy Mr. Roebuck may be salaried by
+the Emperor of Austria, though there is nothing to prove, except his own
+open-mouthed and loud-tongued professions of purity, that he is not
+"_paid_ agent" of the Confederate Government. The indulgence of the evil
+feelings of malice and uncharitableness may, however, sufficiently
+recompense him; and to him, perhaps, his virtue may be its own reward.
+But if paid agencies are not permitted, a very serious suspicion fastens
+on that hard-mouthed, rising lordling, Robert Cecil, son of the Marquis
+of Salisbury, and one of the most active and energetic champions of the
+slave-mongers of the South. The young lord, it is well known, stepped
+down from the lofty pedestal of a bad pedigree to marry the fair, but
+portionless daughter of an English judge; his father is proverbially
+mean and stingy, and the young lord himself proportionately poor; and in
+the intervals of his strenuous advocacy of the claims of the Rebels to
+European recognition he laudably ekes out his very narrow income by
+writing articles for the London newspapers and reviews; and rumor says
+that he communicates gossiping letters, full of piquant and satirical
+sketches of the proceedings of the House of Commons to two or three of
+the provincial papers. He is under these circumstances peculiarly open
+to suspicion. If the proceeding in question is a usual one, why does he
+not openly avow it? If it is unusual or improper, why does he not deny
+the soft impeachment so much credited both in this country and in his
+own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck, after being
+the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become
+such a _purist_ as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the
+Commons, and scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he
+had touched the yellow and handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable
+Indian princes and rajahs who come to England with complaints of
+grievances, sometimes real, and sometimes fictitious, against the
+British Government.
+
+[Footnote A: Lindsay's fawning, plastic sycophancy is well known this
+side the water. After shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from
+Northern business-transactions, he now turns about, kicks his old
+friends, who always half suspected his knavish propensities, bows, cap
+in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some honest
+pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion.
+A "fool's gudgeon" will surely reward his laborious endeavors for
+Southern gold, that article growing beautifully less every day.]
+
+During the period of the "paid agency" Roebuck was tolerably industrious
+with his pen; but in literature and journalism he proved his utter
+incapacity for joining in any combined action. Such was his dogged
+self-assertion and indomitable egotism that none of the ordinary
+channels would answer his purpose; and so he issued a series of
+political papers, entitled "Pamphlets for the People," to which the
+curious may sometimes refer, but which have now lost all their
+significance and interest. His quarrels with editors and publishers were
+notorious; and an altercation with Mr. Black, the well-known editor of
+the "Morning Chronicle," eventuated in a duel so bloodless as to be
+ridiculous. David's pebble did not reach Goliath, and Goliath was
+equally merciful to David. In these pamphlets he violently assailed the
+whole body of editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the
+papers of any note. And the more accustomed he became to the House of
+Commons, the greater liberties did he take with the conventional
+fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility were so
+indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most
+unpopular member of the House.
+
+In 1837 he lost his election for Bath, but was reelected in 1841. In a
+subsequent contest at Bath he was successfully opposed by Lord Ashley,
+the present Earl of Shaftesbury. On this occasion he exhibited even more
+than his usual bad temper and bad taste. He declined to accept Lord
+Ashley's proffered hand; and in the chagrin and vexation occasioned by
+unexpected defeat he uttered a rabid invective against the
+Non-Conformist ministers of the place, to whose influence he rightly
+attributed his rival's success. Lord Ashley was a well-known
+philanthropist, and his consistent support and patronage of many
+religious and charitable societies had naturally given him popularity
+among the Protestant clergy of all denominations,--a popularity
+heightened in the case of the Evangelical and Calvinistic ministers by
+his Lordship's strict Sabbatarianism and his belief in cold dinners on
+Sunday. On the other hand, Mr. Roebuck was openly accused of private
+professions of skepticism in matters of religion; and this report, so
+dangerous to the repute of any public man in England, (where theology
+and politics so frequently cross each other,) considerably damaged his
+chance of success. Lord Ashley, however, was in no way responsible for
+the rumor; and the difference between the conduct of the two during the
+contest was this, that Lord Ashley behaved like a gentleman and Mr.
+Roebuck did not.
+
+During his retirement into private life, after this defeat in 1847, he
+wrote his work entitled "The History of the Whig Ministry of 1830,"--a
+book in the preparation of which he is said to have received
+considerable and valuable assistance from no less a person than Lord
+Brougham. Despite the aid that he received, it is amusing to find in his
+preface a characteristic vaunting of his entire difference with Lord
+Brougham about the character of King William IV. "Lord Brougham," he
+writes, "is accustomed to describe William IV as frank, just, and
+straightforward. We believe him to have been very weak and very false, a
+finished dissembler, and always bitterly hostile to the Whig Ministry
+and their great measure of Reform." This is Roebuck all over. He would
+infinitely rather argue that white was black than quietly coincide in
+any generally received opinion.
+
+While on the subject of his writings, we will mention the book in which
+he vouchsafed to praise those whom he now so elaborately vilifies. In
+1849 he published an octavo volume of two hundred and forty-eight pages
+on "The Colonies of England." Speaking (page 84) of the vast and rapid
+progress made by this country, he says:--
+
+"We are led to inquire by what machinery, by what favoring
+circumstances, such a result has been brought about. The people, be it
+remarked, are the same as ourselves,--the original Thirteen States were
+the work of Englishmen. English heads, English hearts, English hands
+brought those new communities into existence. No longer connected by
+government with us, they nevertheless retained the characteristics of
+the race from which they sprang, and proceeding in the great work to
+which they were destined, they strode across the continent, the fairest
+portion of which they could now call their own. In planting new
+settlements they were aided by our own people,--the very elements _out
+of which we endeavor to frame colonies, and with which we do produce
+sickly, miserable communities that can only be said to exist, and to
+linger on in a sort of half-life_, without the spirit of a young, or the
+amenities and polish of an old community, and, above all, _without any
+spirit of independence_."
+
+Again, speaking of colonization In this country as opposed to Canada and
+other English colonies, he writes (page 88):--"Certain adventurous
+persons, the 'pioneers' of civilization, wishing to make new settlements
+beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands
+belonging to the United States, made formal application to the
+Government of the United States at Washington, who, being bound to
+afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land
+surveyed and laid out into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are
+also indicated, and at once the law exists; and security, guarantied by
+the authority of the United States, immediately follows, both for person
+and property; and all the machinery known to the Common Law, and needed
+for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law's
+decrees, is at once adopted. A municipal authority comes into existence;
+a court-house, a jail, a school-room, arise in the wilderness; and
+although these buildings be humble, and the men who exercise authority
+in them may appear to be in some degree rude, yet is the law there in
+all its useful majesty. To it a reverent obedience is rendered; and the
+plain magistrate, who, in a hunter's frock, may, in the name of the
+United States, pronounce the law's decree, commands an obedience as
+complete and sincere as that which is paid to the Chief-Justice of the
+Supreme Court at Washington, or to the ermined judge who presides in the
+courts of our Lady the Queen in Westminster Hall."
+
+This in 1849; but what a very different tone has he thought fit to adopt
+now! Was any agency then expected which has not been forthcoming? Or,
+having degenerated from being a supporter of liberal opinions in his
+youth to being the fond and fatuous admirer of autocrats in his old age,
+does he think that it is absolutely necessary that the firm friend of
+Austrian despotism should be the malignant assailant of the Government
+and people of the United States? The man is consistent in nothing but
+his spiteful vindictiveness and love of mischief. He is now the general
+object of deserved ridicule and contempt for his flunkyistic attendance
+at the Tuileries. At the time of Louis Napoleon's visit to London,
+Roebuck raved and ranted about his "perjured lips having kissed the
+Queen of England."
+
+He has, on some occasions, put himself prominently forward, and in such
+a way as to make himself an influential member of Parliament. He moved
+the vote of confidence in the Whig Government in 1850, when the great
+debate ensued in which the late Sir Robert Peel made his last speech,
+and they were kept in office by a poetical majority of nine. But the
+speech with which Roebuck introduced the motion was entirely eclipsed by
+the magnificent declamation of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the present
+Lord-Chief-Justice of England. On another great occasion, in January,
+1855, he brought forward in the House of Commons a motion for inquiry
+into the conduct of the Crimean War. Lord Aberdeen's Government was
+defeated by an immense majority, and, of course, resigned. Mr. Roebuck
+was chairman of the Committee of Inquiry; but the cabinet that came in
+discreetly declined to give him any official post in their ranks. They
+knew too well the terrible uncertainty and inconsistency of the man's
+conduct. They could place no reliance either on his temper or his
+discretion. In 1855 he was one of the numerous candidates for the
+chairmanship of the Metropolitan Board of Works, but failed to inspire
+the electors with any confidence in his capacity for the post. In the
+following year he became the chairman of the Administrative Reform
+Association, and although the league had at first been highly
+successful, and aided much in awaking public attention to the
+miscarriages and mismanagement in the Crimea, yet, under this fatal
+presidency, it became speedily and ingloriously defunct. This was his
+last great failure, before abdicating all his early liberal principles.
+He has of late years endeavored to solace himself for the now
+irretrievable blunders of his career by an exaggerated indulgence in his
+idiosyncratic waywardness, paradox, and eccentricity. He is proud of
+being considered the acquaintance of the Emperor of Austria, and rather
+pleased than otherwise at being assailed on this account. He affects the
+society and friendship of conservative members of the House of Commons.
+He has become tolerant of lords. He may be seen sitting next to Lord
+Robert Cecil, indulging in ill-natured jocosities, from which his
+Lordship probably borrows when he indites ill-natured articles for the
+misguided "Saturday Review."[A] He hates the Manchester school of
+politicians, because their liberality and their sympathy with the cause
+of freedom and civilization in this country remind Roebuck of his own
+deflection from the right path.
+
+[Footnote A: This journal is now owned by Mr. Alexander James Beresford
+Beresford-Hope, (we dare not omit any portion of this august name,) who
+has ample means to enlist the talents of reckless, "smart" young men in
+search of employment for any work he may require, no matter how
+unprincipled the job in hand.]
+
+His private undertakings have not been more fortunate than his public
+acts. He was chairman of a bank, which was unsuccessful, to say the
+least of it. He has been connected with other enterprises, which soon
+courted and obtained failure.
+
+What he has recently said and done in reference to this country is too
+fresh in our memories to require that we should recite or recapitulate
+it here. His past career, as we have reviewed it, may account for the
+now intolerable acerbity of temper and the ludicrous vanity which
+disgrace him. Never was a Nemesis more just than that which has for the
+present consigned him to a melancholy obscurity. The political
+extinguisher has certainly dropped upon his head, and this burning and
+shining light has gone out with an unpleasant odor into utter darkness.
+
+In summing up his character, it is evident that excessive vanity is his
+besetting sin. He is not too clever or too honest to act in union with
+other people, but he is too _vain_. He is by no means too good for the
+rest of the world; but he is too conceited and self-opinionated to
+condescend to coöperate with them. As, at some of the minor theatres, a
+single actor may play an army, so, in the House of Commons, Roebuck is a
+host in himself,--is his own party, and leads it. His occasional
+popularity in his own country is due to the fact, that, in his own
+character, he, to a certain extent, represents and crystallizes a few of
+the good and many of the bad qualities of Englishmen. He has their
+courage and audacity, their independence and pride, their generally
+defiant front to the rest of the world; but he is also vain, obstinate,
+bigoted, prejudiced, narrow in his views, and boastful in his language.
+His vulgar swagger, for instance, about the navy sweeping the seas,
+would have been condemned here, if it had been addressed by the most
+violent of demagogues to the most ignorant of Irish mobs.
+
+We have heard him speak in the House of Commons in his palmier days,
+before he was as decrepit in mind as he is in body. He had great
+fluency, some power of invective, and a vast stock of assurance. We
+listened to him upon one occasion, when, without the slightest
+provocation, he used the most undignified personalities to the late Sir
+Robert Peel,--to which Sir Robert, very wisely, never replied.
+
+We cannot say that we feel any profound interest as to his future. He
+has compared himself to a dog,--but, on behalf of that faithful and
+valued companion of man, we protest against the similitude. He has the
+kind of pugnacity which prompts a cur or a puppy to attack a
+Newfoundland or a mastiff. He has not the fidelity and many other good
+qualities of the canine race. At any rate, he has become a mischievous
+dog,--and a dull dog,--and will soon be a "sad dog."
+
+We would venture to suggest, that he should at once be raised to the
+peerage, under the title of Baron Tear-'em. He might then aid the good
+cause of the slave-mongers of the South, and act in unison with that
+just, generous, moral, and virtuous nobleman, the Marquis of
+Clanricarde.
+
+We ought to apologize to our readers for so lengthy an account of so
+undeserving a person,--but, at any rate, they ought by this time to know
+"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Six Months in the Federal States_. By EDWARD DICEY. In Two Volumes.
+London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co.
+
+This is a very _gentlemanly_ book. Whatever excellence of commendation
+belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr.
+Dicey. And it is ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British
+tourists who have preceded him. For, to make no mention of the vulgar
+buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that neither the exalted and
+irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the cleverish
+magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony
+Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition. It is no
+mean praise to say that the word _gentlemanly_ naturally applies itself
+to a traveller's work. And it is necessary to allow that the majority of
+Americans who have printed their impressions of a scamper over Europe
+have fallen as hopelessly below it as a few have risen far above it.
+Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the sterling sentences of
+"English Traits"; some epithet of more rare and subtile significance is
+suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with which
+Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the "Atlantic." But after
+the manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would
+emphatically credit as an American _gentleman_ might speak of six months
+in England, so has Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal
+States.
+
+And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or
+"stereographic" descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us
+which Mr. Dicey offers to his countrymen. To such loyal Americans as
+these volumes may reach they will give a heart not to be found in Dr.
+Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the dashing effects of popular Mr.
+Trollope, nor even--making all allowance for the sanative influence of
+counter-irritation--in the weekly malignity of that _ex_-Moral Minstrel
+whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent
+slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out
+what petty enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly,
+English way of accepting the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis
+he came to study. He seldom gets entangled in trivial events, but knows
+how to use them as illustrations of great events. It is really
+refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily delivered
+from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is
+not called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the
+hardships of indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of
+New-York hackmen. There is scarcely an offence against good taste or
+good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and whatever American homes may
+have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more readily than to
+most publishing tourists from the mother-land.
+
+Mr. Dicey clearly exhibits the bearing of the Rebellion upon the fate of
+the servile population of the South, and confesses that his deep
+sympathy with the Federal cause came from the conviction that the
+supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was intimately connected with the
+success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the necessity that was
+upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their society,
+he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign
+well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the
+Free States. He has the sagacity to perceive that the genius and
+development of the graduates of Northern school-houses are totally
+opposed to a military rule. Mr. Dicey cordially recognizes the
+democratic idea which sanctifies our convulsion, and displays a careful
+observation in noting "the self-restraint, the moderation, and the
+patience of the American people in the conduct of the people's war." He
+is not over-disturbed because this same people loved law and order more
+than freedom itself, and with few murmurs committed high principles to
+the championship of whatever petty men happened to represent them.
+Indeed, one of the best sayings he reports is that of an old Polish
+exile, who congratulates himself that there will be no saviours of
+society, no fathers of their country, to be provided for when the war
+is over.
+
+Throughout these two volumes British readers may discern something more
+than the barren facts of our struggle: they may catch glimpses of its
+energy and movement; they may see it as reflected from the most generous
+American minds. For it seems to have been Mr. Dicey's good fortune in
+this country to have gained admission to the society of men and women of
+high intelligence, in whom the religious sentiment was living and
+powerful; and he appears to estimate the full weight of testimony such
+persons offered in sending their loved ones to Virginia to fall beneath
+the rifle of some Southern boor. It is this silent public opinion of the
+North which our foreign critics have generally failed to comprehend.
+They have been so long accustomed to parody the rhetorical elation of
+our third-rate political speakers, and to represent this as a universal
+American characteristic, that they signally failed to estimate the
+genuine emotion with which it is never connected. When the cherished
+barbarism of slaveholders arose and threatened our Western civilization,
+those who most felt and have best wrought for their country were
+cautious in their speech. They knew that the principle underlying the
+struggle must submit itself to the checks and counter-checks of
+constitutional law. While the fire of liberty burned at the heart of
+citizens of abiding loyalty, it seemed best, that, like the Psalmist,
+they should hold their peace even from good words. Many thought it an
+act of necessary self-restraint to dwell only upon the Union as a symbol
+of that universal freedom which they felt the Union must finally
+represent. The dread of overleaping the restraints of law, which,
+perchance, has prolonged the conflict, has been most creditable to the
+genuine democracy we have represented. We are proud to remember many
+intelligent soldiers who used no language of passionate denunciation
+towards the guilty institution which called them to the field, yet who
+knew the end when they gave their lives to a cause utterly antagonistic
+to its despotic claims.
+
+By the representations of Secessionists encountered in the Free States,
+as well as from disloyal newspapers which the "Lincoln despotism" never
+sought to suppress, Mr. Dicey was convinced that the sole purpose of the
+Rebellion was to get possession of the vast regions which lie west of
+the Mississippi, wherein to establish Slave States and Territories. "The
+North," he declares, "is fighting against, the South is fighting for,
+the power of extending slavery across the American continent; and if
+this was all that could be said, it is clear on which side must be the
+sympathies of any one who really and honestly believes that slavery is
+an evil and a sin." But it is not here that Mr. Dicey rests the case of
+the North as appealing to the Christian sentiment of the world. He shows
+that the inexorable logic of facts must work the overthrow of slavery
+where it now exists. The suppression of the slave-trade, the recognition
+of Hayti, abolition in the District of Columbia, and finally the
+Proclamation of January have one tendency and can have but one result.
+We state these views as one more confirmation of the fact, that, whether
+agreeable to us or not, the sympathies of liberal men in Europe are to
+be had on the sole ground that ours is an anti-slavery war.
+
+Mr. Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although
+discriminating, estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored
+to serve their country by leaving the level commonplaces of respectable
+citizenship. It is no slight praise to say that his chapter upon the
+New-England Abolitionists is clear and just. Their points of
+disagreement with the Republican party are stated with no common
+accuracy. Careful sentences give the precise position of Garrison and
+his adherents: the intrinsic essence of the movement of these reformers
+is divested of the subordinate and trivial facts so often put forward to
+misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey endeavors not to commit himself upon
+the vital differences in the agitation of anti-slavery sentiments by the
+Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very evident that he
+inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of disunion,
+acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical
+compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense
+conviction of the national sin.
+
+We have dwelt thus upon Mr. Dicey's views of the war, and of the great
+moral question with which it is connected, because these portions of his
+volumes are most pertinent to us, as well as creditable to him. His
+sketches of public characters are good common-sense grasps at them,
+which generally get their externals, and occasionally something more.
+The description of the President is forcible, though a little too
+graphic for perfect courtesy. Caleb Cushing impresses the traveller as
+one of the ablest of our public men, and Wendell Phillips as by far the
+most eloquent speaker he ever heard. General Butler, however, is not to
+Mr. Dicey's taste. Indeed, he is hardly behind the "Saturday Review" in
+the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man who he acknowledges "was
+associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms, and by some
+means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost
+of either men or money." It is rather late to renew discussion about the
+notorious order relating to the women of the subjected city. But Mr.
+Dicey chooses to express his belief in an infamous intention of General
+Butler at the time of its issue,--though he declares that "the strictest
+care was taken lest the order should be abused," and that the "Southern
+ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their behavior to the Union
+soldiers, using _language and gestures_ which, in a city occupied by
+troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, _without orders_,
+to the coarsest retaliation." To which we have only to reply, that
+General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool.
+Nobody doubts that he has military or civil aspirations for the future,
+and, for such ends, if for nothing else, wishes the approbation of his
+loyal countrymen. Now Mr. Dicey testifies to "the almost morbid
+sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to women": he
+tells us that "it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female
+influences"; also, that this same "sentiment" among us "protects women
+from the natural consequences of their own misconduct." These
+characteristics of his countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler
+as they are patent to Mr. Dicey; and we hold it to be simply incredible
+that one who is at least a very shrewd politician used language which
+_he intended_ should convey a meaning that must necessarily consign his
+future career to privacy and infamy. It is perhaps not wonderful that
+men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system which
+consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil
+interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to _acts_ which, in
+civilized States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one
+purpose. Neither is it very astonishing that such persons as have been
+employed to pump the New-York sewers into the _cloaca maxima_ which sets
+towards us from Printing-House Square should share the sensitive
+chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do. But it is
+passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey,
+one so appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of
+its representatives, should join in an accusation whose absurdity is
+only lost in its infinite offence.
+
+There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of
+carelessness or repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances
+allowed time for revision, might have been avoided. It would require the
+"Pathfinder" himself to discover "Fremont Street" in the city where we
+write; the "Courier" is _not_ "the most largely circulated of any Boston
+paper"; and our Ex-Mayor "Whiteman" requires no fanciful orthography to
+free his name from the obloquy of an over-devotion to the interests of
+colored citizens. These are local illustrations of mistakes which are
+excusable in view of the commendable expedition with which the work was
+issued,--for, in the late crisis of our affairs, an Englishman who had
+any good words to give us fulfilled the proverb by giving twice in
+giving quickly. But, whatever trifling details might be subjected to
+criticism, the total impression of what Mr. Dicey has written bears
+honorable testimony to the accuracy of his observation, as well as to
+his powers of comparison and judgment.
+
+As has been already remarked, we cannot be blind to the fact that our
+only supporters in England are those men who recognize at the heart of
+our contest that genuine principle of Liberty which is not to be limited
+to caste or to race. And it is only by hastening to justify their
+confidence that we can win to our cause the great people they address.
+If we cannot gain the national sympathy of England, we must do without
+the true sympathy of any nation. It was, indeed, remarked by De
+Tocqueville, that, "in the eyes of the English, the cause which is most
+useful to England is always the cause of justice." But the rare insight
+of the philosopher assigns the phenomenon, not to a political
+Machiavelism, but to a "laudable desire to connect the actions of one's
+country with something more stable than interest." The English have a
+peculiar gift of fixing their whole attention upon certain traits or
+single circumstances which they desire to see. We doubt not that a
+portion of their sympathy with the energy and endurance of those in arms
+against their country is estimable according to its light. But as the
+dignity of our mission in this struggle becomes more and more apparent,
+the moral intelligence of England will be forced to unite itself with
+the Government of the United States. Let that day come when it will,
+posterity will remember its obligations to those Englishmen who did so
+much to avert the hideous calamity of a war between the two liberal
+powers of the world. And to us of this present generation it is grateful
+to know that our brave and generous young men have not died wholly
+unrecognized in the land of their ancestors. Mill, Ellison,
+Hughes,--what need to name the rest?--have stood up to report them and
+their cause aright to the unsatisfied: in which roll of the honorable
+and honored we are glad to write the name of Edward Dicey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Hospital Transports_. A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and
+Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Compiled
+and published at the Request of the Sanitary Commission. Boston: Ticknor
+and Fields.
+
+If pure benevolence was ever organized and utilized into beneficence,
+the name of the institution is the Sanitary Commission. It is a standing
+answer to Samson's riddle, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." Out
+of the very depths of the agony of this cruel and bloody war springs
+this beautiful system, built of the noblest and divinest attributes of
+the human soul. Amidst all the heroism of daring and enduring which this
+war has developed, amidst all the magnanimity of which it has shown the
+race capable, the daring, the endurance, and the greatness of soul which
+have been discovered among the men and women who have given their lives
+to this work shine as brightly as any on the battle-field,--in some
+respects even more brightly. They have not the bray of trumpets nor the
+clash of swords to rouse enthusiasm, nor will the land ever resound with
+their victories. Theirs is the dark and painful side, the menial and
+hidden side, but made light and lovely by the spirit that shines in and
+through it all. Glimpses of this agency are familiar to our people; but
+not till the history of its inception, progress, and results is calmly
+and adequately written out and spread before the public will any idea be
+formed of the magnitude and importance of the work which it has done.
+Nor even then. Never, till every soldier whose last moments it has
+soothed, till every soldier whose flickering life it has gently steadied
+into continuance, whose waning reason it has softly lulled into quiet,
+whose chilled blood it has warmed into healthful play, whose failing
+frame it has nourished into strength, whose fainting heart it has
+comforted with sympathy,--never, until every full soul has poured out
+its story of gratitude and thanksgiving, will the record be complete;
+but long before that time, ever since the moment that its helping hand
+was first held forth, comes the Blessed Voice, "Inasmuch as ye have done
+it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
+
+An institution asking of Government only permission to live and
+opportunity to work, planting itself firmly and squarely on the
+generosity of the people, subsisting solely by their free-will
+offerings, it is a noble monument of the intelligence, the munificence,
+and the efficiency of a free people, and of the alacrity with which it
+responds when the right chord is rightly touched. It is, however, not
+unnatural that doubts should exist as to the success of a plan so
+far-reaching in its aims and hitherto so untried. Stories have been
+circulated of a mercenary disposition of its stores and trickery among
+its officers. Where these stories have found considerable credence, they
+have been tracked to their source and triumphantly refuted; but it would
+indeed be hardly less than miraculous, if an institution ramifying so
+widely, with agents so numerous, and resources so extensive, should have
+no knaves among its servants, and no waste in its circulation. The
+wonder is, that more leakage has not been proved than has ever been
+suspected. All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to convince
+all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all
+hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of
+what it has done, is doing, and purposes to do. This information the
+Commission has, at different times, and by piecemeal, furnished:
+necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book justly remarks, the
+immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its operations
+in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in
+the reading as in the performance. In this little volume we have,
+photographed, a single phase of its operations. It consists simply of
+extracts from letters and reports. There is no attempt at completeness
+or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate grouping would probably
+fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work and its
+ways as these unpretending fragments. It delights us to see the--we can
+hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the "self-sacrifice"
+which benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about--but, rather, the
+gay, lively, merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold
+of. Men and women seem to have gone into the service with good-will and
+hearty love and buoyant spirits. It refreshes and strengthens us like a
+tonic to read of their taking the wounded, festering, filthy, miserable
+men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and beef-tea, and
+putting them abed and asleep. There is not a word about "devotion" or
+"ministering angels," (we could wish there were not quite so much about
+"ladies,") but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains
+and quick hands, now bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be
+rewarded with one grateful smile from the parting soul,--now standing in
+the way of a procession of the slightly wounded, to pour a little brandy
+down their throats, or put an orange into their hands, just to keep them
+up till they reach food and rest,--now running up the river in a
+steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they
+go,--now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents
+of rain, into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, "calling
+back to life those in despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again
+catching for mother or wife the last faint whispers of the dying,"--now
+leaving their compliments to serve a disappointed colonel instead of his
+dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by dragging away the stove with
+its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood pot-holes;--and let the
+sutler's name be wreathed with laurel who not only permitted this, but
+offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and would take
+no pay!
+
+The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of
+thousands who love their country and their kind, rest upon those who
+originated, and those who sustain, this noble work. Let the people's
+heart never faint and its hand never weary; but let it, of its
+abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed down, shaken
+together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen,
+its divine footsteps may follow,--that, wherever the red hand of war is
+lifted to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,--that its work
+may never cease until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or
+until peace once more reigns throughout the land. And even then,
+gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory, shall never die out of
+the hearts of the American people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all
+Churches, Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith_. By
+WILLIAM HOWITT. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
+
+There has been a great change of late years in connection with the
+science of Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it. There was a
+revolution of opinion on this subject in the middle of the last century;
+there is a counter-revolution to-day.
+
+The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during
+the course of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopædism of French
+philosophy. The grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the
+supernatural were fiercely attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove
+the insufficiency of such grounds were assumed to prove more than lack
+of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs, that, in the nature
+of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
+the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of
+mortals, except that which relates to the physical,--to this earth, as
+the only phase of existence,--to the vital body, as the all of the human
+being. Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material
+organization, as heat is the result of combustion: they exhibited
+themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death
+supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of
+combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
+phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but
+the mere fancy of an excited imagination.
+
+Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this
+materialistic influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and,
+more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.
+The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not
+merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual. Science, with her
+strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
+direction.
+
+It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the
+Encyclopædian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an
+insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it. It does not appear
+to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of
+Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as
+those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the
+products of chemical combinations.
+
+Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God
+adapts the proofs of that which it is important that man should know to
+the intellectual progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same
+evidence which sufficed for the foundation of religious faith five
+hundred years ago will suffice equally well to-day? Truths are eternal;
+laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts there is a
+childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
+arguments suited to various stages of progress.
+
+Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the
+economy of human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present
+phase, (that phase being but the preparation for another and a higher,)
+may it not be, that, as the world advances, men may gradually be
+permitted, occasionally and to a limited extent, to become aware of
+influences exerted from a more advanced phase of existence over this?
+May it not be that the links connecting the two phases of existence are
+gradually to become more numerous and apparent?
+
+Such are the general views which William Howitt's work is intended to
+illustrate and enforce. He selects, as a title-page motto, an axiom from
+Butler's "Analogy,"--"There are two courses of Nature: the ordinary and
+the extraordinary." By the supernatural he does not mean phenomena out
+of the course of Nature, but such comparatively rare phenomena as are
+governed by laws with which we are unacquainted, and as are, therefore,
+to us something extraordinary, something to be wondered at,--miracles.
+
+The author travels over a vast extent of ground,--more, we think, than
+can be properly explored in the compass of two duodecimo volumes. All
+ages, all countries, all faiths, furnish their quota towards his
+collection. It is curious, interesting, suggestive, rather than
+conclusive. It exhibits more industry than logic. It consists rather of
+abundant materials for others to use, than of materials worked up by the
+collector. It gives evidence of learning, research, and a comprehensive
+study of the subject. It is a _thesaurus_ of pneumatological knowledge,
+collected with German assiduity. It will set many to thinking, though it
+may convince but few, except of the one truth, that the faith in the
+supernatural has been a universal faith, pervading all nations,
+persisting through all ages.
+
+The number of those who take an interest in the subject treated of in
+Mr. Howitt's book, and who believe that great truths underlie popular
+superstitions, increases day by day; and the work will probably have a
+wide circulation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. XII. ***
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+
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI.
+       A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: October 5, 2004 [EBook #13631]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. XII. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, the PG Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team, and Cornell University
+
+
+
+
+
+
+</pre>
+
+    <a name="page265" id="page265"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 265]</span>
+    <h1>THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.</h1>
+    <center>
+      A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+    </center>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <center>
+      VOL. XII.&mdash;SEPTEMBER, 1863.&mdash;NO. LXXI.
+    </center>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <center>
+      Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND FIELDS, in
+      the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.
+    </center>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE PURITAN MINISTER.</h2>
+    <p>It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen hundred and
+    something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest settlement, around whose
+    expanding fields the great American wilderness recedes each day, withdrawing its
+    bears and wolves and Indians into an ever remoter distance,&mdash;not yet so far but
+    that a stout wooden gate at each end of the village street indicates that there is
+    something outside which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
+    thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness which broods
+    over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the smoke ascends more faintly
+    than usual from the chimneys of these abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and
+    since three o'clock yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been
+    done. Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the consummation of
+    the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In which settlement of the
+    Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to pass before our eyes? If it be
+    Cambridge village, the warning drum is beating its peaceful summons to the
+    congregation. If it be Salem village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal,
+    and a red flag is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
+    auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without money and
+    beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham Tyler has been blowing his
+    horn assiduously for half an hour, a service for which Abraham, each year, receives a
+    half-pound of pork from every family in town.</p>
+    <p>Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to this
+    important building, the centre of the village, the one public
+    edifice,&mdash;meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in one. So
+    important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a half-mile from it. And yet
+    the people ride to meeting, short though the distance be, for at yonder oaken block a
+    wife dismounts from behind her husband;&mdash;and has it not, moreover, been found
+    needful to impose a fine of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins <a
+    name="page266" id="page266"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 266]</span> are not modern
+    ones, young gentlemen.</p>
+    <p>We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is the
+    pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a terror to evil-doers,
+    but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house is a high wooden paling, to which
+    the law permits citizens to tie their horses, provided it be not done too near the
+    passage-way. For at that opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is
+    painted black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears also a
+    heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the ground, ready to
+    support the weapon; and he is girded with his bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which
+    sustains a sword and a dozen tin cartridge-boxes.</p>
+    <p>The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself, the first
+    having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat roof and
+    battlements,"&mdash;a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel down below. But
+    this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned pounds, and carefully
+    expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside with clay, and finished with
+    clay-boards, larger than our clapboards, outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet
+    square, with a chimney half the width of the building, and projecting four feet above
+    the thatched roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
+    hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on each of the two
+    sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with oiled paper only, part glazed
+    in numerous small panes. And between the windows, on the outside, hang the heads of
+    all the wolves that have been killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers
+    think that the wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's
+    clothing.</p>
+    <p>The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four vergers
+    bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who have just arrived
+    from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and left to stay quietly in the
+    Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines, and the liberty of a private walk in the
+    garden. The sexton has just called for the minister, as is his duty twice every
+    Sunday, and, removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
+    minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black skull-cap,
+    and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better handling of his manuscript.
+    He looks round upon his congregation, a few hundred, recently <i>seated</i> anew for
+    the year, arranged according to rank and age. There are the old men in the pews
+    beneath the pulpit. There are the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with
+    ruffs, showy belts, gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots.
+    There are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs," "embroidered or
+    needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut works,"&mdash;a
+    mystery,&mdash;"slash apparel,"&mdash;another mystery,&mdash;"immoderate great
+    vayles, long wings," etc.,&mdash;mystery on mystery, but all recorded in the
+    statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate. There are the wives
+    of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the grammar-school master's wife next
+    them; and in each pew, close to the mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the
+    youngest child, still too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit
+    alone also; for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
+    presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday meetings, yet the
+    urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and gallery-stairs, with four constables to
+    guard them from the allurements of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the
+    shrinking form of some humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the
+    principal aisle, bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to
+    the garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.</p>
+    <a name="page273" id="page273"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 273]</span>
+    <p>Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets in!
+    "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one writer,
+    triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be short," which the
+    minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no authority over his pulpit. He
+    may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one thinks it long; for, indeed, at
+    prayer-meetings four persons will sometimes pray an hour each,&mdash;one with
+    confession, one with private petitions, a third with petitions for church and
+    kingdom, and a fourth with thanksgiving,&mdash;neither part of the quartette being
+    for an instant confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
+    hour-glass, may say,&mdash;but that he will not anticipate the levity to be born in a
+    later century with Mather Byles,&mdash;"Now, my hearers, we will take another
+    glass."</p>
+    <p>In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe to any one
+    who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the statute, "If any one
+    interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of worship, they shall be reproved by the
+    magistrate, and on repetition shall pay &pound;5, or stand two hours on a block four
+    feet high, with this inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone,
+    but the law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It is
+    but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely whipped for
+    declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H&mdash;&mdash;'s
+    preaching,&mdash;since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes for
+    declaring that Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; preached lies, and that his instruction was the
+    doctrine of devils,&mdash;since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was sentenced to pay
+    five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same Mr. H&mdash;&mdash; sent
+    abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and lambs. Truly, it is a perilous
+    thing to attend public worship in such reverential days. However, it is equally
+    dangerous to stay at home; there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any
+    one unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the stocks or in
+    the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.</p>
+    <p>But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the congregation will
+    pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a Scriptural
+    discourse,&mdash;like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all backbone and a great deal
+    of that. It may be some very special and famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is
+    preaching on "The Morning Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy
+    Winds"; or it may be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson
+    of some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking and
+    partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton Mather, his son,
+    rolling forth his resounding discourse during a thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia
+    Sacra,"&mdash;consisting of seven separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with
+    sharp lightning from Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural
+    philosophy. Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
+    glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to tell him
+    that his own house has just been struck, and though no person is hurt, yet the house
+    hath been much torn and filled with the lightnings. With what joy and power he
+    instantly wields above his audience this providential surplus of excitement,
+    reminding one irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself
+    up by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the full power
+    of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the emergency, he tells them
+    grandly, that, as he once had in his house a magnet which the thunder changed
+    instantly from north to south, so it were well if the next bolt could change their
+    stubborn souls from Satan to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan
+    also is sometimes permitted to have <a name="page274" id="page274"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 274]</span> a hand in the thunder, which is the reason why it
+    breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again he admits,
+    pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have undoubtedly the larger
+    share.</p>
+    <p>The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose sleepy eyes
+    have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand of the
+    constables,&mdash;the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is kept for the
+    smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,&mdash;look up thoroughly awakened now. Bright
+    eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for a little interlude is coming.
+    Many things may happen in this pause after the sermon. Questions may be asked of the
+    elders now, which the elders may answer,&mdash;if they can. Some lay brother may
+    "exercise" on a text of Scripture,&mdash;rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns
+    out. Candidates for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be
+    the proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The last
+    town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage may be published.
+    Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending magistrate may be required to stand
+    upon a bench, in his worst garments, with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes,
+    and acknowledge his sins before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.</p>
+    <p>These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is time for
+    contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely offer." Then the people
+    in the galleries come down and march two abreast, "up one ile and down the other,"
+    passing before the desk, where in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of
+    these holds a moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
+    varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and good-will. Some
+    give paper pledges instead; and others give other valuables, such as "a fair gilt
+    cup, with a cover," for the communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after
+    line, by some one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
+    These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten tunes
+    compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the words, "Blessed are
+    they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and then the benediction.</p>
+    <p>And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the aisle,
+    bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom stirs till the minister
+    has gone out; and then the assembly disperses, each to his own home, unless it be
+    some who have come from a distance, and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the
+    meeting-house.</p>
+    <p>Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two centuries ago,
+    lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing prove wearisome in the
+    delineation now. It needed all this accumulation of small details to show how widely
+    the externals of New-England church-going have changed since those early days. But
+    what must have been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
+    service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious and painful
+    preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old Watertown
+    graveyard;&mdash;"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He relates that Mr.
+    Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding his ordinary lecture every
+    Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on Wednesday and Thursday early in the
+    morning, and on Saturday afternoon. He also held a daily lecture in his house, which
+    was at last abandoned as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days
+    occurred, when he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
+    this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly had three
+    sermons a day,&mdash;one after every meal. He was "an universal scholar and a walking
+    library,"&mdash;he studied twelve hours a day, <a name="page275"
+    id="page275"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 275]</span> and said he liked to sweeten
+    his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went to sleep.</p>
+    <p>A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous life. It
+    seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have survived to write four
+    thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the Reverend John Mitchell was called "a
+    truly aged young man" at thirty,&mdash;especially when we consider that he was
+    successor at Cambridge to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing
+    Mr. Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture, "wherein he
+    largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most entertaining exposition of the
+    Book of Genesis."</p>
+    <p>For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to have for
+    each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable duty for each. He must
+    visit families during several afternoons in every week, sending previous notice, so
+    that children and domestics might be ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for
+    counsel" in his own home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of
+    conscience, ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
+    unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring towns, a kind of
+    religious dissipation which increased so fast that the Legislature at last interfered
+    to restrict it. He must have five or six separate seasons for private prayer daily,
+    devoting each day in the week to special meditations and intercessions,&mdash;as
+    Monday to his family, Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to
+    other societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He must
+    have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and whole nights
+    prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself starved," unless he fasted
+    once a month at farthest, while he often did it twice in a week. Then there were
+    public fasts quite frequently, "because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought,
+    grasshoppers, caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
+    Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the neighborhood, and the
+    minister must expound it as "symbolizing the conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor
+    people," the latter being the mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military
+    expedition, the minister might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a
+    muster, he must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
+    officiate instead.</p>
+    <p>One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on weddings and
+    funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make a usage seem ancestral, or
+    to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now remembers that our progenitors for more
+    than a century disused religious services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates
+    alone could perform the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the
+    monopoly quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
+    Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin at Geneva, by
+    John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the Westminster Assembly, and by
+    the French Huguenots. The bell might ring, the friends might walk, two and two, to
+    the grave; but there must be no prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions
+    of the English and Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said
+    King James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear shoes
+    and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit of eating salt fish
+    on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that Roman Catholics eat it on
+    Friday.</p>
+    <p>But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were sermons. Mr. John
+    Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral sermon in immortal
+    verse:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "On Sabbath day he went his way,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;As he was used to do,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          God's house unto, that they might know
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;What he had for to show;
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <a name="page276" id="page276"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 276]</span>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          God's holy will he must fulfil,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;For it was his desire
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          For to declare a sermon rare
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Concerning Madam Fryer."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last century, and
+    sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather startling levities. For
+    instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was to marry young Mr.
+    Cranch,&mdash;(what graceful productions of pen and pencil have come to this
+    generation from the posterity of that union!)&mdash;the father permitted the saintly
+    maiden to decide on her own text for the sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath
+    chosen the better part, which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse
+    was duly pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
+    certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would not even invite
+    to dinner, she boldly suggested for <i>her</i> text, "John came, neither eating bread
+    nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a devil." But no sermon stands recorded under
+    this prefix, though Abby lived to be the wife of one President of the United States
+    and mother of another.</p>
+    <p>The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being a
+    country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably enwrapped in
+    theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest themselves in politics."
+    Indeed, for many years they virtually controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male
+    church-members could vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
+    malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and imprisoned in
+    1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by permitting non-church-members to
+    vote on a formal certificate to their orthodoxy from the minister. The government
+    they aimed at was not democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a
+    fit government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their first
+    code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,&mdash;that is, based on
+    Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,&mdash;and Cotton's was afterwards rebuked in
+    England as "fanatical and absurd." But the government finally established was an
+    ecclesiastical despotism, tempered by theological controversy.</p>
+    <p>In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as late as
+    1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon, on the day appointed
+    by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for the direction of the town in the
+    work before them." They wrote state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at
+    town-meetings. At the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson,
+    minister of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for his
+    candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from among the boughs.
+    Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which still ornaments the Common; but
+    one sees no chips of that other old block among its branches now.</p>
+    <p>One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence would have
+    been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their consistency unflinching, their
+    range narrow, and their penalties severe,&mdash;and it certainly was so. Looking at
+    their educational provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins
+    and retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a day.
+    Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger Williams, with all
+    his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no such system of schools as his
+    persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But the children who were watched and trained
+    thus carefully might be put to death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after
+    the age of sixteen;&mdash;not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
+    statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with murder,&mdash;though Calvin
+    himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and the young men to practise military
+    training, <a name="page277" id="page277"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 277]</span>
+    after afternoon service, at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place
+    on Sunday in Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
+    the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel" punishments were
+    forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a ducking-stool and dipped over
+    head and ears three times, in running water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome
+    theologian, was silenced with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in
+    1649, was sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
+    shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes offenders, with a
+    refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to the elders." And if any youth
+    made matrimonial overtures to a young female without the consent of her parents, or,
+    in their absence, of the County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new
+    etymology for the word "courting."</p>
+    <p>An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the ministers to
+    the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and powerless, could keep the
+    peace with the natives. But when the brave Miantonimo was to be dealt with for
+    suspected treason, and the civil authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to
+    set him at liberty, they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being
+    finally referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him in
+    cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated, and their heroic
+    King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard, was hunted like a wild beast,
+    his body quartered and set on poles, his head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on
+    a gibbet in Plymouth, and one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers
+    returned thanks, and one said that they had <i>prayed</i> the bullet into Philip's
+    heart. Nay, it seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they
+    came out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought in as
+    captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them," in revenge for the
+    death of some fishermen: a moral application which certainly gives a singular
+    impression of the style of gospel prevailing inside the meeting-house that day. But
+    it is good to know, on the other side, that, when the Commissioners of the United
+    Colonies had declared an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become
+    afterwards convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
+    already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the order from being
+    rescinded.</p>
+    <p>These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives without
+    relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have little to joy in in
+    this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think so, to read the dismal diaries,
+    printed or manuscript, of those days. "I can compare with any man living for fears,"
+    said Hooker. "I have sinned myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I
+    been ready to lay down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in
+    the suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
+    introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who drank, for
+    instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of white wine which the
+    General Court thought it convenient that the Auditor should send, "as a small
+    testimony of the Court's respect, to the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge,"
+    in 1644? Did the famous Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew
+    cosmology, upon the waters,&mdash;strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians
+    who would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is startling to
+    remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public funeral, that "some
+    person be appointed to look after the burning of the wine and the heating of the
+    cider," and to hear that on this occasion there were thirty-two gallons of wine and
+    still more of cider, with one hundred and four pounds of <a name="page278"
+    id="page278"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 278]</span> that ensnaring accessory,
+    sugar. Francis Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
+    England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave convincing
+    proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the very relaxations of the
+    Puritan minister were more spiritual than spirituous, and to send forth a good
+    Nineteenthly from his own lips was more relishing than to have the best Double X go
+    in.</p>
+    <p>In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only Elders
+    for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days. The commonalty bore
+    the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of Roger William's offences was his
+    wishing to limit these terms to those who gave some signs of deserving them. The name
+    "Mr." was allowed to those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and
+    also to professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of vessels,
+    and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs." Mr. Josiah Plastow, when
+    he had stolen four baskets of corn from the Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah.
+    "Mr." seems to have meant simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir"
+    merely, a title given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to
+    the time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the idolatry of
+    saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes designated as Sir Paul, Sir
+    Peter, and Sir James.</p>
+    <p>In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is humiliating to find
+    that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin. The highest compensation I can
+    find recorded is that of John Higginson in 1671, who had &pound;160 voted him "in
+    country produce," which he was glad, however, to exchange for &pound;120 in solid
+    cash. Solid cash included beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and
+    musket-balls, value one farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had
+    &pound;60, and Mr. Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in
+    money and half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap in
+    New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather says, most salaries
+    were less than &pound;100, which he thinks "might account for the scanty harvests
+    enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton both tell the story of a town where
+    "two very eminent ministers were only allowed &pound;30 per annum" and "the God who
+    will not be mocked made them lose &pound;300 worth of cattle that year." The latter
+    also complains that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
+    rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the stars, would
+    shine without earthly contributions.</p>
+    <p>He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words, "Synecdotical
+    Pay,"&mdash;in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a part is used for the
+    whole. And apparently various causes might produce this Synecdoche. For I have seen
+    an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young
+    ministers have often occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of
+    the wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a considerable
+    part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how entirely this source of
+    discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the path of the clergy; and it is
+    painful to think that there ever was a period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy
+    the delineation of their own sins.</p>
+    <p>However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of rhetorical
+    tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine could commonly afford not
+    only to keep house, but to keep horse likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional
+    felicity of printing his own sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been
+    no great trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
+    1677,&mdash;not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors are,&mdash;and
+    Cotton Mather published <a name="page279" id="page279"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    279]</span> three hundred and eighty-two different works for his own share. Books
+    were abundant enough at that day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete
+    Puritan libraries are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian
+    Society at Worcester,&mdash;without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
+    monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse, the moral
+    sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man was fined in Newbury
+    for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good beast she was." The minister's
+    house was built by the town; in Salem it was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies
+    and no gable-ends,"&mdash;so that the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody
+    else;&mdash;and the Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day
+    and put the minister's grounds in order.</p>
+    <p>Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev. Ezekiel
+    Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,&mdash;"Much ado I have with my own
+    family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or family duties. I had a rare
+    blessing of servants in England, and those I brought over were a blessing; but the
+    young brood doth much afflict me." Probably the minister's wife had the worst of
+    this; but she seems to have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint,
+    and could bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase for a
+    model female,&mdash;"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of the most
+    singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old gentleman's own
+    narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate love-adventure, in his later
+    years, with a fascinating young girl, an "ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his
+    parish thought by no means a model female, but from whom it took three days of
+    solitary fasting and prayer to wean him at last.</p>
+    <p>He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat strangely.
+    Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard at Cambridge, as
+    aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the general recommendation of her,"
+    and the college students were greatly delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael
+    Wigglesworth, in 1691, wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have
+    seen in manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,&mdash;one of which treats
+    of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care. She having
+    children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of his own children "out of
+    the way," if necessary,&mdash;a hint which becomes formidable when one remembers that
+    he was the author of that once famous theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which
+    he relentingly assigned to infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the
+    easiest room in hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as
+    if he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little heart-shaped
+    locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart and "Thine forever."</p>
+    <p>Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister. First
+    came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's followers were exasperating
+    enough; they had to be confined in irons separately, one in each town, on pain of
+    death, if they preached their doctrines,&mdash;and of course they preached them. But
+    their offences and penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
+    Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken open,&mdash;a
+    thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do to any one,&mdash;they
+    might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury, for the first offence be
+    fined, for the second lose one ear, for the third lose the other ear, and for the
+    fourth be bored with red-hot iron through the tongue,&mdash;though this last penalty
+    remained a dead letter. They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and
+    whipped through town after town,&mdash;three women were whipped through eleven towns,
+    eighty miles,&mdash;but afterwards the number <a name="page280"
+    id="page280"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 280]</span> was limited to three. Their
+    testimony was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
+    fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless among wolves and
+    bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic, and R for Rogue; they could be
+    sold as slaves; and their graves must not be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest
+    their poor afflicted bodies should find rest there.</p>
+    <p>Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta and to
+    Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan must have looked on
+    the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have since regarded the Bloomer
+    costume,&mdash;and the Inquisition imprisoned the missionaries, though the Sultan did
+    not. But meanwhile the Quaker women in New England might be walking to execution with
+    their male companions,&mdash;like Mary Dyer in Boston,&mdash;under an armed guard of
+    two hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for every year.
+    When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus hand in hand between two
+    young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an hour of the greatest joy I could
+    enjoy in this world. No tongue could utter and no heart understand the sweet
+    influence of the Spirit which now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and
+    covered her face with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman;
+    and when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying that she
+    would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at last, and the Reverend
+    Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.</p>
+    <p>It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat of
+    Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow wormy. It is no
+    wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on, the Quakers called it a
+    retribution for these things. But let us be just, even to the unjust. Toleration was
+    a new-born virtue in those days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment
+    recognized as such, or asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did
+    not wish to be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
+    the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of legislators to
+    establish the true religion and to punish false,"&mdash;a doctrine equally fatal,
+    whether applied to enforce the right theology or the wrong. They objected to the
+    Church of England, not that it persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly
+    aimed. It is, therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
+    professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised intolerance.
+    They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely blamed. What was great in
+    them was their heroism of soul, not their largeness. They sought the American
+    wilderness not to indulge the whims of others, but their own. They said to the
+    Quakers, "We seek not your death, but your absence." All their persecution, after
+    all, was an alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
+    their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties were borrowed
+    from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to death from the
+    beginning;&mdash;of course, four too many.</p>
+    <p>Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not theological
+    only, but political and social also. Everything that the Puritan system of government
+    asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no
+    taxes, bore no arms. With the best possible intentions, they subverted all
+    established order. Then their modes of action were very often intemperate and
+    violent. One can hardly approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a
+    certain Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
+    would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the Rareys.
+    Running naked through the public streets,&mdash;coming into meeting dressed in
+    sackcloth, with ashes <a name="page281" id="page281"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    281]</span> on their heads and nothing on their feet,&mdash;or sitting there with
+    their hats on, groaning and rocking to and fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and
+    tithing-men: these were the vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the
+    main body. The Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
+    so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed, the Quakers
+    themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in Philadelphia, thirty
+    years afterwards,&mdash;playing over again upon George Keith and his followers the
+    same deluded policy of fines and imprisonment from which they had just
+    escaped;&mdash;as minorities have persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance
+    began.</p>
+    <p>Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the majority.
+    Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as these: "Thou fiery
+    fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and grinning dog! thou mole! thou
+    tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal but the tone of a kettle! thou
+    wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou
+    ragged tatterdemalion! thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the
+    earth! thou best to be spared of all mankind!"&mdash;all of which are genuine
+    epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton Mather, who
+    collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even Dr. Chauncy's catalogue
+    of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and Tennent a century later; and it was
+    not likely that they would be tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in
+    authority was so comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that
+    Major Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.</p>
+    <p>There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the Quaker feud
+    in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends wished to espouse a fair
+    Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his marrying out of their society, and
+    the Congregationalists his marrying into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed
+    her:&mdash;"Ruth, let us break from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my
+    religion, and thou shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
+    England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the resolution, the
+    Puritan historian says, <i>so far</i> as going into the Church, and marrying, and
+    staying there for life. But probably the ministers thought it to be another case of
+    synecdoche.</p>
+    <p>With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the astonishing part
+    played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It must be remembered that the
+    belief in this visitation was no new or peculiar thing in New England. The Church,
+    the Scriptures, the medi&aelig;val laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had
+    been laws against it in England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to
+    Queen Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas Browne
+    had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and judicial authorities, as
+    Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described this crime as definitely and
+    seriously as any other. In Scotland four thousand had suffered death for it in ten
+    years; Cologne, Nuremberg, Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in
+    1749 a girl was burnt alive in W&uuml;rtzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
+    wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is in the
+    independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there were no witches on
+    the earth, nor devils,&mdash;except" (as they profanely added) "the New-England
+    ministers, and such as they."</p>
+    <p>John Higginson sums it up best:&mdash;"They proceeded in their integrity with a
+    zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and evidence." "<i>But
+    there is a question</i>," he wisely adds, "whether some of the laws, customs, and
+    privileges used by judges and juries in England, which were followed as patterns <a
+    name="page282" id="page282"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 282]</span> here, were not
+    insufficient." Cotton Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
+    conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long list of the
+    legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally, that the fact of fifty
+    confessions was, after all, the one irresistible vindication of their strong
+    measures.</p>
+    <p>It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every other
+    evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the authorities to do,
+    when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural precedents, the prisoners insisted on
+    entering a plea of guilty? When Goody E&mdash;&mdash; testified that she and two
+    others rode from Andover to a witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and
+    she fell and was still lame from it,&mdash;when her daughter testified that she rode
+    on the same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,&mdash;when the
+    grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another stick, and
+    they all signed Satan's book together,&mdash;when W. B&mdash;&mdash;, aged forty,
+    testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem Meeting-House, and
+    the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried round, and Satan was like a
+    black sheep, and wished them to destroy the minister's house, (by thunder probably,)
+    and set up his kingdom, and "then all would be well,"&mdash;when one woman summoned
+    her three children and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified
+    that she was a witch and so were they all,&mdash;what could be done for such
+    prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty? It was only
+    the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the convictions.</p>
+    <p>One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
+    us,&mdash;though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not yet
+    unfolded,&mdash;was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it. Conceive, for
+    an instant, of believing in the visible presence and labors of the arch-fiend in a
+    peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of their souls these strong men held to it,
+    and they waged a hand-to-hand fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently
+    the opponent sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
+    thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed discourse, to have a
+    girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears start up and exclaim, "Parson, your
+    text is too long,"&mdash;or worse yet, "Parson, your sermon is too long,"&mdash;or
+    most embarrassing of all, "There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in
+    the pulpit." But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
+    stern discipline in such cases made and provided.</p>
+    <p>But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female tormentors to deal
+    with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel,
+    laying out of hair, borders, naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with
+    superfluous ribbons,"&mdash;these were the things which tried men's souls in those
+    days, and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
+    inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel" seem to have
+    been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one slash on each sleeve and
+    one in the back. Men also must be prohibited from shoulderbands of undue width,
+    double ruffs and cuffs, and "immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was
+    for modesty, part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
+    condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each and costs for
+    wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another for tiffany, and another
+    for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a silk hood, but, proving herself worth
+    more than two hundred pounds, escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same
+    time, was charged with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he
+    was fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.</p>
+    <p>The question of veils seems to have <a name="page283" id="page283"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 283]</span> rocked the Massachusetts Colony to its foundations,
+    and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th, 1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was
+    utterly and unalterably opposed to veils, regarding them as a token of submission to
+    husbands in an unscriptural degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an
+    unscriptural extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
+    Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such cases; so Paul,
+    veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr. Cotton came to Salem to preach
+    for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his chance to put in his solemn protest against
+    veils; he said they were a custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to
+    meeting without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding visible
+    result from a single sermon within the memory of man.</p>
+    <p>Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what was under
+    them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done much harm of late, and
+    the Deity was evidently displeased with something, the General Court should publish a
+    list of the evils of the time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this:
+    "Long hair like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
+    made into periwigs;&mdash;and by some women wearing borders of hair, and their
+    cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does this hint at
+    puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially among the younger sort." Not
+    much was effected, however,&mdash;"divers of the elders' wives," as Winthrop lets
+    out, "being in some measure partners in this disorder." The use of wigs also, at
+    first denounced by the clergy, was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later
+    than 1700 they usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752
+    the tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused communion
+    because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought they played no small
+    part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous Periwigs, such as some of our
+    church-members indulge in, which make them resemble the Locusts that came out of y^e
+    Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7, 8,&mdash;and as an eminent Divine calls them, <i>Horrid
+    Bushes of Vanity</i>; such strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and
+    to express Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord to
+    kindle fires in all the towns in the country."</p>
+    <p>Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a community where
+    every man was expected to have a current supply of religious experiences always ready
+    for circulation. There was a certain hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a
+    seafaring man, who gave much trouble; and E.F.,&mdash;for they mostly appear by
+    initials,&mdash;who, coming to New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in
+    black, was taken for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little
+    insane, and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh," Cotton
+    Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally stole his employer's
+    leather breeches and set up for a preacher,&mdash;less innocently apparelled than
+    George Fox. But the worst of all was one bearing the since sainted name of Samuel
+    May. This vessel of wrath appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel
+    spirit,&mdash;though, indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous
+    fire-ship among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
+    this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who knew no Latin,
+    Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,&mdash;for (as he indignantly asserts) "there were
+    eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in one very short note I received
+    from him." This doubtful personage copied his sermons from a volume by his namesake,
+    Dr. Samuel Bolton,&mdash;"Sam the Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them.
+    Finally, "this eminent worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled
+    <a name="page284" id="page284"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 284]</span> with his
+    parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting this among
+    other fire at them:&mdash;'I see, no longer pipe, no longer dance,'&mdash;so that
+    they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had never seen him." Then "the guilty
+    fellow, having bubbled the silly neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a
+    sudden was gone," and Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to
+    have been the worst penalty the man suffered.</p>
+    <p>It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan ministers, lest
+    the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and have no tithingman to take
+    his part. But however it may be with the regular standards of theology of that
+    period, every one could find a sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies.
+    Eighty-two "pestilent heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637;
+    others say one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept Rhode
+    Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to crowd all these
+    eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened to lose his religious opinion,
+    he might be sure to find it again at some village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger
+    Williams and his Baptists; thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann
+    Hutchinson, that extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country
+    by her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and converting the
+    strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions. Thither went also Samuel
+    Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who proclaimed a mystical union with God in love,
+    thought that heaven and hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy
+    and the ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and chivalrous
+    Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that the Jewish Sabbath should
+    give place to the modern Sunday. All these, and such as these, were called generally
+    "Seekers" by the Puritans,&mdash;who claimed for themselves that they had found that
+    which they sought. It is the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be
+    afloat or to be at anchor?</p>
+    <p>Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with the
+    leadership of the New-England colonies,&mdash;Cotton, Hooker, Norton, Shepard, the
+    Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an obscurer name, preserved in
+    the quaint epitaphs of the "Magnalia":&mdash;Blackman, "in spite of his name, a
+    Nazarene whiter than snow";&mdash;Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove
+    and an eagle";&mdash;Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
+    children might pluck";&mdash;Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a very
+    preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family and he taught his
+    family as if it had been his church";&mdash;Warham, the first who preached with
+    notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt respecting the Lord's Supper;&mdash;Stone,
+    "both a loadstone and a flint stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of
+    preaching only one hour.</p>
+    <p>These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,&mdash;nobler than
+    their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The most strait-laced
+    Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been disciplined by them for
+    insufferable laxity, and yet their modern successor would count it utter shame,
+    perhaps, to own a slave in his family or to drink rum-punch at an
+    ordination,&mdash;which Puritan divines might do without rebuke. Not one of them has
+    left on record a statement so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:&mdash;"To be
+    content with food and raiment,&mdash;to mind, not our own, but every man the things
+    of another,&mdash;yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
+    right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many as there be
+    hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of God's sake,&mdash;this
+    is humanity, this is Christianity; the <a name="page285" id="page285"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 285]</span> rest is but formality and picture-courteous idolatry,
+    and Jewish and Popish blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of
+    Roger Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and in
+    what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the testing of two
+    centuries, less solid or durable than his?</p>
+    <p>These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held evil,&mdash;Satan
+    and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians, negligent parishioners,
+    disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and women in slash apparel. Yet the
+    tenderest private gentleness often lay behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience.
+    Some of them would never chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others
+    would write in Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
+    the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made the ballad
+    at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day. "Sir," said some one,
+    "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there's not seven
+    of them all but loves Mr. Wilson." "Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a
+    thing: here's a mighty body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson
+    loves him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men came
+    along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton," and one came and
+    cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"&mdash;"I know it, I know it,"
+    retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently added, "The Lord make both me and
+    thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied,
+    "I see you are in a passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts
+    all one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man, finding
+    afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to apologize, and owned
+    himself to have been wrong.</p>
+    <p>What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness and zeal,
+    with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their shoulders, and put that
+    iron into the New-England blood which has since supplied the tonic for a continent?
+    It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he was "a person who, while doing his Master's work,
+    would put a king in his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket
+    anything but a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
+    flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound Christians" was a
+    proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers, and sometimes their parishes,
+    but never their independence. I find a hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty
+    laid up against them, but not one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored
+    the tongues of others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
+    with a bar of gold,&mdash;as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to do, and
+    not African tribes alone.</p>
+    <p>There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day every man of
+    New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous habit they accumulated. And,
+    on the other hand, every man of the many who still stand ready to indorse everything
+    signed by a D.D.&mdash;without even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors
+    Excepted&mdash;is in part the victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there
+    was a kind of democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
+    thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no separate
+    clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of his own church. Each
+    religious society could choose and ordain its own minister, or dispense with all
+    ordaining services at will, without the slightest aid or hindrance from council or
+    consociation. So the stern theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology
+    of the pews; the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were <a
+    name="page286" id="page286"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 286]</span> recognized as
+    spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the men of their time, whatever
+    they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when asked about the priests' money, said,
+    that, if they were really the leaders of the people, they could not have too much
+    payment,&mdash;or too little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions
+    the Puritan ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
+    discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and musket-balls.
+    What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the heavier ammunition of moral
+    truth. Here is a specimen of their grape-shot:&mdash;"My fathers and brethren," said
+    John Higginson, "this is never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a
+    plantation of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as are
+    making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over since at sundry
+    times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end and design of the people of
+    New England, but religion. And if any man among us make religion as twelve and the
+    world as thirteen, let such a man know he hath neither the spirit of a true
+    New-England man, nor yet of a sincere Christian."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THOREAU'S FLUTE.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;His pipe hands mute beside the river;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But Music's airy voice is fled.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The bluebird chants a requiem;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The willow-blossom waits for him;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The Genius of the wood is lost."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;There came a low, harmonious breath:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;"For such as he there is no death;&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          His life the eternal life commands;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Above man's aims his nature rose:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The wisdom of a just content
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Made one small spot a continent,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And tuned to poetry Life's prose.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;To him grew human or divine,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;And yearly on the coverlid
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;'Neath which her darling lieth hid
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Will write his name in violets.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <a name="page287" id="page287"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 287]</span>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "To him no vain regrets belong,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Gave to the world no poor lament,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          O lonely friend! he still will be
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;A potent presence, though unseen,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Seek not for him,&mdash;he is with thee."
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.</h2>
+    <p>The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of acquaintanceship,
+    that, should these circumstances be comic in their nature, the intercourse which
+    follows partakes much of the grotesque. Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of
+    Edward Martin, apart from the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my
+    memory a smile rather than a sigh.</p>
+    <p>Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it became
+    necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon S&mdash;&mdash;.</p>
+    <p>Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had lingered
+    about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many sweet memories of
+    Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in the neighborhood of Gramley
+    Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels, and the plenty of a country
+    tea-table,&mdash;not averse to strawberry short-cake, or the snowy delights of
+    cottage-cheese.</p>
+    <p>It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful welcome, a
+    bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled me with curiosity and
+    amazement.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Was it a man?
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        A devil infernal?
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        An angel supernal?"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and, as I
+    cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in the singular
+    form,&mdash;stooping, squatting, and groping before me.</p>
+    <p>The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics upon the
+    ground,&mdash;smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy, too silent to be
+    mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at nightfall with a maniac, and I
+    was not sorry when my nearer approach resolved these strange phenomena into a
+    well-dressed pedestrian on all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.</p>
+    <p>He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride his
+    handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly bewildered. I
+    looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay shining at me from the very spot
+    where he had been so industriously peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him,
+    fitted his treasure into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle
+    said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
+    circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"</p>
+    <p>"Yes."</p>
+    <p>"So do I."</p>
+    <p>We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,&mdash;I too
+    tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again; but when, at
+    last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's door-step, he turned suddenly to
+    me and asked,&mdash;</p>
+    <a name="page288" id="page288"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 288]</span>
+    <p>"Are you fond of the country?"</p>
+    <p>"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.</p>
+    <p>"Ah, you are an artist!"</p>
+    <p>"I hope to be one."</p>
+    <p>"Its a bad business," said he, testily,&mdash;"a very bad business. If I were you,
+    I would give it up."</p>
+    <p>"Have you ever tried it?"</p>
+    <p>"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,&mdash;"yes, and everything
+    else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I would give you the benefit
+    of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and make a good story of it to your
+    wife."</p>
+    <p>"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."</p>
+    <p>"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true artist,
+    who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite relations, who
+    penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the silent sanctuaries of the
+    mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man. He must be a happy man,&mdash;happy in
+    a sweet and natural way. A man whose life is passed in a daily delight that gently
+    stirs without feverish excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He
+    <i>ought</i> to marry."</p>
+    <p>"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.</p>
+    <p>"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
+    commencing,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        'O thou earthly sea,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Every person thinks of thee,&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The sailor, and the busy bee,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And the Chinese drinking tea!'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they seemed
+    good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they struck others."</p>
+    <p>He smiled pleasantly.</p>
+    <p>"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding your
+    history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with your
+    experience."</p>
+    <p>"Take warning, then, if need be.</p>
+    <p>"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of a ready
+    writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a young miss of her first
+    conquest.</p>
+    <p>"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just rising
+    into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my condescension. It was a
+    charity, indeed, to give my support to this fledgling, and I sent to it a long
+    article, entitled, 'The Cultivated, as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts
+    were returned, with this quiet bit of advice:&mdash;'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any
+    other reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from having
+    a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I determined to revenge
+    myself on the paltry malignant who dared to despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a
+    slashing criticism for one of the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the
+    delinquent periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
+    almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for publication.</p>
+    <p>"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now Mrs.
+    Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings in ten melancholy
+    stanzas, beginning,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
+    'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'</p>
+    <p>"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the plot of
+    which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left to my hero, who
+    forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but, fearful lest the beloved object
+    should worship his money more than his merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue
+    spectacles, becomes tutor to her brother, and wins her affections while playing
+    pedagogue. On her acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea,
+    and, in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin, Greek,
+    Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, <a name="page289"
+    id="page289"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 289]</span> Natural Science, and Civil
+    Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into the surf, where both
+    are drowned.</p>
+    <p>"This, you see, was quite new."</p>
+    <p>"Quite," I replied, laughing.</p>
+    <p>"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive the first
+    remittance for this truly original work.</p>
+    <p>"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable 'M&auml;rchen,'
+    and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's Legacies,' a series of
+    children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of poetry, pleasantry, and information.
+    I sent them to 'The Juvenile Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted
+    with a profusion of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
+    expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.</p>
+    <p>"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a small,
+    uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He seemed the
+    personification of <i>nonchalance</i>, impudence, and conceit. As I entered, he
+    looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a woman, would have brought a hot
+    flush of indignation to my face, and, on my mentioning my name, he rose and extended
+    a very dirty hand.</p>
+    <p>"'Glad to see you, Sir,&mdash;hope you'll continue your contributions,&mdash;Uncle
+    Job,&mdash;good idea, Sir,&mdash;love the little ones? So do we, Sir,&mdash;work very
+    hard for them,&mdash;don't pay at all,&mdash;poor business,&mdash;pure
+    charity,&mdash;that's all.'</p>
+    <p>"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are expected to
+    work from charity?'</p>
+    <p>"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,&mdash;more contributions
+    than we can use,&mdash;best authors in the country write for us,&mdash;pure love for
+    the little ones, I assure you.'</p>
+    <p>"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to bestow my time
+    and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer them to others who do.'</p>
+    <p>"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he growled. 'We
+    don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most of the articles
+    ourselves.'</p>
+    <p>"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end to the
+    interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.</p>
+    <p>"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'</p>
+    <p>"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than the first,
+    emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'</p>
+    <p>"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall take measures
+    that you will not at all relish. If you will not <i>give</i> me my manuscripts, I
+    shall <i>take</i> them'; and, suiting the action to the word, I snatched them from a
+    shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and carried them off without further parley.</p>
+    <p>"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet spirit within
+    me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote a sentimental tale, full
+    of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft epithets. It was accepted by a well-known
+    monthly, then supposed to be in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of
+    comfort, and I looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and
+    renown, when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my story,
+    and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the magazine had been
+    sold to pay her debts.</p>
+    <p>"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it to 'The
+    Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it was published,
+    praised, and further contributions requested. Several weeks passed away. I indited a
+    poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or, Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in
+    print, and my thirst for fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note
+    reached me from 'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to
+    pay <a name="page290" id="page290"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 290]</span> me in
+    <i>back numbers of the magazine</i>. I wrote no more."</p>
+    <p>"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"</p>
+    <p>"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist, and was
+    thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I took for my motto;
+    and, hiring a small studio in &mdash;&mdash; Street, I bought a large canvas, on
+    which I sketched out a picture which cost me much money, more time, and many anxious
+    thoughts.</p>
+    <p>"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a marriage was
+    being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people, in anomalous costumes,
+    was gathered round a youth supposed to be a rejected and despairing lover, who had
+    fallen on the ground in a swoon. It was very affecting, I thought.&mdash;it would be
+    very effective. Were <i>she</i> to see it, she would be stung with remorse,&mdash;she
+    would behold the probable effects of her present indifference,&mdash;she would
+    relent.</p>
+    <p>"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it was a
+    complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio, draping before a
+    cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing for my men, until the last
+    touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was all ready for the Spring Exhibition.
+    Then came doubts and speculations. Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all?
+    Would Ellen like it? How would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to
+    look at it? Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?</p>
+    <p>"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name sent my
+    picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it, by some strange
+    chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington. The juxtaposition gave me a
+    new idea. I saw at once what a villanous daub mine was, and went away oppressed with
+    shame and a new-found modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the
+    Exhibition, in the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
+    coming out.</p>
+    <p>"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I <i>must</i> turn
+    back, and show you the <i>funniest</i> picture! So theatrical! So distorted!'</p>
+    <p>"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'</p>
+    <p>"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are such a good
+    critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art you ever saw?'</p>
+    <p>"Can you imagine my feelings?"</p>
+    <p>"I think I can."</p>
+    <p>"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken studio,
+    previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully packing my
+    materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and an elderly,
+    shrewd-looking man walked into the room.</p>
+    <p>"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.</p>
+    <p>"'I am a friend of his.'</p>
+    <p>"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number &mdash;&mdash;?'</p>
+    <p>"'Yes.'</p>
+    <p>"'How much does he ask for it?'</p>
+    <p>"'How much are you willing to give?'</p>
+    <p>"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'</p>
+    <p>"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'</p>
+    <p>"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio. Twenty-five
+    dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture? I looked at the
+    card:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>'PARKER J. SPERRY,</p>
+      <p>'<i>Yankee Pie Depot</i>,</p>
+      <p>'126 &mdash;&mdash; Street.'"</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>"Did you ever paint again?"</p>
+    <p>"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in a
+    gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning, when she was
+    out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the wall. I turned it round.
+    Directly across the mouth was pasted a white label, on which I saw neatly <a
+    name="page291" id="page291"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 291]</span> printed in
+    India-ink,&mdash;'Queen of the Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in
+    my library as a lesson to me for all future time.</p>
+    <p>"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard my
+    experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing business, and make a
+    handsome income for my wife and two children. To-morrow I go to New York, to bring
+    them into these wilds for change of air. And now, good night."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.</h2>
+    <center>
+      FLORESTAN'S STORY.
+    </center>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are sacred
+    persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you, staining the pane
+    through which their light shone with their own images, but who became perfectly
+    transparent to the word they uttered, the song they sang, or the work they did. Such
+    a sacred person to me is the gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's
+    Albums. Many years ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in
+    the half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
+    rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had been awaiting
+    its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was a listener, and, hastily
+    brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a far corner of the room, away from his
+    <i>r&eacute;pertoire</i>. She confessed, that, afterward, when he was not present,
+    she had looked on that which he evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in
+    pencil, upon it, "Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but
+    no "Sternenkranz" was found,&mdash;the word was evidently her master's own fancy; so
+    she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto complained of her indifference
+    to the pieces he set before her, and informed him that she should perish at his feet,
+    unless he would give her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr
+    Otto, in a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
+    treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to which he had
+    given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to each soul that could
+    receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower of Lilies to another. It was the
+    same as with that white stone which the Seer of Patmos saw,&mdash;within it "a name
+    written which no man knoweth, saving he that receiveth it."</p>
+    <p>This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was known
+    among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day, next to the divine
+    Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert Schumann's works living; and if
+    the love she has obtained for him is not as universal, it is just as fervent. Many
+    silent and holy hours have I sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans
+    love to call their Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture
+    of romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his sorrow,
+    and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to know of
+    him,&mdash;of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I came to know, in
+    the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to relate.</p>
+    <a name="page292" id="page292"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 292]</span>
+    <p>A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to accommodate a
+    certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold winds from over the Lakes made
+    me wish that the Modern Athens had kept its lecture-system at home; for it has always
+    seemed to me, that, wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it.
+    Such ugly thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from the
+    face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed out of me by the
+    glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which animated the coziest of rooms. Why
+    has not some poet celebrated the experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of
+    the thawee responds to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release
+    until all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from the
+    Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet nothing-at-all
+    thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to life.</p>
+    <p>Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into the room,
+    soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls. Confused, I started up;
+    and it was some moments before I understood that the music proceeded from the room
+    adjoining mine in the hotel. Not altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess
+    of whom I have spoken had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was
+    appointed to stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"</p>
+    <p>As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave. Whether the
+    musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a terrible termination was in the
+    music, I knew not: the latter was quite probable, for, alas! such fearful
+    Icarus-falls are not rare in poor Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long,
+    but, rising quickly, passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next
+    room.</p>
+    <p>"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.</p>
+    <p>Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was so swart
+    that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once imagined that a stream
+    of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from some more Oriental race. I
+    stammered out an apology for my intrusion, but told him how irresistible were such
+    subtile threads as Schumann's "Carnival" had projected through the walls which
+    separated our rooms.</p>
+    <p>"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."</p>
+    <p>Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which, having for
+    bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the ice-dragon coiled about him,
+    is suddenly filled with the warm spread of the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he
+    said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"In me, wanderer that I am,&mdash;in me, with the <i>Heimweh</i> in my heart never
+    to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,&mdash;you see
+    Florestan."</p>
+    <p>"Louis Boehner!"</p>
+    <p>Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little piece of
+    paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand. On it these words
+    were written:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"<i>Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never want for such
+      a friend as thou hast been to</i></p>
+      <p>ROBERT SCHUMANN."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when, at this
+    moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a living halo.</p>
+    <p>Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before them the
+    fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention some facts connected
+    with Schumann's "Carnival, or <i>Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes</i>, on Four Notes." Not by
+    any means representing the pure depths of Schumann's soul, this strange <a
+    name="page293" id="page293"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 293]</span> medley is yet
+    pregnant with historic associations. The composer wrote it in his young days,
+    stringing twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a town
+    of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts frequently
+    strayed, because at that time there was an object there interesting to his sensitive
+    soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must be remembered that the H in German stands
+    for our B natural, and S or <i>es</i> for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift
+    f&uuml;r Musik" was begun and for ten years edited by Schumann,&mdash;in what spirit
+    we may gather from his own words:&mdash;"The musical state of Germany, at that time,
+    was not very encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
+    H&uuml;nten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since Beethoven,
+    Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star was ascending, and there
+    were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole, Chopin; but it was later that these gained
+    their lasting influence. One day the idea took possession of our young and hot
+    heads,&mdash;Let us not idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the
+    Poetry of Art shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league
+    of music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at which they
+    threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the <i>Philistines</i>, which is the
+    general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc., for prosaic, narrow,
+    hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities. "Young Germany" was making itself felt
+    in all co&ouml;rdinate directions: forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and
+    Dresden,&mdash;a sharp and spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead
+    of Heine and Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
+    revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality brought together
+    in K&uuml;hne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who talked of Callot,
+    Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz Schubert, and of the three foreign
+    Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry,
+    Victor Hugo." This was the <i>Davidsbund</i>, or League of David (the last of the
+    "Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes" is named "Marche des <i>Davidsb&uuml;ndler</i> contre les
+    Philistines"). An agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a
+    fine sketch of this company, which we will quote.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      "The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle age,
+      intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty remarks. He was
+      the instructor of more than one of the young musicians around him, who all listened
+      to his observations with profound attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the
+      conversation and suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young,
+      highly promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain consciousness of
+      having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl of fourteen, into a prodigy,
+      whose first appearance delighted the whole world, and whose subsequent
+      artist-activity became the pride of her native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a
+      quiet, thoughtful young man of twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a
+      student in Heidelberg, he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to
+      Leipsic and was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
+      liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be melancholy. After
+      long struggles, he had only been able to devote himself entirely to music
+      comparatively late in life, and had been obliged to pass a part of his precious
+      youth in studies which were as uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had
+      finally decided for the career of a <i>virtuoso</i>, and was pursuing the study of
+      the piano with an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
+      consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career forever. He
+      did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate for him in the end, by
+      directing him to <a name="page294" id="page294"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+      294]</span> his true vocation, composition. Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of
+      love, in the garb of admiration for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young
+      Robert so quiet and dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the
+      eccentric Louis Boehner,<a id="footnotetag1" name="footnotetag1"
+      href="#footnote1"><sup>1</sup></a> who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
+      Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession, but a poet
+      as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the indefatigable, yet
+      unsuccessful composer of songs,&mdash;now, in his capacity of critic, the paper
+      bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just returned from Italy, and believed
+      himself in possession of the true secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of
+      which every singing-master is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the
+      eminent organist and industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as
+      many more young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."<a
+      id="footnotetag2" name="footnotetag2" href="#footnote2"><sup>2</sup></a>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood that
+    sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of so many future
+    sorrows and glories.</p>
+    <p>"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys together at
+    Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day, which since has blessed
+    hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone; this breast held his sorrows and his
+    hopes, when he was struggling to reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his
+    madness he cast himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
+    eyelids when they were closed in death."</p>
+    <p>Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.</p>
+    <p>At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out, and was
+    informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had been waiting nearly
+    fifteen minutes!</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <p>Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room, listening to
+    that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And first he told me the story of
+    Schumann's love.</p>
+    <p>The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously than
+    judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have survived the
+    tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no childhood: at the piano she was
+    kept through all the bright days, roving only from scale to scale, when she should
+    have been roving from flower to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she
+    entered into her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
+    and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which were mosses
+    beneath them. From this training she came before the best audience in Germany, and
+    stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen summers, and by acclamation was crowned
+    the Queen of the Piano. Franz Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and
+    many years afterward wrote in his extravagant way,&mdash;"When we heard Clara Wieck
+    in Vienna, fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
+    to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks and lifted by
+    delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets." At her performance of
+    Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was inspired to write the following
+    verses:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "A weird magician, weary of the world,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        In sullen humor locked his charms all up
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And threw the key into the sea, and died.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The manikins here tried with all their might;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
+      </div>
+      <a name="page295" id="page295"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 295]</span>
+      <div class="line">
+        Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Who with white fingers guides them in her play."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child was the
+    young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first appearance, he
+    wrote,&mdash;"Others make poetry,&mdash;she is a poem." And soon
+    afterward,&mdash;"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
+    up,&mdash;the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."</p>
+    <p>From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young composer, the
+    secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one caught in the whorls of some
+    happy dream, who will not pause to ask, "Whither?" he poured out before this child
+    the half-revealed hopes striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her
+    ingenuous and earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
+    due time they were to be rather <i>clenched</i>, through pain. It was under this
+    baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first sonata,&mdash;"Florestan and
+    Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all from whom fame was graceful.</p>
+    <p>In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those wonderful little
+    "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without it their meaning is as strange
+    as their names. Often did he say,&mdash;"I can write only where my life is in unison
+    with my works." "Listen now to these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and
+    struck the piano; "these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with
+    song, "My peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
+    written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged aspirant
+    released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But faster than planets
+    through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased, and there was a long silence;
+    and then he told the unspeakable portion of his story by performing these two:
+    "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed
+    the pathos of the latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath
+    that crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts with the
+    terrible questioning, <i>Wherefore?</i></p>
+    <p>Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each other, the
+    shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was coming to pass. He had
+    educated this girl to be an artist to bring <i>him</i> fame; alas, it must be
+    confessed that he thought also of certain prospective thalers. Willing as he was that
+    all Leipsic should admire his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the
+    "Zeitschrift." He then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who,
+    when he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally the poor
+    soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst have known that it is
+    Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!</p>
+    <p>The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all acquaintance,
+    forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating at once Clara's career as a
+    <i>virtuoso</i>, he took her to Vienna.</p>
+    <p>No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess of
+    Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up to Beethoven.
+    Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the "Schw&auml;rmibriefe of Eusebius to
+    Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the general reader of the "Zeitschrift," <a
+    name="page296" id="page296"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 296]</span> who, doubtless,
+    fancied that its editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
+    Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.</p>
+    <p>"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out an
+    angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou not with us?
+    (<i>Warum!</i>) And how thou wilt have thought of us last night, from the
+    'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major symphony! I also thought of thee
+    then, Chiara, pure one, bright one, whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither
+    thy longing draws thee, but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."</p>
+    <p>At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's "Myrthen,"
+    whose dedication, <i>Seiner geliebten Braut</i>, breaks forth in the passionate and
+    beautiful song,&mdash;"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"</p>
+    <p>But this word <i>Braut</i> means Bride in the German sense of "affianced"; and
+    although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the breath of a Tropic,
+    bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his glorious First Symphony, which
+    some one has well called the Symphony of Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an
+    elusive vision, the two passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of
+    bitter Marahs. "But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the
+    right to know, from these,"&mdash;his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."</p>
+    <p>Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces when they
+    ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to have
+    revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I sought Boehner, and
+    asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded to the one subject that bound us
+    together, I requested him to tell me, what had not yet been given to the world, the
+    details of Schumann's insanity and death.</p>
+    <p>Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings so
+      sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in extremes, was
+      as if you gave an &AElig;olian harp to be swept now by a cold north-wind and now by
+      a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines of his flesh, and was not warmly
+      covered thereby, but only veiled. Under his grief he seemed stronger; but when his
+      joy came, when Clara was his own, and went through Europe with him, giving
+      expression to the voices within, which, to him, had been unutterable,&mdash;then we
+      saw that the emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
+      gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
+      devastating torrent.</p>
+      <p>"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or six years
+      before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times he imagined himself
+      again cruelly separated from the patient and tender being who never left his side;
+      and he would write pieces full of distractions, in the midst of each of which,
+      however, some touchingly beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through
+      seething seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
+      which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a wearing
+      persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice aside gently,
+      saying,&mdash;'A long life is before me; but it must be lived in a few years.' And,
+      indeed, the works which have reached farthest into hearts that loved him most
+      deeply date from these times. I remember, that, when he sat down to compose his
+      last symphony, he said,&mdash;'It is almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion
+      needs another chamber.'</p>
+      <p>"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word: 'Hasten.' I
+      left all my affairs, and came to <a name="page297" id="page297"></a><span
+      class="newpage">[pg 297]</span> watch for many months beside this beloved one. It
+      was not a wild delirium which had taken possession of him; the only fit of that
+      kind was that in which he tried to drown himself in the Rhine,&mdash;at the time
+      when the papers got hold of the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his
+      conviction that he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
+      manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
+      power,&mdash;would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest discords.
+      These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till night,&mdash;during
+      much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance. Of this music no chord or
+      melody was true; they were jangling memories of his earlier works.</p>
+      <p>"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
+      own:&mdash;'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be understood
+      here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.' Then, turning to me, he
+      said,&mdash;'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my last prayer for
+      you,'&mdash;handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and now leave us, to come
+      again and kiss me when I am cold.'</p>
+      <p>"Then I left him alone with his Clara.</p>
+      <p>"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis Boehner, and
+    said, as my voice would let me.&mdash;"Take this paper, and when you would have a
+    friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come and help me to be that
+    friend."</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.</h2>
+    <p>Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is, Will the
+    people of African descent work for a living? and the other is, Will they fight for
+    their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must be put beyond any fair dispute
+    before they will receive permanent security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the
+    theses of philosophers or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of
+    mankind is not likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
+    paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have not industry
+    sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present development of human nature, is
+    the conscience of great communities likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to
+    restrain them from disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to
+    injure, because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
+    lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like all
+    unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full recognition as citizens
+    and men when they have vindicated their title to be an estate of the realm, and not
+    before. Let us, then, take the world as we find it, and try this people accordingly.
+    But it is not pertinent to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs
+    in art, literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to glow
+    upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes. No Plutarch may
+    gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight to warm his canvas with
+    their forms. How many or how few astronomers like Banneker, chieftains like
+    Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may have, it is not worth while to conjecture.
+    It is better to dismiss these fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a
+    fair chance in the <a name="page298" id="page298"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    298]</span> world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
+    appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like the rest of
+    mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree with the conservative and
+    progressive elements of character common to ordinary humanity.</p>
+    <p>It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise it, to make
+    a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but it can do little either
+    in directing or deterring. There is nothing in the gloomy vaticinations of
+    Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is, which should be permitted to darken our
+    future. The medi&aelig;val antagonisms of races, when Christianity threw but a
+    partial light over mankind, and before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests
+    among people of diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
+    richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results of
+    emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they may be, afford any
+    measure of the progress which opens before our enfranchised masses. The insular and
+    contracted life of the colonies, cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism,
+    has no parallel in the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through
+    the continent on which our problem is to be solved.</p>
+    <p>In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report truthfully upon
+    the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the name. Civilization, in its
+    career, may often be traced in the nomenclatures of successive periods. These people
+    were first called contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were
+    next introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally referred to as
+    freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and they are yet to be lost in
+    the better and more comprehensive designation of citizens, or, when discrimination is
+    convenient, citizens of African descent.</p>
+    <p>The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at Port Royal
+    has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of Europe, as well as the
+    best friends of the United States, like Cairnes and Gasparin, have testified much
+    interest in its progress. An English periodical of considerable merit noticed at some
+    length "Mr. Pierce's Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in
+    its incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in American
+    affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number, characterizes the colony as
+    "that small pacific army, far more important in the history of civilization than all
+    the military expeditions despatched from time to time since the commencement of the
+    civil war."</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>No little historical interest covers the region to which this account belongs.
+    Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas, Georgia, and Florida,
+    involving the rival pretensions of Spain and France, were made in the first half of
+    the sixteenth century. They were conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and
+    Soto, in search of the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
+    discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was attempted
+    until 1562.</p>
+    <p>In that year,&mdash;the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and ten
+    years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the most illustrious
+    victim,&mdash;Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief, anxious to found beyond
+    the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots, fitted out the expedition of Jean
+    Ribault, which, after a voyage of over three months across the ocean and northward
+    along the coast, cast anchor on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the
+    name which it retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for
+    another and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark and
+    perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John <a name="page299"
+    id="page299"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 299]</span> Hawkins sailed for Africa in
+    quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to the New World. The expedition of
+    Ribault was the first visit of Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South
+    Carolina, and the garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices
+    ever made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to detail
+    here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their abandonment of the post,
+    the terrible voyage homeward, or the perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose.
+    Nor is it within the compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
+    garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins in 1565 with
+    timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his sad fate, the ferocity of
+    Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and the avenging chivalry of Dominic de
+    Gourges. The student is baffled in attempts to fix localities for the deeds and
+    explorations of this period, even with the help of the several accounts and the
+    drawings of Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
+    permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been abandoned by
+    the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for trade or adventure.</p>
+    <p>Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other commissioners
+    to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the country with reference to an
+    emigration thither. Hilton's Narration, published in London the year after, mentions
+    St. Ellens as one of the points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including
+    the Sea Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish words,
+    and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be alarmed by it. The
+    commissioners, whose explorations were evidently prompted by motives of gain, close a
+    somewhat glowing description of the country by saying, "And we could wish that all
+    they that want a happy settlement of our English nation were well transported
+    thither."</p>
+    <p>Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But, relieved of her
+    civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek colonial empire on the southern
+    coast of North America. In 1663, Charles II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk,
+    Shaftsbury,&mdash;each famous in the conflicts of those times,&mdash;and to their
+    associates, as proprietors of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for
+    philosophy than affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,&mdash;an idle work,
+    as it proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle, arrived at
+    Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed probably with
+    apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they removed to the banks of the
+    Ashley, and, after another change of site, founded Charleston.</p>
+    <p>In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port Royal, but
+    was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent settlement of the
+    Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until 1700. This district is divided into
+    four parishes, St. Peter's, St. Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being
+    fifty-eight miles long and thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St.
+    Helena parish includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a
+    few smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district occupied by
+    our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands is St. Helena, being
+    fifteen miles long and six or seven broad, containing fifty plantations and three
+    thousand negroes, and perhaps more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is
+    two-thirds or three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
+    Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and Coosaw, Morgan,
+    Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort is the largest town in the
+    district of that name, and the only one at Port Royal in our possession. Its
+    population, black and white, in time of peace may have been <a name="page300"
+    id="page300"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 300]</span> between two and three
+    thousand. The first lots were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in
+    1720. Its library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
+    hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about thirty-five
+    hundred.</p>
+    <p>The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since to an
+    island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to a sound, a parish,
+    and an island, originated probably with the Spaniards, and was given by them in
+    tribute to Saint Helena, the mother of Constantine the Great, whose day in the
+    calendar is August 18th. Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given
+    by Ribault. Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
+    Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely to have been
+    so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord proprietors, while Carolina
+    was a province of Great Britain.</p>
+    <p>The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable Revolutionary romance.
+    In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent two hundred troops with a howitzer
+    and two field-pieces to Beaufort. Four companies of militia from Charleston with two
+    field-pieces, reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
+    off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and are said to
+    have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port Royal Islands.</p>
+    <p>There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands. One of
+    these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is claimed by some
+    antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault. There are the well-preserved
+    walls of one upon the plantation of John J. Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles
+    south of Beaufort, now called Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel
+    Higginson's regiment. It is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to
+    it as a Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site of
+    Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and other
+    points.</p>
+    <p>The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of the sea.
+    They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present a rather monotonous
+    and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of French explorers. The creeks run
+    up into the islands at numerous points, affording facilities for transportation by
+    flats and boats to the buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light,
+    sandy mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen bushels
+    of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of ginned cotton to the
+    acre,&mdash;quite different from the plantations in Mississippi and Texas, where an
+    acre produces five or six hundred pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the
+    cultivated grasses, and one finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses,
+    gathered in stacks, furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton
+    peculiar to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the action
+    of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks which permeate the land
+    in all directions. The seed of this cotton, planted on the upland, will produce in a
+    few years the cotton of coarser texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the
+    islands, will in a like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department
+    secured eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
+    including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in storehouses, when
+    our military occupation began.</p>
+    <p>The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
+    lignum-vit&aelig;, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in diameter,
+    and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the long, pendulous,
+    funereal moss adhering to them,&mdash;and the palmetto, shooting up its long, spongy
+    stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by <a name="page301" id="page301"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 301]</span> vines or branches, with a disproportionately small
+    cap of leaves at the summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
+    coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and white oak, the
+    cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil is luxuriant with an
+    undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These interlacing the trees, supported also by
+    shrubs, of which the cassena is the most distinguished variety, and faced with
+    ditches, make the prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in
+    March and April with the yellow jessamine, (<i>jelseminum</i>,)&mdash;the cross-vine
+    (<i>bignonia</i>,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,&mdash;the Cherokee rose,
+    (<i>loevigata</i>,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,&mdash;and, two
+    months later, the palmetto royal, (<i>yucca gloriosa</i>,) which protects the fence
+    with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its pyramid-like clusters of
+    white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs serve a utilitarian end in art and
+    medicine. The live-oak is famous in shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto,
+    as it is called, resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
+    employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British fleet; and
+    the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The moss (<i>tillandsia
+    usneoides</i>) served to calk the rude vessel of the first French colonists, longing
+    for home. It may be used for bedding after its life has been killed by boiling water,
+    and for the subsistence of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a
+    powerful diuretic.</p>
+    <p>The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and to the
+    pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described in Eliot's book.
+    Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to fishing for devil and
+    drum.</p>
+    <p>The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first and
+    second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a free circulation
+    of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built under the supervision of a
+    professional architect. Those on the plantations, designed for the planters or
+    overseers, were, with a few exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving
+    mechanic in New England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards
+    are without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of orange-trees.
+    One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed, they are not well enough
+    built to last long. The estates upon Edisto Island are of a more patrician character,
+    and are occasionally surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees
+    fancifully trimmed.</p>
+    <p>The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although some may be
+    traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from the religious persecutions
+    of France.</p>
+    <p>The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious periodicals, mainly
+    Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern life has been elsewhere observed
+    in the progress of our army. Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal
+    and ruinous was found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
+    South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's collection. Another was
+    Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and tribute to its distinguished examples,
+    translated by Warden in 1810. These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to
+    see the infinite wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
+    sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the moral basis
+    of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who distrusts the rightfulness of
+    his daily conduct, has resolved to persist in it, and therefore hates most of all the
+    prophet who comes to confront him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them
+    to mankind.</p>
+    <p>Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice without
+    <a name="page302" id="page302"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 302]</span> being sought
+    for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out, still showing the place where it was
+    worn by the rope which bound the sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own
+    quarters were was a woman who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of
+    maternity as to crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
+    daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the unwilling witness.
+    She declared to her parents and sisters that it was hell to live in such a place. She
+    was accustomed to advise the negroes how best to avoid being whipped. When the war
+    began, she assured them that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to
+    send them to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
+    girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds which marriage
+    and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell on these painful scenes of
+    the past, constant and authentic as they are; and they hardly concern the practical
+    question which now presses for a solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need
+    of injustice or exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
+    persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are fortunate
+    slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides, there was less labor
+    exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely managed plantations of the Sea
+    Islands than in other districts where slave-labor was better and more profitably
+    organized and directed.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th, 1861, was
+    followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea Islands. In the latter part
+    of December, the Secretary of the Treasury, Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman
+    and humane disposition naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a
+    special agent to visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition
+    of the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of suggesting some
+    plan for the organization of their labor and the promotion of their general
+    well-being. The agent, leaving New York January 13th, 1862, reached that city again
+    on his way to Washington on the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a
+    large number of the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their
+    cabins. The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the people,
+    their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the best mode of
+    administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a report. The plan proposed
+    by him recommended the appointment of superintendents to act as guides of the negroes
+    and as local magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
+    Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the same agent. The
+    agent presented the subject to several members of Congress, with whom he had a
+    personal acquaintance, but, though they listened respectfully, they seemed either to
+    dread the magnitude of the social question, or to feel that it was not one with which
+    they as legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself, and
+    Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone seemed to grasp it,
+    and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is doubtful if any member of the
+    Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any interest in the enterprise, though it has
+    since been fostered by the Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the
+    President appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
+    under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then said, somewhat
+    impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be troubled with such
+    details,&mdash;that there seemed to be an itching to get negroes into our lines; to
+    which the agent replied, that these negroes were within them by the invitation of no
+    one, being domiciled there before we commenced occupation. The President then <a
+    name="page303" id="page303"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 303]</span> wrote and
+    handed to the agent the following card:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion give Mr.
+      Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as may seem
+      judicious.</p>
+      <p>"A. LINCOLN.</p>
+      <p>"Feb. 15, 1862."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>The President, so history must write it, approached the great question slowly and
+    reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the proclamations he was to
+    issue in the September and January following. Perhaps that slowness and reluctance
+    were well, for thereby it was given to this people to work out their own salvation,
+    rather than to be saved by any chief or prophet.</p>
+    <p>Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no funds
+    wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission," organized in
+    Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief Association," organized in
+    New York on the 20th of the same month, gallantly volunteered to pay both
+    superintendents and teachers, and did so until July 1st, when the Government, having
+    derived a fund from the sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the
+    Rebels, undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies, together
+    with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and called the "Port Royal
+    Relief Committee," providing for the support of the teachers.</p>
+    <p>When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an enterprise which
+    otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance had been given as to the legal
+    condition of the negroes. The Secretary, in a letter to the agent, had said, that,
+    after being received into our service, they could not, without great injustice, be
+    restored to their masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
+    citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private, that negroes
+    who were within our lines, and had been employed by the Government, should be
+    protected in their freedom. No official assurance of this had, however, been given;
+    and its absence disturbed the societies in their formation. At one meeting of the
+    Boston society action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
+    gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people, when
+    educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A public meeting in
+    Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken up without action, because of a
+    speech from a furloughed officer of a regiment stationed at Port Royal, who
+    considered such a result the probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely
+    determined to do what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens,
+    in the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be found
+    base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it should be stated, have
+    been managed by persons of much consideration in their respective communities, of
+    unostentatious philanthropy, but of energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one
+    of whom has ever filled or been a candidate for a political office.</p>
+    <p>There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be mentioned. The
+    venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first year, hearing of the
+    enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of it. I went to his chamber, where he
+    had been confined to his bed for many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a
+    patriot who read the hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not
+    been given to protect the enterprise,&mdash;said that but for his disability he
+    should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the postscript of
+    his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty benediction to the work and to
+    myself. Restored in a measure to activity, he is still spared to the generation which
+    fondly cherishes his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
+    read to his fellow-citizens, <a name="page304" id="page304"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 304]</span> gathering close about him and hanging on his speech,
+    words of counsel and encouragement.</p>
+    <p>On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of superintendents
+    and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were women, left the harbor of New
+    York, on board the United States steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on
+    the 9th. It was a voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange,
+    and it was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store for
+    us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal to our
+    responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South Carolina, they were
+    addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the little he had learned of their
+    duties, enjoined patience and humanity, impressed on them the greatness of their
+    work, the results of which were to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps,
+    one way or the other, the social problem of the age,&mdash;assuring them that never
+    did a vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when she
+    conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written history which
+    should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful to their trust, there would
+    come to them the highest of all recognitions ever accorded to angels or to men, in
+    this life or the next,&mdash;"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye
+    have done it unto Me."</p>
+    <p>This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed during the
+    first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its close they had all
+    reached their appointed posts. They took their quarters in the deserted houses of the
+    planters. These had all left on the arrival of our army, only four white men,
+    citizens of South Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except
+    one, who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not interfered
+    with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be so. The negroes had, in
+    the mean time, been without persons to guide and care for them, and had been exposed
+    to the careless and conflicting talk of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were
+    also brought in connection with some <i>employ&eacute;s</i> of the Government,
+    engaged in the collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were
+    doing anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing the
+    plantations and the negroes upon them as <i>adscripti gleboe</i> looking forward to
+    their restoration to their masters at the close of the war. They were uncertain as to
+    the intentions of the Yankees, and were wondering at the confusion, as they called
+    it. They were beginning to plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant
+    cotton, regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except one
+    at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one bearing the name of
+    John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr. Peck. This is not the place to detail
+    the obstacles we met with, one after another overcome,&mdash;the calumnies and even
+    personal violence to which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early
+    period of our struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
+    likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they deserve, and let
+    others of better natures, who were then blind, but now see, not be taunted with their
+    inconsiderate acts. The nickname of Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may,
+    however, be fitly remembered. It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of
+    Puritan and Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
+    disposed to co&ouml;peration. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our most
+    important operations were in the district under the command of Brigadier-General
+    Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were not supposed to be favorable to
+    the enterprise, and who, during the political contest of 1860, had been the chairman
+    of the National Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and
+    his sense of the <a name="page305" id="page305"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    305]</span> duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government, that his personal
+    courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He received his mortal wound at
+    Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of September following, and a braver and abler
+    officer has not fallen in the service.</p>
+    <p>Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other hindrances
+    occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some eight thousand acres of
+    esculents,&mdash;a fair supply of food,&mdash;and some four thousand five hundred
+    acres of cotton (after a deduction for over-estimates) were planted. This was done
+    upon one hundred and eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty
+    people, of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands, made up
+    of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual classification and estimate
+    of the productive capacity of laborers, to three thousand eight hundred and five and
+    one-half full hands. The cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand
+    pounds of ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred thousand
+    pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod, resulting from the lateness
+    of the planting, exposed it to the ravages of the frost and the worm. Troops being
+    ordered North, after the disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated
+    in the middle of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
+    hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished, were abandoned.
+    In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty tons of corn-fodder and
+    seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the ear, for army-forage. These are but some
+    of the adverse influences to which the agricultural operations were subjected.</p>
+    <p>It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the superintendents and
+    teachers commissioned by the associations. There was as high a purpose and devotion
+    among them as in any colony that ever went forth to bear the evangel of civilization.
+    Among them were some of the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard,
+    Yale, and Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,&mdash;men of
+    practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was scarce worthy,
+    and to whom, whether they are among the living or the dead, I delight to pay the
+    tribute of my respect and admiration.</p>
+    <p>Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at Boston, April
+    25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work, which he was obliged to leave
+    six months before his death. He was a faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so
+    many months had passed since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he
+    dwelt fondly upon them in his last days.</p>
+    <p>The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St. Helena
+    Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,&mdash;and though not
+    fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of a superintendent, yet
+    even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He was an evangelist, also, and he
+    preached with more unction than any other the gospel of freedom,&mdash;always,
+    however, enforcing the duties of industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but
+    always buoyant and trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
+    company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to Beaufort,&mdash;being
+    assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a month, and was a remote and
+    exposed point; but he went fearlessly and without question. The evacuation of Edisto
+    in July, the heat, and the labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at
+    the village on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where were
+    some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive exertions brought on
+    malarious fever. This produced an unnatural excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot
+    sun, he rode about to attend to his people. He died,&mdash;men, women, and children,
+    for whom he had toiled, filling the house with <a name="page306"
+    id="page306"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 306]</span> their sobs during his
+    departing hours. His funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers
+    which they and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
+    native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church of Dorchester.
+    Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth can live fourscore years in a
+    little more than one score. One high privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear
+    of the immortal edict of the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his
+    people was to be secured for all time to come.</p>
+    <p>Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he never
+    advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the Episcopal Church. He
+    was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the quality as well as adding to it by
+    self-discipline. He had good business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences,
+    was humane, yet not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
+    unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was recently asking
+    the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who first taught them their
+    letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr. Phillips." He was at home in the autumn
+    for a vacation, was at the funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time
+    in imperfect health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
+    Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate return
+    necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,&mdash;but his health never came back
+    to him. His quarters were in the same house where Barnard had died, and in a few
+    days, on the 5th of December, he followed him. He was tended in his sickness by the
+    negroes, and one day, having asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the
+    words, "Thank God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the
+    same funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North to
+    bereaved relatives.</p>
+    <p>Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
+    Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his professional studies
+    at the summons of Christian duty. He labored faithfully as a superintendent, looking
+    after the physical, moral, and educational interests of his people. He had a
+    difficult post, was overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of
+    taking as good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came home
+    in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the citizens and students
+    of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill, and, again coming North, died
+    October 30th, a few days after reaching New York. The young woman who was betrothed
+    to him, but whom he did not live to wed, has since his death sought this field of
+    labor; and on my recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
+    teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had guided to
+    freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed away!</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal having
+      been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the charge of the
+      freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus Saxton, a native of
+      Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the free air of the valley of the
+      Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane nature; and under his wise and benevolent
+      care they still remain. The Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in
+      Florida, are within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
+      eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.</p>
+      <p>The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject race,
+      more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The native African was
+      of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and untamable. The master was obliged to
+      abate something of the <a name="page307" id="page307"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+      307]</span> usual rigor in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner,
+      now at Port Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
+      African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would perpetually insist on
+      doing his work in his own way, and being asked the threatening question, "A'n't you
+      going to mind?" would answer, with spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master
+      desisted! Severe discipline drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a
+      mutilation of person which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816,
+      eight hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades of
+      Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the early part of
+      the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on farms, and raising cattle.
+      They had two hundred and fifty men fit to bear arms, led by chiefs brave and
+      skilful. The story of the Exiles of Florida is one of painful interest. The
+      testimony of officers of the army who served against them is, that they were more
+      dangerous enemies than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the
+      longest. The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of Charleston
+      during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark Vesey, relates that
+      one of the native Africans, when called to answer to the charge against him,
+      haughtily responded,&mdash;"<i>I was a prince in my country, and have as much right
+      to be free as you!</i>" The Carolinians were so awe-struck by his defiance that
+      they transported him. Another, at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade
+      about to speak, and said, "<i>Die silent, as I do!</i>" and the man hushed. The
+      early newspapers of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned
+      by these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the third
+      generation reduced to obedient slaves.</p>
+      <p>Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood been
+      carried so far as on these Sea Islands,&mdash;a deterioration due to their
+      isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the constant
+      surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with each other, involving a
+      physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature punishes disobedience to her laws.
+      The population with its natural increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the
+      soil under existing modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is
+      found pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
+      Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had been carried
+      so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration, in January, 1862, was
+      obliged to confess the existence of a general disinclination to military service on
+      the part of the negroes; though it is true that even then instances of courage and
+      adventure appeared, which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to
+      be developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it has been.
+      You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a subject race; but in
+      vain will you attempt to study it until the burden is lifted. The slave is unknown
+      to all, even to himself, while the bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She
+      soothes us with her deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing
+      in pain, is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the spirit
+      the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not even Tocqueville or
+      Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the capacities and possibilities of the
+      slave, until the slave himself is transmuted to a man.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It was
+    pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their posts, and specially
+    grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen, and to note the progress they had
+    made. There were interesting scenes to fill the days. I saw an aged negro,
+    C&aelig;sar by name, not less than one hundred years old, who had left children in
+    Africa, when stolen away. The vicissitudes <a name="page308" id="page308"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 308]</span> of such a life were striking,&mdash;a free savage in
+    the wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long years a
+    toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the President,&mdash;his
+    life covering an historic century. A faithful and industrious negro, Old Simon, as we
+    called him, hearing of my arrival, rode over to see me, and brought me a present of
+    two or three quarts of pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don
+    Carlos, whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon Barnard,
+    and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last hours,&mdash;now not
+    less than seventy years of age, and early in life a slave in the Alston family, where
+    he had known Theodosia Burr, the daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston.
+    He talked intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
+    known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and accompanying
+    the sons on their way North to college after the completion of their preparatory
+    studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C. Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon
+    graduating, went South as a private tutor.</p>
+    <p>Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,&mdash;an old woman, with much power
+    of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had formerly been. The
+    attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If you're as long beating Secesh
+    everywhere as you have been in taking the town, guess it'll take you some time!"
+    Indeed, the negroes had somewhat less confidence in our power than at first, on
+    account of our not having followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The
+    same quaint old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
+    of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"</p>
+    <p>I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of Trescot,
+    formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom Russell describes in his
+    "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when Russell saw it. Its large library is
+    deposited in the Smithsonian Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the
+    first and second stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families
+    of negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see a
+    cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the plantation,
+    and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name, linked with the struggles
+    for freedom in both hemispheres.</p>
+    <p>The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are usually in
+    an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees, perhaps live-oaks, and
+    not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred graves, marked only by sticks eighteen
+    inches or two feet high and about as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones
+    in a negro graveyard at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather
+    illiterate inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
+    not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and that was in a
+    burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the head of the grave, shaped
+    something like an ordinary gravestone, about three feet high and six inches wide. The
+    inscription was as follows:&mdash;</p>
+<pre>
+  OLd Jiw
+de PArt his
+Life on the
+  2 of WAY
+ Re st frow
+   LAuer
+</pre>
+    <p>On the foot-board were these words:&mdash;</p>
+<pre>
+ We ll
+d OW N.
+</pre>
+    <p>The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also write a
+    little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He said that he used to
+    carry his father in his arms in his old age,&mdash;that the old man had no pain, and,
+    as the son expressed it, "sunk in years." I inquired of Kit concerning several of the
+    graves; and I found, by his intelligent <a name="page309" id="page309"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 309]</span> answers, that their tenants were disposed in families
+    and were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing, are not
+    without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a faster hold on the
+    sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned with shafts of marble and granite,
+    and rich in illustrious dead.</p>
+    <p>There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African origin, which
+    the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as evil spirits, and in a kind of
+    witchcraft which only certain persons can cure. They have a superstition, that, when
+    you take up and remove a sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry,
+    on awaking, until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
+    They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and they will not
+    talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby be brought on.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing directly on the
+    solution of the social problem deserve most consideration.</p>
+    <p>And, first, as to <i>education</i>. There are more than thirty schools in the
+    territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are commissioned
+    by the three associations in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, and by the American
+    Missionary Association. They have an average attendance of two thousand pupils, and
+    are more or less frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range
+    in the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their letters prior to
+    a year ago last March, except those who were being taught in the single school at
+    Beaufort already referred to, which had been going on for a few weeks. Very many did
+    not have the opportunity for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the
+    spring and summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
+    much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times some of the
+    teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a brief time, and upon its
+    expiration, or for other cause, returned home, leaving the schools to be broken up.
+    It was not until October or November that the educational arrangements were put into
+    much shape; and they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is
+    as yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds wherewith
+    to provide one.</p>
+    <p>I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others. There
+    were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the town of
+    Beaufort,&mdash;ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of sixty-four, and
+    twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the plantations there were never more
+    than half a dozen in one school, in some cases but two or three, and in others
+    none.</p>
+    <p>The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages in the
+    ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader, Willson's Second Reader,
+    and others of similar grade. Those who had enjoyed a briefer period of instruction
+    were reading short sentences or learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a
+    class was engaged on an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The
+    eagerness for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
+    had not abated.</p>
+    <p>On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on St.
+    Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with the long,
+    pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading branches, and surrounded
+    by the gravestones of the former proprietors, which bear the ever-recurring names of
+    Fripp and Chaplin. This school was opened in September last, but many of the pupils
+    had received some instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were
+    present on my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
+    few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened at noon and
+    closed at <a name="page310" id="page310"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 310]</span>
+    three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the children to work in the field or perform
+    other service in which they could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page
+    70th in Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before, and
+    they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had recited the first
+    thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the multiplication-table as high as fives, and
+    were commencing the sixes. A few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come
+    latest to the school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
+    recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring prompting at the
+    beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much spirit hymns which had been
+    taught them by the teachers, as,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "My country, 'tis of thee,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Sweet land of liberty";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>also,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Sound the loud timbrel";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the closing stanzas
+    of which are,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "The very oaks are greener clad,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;The waters brighter smile;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Oh, never shone a day so glad
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;On sweet St. Helen's Isle!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "For none in all the world before
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Were ever glad as we,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          We're free on Carolina's shore,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;We're all at home and free!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the highest
+    beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service than to write the songs
+    of praise for these little children, chattels no longer, whom the Saviour, were he
+    now to walk on earth, would bless as his own.</p>
+    <p>The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by the
+    way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white soldiers,
+    particularly when the singers roll out,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>The children also sang their own songs, as,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "In de morning' when I rise,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?<a id="footnotetag3" name="footnotetag3"
+          href="#footnote3"><sup>3</sup></a>
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          In de mornin' when I rise,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Also,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I would not let you go, my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I would not let you go,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I would not let you go, my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I would not let you go.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          De angels march all roun' de trone,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin',
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;I can't stay behin'.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Dere's room enough," etc.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down in the
+    lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my home." Russell's
+    "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard them in his evening row over
+    Broad River, on his way to Trescot's estate.</p>
+    <p>One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from Philadelphia, <a
+    name="page311" id="page311"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 311]</span> Another is from
+    Newport, Rhode Island, where she had prepared herself for this work by benevolent
+    labors in teaching poor children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of
+    olive complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of gentle
+    address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with an overwrought
+    consciousness of her race. She had read the best books, and naturally and gracefully
+    enriched her conversation with them. She had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had
+    been a pupil in the Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that
+    city, then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had received
+    only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their parents,&mdash;and let this
+    be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She had refused a residence in Europe,
+    where a better social life and less unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she
+    would not dissever herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a
+    superficial sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
+    elevation.</p>
+    <p>At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a young woman
+    from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of parents passed into the skies,"
+    whose lives have both been written for the edification of the Christian world. She
+    teaches two schools, at different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars
+    in each. One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on a
+    review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being questioned as to
+    the subjects of the lessons, they answered intelligently. They recited the twos of
+    the multiplication-table, explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard,
+    and wrote letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining district, a
+    graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian clergyman of Providence,
+    Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which a class of three pupils was about
+    finishing Ellsworth's First Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had
+    just finished Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
+    Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two schools. He
+    exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence to be repeated with
+    different tones and inflections, and one could not but remark the excellent
+    imitations.</p>
+    <p>In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto refugees,
+    ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were engaged in teaching,
+    assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had picked up clandestinely a
+    knowledge of reading while still a slave. One class of boys and another of girls read
+    in the seventh chapter of St. John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They
+    stumbled a little on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they
+    got along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July, 1862, Ned,
+    who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus, a man of seventy, who
+    also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty children into two schools, and taught
+    them as best they could for five months until teachers were provided by the
+    societies. Ned has since received a donation from one of the societies, and is now
+    regularly employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this school
+    for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to bed. She had become
+    interested in learning by hearing her younger sister read when she came home from
+    school; and when she asked to be taught, she had learned from this sister the
+    alphabet and some words of one syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are,
+    however, learning.</p>
+    <p>On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a small church
+    on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from Kingston, Massachusetts. She
+    had manifested much persistence in going to this field, went with the <a
+    name="page312" id="page312"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 312]</span> first
+    delegation, and still keeps the school which she opened in March, 1862. She taught
+    the pupils their letters. Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of
+    ten pupils read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
+    Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read so rapidly
+    that she had to be checked,&mdash;the only case of such fast reading that I found.
+    She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners to a corner of the room and
+    exercising them upon an alphabet card, requiring them to give the names of letters
+    taken out of their regular order, and with the letters making words, which they were
+    expected to repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
+    Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states, lakes, and
+    large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the different continents on
+    the map of the world, as they were called. I saw the teacher of this school at her
+    residence, late in the afternoon, giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and
+    girls, all but two being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the
+    Book of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St. John.
+    Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly at the teacher, and
+    whispered,&mdash;"he's putting me in the book"; and as Elsie guessed, so I do. The
+    teacher was instructing her pupils in some dates and facts which have had much to do
+    with our history. The questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were
+    these:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"</p>
+      <p>"Virginia."</p>
+      <p>"When?"</p>
+      <p>"1620."</p>
+      <p>"Who brought them?"</p>
+      <p>"Dutchmen."</p>
+      <p>"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"</p>
+      <p>"Pilgrims."</p>
+      <p>"Did they bring slaves?"</p>
+      <p>"No."</p>
+      <p>A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given in a loud
+      tone by the whole school:&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"What country do you live in?"</p>
+      <p>"United States."</p>
+      <p>"What State?"</p>
+      <p>"South Carolina."</p>
+      <p>"What island?"</p>
+      <p>"Port Royal."</p>
+      <p>"What town?"</p>
+      <p>"Beaufort."</p>
+      <p>"Who is your Governor?"</p>
+      <p>"General Saxton."</p>
+      <p>"Who is your President?"</p>
+      <p>"Abraham Lincoln."</p>
+      <p>"What has he done for you?"</p>
+      <p>"He's freed us."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited, each
+    having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and each provided with
+    two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But it is unnecessary to describe
+    them, as they were very much like the others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an
+    industrial school, which meets two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady
+    from New York, with some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the
+    afternoon I visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
+    age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others with aprons,
+    pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.</p>
+    <p>Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations to
+    address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the pupils with
+    questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I have rarely heard children
+    answer with more readiness and spirit. We had a dialogue substantially as
+    follows:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to work, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"On what?"</p>
+      <p>"Cotton and corn, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the corn?" <a name="page313"
+      id="page313"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 313]</span> "Eat it."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the cotton?"</p>
+      <p>"Sell it."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"</p>
+      <p>One boy answered in advance of the rest,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"Put it in my pocket, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"That won't do. What's better than that?"</p>
+      <p>"Buy clothes, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What else will you buy?"</p>
+      <p>"Shoes, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"What else are you going to do with your money?"</p>
+      <p>There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do Sundays?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to meeting."</p>
+      <p>"What are you going to do there?"</p>
+      <p>"Going to sing."</p>
+      <p>"What else?"</p>
+      <p>"Hear the parson."</p>
+      <p>"Who's going to pay him?"</p>
+      <p>One boy said,&mdash;"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"We's pays him."</p>
+      <p>"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people do, and
+      you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with them?"</p>
+      <p>There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,&mdash;</p>
+      <p>"Send 'em to school, Sir."</p>
+      <p>"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"</p>
+      <p>"We's pays him."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any natural
+    incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years the ideas and habits
+    of good citizens.</p>
+    <p>The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved, except that
+    it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking. They are joyous, and you can
+    see the boys after school playing the soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory
+    is very susceptible in them,&mdash;too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the
+    reasoning faculty.</p>
+    <p>The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the parents
+    being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and cultivating their
+    crops, and it not being thought best to allow the teaching to interfere in any way
+    with industrious habits.</p>
+    <p>A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading, have assisted
+    our teachers, though a want of proper training materially detracts from their
+    usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have already been mentioned. The
+    latter, a man of earnest piety, has died since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on
+    Hilton Head Island last summer and autumn, being paid at first by the
+    superintendents, and afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he
+    enlisted in the negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
+    Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were brought to St.
+    Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to the school at the Baptist
+    Church, saying to the teachers there that she could carry them no farther. They could
+    read their letters and words of one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on
+    Wadmelaw Island, a kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only
+    citizen of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South Carolina,
+    stood up boldly for his official and personal protection. Hettie had been taught to
+    read by his daughter; and let this be remembered to the honor of the young woman.</p>
+    <p>Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The most advanced
+    classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can read simple stories and the
+    plainer passages of Scripture; and they could even pursue self-instruction, if the
+    schools were to be suspended. The knowledge they have thus gained can never be
+    extirpated. They could read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them
+    and adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not bounded north
+    <a name="page314" id="page314"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 314]</span> by
+    Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and east by the sea, with dim
+    visions of New York on this planet or some other,&mdash;about their conception of
+    geography when we found them. They are acquiring the knowledge of figures with which
+    to do the business of life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their
+    schools; remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a letter,
+    and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their race; then contemplate
+    what is now transpiring, and you have a scene which prophets and sages would have
+    delighted to witness. It will be difficult to find equal progress in an equal period
+    since the morning rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I
+    have never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel Angelo
+    has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor souls struggling in
+    darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the upper and better light
+    transcends in moral grandeur anything that has ever come from mortal hands.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Next as to <i>industry</i>. The laborers, during their first year under the new
+    system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of wages, and have
+    come to see that labor and slavery are not the same thing. The notion that they were
+    to raise no more cotton has passed away, since work upon it is found to be
+    remunerative, and connected with the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were
+    at first particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
+    collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of their masters,
+    the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and ginned the cotton on the promise
+    of wages. Except upon plantations in the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more
+    immediately remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
+    disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the only penalty
+    for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for the tenement and land
+    adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not exceeding two dollars per month. Both the
+    Government and private individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land
+    by the recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which may,
+    by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by noon; and the same
+    was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on very many of the plantations.
+    As I was riding through one of Mr. Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty
+    persons at work who belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the
+    first delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent contributions
+    for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the tax-sales, and combining a fine
+    humanity with honest sagacity and close calculation, no man is so well fitted to try
+    the experiment. He bought thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and
+    cultivated eight hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and
+    ninety-nine and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,&mdash;a larger
+    increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due mainly to
+    prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal Wand said to
+    me,&mdash;"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the negroes to take land for
+    cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton Head Island said, that on that island
+    the negroes had, besides adequate corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four
+    acres of cotton to a hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it,
+    except near the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
+    going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had charge of the
+    refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena village, and who had cleared
+    and fenced patches for gardens, felling the trees for that purpose.</p>
+    <p>The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might <a
+    name="page315" id="page315"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 315]</span> do; but they do
+    about as much as he himself would do, after a residence of a few years in the same
+    climate, and when he had ceased to work under the influence of Northern habits.
+    Northern men have sometimes been unjust to the South, when comparing the results of
+    labor in the different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
+    tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing latitude. There has
+    been less complaint this year than last of "a pain in the small of the back," or of
+    "a fever in the head,"&mdash;in other words, less <i>shamming</i>. The work has been
+    greatly deranged by the draft, some features of which have not been very skilfully
+    arranged, and by the fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the
+    military authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by the
+    women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that field-work does not
+    become women in the new condition; and so it may seem to some persons of just
+    sympathies who have not yet learned that no honest work is dishonorable in man or
+    woman. But this matter may be left to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation,
+    may not be consistent with the finest feminine culture or the most complete
+    womanliness; but it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
+    development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country of Europe;
+    and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this generation, when the American
+    negroes become the peers of the Swiss peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than
+    without it, when she is not yet fitted for the needle or the book.</p>
+    <p>The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply capital
+    to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my faithful guide and
+    attendant, who had done for me more service than any white man could render," with
+    funds of his own, and some borrowed money, bought at the recent tax-sales a small
+    farm of three hundred and thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was
+    to plant sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one and a
+    half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my last day in the
+    territory, and one-third of his crop was then in. Besides some servant's duty to an
+    officer, for which he is well paid, he does the work of a full hand on his place. He
+    hires one woman and two men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters
+    hand. He has two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
+    likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he said, "She's the
+    best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with her hoe as I know her to be with
+    her tongue, Harry's estimate must be right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and
+    blind in both eyes, whom he guides with a rope,&mdash;carrying on farming, I thought,
+    somewhat under difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
+    delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor. He has
+    promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an account of the progress
+    of his crop. He has had much charge of Government property, and when Captain Hooper,
+    of General Saxton's staff, was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany
+    him; but at last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
+    all two to leave together."</p>
+    <p>Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The Government is
+    building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen feet by fourteen, with two
+    rooms, each provided with a swinging board-window, and the roof projecting a little
+    as a protection from rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have
+    fifty cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the direction
+    of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a month. Rarely have I
+    talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was my great regret that I had not time
+    to visit the village of <a name="page316" id="page316"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    316]</span> improved houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
+    extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of his last
+    days.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Next as to the <i>development of manhood</i>. This has been shown, in the first
+    place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not appear upon our first
+    introduction to these people, and they did not seem to understand us when we used to
+    tell them that we wanted them to own land. But it is now an active desire. At the
+    recent tax-sales, six out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them,
+    comprising two thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one
+    hundred and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
+    superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United States. One
+    of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The other five were made by the
+    negroes on the plantations combining the funds they had saved from the sale of their
+    pigs, chickens, and eggs, and from the payments made to them for work,&mdash;they
+    then dividing off the tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit,
+    before mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands, who are
+    equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are cultivating sixty-three
+    acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes, with as many more to be planted,
+    four and a half of cow-peas, three of pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These
+    facts are most significant. The instinct for land&mdash;to have one spot on earth
+    where a man may stand, and whence no human being can of right drive him&mdash;is one
+    of the most conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any fair
+    degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.</p>
+    <p>This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness of rights,
+    and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed by white men. The former
+    slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a resident of New York when the war
+    broke out, have generally left the plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying
+    that they will not be his bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if
+    they remain on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
+    during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to Coosaw
+    Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken belonging to a negro.
+    The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from the corporal, to whom the soldier had
+    handed it, thinking that the negroes would not take it from an officer. They then
+    carried it to the superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was
+    given for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but these are
+    sufficient.</p>
+    <p>Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the comforts
+    and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society, for the purpose of
+    maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St. Helena Island, which is under the
+    charge of Friend Hunn, of the good fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in
+    Delaware three thousand dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he
+    now harbors and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
+    which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of the world's
+    people. In this store alone&mdash;and there are others on the island, carried on by
+    private enterprise&mdash;two thousand dollars' worth of goods are sold monthly. To be
+    sure, a rather large proportion of these consists of molasses and sugar,
+    "sweetening," as the negroes call it, being in great demand, and four barrels of
+    molasses having been sold the day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for
+    plates, knives, forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
+    Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,&mdash;in short, the
+    distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform allowance,&mdash;are
+    very generally rejected. But there is no article of household-furniture or wearing
+    apparel, used <a name="page317" id="page317"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    317]</span> by persons of moderate means among us, which they will not purchase, when
+    they are allowed the opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South
+    would open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops astir. Four
+    millions of people would become purchasers of all the various articles of manufacture
+    and commerce, in place of the few coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in
+    gross by the planters. Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The
+    indisposition to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
+    superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed and fed, the
+    sense of security derived from provision for the future, the feeling of self-respect,
+    the love of family and children, and the convictions of duty. These all exist in the
+    negro, in a state of greater or less development. To give one or two examples. One
+    man brought Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
+    obtained from selling pigs and chickens,&mdash;thus providing for the future.
+    Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same officer,
+    intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred dollars, to be transmitted
+    by him to their wives, and this besides what they had sent home in other
+    ways,&mdash;showing the family-feeling to be active and strong in them. They have
+    also the social and religious inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of
+    Hilton Head, they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
+    for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the Government longer
+    to provide them. The result was a contribution of two dollars and forty-eight cents.
+    They had just fled from their masters, and had received only a small pittance of
+    wages, and this little sum was not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the
+    treasury. Another collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena
+    Island, upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses of
+    worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,&mdash;not a bad collection for some of our
+    Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are said to be lowest, and sad
+    indeed are some features of their lot, yet with all earnestness and confidence I
+    enter my protest against the wicked satire of Carlyle.</p>
+    <p>Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste which has
+    troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer be used as slaves, men
+    will try to see how they can make the most out of them as freemen. Your Irishman, who
+    now works as a day-laborer, honestly thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war
+    is over, he will have no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
+    household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or to hiring him
+    to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our prejudices, under any
+    reasonable adjustment of the social system, readily accommodate themselves to our
+    interests, even without much aid from the moral sentiments.</p>
+    <p>Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public trusts are
+    charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive in the minds of these
+    people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must be addressed. All the elements of
+    human nature must be appealed to, physical, moral, intellectual, social, and
+    religious. Imperfect indeed is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers
+    wages, but does not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars
+    or thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to bind both
+    parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them, and truth
+    requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good deal of petty pilfering
+    among them, although they are faithful to trusts. This is the natural growth of the
+    old system, and is quite <a name="page318" id="page318"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    318]</span> likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present disturbed
+    and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the rigid virtues. But
+    inferences from this must not be pressed too far. When I was a private soldier in
+    Virginia, as one of a three-months' regiment, we used to bide from each other our
+    little comforts and delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
+    disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
+    characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom to the
+    conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And what inferences might
+    not one draw, discreditable to all traders and manufacturers, from the universal
+    adulteration of articles of food! These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood
+    in order to get rations and small benefits,&mdash;a natural vice which comes with
+    slavery, and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
+    demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed, hypocritical, but
+    satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and indulgence in
+    emotion,&mdash;psychological manifestations which one may find in more advanced
+    communities. They show no special gratitude to us for liberating them from bonds. Nor
+    do they ordinarily display much exhilaration over their new condition,&mdash;being
+    quite unlike the Italian revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the
+    forum, and personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
+    chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their excitement when an
+    attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while the assault on Charleston was
+    going on, and in their desire to get their friends and relatives away from the
+    Rebels,&mdash;an appreciation of freedom, if not ostentatious, at least sensible.</p>
+    <p>But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races to
+    self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and conceited,
+    Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of one other nation are
+    sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these therefore be slaves? And where is
+    that model race which shall sway them all? A people may have grave defects, but it
+    may not therefore be rightfully disabled.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different occasions, to
+    note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment, known as the First Regiment
+    of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General Hunter's first regiment was mainly made
+    up of conscripts, drafted May 12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months
+    afterwards, there being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going
+    home to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On the 10th
+    of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent authority to raise five
+    thousand colored troops, began to recruit a regiment. His authority from the War
+    Department bore date August 25th, and the order conferring it states the object to be
+    "to guard the plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
+    This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise a negro
+    regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words in the instructions of
+    Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the original expedition went to Port
+    Royal, authorizing him to organize the negroes into companies and squads for such
+    services as they might be fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for
+    military service. Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to
+    General Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
+    payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General Saxton, numbered
+    four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson took command of it on the 1st
+    of December; and on the 19th of January, 1863, it had increased to eight hundred and
+    forty-nine. It has made three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,&mdash;one before
+    Colonel Higginson assumed <a name="page319" id="page319"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 319]</span> the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the
+    women of England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in January
+    up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which it occupied for a
+    few days until an evacuation was ordered from head-quarters. The men are volunteers,
+    having been led to enlist by duty to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and
+    to us, their allies. Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
+    themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white regiments in
+    skirmishing. In <i>morale</i> they seemed very much like white men, and with about
+    the same proportion of good and indifferent soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal,
+    like Robert Sutton, whom Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of
+    the whole expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
+    capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said, addressing a
+    meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights, thinking of the war and of
+    his people,&mdash;that, when he heard of the regiment being formed, he felt that his
+    time to act had come, and that it was his duty to enlist,&mdash;that he did not fight
+    for his rations and pay, but for wife, children, and people.</p>
+    <p>These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily depressed,
+    and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have been reluctant to
+    engage in military service,&mdash;their imagination investing it with the terrors of
+    instant and certain death. But this reluctance has passed away with participation in
+    active service, with the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the
+    latent manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was of the
+    first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,&mdash;a truthful man, and not given to
+    rose-colored views,&mdash;"I did not have faith in arming negroes, when I visited the
+    North last autumn, but I have now. They will be not mere machines, but real tigers,
+    when aroused; and I should not wish to face them." One amusing incident may be
+    mentioned. A man deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in
+    the district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
+    Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes, became excited
+    with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a furlough on his return, went
+    to the plantation where he had hid, and said he would not take five thousand dollars
+    for his place.</p>
+    <p>But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the change of
+    feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a change due in part to
+    the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the President's Proclamation of January
+    1st, which has done much to clear the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines,
+    but more than all to the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
+    expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the 6th of
+    April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty on Port Royal
+    Island,&mdash;the first active duty it had performed on the Sea Islands,&mdash;and
+    was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a march of ten miles, it
+    reached the advanced picket-station, there were about two hundred soldiers of the
+    Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a
+    careless tone, to one of the Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's
+    regiment as it stood in line,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"</p>
+    <p>"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as I have to
+    fight for them."</p>
+    <p>A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting him as
+    their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a soldier,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"What do you think of that regiment?"</p>
+    <p>The answer was,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot <a name="page320" id="page320"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 320]</span> the Rebels than have the Rebels shoot me"; and none
+    of the by-standers dissented.</p>
+    <p>As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station at the
+    Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the Pennsylvania soldiers,
+    just formed into line preparatory to marching to Beaufort. The countenances of the
+    latter, which I watched, exhibited no expression of disgust, dislike, or
+    disapprobation, only of curiosity. Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the
+    hominy left from the morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command
+    of the relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
+    stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid desired. This was,
+    it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways than one in which to perform
+    even an official duty. I rode back to Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a
+    captain of the First Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said
+    "he wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our fighting."
+    He pronounced the word as spelled with two <i>g</i>s; but I prefer to retain the good
+    English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled regiment, most of whom were
+    conscripts, said that on his return from Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men
+    ashore in charge of some prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them
+    approach from the wharf, one said,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"What are those coming?"</p>
+    <p>"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the answer.</p>
+    <p>"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.</p>
+    <p>But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was inquired.</p>
+    <p>"Why, some Secesh prisoners."</p>
+    <p>"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then the response
+    from all.</p>
+    <p>So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had demonstrated
+    their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember that such an unreasonable
+    and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time existed; but it is never worth while to
+    suppress the truth of history. This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free
+    States; and one of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston,
+    on the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the Fifty-Fourth Regiment
+    of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of negro soldiers which the Free
+    States have sent to the war. On the day previous, May 27th, a far different scene
+    transpired on the banks of the Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months
+    before in Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and one
+    with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge on the batteries
+    of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass, the survivors, many with
+    mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks and pressing on again, careless of
+    life, and mindful only of honor and duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in
+    the annals of war, and leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves
+    and their race.</p>
+    <p>I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson. Devoting himself
+    heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties, and bearing his oppressive
+    responsibility as the leader of a regiment in which to a great extent are now
+    involved the fortunes of a race, he adds another honorable name to the true chivalry
+    of our time.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again among the
+    familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that Major-General Butler, first of
+    all the generals in the army of the Republic, and anticipating even Republican
+    statesmen, had clearly pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two
+    accomplished women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
+    every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two good men, <a
+    name="page321" id="page321"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 321]</span> one at the fort
+    and the other at Norfolk, were distributing the laborers on farms in the vicinity,
+    and providing them with implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had
+    furnished. Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
+    ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war, had been for a
+    brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to one whom they remembered as
+    the first to point them to freedom and cheer them with its prospect could hardly be
+    received without emotion. But there is no time to linger over these scenes.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
+    particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in doubt, is no
+    longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a consummation. The negroes
+    will work for a living. They will fight for their freedom. They are adapted to civil
+    society. As a people, they are not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity,
+    nor from the vices which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said
+    to take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it may not be
+    possible in a single generation to restore the pristine manhood. One who expects to
+    find in emancipated slaves perfect men and women, or to realize in them some fair
+    dream of an ideal race, will meet disappointment; but there is nothing in their
+    nature or condition to daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to
+    cheer and fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
+    industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly fortitude, for
+    social and family relations, for religious culture and aspirations; and these
+    qualities, when stirred and sustained by the incitements and rewards of a just
+    society, and combining with the currents of our continental civilization, will, under
+    the guidance of a benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them
+    a constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the calamity of
+    another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity of being again their
+    oppressors.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>NO AND YES.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          I watched her at her spinning;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And this was my beginning
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of wooing and of winning.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          But when a maid opposes,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And throws away your roses,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          You say the case forecloses.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Yet sorry wit one uses,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Who loves and thinks he loses
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Because a maid refuses.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          For by her once denying
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She only means complying
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Upon a second trying.
+        </div>
+        <a name="page322" id="page322"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 322]</span>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          When first I said, in pleading,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She heard me half unheeding.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          When afterward I told her,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And blamed her growing colder,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          She dropped upon my shoulder.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Her very look dispelled it,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I caught her hand, and held it.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Along the lane I led her,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And while her cheeks grew redder,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I sued outright to wed her.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Good end from bad beginning!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          My wooing came to winning,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And still I watch her spinning.
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE MATHER SAFE.</h2>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
+    &mdash;&mdash; College in New England procured me access to the library belonging to
+    that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had previously enjoyed
+    the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning for money to buy books for
+    interment in this choice literary catacomb; nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction
+    of an annual stare at them through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the
+    effect that nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
+    occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more to the
+    select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the shelves, could really
+    use the library, I demanded this favor of the gentleman who desired to recompense me
+    for what I had done for him. The Librarian, who valued books as things capable of
+    being locked up in cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion
+    of rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my credentials. The
+    authority, however, was not to be questioned;&mdash;I was to be admitted to the
+    library at any hour of the day; and I took care to drop a civil expression to imply
+    my estimation of the privilege and my purpose of enjoying it.</p>
+    <p>Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a course of
+    reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon Saturday afternoons,
+    and finally to establish myself, with whatever authors I had selected, in a certain
+    retired alcove devoted to the metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind
+    Crawford's bust of the late President T&mdash;&mdash;, and is nearly opposite the
+    famous Mather Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
+    of &mdash;&mdash; College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
+    word of the history of the spacious <a name="page323" id="page323"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 323]</span> and ancient coffer to which allusion is made.</p>
+    <p>The Mather Safe&mdash;which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily bound
+    with that metal&mdash;is said to have been among the possessions of the author of the
+    "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral descendant of the Mathers,
+    an eccentric character, popularly known as Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor,
+    and had the reputation of being enormously rich, the College authorities of his day
+    were accustomed to treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I
+    believe, as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic blandishments
+    may have had upon their object cannot at present be determined. For when the day came
+    for the long-expected will to be opened, it was found that the old gentleman had
+    bequeathed to the College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let
+    into the wood-work in one corner of the same,&mdash;which papers were not to be
+    removed or opened for a hundred years.</p>
+    <p>It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with the best
+    grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for considerable expense
+    necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in the library. Yet, not satisfied
+    with this culpable negligence, Mr. Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the
+    acceptance of his gift. He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather
+    Safe, of which he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
+    President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could have access to
+    its contents except in the presence of the other. Moreover, he required that the Safe
+    should be used only as a receptacle for packages which the depositors desired to keep
+    from the world for at least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would
+    have endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers left in
+    the Safe,&mdash;these being considered instruments whereby immense possessions would
+    finally come to the College. But, as their worthy friend, however niggardly in other
+    respects, had taken care to save nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of
+    disregarding his wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so,
+    many years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the conditions
+    already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so many persons appeared
+    to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had
+    been consigned to various periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women.
+    These were numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
+    severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living person, perhaps
+    to the future occupant of some professor's chair or metropolitan pulpit.</p>
+    <p>It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite alcove
+    opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight thickened without the
+    building, and the type began to blur within, I would lay aside my book and muse over
+    wild rumors of secrets borne by this messenger between the generations. Journals and
+    letters, it was said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
+    history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the world. There
+    were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church and State, which their
+    perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before their fellows, but which, in the
+    bitterness of remorse, they had recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to
+    future times,&mdash;thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
+    should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was vague talk, also,
+    of funds which had been deposited to found some professorship in the College, to
+    furnish some instruction which the age was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too,
+    there were intimations of endowments to establish scholarships for women,
+    who,&mdash;so <a name="page324" id="page324"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    324]</span> it was argued,&mdash;after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of
+    years, would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In short,
+    there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the blood, as this tough
+    old ark, buffeting slowly through the years, entered its familiar night. If there was
+    deficiency in the testimony which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there
+    was, doubtless, sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
+    interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.</p>
+    <p>During the latter part of a certain August&mdash;my family being established at
+    the seaside&mdash;I determined to devote a long day to the College Library. The fact
+    was, that a trifling domestic incident&mdash;no other than the smoking of a
+    kitchen-chimney&mdash;had turned my attention to the conditions of atmospheric
+    changes. Certain phenomena I had observed seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in
+    popular text-books. Indeed, as it appeared to me, modifications of a received
+    theory&mdash;which might be determined by a diligent comparison of existing
+    authorities&mdash;would suggest a household economy of great practical importance.
+    Certain facts, which must have been noted by all the great voyagers of the world,
+    might give me data from which to establish the suspected conclusion. I accordingly
+    repaired to the library at a very early hour, and labored through the day in
+    collecting and committing to writing what had been observed by many eminent
+    navigators upon the point in question. Four o'clock in the afternoon found me too
+    tired to apply any process of analysis to the observations obtained. I therefore
+    retired to my accustomed seat, took down almost the first book which came to hand,
+    and resigned myself to the impressions of a favorite author. I had passed about an
+    hour in a delicious state of dreamy tranquillity, sometimes reading, sometimes
+    pausing to color the faded page with the brilliant hues of more modern thought, when
+    my attention was attracted by a familiar voice proceeding from the neighborhood of
+    the Mather Safe.</p>
+    <p>"The President and Treasurer were to have been here at five o'clock."</p>
+    <p>"I have heard nothing of it," said the Librarian. "I am sure that the President is
+    out of town for the day."</p>
+    <p>"Strange! strange!" exclaimed the Reverend Mr. Clifton, in a very excited tone. "I
+    wish to make a deposit of great importance in the Mather Safe. I had the assurance
+    that the Safe should be opened at five this afternoon. Here, read the solemn promise
+    upon which I have come from Foxden!"</p>
+    <p>The Librarian glanced at an open letter which Clifton held out to him, and said,
+    in a quiet manner,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"The President promises to meet you in the College Library on the afternoon of
+    Thursday, the twenty-fourth instant; to-day is Wednesday, the twenty-third."</p>
+    <p>"Is it possible?" muttered the clergyman, with a look of startled despair. "Pardon
+    my disturbance. I have been hardly myself for these last weeks. Yet I can wait."</p>
+    <p>I spoke to Mr. Clifton as he was about to leave the library. He blenched at
+    hearing my voice, and strove to conceal the package beneath his arm.</p>
+    <p>"How do my good friends in Foxden?" said I, inviting him into my alcove. "Is it
+    true that Dr. Dastick has presented his cabinet of curiosities to the town?"</p>
+    <p>"What are you reading?" said the clergyman, in a tone of curt authority very
+    foreign to the mild persuasiveness of his usual professional accents.</p>
+    <p>I exhibited the title of the book: it was the "Meditations of Descartes."</p>
+    <p>"And do you follow those who vainly seek for truth through the inner world of man,
+    not conforming themselves to the necessities of the outward world and the teachings
+    of Revelation?"</p>
+    <p>I defended the usefulness of some acquaintance with the original and powerful
+    thinker, whose apologies are certainly profuse enough to satisfy the most
+    orthodox.</p>
+    <a name="page325" id="page325"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 325]</span>
+    <p>"Yes; I suppose you read Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, the Atheism of D'Holbach,
+    Utilitarianism Systematized by Auguste Comte! Did you ever go fishing in a dory when
+    the wind was off shore?"</p>
+    <p>There was an alarm in the eye and manner of Mr. Clifton, a tremulous restlessness
+    in his speech, which warned me to avoid discussion, and endeavor to soothe his
+    agitation. It was only to the last interrogatory, therefore, that I made some light
+    reply.</p>
+    <p>"The sea sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an
+    extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations some
+    illustration which presents itself,&mdash;"the boat tosses on from wave to wave, for
+    dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from shore, and throw the anchor.
+    What auspicious expansion of soul and body! How we slide up and down the backs of
+    great billows, and cast our lines with ever-varying success! But the night comes, and
+    with it the necessity of rowing back against wind and tide. Ah, then how long the
+    lonely ocean-leagues! How distant the time when we may hope to stand confused and
+    giddy upon solid earth! Some never see the land again, but are swept out into the
+    storm and darkness, and are lost,&mdash;<i>lost</i>!"</p>
+    <p>"I presume I understand the significance of your similitude," I replied, a little
+    annoyed at this inopportune indulgence of the pastoral privilege. "You would imply
+    the dangerous tendency of a certain sort of philosophical speculation; and so far we
+    doubtless agree. Yet I ought to say, that, in cases where personal investigation is
+    possible, I would take neither popular clamor nor learned dogmatism as conclusive
+    evidence against any writer's honesty and usefulness. With the vulgar, genius has
+    always seemed a sort of madness; and should a man rise preeminent above the teachers
+    of his generation, his wisdom would appear to them as foolishness."</p>
+    <p>A change came over the face of Clifton as I said these words. It was as if a mask
+    had fallen. Perchance he had wished to appear to me in that character of instructor
+    which he desired some competent person to assume to him. Now, the relaxed muscles and
+    averted eye only asked the sympathy of an equal. He spoke with forced, and almost
+    grating, utterance.</p>
+    <p>"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may bear into
+    the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general perception, too pure for even
+    exceptional recognition."</p>
+    <p>"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says true, holds
+    many mystic signals which the past and present could address only to the
+    future,&mdash;signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but which the freemasonry of
+    higher intelligence shall render plain in the time hereafter."</p>
+    <p>"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,&mdash;"what if I had come to
+    add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may be for other times?
+    What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we common men, who find a life full
+    of active duties presented to our acceptance,&mdash;should such as we, I say, receive
+    this world as a pageant before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The
+    conceit of external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
+    element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind only an
+    awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now tolerated, but an
+    extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether wanting the perception, that,
+    rising from the gross symbols of language, can know the subtile and precious emotion
+    which in a more advanced state of being those symbols might suggest."</p>
+    <p>As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous excitability,
+    I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what he said, or even demand that
+    it be made intelligible by further explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied
+    in striving to identify this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance,
+    the pastor of the <a name="page326" id="page326"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    326]</span> First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had once been
+    said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality popularly known as "The
+    Transcendentalists." But this was many years ago; and the world always supposed that
+    he had outgrown his early errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England,
+    a more genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
+    remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to resist the social
+    influences into which they may be thrown. This was probably the case even where that
+    influence tended to degrade him from the plane he would have occupied, if left to
+    himself. His spiritual life seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely
+    important to contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which
+    should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some moments, Clifton
+    again addressed me.</p>
+    <p>"Recollections of moments, months of excitement, of intense power, have returned!
+    They may not fade again unspoken. You shall know my long-cherished secret. Younger in
+    years, you may scarcely advise; but, at least, you may give sympathy that shall
+    confirm my decision. I have engaged rooms at the neighboring hotel. Come and pass the
+    evening&mdash;nay, the night&mdash;with me; for much must be read and thought and
+    spoken before the black veil of personality can be lifted between us."</p>
+    <p>It has already been observed that my family were at the seaside. This circumstance
+    left me sole disposer of my time and localities. How, then, resist the inclination to
+    see out the adventure upon which I had stumbled? Let me credit myself also with a
+    worthier motive: I saw that my companion was in no state to be left to
+    himself,&mdash;and, really, there was no mutual friend to whom I could consign him.
+    Accordingly I offered my arm in a manner to imply acquiescence in his proposal.</p>
+    <p>We soon reached the hotel, and ascended to a room in the remote corner of a
+    spacious wing. Clifton at once turned the key, placed his package upon the table, and
+    proceeded to employ a stray bit of carpet in stopping a ventilator which communicated
+    with the entry. Having satisfied himself that this passage was rendered impervious to
+    sound, he drew two chairs up to the table, motioned me into one, and planted himself
+    in the other with the air of a man, in popular phrase, about to make a night of
+    it.</p>
+    <p>"Did you ever hear of Herbert Vannelle?" he asked, abruptly.</p>
+    <p>It can hardly be necessary to say that a substitute is here placed for the name
+    really mentioned.</p>
+    <p>I replied in the negative, and asked where the gentleman lived.</p>
+    <p>"He lives nowhere on earth; he is dead,&mdash;just dead."</p>
+    <p>"A friend of yours?"</p>
+    <p>"A master once; now a presence eluding, haunting, torturing. He left me this
+    manuscript; it is a 'Philosophy of the Absolute.'" (Here Clifton drew from a
+    curiously contrived case of parchment a cluster of pages.) "It has now twenty-two
+    hours to appear in the present century. You shall devote the night to reading it, and
+    tell me that I have acted well."</p>
+    <p>A sultry August evening, a smoky boarding-house lamp, much skirmishing of
+    mosquitoes, and&mdash;a manuscript system of philosophy! The prospect was not
+    inviting. The reading of other people's manuscripts is surely the crucial test of a
+    devoted benevolence. There are few ways in which I am so little ready to oblige my
+    fellow-men. I had, indeed, at times, been induced to inspect sundry romances in
+    blotted embryo; but, as yet, nobody had called upon me with a system of philosophy.
+    <i>Printed</i> philosophy is none too easy reading. But to sit there, under the
+    guardianship of Clifton, and spell out the dim dogmatism of some nebulous
+    fanatic,&mdash;of course it was not to be thought of for a moment. With a
+    <i>suave</i> periphrasis of speech I questioned the expediency of the
+    proposition.</p>
+    <a name="page327" id="page327"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 327]</span>
+    <p>"I shall ring for candles that will burn during the night," said Mr. Clifton,
+    heedless of my expostulation. "Also some refreshment. You take tea, I suppose? You
+    shall read the first ten pages of Vannelle's writing. It is possible you may exercise
+    self-control enough to abandon it unfinished. But you will not sleep tonight."</p>
+    <p>There was a confidence in the minister's tone which gave rather unpleasant
+    emphasis to this final prophecy. Still, I believed myself capable of the ten pages
+    without establishing a hopelessly wakeful condition,&mdash;indeed, it was something
+    to be guarantied against the opposite infirmity. The tea, accompanied by a few thin
+    shavings of toast, presently arrived. The means of procuring light were also
+    furnished us. Clifton's hand lay heavily upon the manuscript until the attendant had
+    disappeared for the last time, and the door was locked behind him. He then opened the
+    papers before me, and signified that the time had come. I braced myself as for a
+    serious undertaking.</p>
+    <p>Thus I accepted the task. How give words to the singular emotions which soon
+    possessed me? As if some charm, some spell of magnetism, had been given to the paper,
+    my whole consciousness was riveted upon it. I know not how to represent this bold,
+    this startling attempt to establish a positive basis for metaphysical philosophy, an
+    exact science of all things human and divine. Here was a man, perchance of more
+    courage and conscience, perchance of more devilish recklessness, than any of his
+    contemporaries. But how deal with what came to me from that wondrous writing in the
+    ambiguities of common language? All thought&mdash;even supposing it embodied in a
+    perfect form of speech&mdash;is subject to the limitations of the recipient mind. My
+    own glimpses of the writer's meaning were necessarily most indistinct. I cannot
+    attempt to transfer them. I was controlled by a force not my own. The shadow of a
+    mysterious power was over me. The mists of sentimental pantheism were left far below
+    the clear-cut summits whither the reader was invited to ascend. There was an
+    interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the apparent letter than that of
+    Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for a widely different purpose) what the
+    Romish Church has ever declared,&mdash;that the Scriptures, recording spiritual
+    truth, cannot be comprehensible to the natural understanding,&mdash;that, while the
+    Sacred Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual verity
+    only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was an idealism, it
+    nevertheless manifested itself through the plainest realities. The solution of the
+    problem seemed to come not from one point, but from all points. Certainly there was a
+    tendency towards the supersensible; but this direction was taken through stern
+    grappling with the actual. At one time I struggled against the august spirit that was
+    borne in upon me; at another, I was utterly subdued by the lofty enthusiasm of the
+    writer,&mdash;something within me capable of absolute cognition seemed responding to
+    his appeals. But the pith and vitality of this marvel could be recognized only by
+    long experience. And here the student was required to stake his soul upon a perilous
+    cast. For, if not pursued and fathomed to full satisfaction, this view of things
+    would be disturbing, paralyzing. With any half-acceptance a man might scarcely live.
+    It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals into a musical
+    instrument, and then every event in time might touch it to exquisite harmony. But the
+    more ravishing the beauty which seemed offered through perfect realization of this
+    knowledge, the more blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a
+    selfish dilettanteism. For in certain passages were breathed faint suggestions, that
+    moral codes held sacred by the people could not bind the initiated,&mdash;nay, that
+    what seemed most evil might be so explained as to become wholly legitimate to the
+    elect.</p>
+    <p>It was far into the night. I had gone over about a third of the manuscript. <a
+    name="page328" id="page328"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 328]</span> Sharp questions
+    assailed my ears. Was I bound to jeopard all the common good of life for the chance
+    of&mdash;just failing to know existence from a higher plane? Could I ascend so far
+    above the frailties of average men as to receive in purity and innocence the license
+    which acceptance of this strange scheme would surely give? Dim-sighted as I was, it
+    was necessary to rise and dispel this splendid phantasm. I shuddered in sudden alarm
+    at the danger which threatened me. By a spasmodic movement, in which I failed to
+    recognize any presence of my will, the manuscript was closed and handed to Clifton.
+    Welcome existence under coarsest and harshest terms, rather than tamper with such
+    fearful possibilities!</p>
+    <p>For hours the minister had gazed into my face, partaking the excitement to which
+    he had subjected me. He had lighted and trimmed the candles, as was necessary, but
+    had never broken silence. And now there came from him the deep sigh of relief from an
+    absorbing interest; he sighed as a little child when the fairytale is ended and the
+    tense strain of attention may be relaxed.</p>
+    <p>"What was this man?" I demanded, hurriedly.</p>
+    <p>"What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be found out at
+    all. What he was is not for me nor for you to know. It is possible that he may meet
+    with competent judges hereafter, even among men. Look at this address."</p>
+    <p>Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate disposition of the
+    manuscript. It was to remain for eighty years in the Mather Safe, and was then to be
+    consigned to the occupant of the Chair of Moral Philosophy in the College.</p>
+    <p>"Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!" I exclaimed. "I
+    doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession will feel disposed to
+    abandon the market-worth of conventional acquirements, and set forth as a humble
+    student of unpopular truth."</p>
+    <p>The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration I had
+    indicated.</p>
+    <p>The darkest hour of the night had come. Every sound of human activity had long ago
+    ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily probe an intense experience. I
+    felt that more was to be known,&mdash;something which the minister longed to
+    tell,&mdash;something to which what he had caused me to read was to serve as a
+    prelude. I suspected how powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence
+    of the Idea which he had carried. Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it
+    might prevent all harmonious action,&mdash;it might ever goad the intellect, and
+    crush the heart. As the confession trembled upon the lips of Clifton, I signified my
+    profound sympathy. It is an awful moment, when a mature man tries to put off the
+    solitariness of his life.</p>
+    <p>What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person. The pathetic
+    earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very phrases that he used;
+    there can be few verbal changes as they now flow from the pen.</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <center>
+      NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.
+    </center>
+    <p>I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great bereavement,
+    received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at that time about twelve
+    years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome annuity, which he spent with the utmost
+    liberality. As I was rather a thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was
+    determined that I should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my
+    seventeenth birthday,&mdash;an age somewhat later than the average at that time.</p>
+    <p>Two years before me in college was the class of 18&mdash;. Upon the roll of its
+    fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an orphan, <a
+    name="page329" id="page329"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 329]</span> inclined to
+    thought and study beyond the limited academic range of those days, endowed with
+    personal fascinations of a very rare and peculiar kind,&mdash;there seemed only one
+    possible shadow to darken his career. In his family there had been said to exist a
+    tendency to eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed
+    for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college, had given much
+    uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle with which he was socially
+    connected. Upon the death of his wife he had retired to the Vannelle homestead in the
+    northwestern part of Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he
+    insisted upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and
+    companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended his studies
+    with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to accomplish him in the grace of
+    physical power, at that time little recognized as a part of education.</p>
+    <p>So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the young men of
+    the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he left America on the day
+    his class graduated. His connections with the other students had been very slight. He
+    had never cared to acquire that fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon
+    which college-rank depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value
+    in his connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with the
+    openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the bewildering sophistries of
+    the school-philosophies, and their aimless wrangling over verbal conceits.</p>
+    <p>At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting rounds upon
+    the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often encountered Vannelle in search
+    of some volume of which I had just possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I
+    was soon fascinated by a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and
+    persuaded by a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no
+    other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that which the
+    mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an interest in directing
+    my inquiries along the paths to which they naturally tended, he never communicated
+    the results of his own studies, or offered me the slightest assistance in
+    generalizing my random observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he
+    was influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the writings
+    of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest notoriety, yet never
+    for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights where those earnest spirits
+    soared.</p>
+    <p>Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the time that
+    my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him during his absence was from
+    the scattered notices of newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert
+    possessed the privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for
+    knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter dated from
+    X&mdash;&mdash;, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed almost a command,
+    to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert had returned, and thus
+    abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until the autumn the study of a
+    profession, I promised to come to him for a few weeks,&mdash;a visit which might be
+    extended, were it mutually agreeable.</p>
+    <p>There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars, before
+    arriving in the village of X&mdash;&mdash;; there were also six rough miles of
+    carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house by the damp
+    river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there, Vannelle stood at the door
+    to greet me.</p>
+    <p>"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering himself of some
+    studied speech,&mdash;"we have six months' concern together; then we may <a
+    name="page330" id="page330"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 330]</span> stand at the
+    parting of the ways,&mdash;we may cleave to one another, or separate forever."</p>
+    <p>A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and cedars.
+    The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into dusty ridges. The
+    wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the pine-trees without. Little oval
+    mirrors distorting the human countenance within. In the living-room (so called by
+    those able to live in it) loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral
+    proportion,&mdash;a ghastly altar which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel
+    fully justified in protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the
+    house, had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused mass
+    of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical apparatus about the
+    floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to the ceiling;&mdash;at first I
+    supposed them to be made of painted wood; afterwards I discovered they were of iron,
+    and filled with rare books and manuscripts.</p>
+    <p>"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He wished to
+    get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is no escape in a
+    New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our farmer, could never resist the
+    feminine itch to put things to rights. She was always contriving to arrange papers
+    and books in symmetrical piles where nothing could be found. My father could never
+    turn his back but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were
+    lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom of dust that
+    hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this room, and kept the key of
+    it, there was no more trouble."</p>
+    <p>I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which I hardly
+    dare to put into words must accompany them. All these surroundings, seen by me for
+    the first time, had a fearful familiarity. In some occult state of spiritual
+    existence I seemed to have known them all. I have learned that the soul may enter
+    into communion with other minds otherwise than through the senses,&mdash;nay, more,
+    it may thus take an inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had
+    such proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this
+    startling suspicion for the first time.</p>
+    <p>"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the house.
+    "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber projecting over the
+    porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he wore at city club-houses and
+    family-dinners,&mdash;but the man as you knew him <i>here</i>, how little does it
+    resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet which stands between the windows, it has
+    associations, no doubt, but it is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the
+    fireplace may be interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as
+    corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious subjects and
+    execrable drawing always put me."</p>
+    <p>The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and said,
+    slowly,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Have you been here before?"</p>
+    <p>"No."</p>
+    <p>"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"</p>
+    <p>"No."</p>
+    <p>"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned purity. It is
+    as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."</p>
+    <p>The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the study. I
+    glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which seemed in strange contrast
+    with the exquisitely neat and even fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of
+    proud pity touched the lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as
+    if I had read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of mankind, fret <a
+    name="page331" id="page331"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 331]</span> our souls at
+    trifles,&mdash;we, who are to be instruments in marshalling the race from slavery and
+    folly to wisdom and freedom? Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth
+    shall be alike, and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as
+    the highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to
+    declare!"</p>
+    <p>These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into my
+    consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been uttered. It was with
+    awe that this mystic correspondence between mind and mind was made plain to me. One
+    man out of this myriad-bodied humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was
+    never more to be alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in
+    the potter's hands!</p>
+    <p>At length Herbert spoke.</p>
+    <p>"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to me,&mdash;not by
+    my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till I go to join my father,
+    with his great work more nearly completed than when it came to my hands. At that
+    table he died, with some glimpses of the promised land whither he tended,&mdash;where
+    he prayed that I might enter."</p>
+    <p>There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,&mdash;no utterance of the heart, but
+    rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered in the memory.</p>
+    <p>"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,&mdash;you, whose career might be
+    such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must know, the wonderful
+    gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be ignorant of the fascination you might
+    exercise over man and woman."</p>
+    <p>"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise," exclaimed
+    Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,&mdash;if not through spiritual grace, then by
+    some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you certain qualities of mind
+    that may serve to regulate the equipoise of mine. I have the means to provide for us
+    both during the high speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in
+    this undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural from the
+    spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of obtaining an absolute
+    ground for the philosophy which should include all things human and divine. He passed
+    onward before the inestimable gift he seemed to have won could be set forth in the
+    symbols of the world. To see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular
+    adaptation through which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express
+    the truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such colored
+    mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man has found out the
+    knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos: shall he not perfect that
+    knowledge in the Law which includes the divine element by which the universe is
+    informed? How can we love with our whole heart what we do not know with our whole
+    mind? Clifton, I declare to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and
+    acts is possible to man!"</p>
+    <p>I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been moved by
+    utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the words, not the wild power
+    of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring courage that struck me from his eye.
+    Almost against my will there was produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to
+    demand the impress of some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst
+    of the garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes shall
+    be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."</p>
+    <p>I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly lores, that I
+    at length came to think it possible he might be the appointed instrument of
+    communicating the singular intelligence that he sought. He proposed to review the
+    different systems built by human <a name="page332" id="page332"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 332]</span> thought before applying himself to the problem of
+    finding a system of philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from
+    the extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position&mdash;when that
+    position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious
+    thinker&mdash;some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking from the
+    conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after the inaccessible, but a
+    definite effort so to place the soul and discipline the understanding that wisdom
+    could be realized without process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he
+    had no love for the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as
+    finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He declared that
+    only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of speculative deism. Let me
+    also say this for my friend,&mdash;that his directing stimulus to action was neither
+    ambition nor curiosity, but what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the
+    world would have called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow
+    wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest self-culture only
+    as a state of more passionate yearning for regeneration.</p>
+    <p>What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble companionship?
+    how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the feasibility of the object he
+    strove to attain? We read together certain manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in
+    which, wrapt in a gorgeous symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which,
+    at times, could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints,
+    apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored to grasp
+    them, vanished like a vision.</p>
+    <p>Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with Vannelle
+    in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I knew an intellectual
+    intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of spirit wholly delivered from the burden
+    of the flesh. Vannelle talked like one inspired upon the higher problems of
+    metaphysical research, showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations
+    of the philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to have
+    cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it from a position
+    whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable oppressions marked the rhythm
+    in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of
+    blessedness, were equally wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed
+    impossible that any words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the
+    thought which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding to
+    what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of opinion man had
+    known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and despair analogous to those
+    which succeed physical intoxication. The grosser systems of antiquity were not only
+    considered, but actually personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us
+    to penetrate into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how
+    nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how the noblest
+    virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we learned to welcome these
+    convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly bearing us onward towards our destined
+    goal.</p>
+    <p>&mdash;But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was the
+    delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?) which has overhung
+    my earthly life.</p>
+    <p>Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,&mdash;partially broken.
+    During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from friends once dear to me
+    had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly valueless. On the eleventh of November I
+    started,&mdash;as a black seal was to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last
+    instalment of his annuity had been paid, and my little <a name="page333"
+    id="page333"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 333]</span> sister, an orphan and
+    penniless, was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then
+    hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put the letter
+    into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him forever. Let me forget the
+    bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged to provide for my sister from his own
+    ample means, and even offered her an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient
+    sanity to perceive the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither
+    removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a condition to be
+    sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would be confused, and finally
+    petrified. Had this refined probing and questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was
+    this the end of my Absolute Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of
+    the conscience and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such
+    questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have bantered aside. I
+    seemed to realize the torture described in the dream of Dante,&mdash;two souls
+    struggling together in one frail body. I had been applauding good and condemning evil
+    when it cost me nothing but the sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose
+    cracked and shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the
+    victory have ached through my life.</p>
+    <p>There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my bread; for
+    how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and huckster through the
+    world,&mdash;<i>I</i>, who had thought to condition the Spirit of the Universe? But
+    there were metaphors faintly shadowing divine things, symbols adapted to the
+    limitations of the popular mind, and with these I might do an honest work for the
+    souls of men. <i>Honest?</i> Yes,&mdash;unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he
+    declared that he spoke of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something
+    than not to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the clergy
+    this is the daily cross,&mdash;the necessity of maintaining a fixed position, and
+    ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever yearning upward to be taught.</p>
+    <p>It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by school-teaching, I
+    achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to qualify for enrolment among the
+    liberal clergy of New England. Until the time when my sister left me by marriage I
+    was settled at N&mdash;&mdash;, on the Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old
+    Dr. P&mdash;&mdash; of Foxden, and I received a call to his vacant parish. I knew
+    that the sort of society to be found in that place would minister to my most urgent
+    need. I craved some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal
+    spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might speak freely, and
+    from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the years had led us! Sometimes there
+    came a whisper that I had been snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls;
+    sometimes my only opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead.
+    I could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever was I
+    controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant power. No occupation
+    was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading presence of Herbert Vannelle.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary of the day
+    that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a written sermon on those
+    solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not of faith is sin." For the first time
+    I shrank from the consciousness that the words uttered were true to me in a very
+    different sense from that in which the congregation received them. I found it
+    difficult to poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available
+    representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously in the
+    afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could perceive that my
+    pulse and breathing <a name="page334" id="page334"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    334]</span> were accelerated. A certain numbness of the brain seemed pierced with
+    convulsive, fugitive shocks. An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral
+    sympathy, seemed beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but
+    could find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come
+    incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and boisterous
+    objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too nearly acquainteth us. More
+    of these no man hath known than myself; which I confess I conquered, not in martial
+    attitude, but on my knees."</p>
+    <p>An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have said that I
+    spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before. Indeed, I was conscious of
+    a capacity to receive and convey such portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to
+    their needs. To speak in figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued
+    my soul.</p>
+    <p>Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw myself upon a
+    sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state where one far distant may
+    make himself perceived and known. The occult power of foreknowing events, the
+    delicate perception of forbidden things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the
+    brain. I became conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I
+    knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the night. One by one
+    went out the scattered village-lights. Another consciousness of twenty years seemed
+    compressed into those brilliant, bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort
+    and supplied oil; it would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew
+    that Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.</p>
+    <p>A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul burning with
+    lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the face,&mdash;it was ghastly,
+    livid as the face of a leper: it was spectral,&mdash;blanched and dried with the
+    white flames of his exalted vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible
+    triumph! The old idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon
+    my visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of time. His
+    magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself&mdash;and wait. At length the
+    silence was broken.</p>
+    <p>"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught! For the
+    last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense. The impulses with
+    which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me. Alone, alone, I have risen from
+    the abysmal depths of personality. I have struggled fiercely. I have also
+    conquered."</p>
+    <p>The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some voluntary
+    disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had cut away the lusts for
+    pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would kiss that ghastly cheek? What
+    sycophant could fawn and smirk in that chilly presence? The injunctions concerning
+    the offending eye and hand Vannelle had interpreted literally.</p>
+    <p>"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction seized by
+    effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity, and you may guess a
+    little of the sublime contentment which wraps me round! Does the best stage-trick of
+    your liberal clergy help them to anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into
+    artistic forms of skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
+    affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men? How can you
+    come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it alone dogmatic and
+    compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you from this haze of thought and
+    feeling,&mdash;I, who have even now discarded Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."</p>
+    <a name="page335" id="page335"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 335]</span>
+    <p>"I hope to be pardoned," I said,&mdash;"the current of this life sets so in favor
+    of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with sentiment,&mdash;why try to
+    give them ideas?"</p>
+    <p>"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties," exclaimed
+    Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the pardonable weakness of one
+    who has done his best. You may be guiltless in failing to attain the strength, the
+    glory, of a true conviction."</p>
+    <p>"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.</p>
+    <p>"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in this
+    manuscript the result of my life,&mdash;the result of two lives. Here is written, as
+    clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human language, that which may suggest
+    the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but
+    divinely founded upon Law."</p>
+    <p>I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.</p>
+    <p>"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
+    manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may be brought to
+    you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with the pride of inventing
+    arguments and detecting analogies, if they have only given you the petty skill of a
+    petty scholar, why then dally on with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments,
+    and give others the blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."</p>
+    <p>"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may have found,
+    it is for your honor to promulgate."</p>
+    <p>"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual manhood is
+    indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters towards earth. My
+    responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will now begin."</p>
+    <p>A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid as Fate
+    seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that Vannelle had left the room.
+    Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the
+    distance. A dream of passionate excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old
+    hopes, of the life I might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of
+    Vannelle seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable thirst
+    that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the manuscript, and devoured
+    page after page. Then I felt the approaches of a supreme despotism that might
+    annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to be,&mdash;that might compel me to denounce
+    all that I had taught, to hear all that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer
+    at me as an impostor, an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited
+    to come above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and encouraged
+    by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself where the most earnest
+    souls&mdash;unless a second birth could be granted them&mdash;would scoff with the
+    ignorance and intolerance of the mass.</p>
+    <p>At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.</p>
+    <p>One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A physical
+    emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the influence of the
+    night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I closed the manuscript forever.
+    Hereditary imperfections of body and mind confine me to a sphere of reputable
+    usefulness. If I have sinned in the past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes
+    suspect, I have thrust from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss
+    through all eternity will be mine.</p>
+    <p>In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>As the last words of his strange narration fell from Clifton's lips, he bowed his
+    head and was greatly agitated. The <a name="page336" id="page336"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 336]</span> vast theologic conception over which he had so long
+    brooded, instead of lifting him on high, had crushed him to the earth. His moral
+    consciousness had demanded a satisfaction which he lacked integrity of purpose to
+    pursue and challenge. A fixed conviction of the dreariest pessimism would have been
+    better for this man than the lofty uncertainty which had tortured his days; for in
+    the belief that one may neither struggle nor aspire there is a certain practical
+    drift. But how shall he do any good who bears about him a quick conscience, a
+    skeptical understanding, sensitive religious affections, and a feeble will? Charles
+    Clifton had neither the leisure, nor possibly the application, to follow the creeping
+    advances of systematic knowledge. He had listened to a fatal persuasion, and at the
+    same time had sought to satisfy contradictory principles of the human mind. The
+    kindest thing I could do for him was soon perceived.</p>
+    <p>"Reverend Sir," I said, "you must permit me to advise you. It is now six o'clock.
+    In an hour the early train leaves for Foxden. You must take it and return home. Any
+    further vacuum in your daily employment will produce a crushing pressure from without
+    that might endanger reason itself. I solemnly promise to deposit this manuscript in
+    the Mather Safe,&mdash;nay, I will not leave town until the President and Treasurer
+    have met me this afternoon according to your agreement. I pledge you my honor that
+    the parchment shall be consigned to its resting-place with every necessary
+    formality."</p>
+    <p>My companion gazed long upon vacancy before returning any answer. He strove to
+    dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in shapeless beauty. He walked
+    up and down the chamber, paused, threw open the window, and looked upon the street
+    below. I felt that every petty detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful
+    vividness upon the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he spoke to this
+    effect: &mdash;</p>
+    <p>"A grief has been lessened in giving it words. My deepest and most solitary
+    moments have been revealed to human sympathy, and the relief is great. It may be that
+    I have been created to some wholesome end,&mdash;that some truth may shine before the
+    world through what seems the failure of my life. I will return at once to the sphere
+    of the senses: it is, as you say, all that is left me. Let who will inquire into the
+    significance and purpose of the Universe; it is for me to work in the bondage of the
+    flesh, to be the humble tool of the age in which my lot is cast."</p>
+    <p>Yet it was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the conclusion of
+    the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar nervous temperament
+    foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the precious legacy of his friend. It
+    was only by addressing his reason in repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating
+    my entire fidelity, that I induced him to yield.</p>
+    <p>It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.</p>
+    <p>I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding. Without
+    acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by what I had read and
+    heard. As Clifton emerged from the magical influence of Vannelle, was it not
+    concentrated upon me? The impulse to return to the perusal of the manuscript was
+    almost irresistible. Yet it was evident, that, failing to receive as my very life
+    what was there written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and
+    contradictions. A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my only
+    safety.</p>
+    <p>It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries tending to
+    modify the received understanding of a certain natural law. During my morning in the
+    College Library I had collected the records of many facts, which, laboriously
+    compared, might confirm the hypothesis I had conceived. I now braced myself to the
+    task of tracing an order in these random observations. I was soon stimulated by
+    perceiving that my <a name="page337" id="page337"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    337]</span> statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at first
+    roused my suspicion. More and more plainly did man's experience respond to the
+    results I had dared to predict. Trivial circumstances, noted in remote times and
+    disconnected places, pointed in one direction, and there beat the regular pulse of
+    Nature.</p>
+    <p>It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards discovered, that
+    the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been already conceived and passed upon
+    by a not very eminent scientist in one of the Western States. But at that time
+    absorption in the search for attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with
+    very brief intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the
+    afternoon-hour for visiting the library.</p>
+    <p>The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o'clock.</p>
+    <p>For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather Safe,
+    wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular than the
+    consignment about to be made to its keeping.</p>
+    <p>"Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?" inquired the President.</p>
+    <p>"I am here to represent him," I replied. "He made a strange mistake in the day of
+    appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning. The package which he
+    wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my hand."</p>
+    <p>"<i>Lex Universalis Natur&aelig;</i>; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE," exclaimed
+    the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment. "Poh, poh! I thought
+    that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to the limbo of fallacies."</p>
+    <p>"By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for anything not
+    transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has," I rejoined, somewhat tartly.</p>
+    <p>"Come, come!" said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones; "since the
+    days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians have generally been
+    broken-down poets, and should be treated with the greatest tenderness. Some flighty
+    minds will prefer dangerous trips to dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of
+    figures; but the mass of our graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that
+    only the mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers
+    only natural philosophers are competent instructors."</p>
+    <p>"Yet, Sir," I said, "you will remember that the time was when your natural
+    philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State. Even the mathematician
+    is defined by an old lexicographer to be '<i>Magus d&aelig;monum invocator</i>'; and
+    I cannot forget that all that is of honor and respect to-day is but the actual of a
+    once despised ideal."</p>
+    <p>I really marvelled at my own audacity in presuming to question the words of this
+    distinguished and excellent gentleman. Indeed, it was particularly surprising,
+    because (if I knew myself) I precisely agreed with him. But there is a certain
+    waywardness in my composition, which loves to puncture an inflated conventionality,
+    even when I myself am most conventional.</p>
+    <p>In the mean time the Treasurer, taking the President's key with his own, had
+    opened the Safe. I looked in and beheld coffers of lead and oak, nooks and
+    pigeon-holes covered and sealed with the College seal, little cells of glass which
+    appeared to hold documents of the utmost importance, and, in short, whatever might
+    best defy the injuries of time. The weighty book which registered the contents of the
+    Safe was opened before me. I was told to write the number assigned to the manuscript,
+    to describe its present condition, and to indicate its destination. This I carefully
+    did, and was about to confide my charge to its long oblivion.</p>
+    <p>"Stay!" said the President. "You have forgotten the mottoes! Here is only one; and
+    it is our rule that every deposit in the Mather Safe be distinguished by three, in as
+    many languages.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        '<i>Alteri S&aelig;culo</i>.'
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <a name="page338" id="page338"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 338]</span>
+    <p>The selection is good, though it has already been adopted by a Massachusetts
+    statesman. It is now for you to supply two others."</p>
+    <p>Singular as it may appear, this sudden call to perform a trifling office which I
+    had not anticipated, filled me with a conflict of emotions. In choosing another's
+    words, I seemed to indorse or repudiate the strange matter with which they were to be
+    associated. I thought of Vannelle's wondrous language, of Clifton's exhilaration, and
+    of the vivid buoyancy with which my spirit had striven to rise. I even groped for
+    some phrase which might hint what delicate a&euml;rial impressions had tended to
+    condense the soul on the supreme point of spiritual ecstasy. But memory was a blank
+    when I demanded words for this seeming-glorious fact in the experience of humanity.
+    Success was made impossible by the very intensity of the effort to summon an
+    appropriate message to be dropped over the abyss of Time. I was confident that there
+    were many apt things which might be said, if I could come at them, as it were,
+    sideways. In order that I might take them at this advantage, I snatched a letter from
+    my pocket, and began to read. My eye was soon caught by the impression of a seal that
+    I had once given my wife. It was a good [woman's] motto, I jestingly told her; and
+    now it was returned to me at my sorest need. Six little words of the good
+    Pascal,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "<i>Le plus s&uacute;r est de croire</i>."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Something compelled me to write them, and a new freedom was with me when I had
+    done so.</p>
+    <p>"Make haste, make haste, for the prayer-bell is ringing!" cried the President
+    "See, here is a copy of Plato's 'Ph&aelig;drus,'&mdash;a work which our vapory
+    brethren are fond of quoting, generally at second-hand; perhaps you may pick out a
+    sentence that will prophesy with sufficient ambiguity."</p>
+    <p>But it was not Plato or his "Ph&aelig;drus" that then claimed my thoughts. There
+    loomed a Rock graven with more august instruction than the sage of the Academy was
+    privileged to communicate,&mdash;a Rock against which the heaving surface of human
+    opinion had chafed and broken in vain. Tossed to and fro upon the tide of life, who
+    has not sometimes listened to the wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical
+    Interpretation," "Absolute Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has
+    never been caught by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers,
+    Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature, Clairvoyance, and
+    Magnetic Currents? Happy those who are able to return to that one channel through
+    which magnetic currents have indeed descended from an unseen sphere, and touched the
+    noblest hearts! For there <i>is</i> a certain mediation between the necessities and
+    aspirations of man,&mdash;an assured deliverance from the gross and sordid
+    surroundings of his earthly life. There came before me one simple period from a
+    familiar Book. Most direct and confident is the solemn statement. I wrote it as the
+    final motto.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"NOW THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTILE THAN ANY BEAST OF THE FIELD WHICH THE LORD GOD
+      HAD MADE."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <a name="page339" id="page339"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 339]</span>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THE TERTIARY AGE, AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC ANIMALS.</h2>
+    <p>In entering upon the Tertiaries, we reach that geological age which, next to his
+    own, has the deepest interest for man. The more striking scenes of animal life,
+    hitherto confined chiefly to the ocean, are now on land; the extensive sheets of
+    fresh water are filled with fishes of a comparatively modern character,&mdash;with
+    Whitefish, Pickerel, Perch, Eels, etc.,&mdash;while the larger quadrupeds are
+    introduced upon the continents so gradually prepared to receive them. The connection
+    of events throughout the Tertiaries, considered as leading up to the coming of man,
+    may be traced not only in the physical condition of the earth, and in the presence of
+    the large terrestrial Mammalia, but also in the appearance of those groups of animals
+    and plants which we naturally associate with the domestic and social existence of
+    man. Cattle and Horses are first found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the
+    Rosace&aelig;, with their variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges,
+    Bananas, etc., the shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter
+    of man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil vegetation
+    of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this point of view, showing the
+    gradual maturing and completion of those conditions most intimately associated with
+    human life. The earth had already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn and
+    winter, its seed-time and harvest, though neither sower nor reaper was there; the
+    forests then, as now, dropped their thick carpet of leaves upon the ground in the
+    autumn, and in many localities they remain where they originally fell, with a layer
+    of soil between the successive layers of leaves,&mdash;a leafy chronology, as it
+    were, by which we read the passage of the years which divided these deposits from
+    each other. Where the leaves have fallen singly on a clayey soil favorable for
+    receiving such impressions, they have daguerreotyped themselves with the most
+    wonderful accuracy, and the Oaks, Poplars, Willows, Maples, Walnuts, Gum- and
+    Cinnamon-trees, etc., of the Tertiaries are as well known to us as are those of our
+    own time.</p>
+    <p>It was an eventful day, not only for science, but for the world, when a Siberian
+    fisherman chanced to observe a singular mound lying near the mouth of the River Lena,
+    where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. During the warmer summer-weather, he noticed,
+    that, as the snow gradually melted, this mound assumed a more distinct and prominent
+    outline, and at length, on one side of it, where the heat of the sun was greatest, a
+    dark body became exposed, which, when completely uncovered, proved to be that of an
+    immense elephant, in so perfect a state of preservation that the dogs and wolves were
+    attracted to it as by the smell of fresh meat, and came to feed upon it at night. The
+    man knew little of the value of his discovery, but the story went abroad, and an
+    Englishman travelling in Russia, being curious to verify it, visited the spot, and
+    actually found the remains where they had been reported to lie, on the frozen shore
+    of the Arctic Sea,&mdash;strange burial-place enough for an animal never known to
+    exist out of tropical climates. Little beside the skeleton was left, though parts of
+    the skin remained covered with hair, showing how perfect must have been the condition
+    of the body when first exposed. The tusks had been sold by the fisherman; but Mr.
+    Adams succeeded in recovering them; and collecting all the bones except those of one
+    foot, which had been carried off by the wolves, he had them removed to St.
+    Petersburg, where the skeleton now stands in the Imperial Museum. The inhabitants of
+    Siberia seem to be familiar with this animal, which they designate by the name of
+    <i>Mammoth</i>, while naturalists call <a name="page340" id="page340"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 340]</span> it <i>Elephas primigenius</i>. The circumstance that
+    they abound in the frozen drift of the great northern plain of Asia, and are
+    occasionally exposed in consequence of the wearing of the large rivers traversing
+    Siberia, has led to the superstition among the Tongouses, that the Mammoths live
+    under ground, and die whenever, on coming to the surface, the sunlight falls upon
+    them.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image1_full.png"><img src="images/image1_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Had this been the only creature of the kind found so far from the countries to
+    which elephants are now exclusively confined, it might have been believed that some
+    strange accident had brought it to the spot where it was buried. But it was not long
+    before similar remains were found in various parts of Europe,&mdash;in Russia, in
+    Germany, in Spain, and in Italy. The latter were readily accounted for by the theory
+    that they must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the
+    armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have been swept from
+    India by some great flood, and stranded where they were found. It was Cuvier,
+    entitled by his intimate acquaintance with the anatomy of living animals to an
+    authoritative opinion in such matters, who first dared to assert that these remains
+    belonged to no elephant of our period. He rested this belief upon structural
+    evidence, and insisted that an Indian elephant, brought upon the waves of a flood to
+    Siberia, would be an Indian elephant still, while all these remains differed in
+    structure from any species existing at present. This statement aroused research in
+    every direction, and the number of fossil Mammalia found within the next few years,
+    and proved by comparison to be different from any living species, soon demonstrated
+    the truth of his conclusion.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image2_full.png"><img src="images/image2_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Shortly after the discovery of fossil elephants had opened this new path of
+    investigation, some curious bones were found by some workmen in the quarries of
+    Montmartre, near Paris, and brought to Cuvier for examination. Although few in
+    number, and affording but very scanty <i>data</i> for such a decision, he at once
+    pronounced them to be the remains of some extinct animal preceding the present
+    geological age. Here, then, at his very door, as it were, was a settlement of that
+    old creation in which he could pursue the inquiry, already become so important in its
+    bearings. It was not long before other bones of the same kind were found, though
+    nothing as yet approaching an entire skeleton. However, with such means as he had,
+    Cuvier began a comparison with all the living Mammalia,&mdash;with the human skeleton
+    first, with Monkeys, with the larger Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the
+    smaller Mammalia, then with the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to
+    find some resemblance. He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to the
+    family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare all the living
+    species, till he had collected ample <a name="page341" id="page341"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 341]</span> evidence to show that the bones in question did not
+    correspond with any species, and could not even be referred to any genus, now in
+    existence. At length there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same
+    animal,&mdash;next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole head
+    with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with Cuvier's vast
+    knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the whole skeleton. At about the
+    same time, in the same locality, were found other bones and teeth also, differing
+    from those first discovered, and yet equally unlike those of any living animal. The
+    first evidently belonged to some stout and heavy animal, the others were more slender
+    and of lighter build. From these fragments, ample evidence to him of his results, he
+    drew the outlines of two animals: one which he called the Pal&aelig;otherium, (old
+    animal,) a figure of which is given in the above wood-cut, and the other
+    Anoplotherium, (animal without fangs). He presented these figures with an explanatory
+    memoir at the Academy, and announced them as belonging to some creation preceding the
+    present, since no such animals had ever existed in our own geological period. Such a
+    statement was a revelation to the scientific world: some looked upon it with
+    suspicion and distrust; others, who knew more of comparative anatomy, hailed it as
+    introducing a new era in science; but it was not till complete specimens were
+    actually found of animals corresponding perfectly to those figured and described by
+    Cuvier, and proving beyond a doubt their actual existence in ancient times, that all
+    united in wonder and admiration at the result obtained by him with such scanty
+    means.</p>
+    <p>It would seem that the family of Pachyderms was largely represented among the
+    early Mammalia; for, since Cuvier named these species, a number of closely allied
+    forms have been found in deposits belonging to the same epoch. Of course, the
+    complete specimens are rare; but the fragments of such skeletons occur in abundance,
+    showing that these old-world Pachyderms, resembling the Tapirs more than any other
+    living representatives of the family, were very numerous in the lower Tertiaries.</p>
+    <p>There is, however, one animal now in existence, forming one of those singular
+    links before alluded to between the present and the past, of which I will say a few
+    words here, though its relation is rather with a later group of Tertiary Pachyderms
+    than with those described by Cuvier. On the coast of Florida there is an animal of
+    very massive, clumsy build, long considered to be a Cetacean, but now recognized, by
+    some naturalists at least, as belonging to the order of Pachyderms. In form it
+    resembles the Cetaceans, though it has a fan-shaped tail, instead of the broad
+    flapper of the Whales. It inhabits fresh waters or shoal waters, and is not so
+    exclusively aquatic as the oceanic Cetaceans. Its most striking feature is the form
+    of the lower jaw, which is bent downward, with the front teeth hanging from it. This
+    animal is called the Manatee, or Sea-Cow. There are three species known to
+    naturalists,&mdash;one in Tampa Bay, one in the Amazon, and one in Africa. In the
+    Tertiary deposits of Germany there has been found an animal allied in some of its
+    features to those described by Cuvier, <a name="page342" id="page342"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 342]</span> but it has the crown of its teeth folded like the
+    Tapir, while the lower jaw is turned down with a long tusk growing from it. This
+    animal has been called the Dinotherium. A part of the head, showing the heavy jaws
+    and the formidable tusk, is represented in the subjoined wood-cut.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image3_full.png"><img src="images/image3_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Its hanging lower jaw, with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly to the
+    formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some resemblance of the
+    Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison with that animal as the next step
+    in the investigation, when it was found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the
+    latter there was a pit with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in
+    its position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. The Elephant was now examined; and in
+    him also a rudimentary tooth appeared in the lower jaw, not cut through, but placed
+    in the same relation to the jaw and the other teeth as that of the Mastodon. It would
+    seem, then, that the Manatee makes one in this series of Dinotherium, Mastodon, and
+    Elephant, and represents the aquatic Pachyderms, occupying the same relation to the
+    terrestrial Pachyderms as the Seals bear to the terrestrial Carnivora, and, like
+    them, lowest in structure among their kind.</p>
+    <p>The announcement of Cuvier's results stimulated research, and from this time
+    forward Tertiary Mammalia became the subject of extensive and most important
+    investigations among naturalists. The attention of collectors once drawn to these
+    remains, they were found in such numbers that the wonder was how they had been so
+    long hidden from the observation of men. They remind us chiefly of tropical animals;
+    indeed, Tigers, Hyenas, Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had
+    their home in countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the
+    climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present. Bones of many
+    of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France, Italy, and England.
+    Perhaps the story of Kirkdale Cave, where the first important discovery of this kind
+    was made on English soil, may not be so well known to American readers as to forbid
+    its repetition here.</p>
+    <p>It was in the summer of 1821 that some workmen, employed in quarrying stone upon
+    the slope of a limestone hill at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, came accidentally upon the
+    mouth of a cavern. Overgrown with grass and bushes, the mouth of this cave in the
+    hill-side had been effectually closed against all intruders, and it was not strange
+    that its existence had never been suspected. The hole was small, but large enough to
+    admit a man on his hands and knees; and the workmen, creeping in through the opening,
+    found that it led into a cavern, broad in some parts, but low throughout. There were
+    only a few spots where a man could stand upright; but it was quite extensive, with
+    branches opening out from it, some of which have not yet been explored. The whole
+    floor was strewn, from one end to the other, with hundreds of bones, like a huge
+    dog-kennel. The workmen wondered a little at their discovery, but, remembering that
+    there had been a murrain among the cattle in this region some years before, they came
+    to the conclusion that these must be the bones of cattle that had died in great
+    numbers at that time; and, having so settled the matter to their own satisfaction,
+    they took little heed to the bones, but threw many of them out on the road with the
+    common limestone. Fortunately, a gentleman, living in the neighborhood, whose
+    attention had been <a name="page343" id="page343"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    343]</span> attracted to them, preserved them from destruction; and a few months
+    after the discovery of the cave, Dr. Buckland, the great English geologist, visited
+    Kirkdale, to examine its strange contents, which proved indeed stranger than any one
+    had imagined; for many of these remains belonged to animals never before found in
+    England. The bones of Hyenas, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, and Hippopotamuses
+    were mingled with those of Deer, Bears, Wolves, Foxes, and many smaller creatures.
+    The bones were gnawed, and many were broken, evidently not by natural decay, but
+    seemed to have been snapped violently apart. After the most complete investigation of
+    the circumstances, Dr. Buckland convinced himself, and proved to the satisfaction of
+    all scientific men, that the cave had been a den of Hyenas<a id="footnotetag4"
+    name="footnotetag4" href="#footnote4"><sup>4</sup></a> at a time when they, as well
+    as Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., existed in England in as great numbers as
+    they now do in the wildest parts of tropical Asia or Africa. The narrow entrance to
+    the cave still retained the marks of grease and hair, such as one may see on the bars
+    of a cage in a menagerie against which the imprisoned animals have been in the habit
+    of rubbing themselves constantly, and there were marks of the same kind on the floor
+    and walls.</p>
+    <p>It was evident that the Hyenas were the lords of this ancient cavern, and the
+    other animals their unwilling guests; for the remains of the latter were those which
+    had been most gnawed, broken, and mangled; and the head of an enormous Hyena, with
+    gigantic fangs found complete, bore ample evidence to their great size and power.
+    Some of the animals, such as the Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., could not have been
+    brought into the cave without being first killed and torn to pieces, for it is not
+    large enough to admit them. But their gnawed and broken bones attest, nevertheless,
+    that they were devoured like the rest; and probably the Hyenas then had the same
+    propensity which characterizes those of our own time, to tear in pieces the body of
+    any dead animal, and carry it to their den to feed upon it apart.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image4_full.png"><img src="images/image4_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other caverns in
+    Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a gigantic species of Bear.
+    Their remains, mingled with those of the animals on which they fed, have been found
+    in great numbers in the Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia. The subjoined wood-cut
+    shows the head of this formidable beast, which must have exceeded in size any Bear
+    now living. <a name="page344" id="page344"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 344]</span>
+    Indeed, although there were many smaller kinds, and the other types of the Animal
+    Kingdom in the Tertiaries seem to approach very nearly both in size and general
+    character their modern representatives, yet, on the whole, the earlier Mammalia were
+    giants in comparison with those now living. The Mastodon and Mammoth, as compared
+    with the modern Elephant, the Megatherium, as compared with the Sloths of present
+    times, the Hyenas and Bears of the European caverns, and the fossil Elk of Ireland,
+    by the side of which even the Moose of our Northern woods is belittled, are
+    remarkable instances in proof of this. One cannot but be struck with the fact that
+    this first representation of Mammalia, the very impersonation of brute force in
+    power, size, and ferocity, immediately preceded the introduction of man, with whose
+    creation intelligence and moral strength became the dominant influences on earth.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image5_full.png"><img src="images/image5_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the North-American
+    continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The magnificent specimens preserved in
+    this country are too well known to require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros
+    occur also in the recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect
+    skeletons have been found. The Edentata, now confined to South America and the
+    western coast of Africa, were also numerous in the Southern States during that time;
+    their remains have been found as far north as the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must
+    not judge of the Tertiary Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the
+    Armadillos, the Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but
+    formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the Megalonyx, and the
+    Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant, and others about the same size
+    of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The subjoined wood-cut represents a Mylodon in the
+    act of lifting himself against the trunk of a tree.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image6_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>They were clumsy brutes, and though their limbs were evidently built with
+    reference to powerful movements, perhaps climbing, or at least rising on their hind
+    quarters, the act of climbing with them cannot have had anything of the nimbleness or
+    activity generally associated with it. On the contrary, they probably were barely
+    able to support their huge bodies on their hind limbs, which are exceedingly massive,
+    and on the stiff, heavy tail, while they dragged down with their front limbs the
+    branches of the trees, and fed upon them at leisure. The Zo&ouml;logical Museum at
+    Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates for a very fine set of
+    casts taken from the Megatherium in the British Museum. They are now mounted, and may
+    be seen in one of the exhibition-rooms of the building. Large Reptiles, but very
+    unlike those of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of
+    Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the Tertiary epochs.
+    The <a name="page345" id="page345"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 345]</span> wood-cut
+    below represents a gigantic Salamander of the Tertiary deposits. It is a curious
+    fact, illustrative of the ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that,
+    when the remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first discovered
+    toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were described by old Professor
+    Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually
+    preserved, not for their scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and
+    described in a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Homo Diluvii Testis." Among the Tertiary
+    Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their size as well
+    as by their extensive distribution. Their remains have been found both in the far
+    West and in the East. The fossil Turtles of Nebraska are well known to American
+    naturalists; but the Oriental one exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most
+    gigantic representative of the order known thus far. A man could stand under the arch
+    of the shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image7_full.png"><img src="images/image7_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <a href="images/image8_full.png"><img src="images/image8_thumbnail.png" alt="" />
+      </a>
+    </div>
+    <p>It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than the most
+    cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed, they are so well
+    known, and have been so fully represented in text-books, that I fear some of my
+    readers may think even now that I have dwelt too long upon them. Monkeys were
+    unquestionably introduced upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones
+    have been found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the
+    later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected in sufficient
+    number to establish much more than the fact of their presence in the animal creation
+    at that time. I do not offer any opinion respecting the fossil human bones so much
+    discussed recently, because the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any
+    decisive judgment concerning them. It becomes, however, daily more probable that
+    facts will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far beyond
+    any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human races, as of animals,
+    have followed one another upon the earth. It may be the inestimable privilege of our
+    young naturalists to solve <a name="page346" id="page346"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 346]</span> this great problem, but the older men of our
+    generation must be content to renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision
+    of its fulfilment, we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not
+    enter in and possess it.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image9_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image10_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image11_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>The other great types of the Animal Kingdom are very fully represented in the
+    Tertiaries, and in their general appearance they approach much more closely those of
+    the present creation than of any previous epochs. Professor Heer has collected and
+    described the Tertiary Insects in great number and variety; and the Butterflies,
+    Bugs, Flies, Grasshoppers, Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., described in his volumes,
+    would hardly be distinguished from our own, except by a practised entomologist. Among
+    Crustacea, the Shrimp-like forms of the earlier geological epochs have become much
+    less conspicuous, while Crabs and Lobsters are now the prominent representatives of
+    the class. Among Mollusks, the Chambered Shells, hitherto so numerous, have become,
+    as they now are, very few in comparison with the naked Cephalopods. The Nautili,
+    however, resemble those now living in the Pacific Ocean; and some fragments of the
+    Paper-Nautilus have been found, showing that this delicate shell was already in
+    existence. There is one very peculiar type of this class, belonging to the
+    Tertiaries, which should not be passed by unnoticed. It partakes of the character
+    both of the Cretaceous Belemnites and of the living Cuttle-Fish, and is known as the
+    Spirulirostra. Another very characteristic group among the Tertiary Shells is that of
+    the Nummulites, formerly placed by naturalists in immediate proximity with the
+    Ammonites, on account of their internal partitions. This is now admitted to have been
+    an error; their position is not yet fully determined, but they certainly stand very
+    low in the scale, and have no affinity whatever with the Cephalopods. The subjoined
+    wood-cut represents one of these Shells, so numerous in the Tertiaries that large
+    masses of rock consist of their remains. The Univalve Shells or Gasteropods of the
+    Tertiaries embraced all the families now living, including land and fresh-water
+    Shells as well as the marine representatives of the type. Some of the latter, as, for
+    instance, the Cerithium, are accumulated in vast numbers. The limestone quarries out
+    of which Paris is chiefly built consist wholly of these Shells. The fresh-water
+    basins were filled with Helices, one of which is represented in the following <a
+    name="page347" id="page347"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 347]</span> wood-cut, with
+    Planorbis, Limn&aelig;us and other Shells resembling those now so common in all our
+    lakes and rivers, and differing from the living ones only by slight specific
+    characters. The Bivalves also have the same resemblance to the present ones,
+    including fresh-water Mussels as well as the marine Clams and Oysters. Among
+    Radiates, the higher Echini (Sea-Urchins) have become numerous, while the other
+    Echinoderms of all families abound. Corals include, for the first time, the more
+    highly organized Madrepores.</p>
+    <div class="figcenter">
+      <img src="images/image12_full.png" alt="" />
+    </div>
+    <p>In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things, not only in
+    the character of the animals and plants, but in the height of the mountains and in
+    the distribution of land and sea.</p>
+    <p>Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been following, and
+    see what these more recent geological epochs have done for their completion. In
+    Europe they have filled the basin in Central France, and converted all that region
+    into dry land: they have filled also the channel between France and Spain; they have
+    united Central Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
+    greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the promontories of Italy
+    and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at the foot of the Jura into the plain
+    of Switzerland. But this fruitful period in the progress of the world, when the
+    character of organic life was higher and the physical features of the earth more
+    varied than ever before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees,
+    the Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and Himalayas,
+    were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or in the course of the
+    Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant passage in her history, Europe
+    acquired all her essential characters. There remained, it is true, much to be done in
+    what is called by geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet
+    finished when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
+    stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued from the
+    water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her soil was clothed with
+    field and forest, processes by which her valleys were to be made more fruitful, her
+    gulfs to be filled with the rich detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole
+    surface to be rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess
+    it.</p>
+    <p>We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
+    geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic, and Jurassic
+    epochs little was added to the United States, though here and there deposits
+    belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous epoch, however, large tracts of
+    land were accumulated, chiefly in the South and West; and during the Tertiaries the
+    continent was very nearly completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the
+    neighborhood of St. Louis to be filled by modern detritus, and the peninsula of
+    Florida to be built by the industrious Coral-Workers of our own period. The age of
+    the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was probably raised at
+    the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that time, only the Laurentian Hills, the
+    northern side of that mountainous triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were,
+    of the United States, existed. The upheaval of the Alleghanies added its eastern
+    side, raising the central part of the continent so as to form a long slope from the
+    base of the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean; but it was not until the Tertiary Age
+    that the upheaval of the great chain at the West completed the triangle, and
+    transformed that wide westerly slope into <a name="page348" id="page348"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 348]</span> the Mississippi Valley, bounded on one side by the
+    Alleghanies, and on the other by the Rocky Mountains.</p>
+    <p>It is my belief, founded upon the tropical character of the Fauna, that a much
+    milder climate then prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere than is now known to
+    it. Some naturalists have supposed that the presence of the tropical Mammalia in the
+    Northern Temperate Zone might be otherwise accounted for,&mdash;that they might have
+    been endowed with warmer covering, with thicker hair or fur. But I think the simpler
+    and more natural reason for their existence throughout the North is to be found in
+    the difference of climate; and I am the more inclined to this opinion because the
+    Tertiary animals generally, the Fishes, Shells, etc., in the same regions, are more
+    closely allied in character to those now living in the Tropics than to those of the
+    Temperate Zones. The Tertiary age may be called the geological summer; we shall see,
+    hereafter, how abruptly it was brought to a close.</p>
+    <p>One word more as to the relation of the Tertiary Mammalia to the creation which
+    preceded them. I can only repeat here the argument used before: the huge quadrupeds
+    characteristic of these epochs make their appearance suddenly, and the deposits
+    containing them follow as immediately upon those of the Cretaceous epoch, in which no
+    trace of them occurs, as do those of the Cretaceous upon those of the Jurassic epoch.
+    I would remind the reader that in the central basin of France, in which Cuvier found
+    his first Pal&aelig;otherium, and which afterwards proved to have been thickly
+    settled by the early Mammalia, the deposits of the Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary
+    epochs follow each other in immediate, direct, uninterrupted succession; that the
+    same is true of other localities, in Germany, in Southern Europe, in England, where
+    the most complete collections have been made from all these deposits; and there has
+    never been brought to light a single fact leading us to suppose that any intermediate
+    forms have ever existed through which more recent types have been developed out of
+    older ones. For thirty years Geology has been gradually establishing, by evidence the
+    fulness and accuracy of which are truly amazing, the regularity in the sequence of
+    the geological formations, and distinguishing, with ever-increasing precision, the
+    specific differences of the animals and plants contained in these accumulations of
+    past ages. These results bear living testimony to the wonderful progress of the
+    kindred sciences of Geology and Pal&aelig;ontology in the last half-century; and the
+    development-theory has but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to
+    strengthen itself by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of
+    which, in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument of its
+    upholders.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page349" id="page349"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 349]</span>
+    <h2>THE NEW SANGREAL.</h2>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          "Show me the Sangreal, Lord! Show me Thy blood!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Thy body and Thy blood! Give me the Quest!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Lord, I am faint and tired; my soul is sick
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of all the falseness, all the little aims,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The weary vanities, the gasping joys,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The slow procession of this satiate world!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Dear Lord, I burn for Thee! Give me Thy Quest!
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Down through the old reverberating time,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          I see Thy knights in wonderful array
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Go out to victory, like the solemn stars
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fighting in courses, with their conquering swords,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Their sad, fixed lips of purity and strength,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Their living glory, their majestic death.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          He lay upon a mountain's rocky crest,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So high, that all the glittering, misty world,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All summer's splendid tempests, lay below,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And sudden lightnings quivered at his feet;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So still, not any sound of silentness
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Expressed the silence, nor the pallid sun
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Burned on his eyelids; all alone and still,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Save for the prayer that struggled from his lips,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Broken with eager stress. Then he arose.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But always, down the hoary mountain-side,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Through whispering forests, by soft-rippled streams,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          In clattering streets, or the great city's roar,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Still from his never sated soul went up,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Through all the land there poured a trumpet's clang,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And when its silvery anger smote the air,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Men sprang to arms from every true man's home,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And followed to the field. He followed, too,&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All the mad blood of manhood in his veins,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          All the fierce instincts of a warring race
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Kindled like flame in every tingling limb,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And raging in his soul on fire with war.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He heard a thousand voices call him on:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Lips hot with anguish, shrieking their despair
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From swamps and forests and the still bayous
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          That hide the wanderer, nor bewray his lair:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From fields and marshes where the tropic sun
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Scorches a million laborers scourged to work;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From homes that are not homes; from mother-hearts
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Torn from the infants lingering at their breasts;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From parted lovers, and from shuddering wives;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          From men grown mad with whips and tyranny;
+        </div>
+        <a name="page350" id="page350"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 350]</span>
+        <div class="line">
+          From all a country groaning in its chains.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Nor sleep, nor dream beguiled him any more;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He leaped to manhood in one torrid hour,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And armed, and sped to battle. Now no more
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          He cried or prayed,&mdash;"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          So in the front of deadly strife he stood;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The glorious thunder of the roaring guns,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The restless hurricane of screaming shells,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The quick, sharp singing of the rifle-balls,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The sudden clash of sabres, and the beat
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Of rapid horse-hoofs galloping at charge,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Made a great chorus to his valorous soul,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The dreadful music of a grappling world,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          That hurried him to fight. He turned the tide,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But fell upon its turning. Over him
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Fluttered the starry flag, and fluttered on,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          While he lay helpless on the trampled sward,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          His hot life running scarlet from its source,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And all his soul in sudden quiet spent,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          As still as on the silent mountain-top;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So still that from his quick-remembering heart
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Burst that old cry,&mdash;"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Then a bright mist descended over him,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And in its central glory stood a shape,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Wounded, yet smiling. With His bleeding hands
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Stretched toward that bleeding side, His eyes divine
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Like a new dawn, thus softly spake the Lord:&mdash;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          "The blood poured out for brothers is my blood;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The flesh for brothers broken is my flesh;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          No more in golden chalices I dwell,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          No longer in a vision, angel-borne:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Here is the Sangreal, here the Holy Quest.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Thy prayer is heard, thy soul is satisfied:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Come, my belov&egrave;d! I am come for thee.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          As first I broke the bread and poured the wine,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So have I broken thee and poured thy life,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So do I bless thee and give thanks for thee,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          So do I bear thee in my wounded hands."
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Smiling, He stooped, and kissed the tortured brow,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          And over all its anguish stole a smile;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          The blood-sealed lips unclosed; the dying breath
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Sighed, like the rain-sound in a summer wind,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Sobbing, but sweet,&mdash;"I see the Sangreal, Lord!"
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <a name="page351" id="page351"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 351]</span>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>THOMAS DE QUINCEY.</h2>
+    <p>In the notice of so memorable a man, even the briefest prelusive flourish seems
+    uncalled for; and so indeed it would be, if by such means it were meant simply to
+    justify the undertaking. In regard to any of the great powers in literature there
+    exists already a prevailing interest, which cannot be presumed to slumber for one
+    moment in any thinking mind.<a id="footnotetag5" name="footnotetag5"
+    href="#footnote5"><sup>5</sup></a> By way of notification, there is no need of
+    prelude. Yet there are occasions, as, for example, the entrances of kings, which
+    absolutely demand the inaugural flourish of arms,&mdash;which, like the rosy flood of
+    dawn, require to be ushered in by a train of twilight glories. And there are lives
+    which proceed as by the movements of music,&mdash;which, must therefore be heralded
+    by overtures: majestic steppings, heard in the background, compel us, through mere
+    sympathy with their pomp of procession, to sound the note of preparation.</p>
+    <p>Else I should plunge <i>in medias res</i> upon a sketch of De Quincey's life; were
+    it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the important ceremony of
+    prelibation, and that at a banquet to which, implicitly, gods are invited. The reader
+    will assuredly unite with me in all such courtesies,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Neu desint epulis ros&aelig;";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
+    incantations,&mdash;only the heralding of certain precise claims will this monarch
+    listen to as the just <i>inferi&aelig;</i>, the fitting sacrifice or hecatomb of our
+    homage.</p>
+    <p>The key-note of preparation, the claim which pre&euml;minently should be set forth
+    in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of hierophants, or of pontifical
+    hierarchs, as regards all those profound mysteries which from the beginning have
+    swayed the human heart, sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it
+    upwards to an altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with
+    the shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
+    hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as concrete
+    incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open light the everlasting
+    symbols, universally intelligible when once disclosed, which <a name="page352"
+    id="page352"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 352]</span> are folded in the involutions
+    of dreams and of those meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner
+    of these revelations, no Roman <i>pontifex maximus</i>, were it even C&aelig;sar
+    himself, could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.</p>
+    <p>The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated. It was
+    his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain secret recesses of
+    human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along that border-line by which the
+    glimmerings of consciousness are, as by the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil,
+    separated from the regions of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked
+    familiarly and with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
+    inscribed meanings did he&mdash;this Champollion, defying all human enigmas, this
+    Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms and yawning abysses
+    of human astronomy&mdash;resolve into orderly constellations, that, once and for all,
+    through his telescopic interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and
+    commensurable amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
+    psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life, two of which
+    are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition towards meditation,
+    constituting him, in the highest sense of the word, a poet. Secondly, the peculiar
+    qualities which this singular mental constitution derived from his use of
+    opium,&mdash;qualities which, although they did not increase, or even give direction
+    to his meditative power, at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual
+    capacity, and creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
+    concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a degree of
+    psychological interest which belongs to no other on record. Nor is this all. The
+    reader knows how often a secondary interest will attach to the mightiest of
+    conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns, who is not merely in himself, and through
+    his own deeds, magnificent, but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by
+    numerous reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
+    doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, and
+    a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of the Turkish Solyman, as by some
+    subtile connection of fate sympathetic with his own. A secondary interest of this
+    nature belongs to the life of De Quincey,&mdash;a life which inclosed, as an island,
+    a whole period of English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
+    unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of Wordsworth,
+    Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. His connection
+    with very many of these was not simply that of co&euml;xistence, but also of familiar
+    intercourse.</p>
+    <p>Between De Quincey's life and his writings it is impossible that there should be
+    any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two interwoven: in this case more
+    so than in that of any known author. Particularly is this true of his more
+    impassioned writings, which are a faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life.
+    Hierophant we have called him,&mdash;the prince of hierophants,&mdash;having
+    reference to the matter of his revelations; but in his <i>manner</i>, in his style of
+    composition, he is something more than this: here he stands the <i>monarch</i>
+    amongst rhapsodists. In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of his
+    life and genius.</p>
+    <p>But, besides these, there is a large section of his works, the aim of which is
+    purely intellectual, where feeling is not at all involved; and surely there is not,
+    in either ancient or modern literature, a section which, in the same amount of space,
+    exhibits the same degree of intense activity on the part of the analytic
+    understanding, applied to the illustration of truth or to the solution of vexed
+    problems. This latter class is the more remarkable from its polar antithesis to the
+    former; just as, in his life, it is a most remarkable characteristic of the man, <a
+    name="page353" id="page353"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 353]</span> that, rising
+    above all other men through the rhapsodies of dreams, he should yet be able truly to
+    say of himself that he had devoted a greater number of hours to intellectual pursuits
+    than any other man whom he had seen, heard of, or read of. A wider range is thus
+    exhibited, not of thought merely, but also of the possible modes of expressing
+    thought, than is elsewhere to be found, even in writers the most skilled in
+    rhetorical subtilty. The distance between these two opposites De Quincey does not
+    traverse by violent leaps; he does not by some feat of legerdemain evanish from the
+    fields of impassioned eloquence, where he is an unrivalled master, to appear
+    forthwith in those of intellectual gymnastics, where, at least, he is not surpassed.
+    He is familiar with every one of the intervening stages between the rhapsody and the
+    demonstration,&mdash;between the loftiest reach of aspirant passion, from which, with
+    reptile instinct, the understanding slinks downwards to the earth, and that fierce
+    antagonism of naked thoughts, where the crested serpent "mounts and burns." His
+    alchemy is infinite, combining light with warmth in all degrees,&mdash;in pathos, in
+    humor,<a id="footnotetag6" name="footnotetag6" href="#footnote6"><sup>6</sup></a> in
+    genial illumination. Let the reader, if he can, imagine Rousseau to have written
+    "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in both of which great
+    erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as nothing when compared to the
+    faculty of recombining into novel forms what previously had been so grouped as to be
+    misunderstood, or had lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To
+    have written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or, moving
+    into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to have been the author
+    of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts": that would mount a new plume in
+    Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to be reminded of another little paper,
+    numbering about six pages, entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give
+    him <i>that</i>, too. Why, the <a name="page354" id="page354"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 354]</span> little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
+    consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of this nature,
+    which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse, that the two writers are
+    often mentioned as on the same level, and with no appreciation of that unlimited
+    range of power which belongs to De Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one
+    of the trophies which we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a
+    single volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one imperial
+    column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,&mdash;alas for Rousseau!&mdash;two
+    other <i>spolia opima</i> by which the French master is, in his own field, proved not
+    the first, nor even the second,&mdash;<i>proximus, sed non secundus</i>,&mdash;so
+    wide is the distance between De Quincey and <i>any</i> other antagonist. These two
+    are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan of Arc," and "The English
+    Mail-Coach."</p>
+    <p>It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I have
+    undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about which the
+    thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De Quincey's childhood, and his
+    opium-experiences.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>Thomas de Quincey&mdash;hierophant, rhapsodist, philosopher&mdash;was born at
+    Greenhay, then a suburb of Manchester, in Lancashire County, England, on the 15th of
+    August, 1785. According to his own account, the family of the De Quinceys was of
+    Norwegian origin; and after its transfer to France, in connection with William the
+    Norman, it received its territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in
+    Normandy. Thence, at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
+    where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not merely in
+    connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but chiefly on account of
+    valuable services rendered to the State, and conferring preeminence in baronial
+    privilege and consideration.</p>
+    <p>So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the point of his
+    descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French extraction, that, even
+    into the ears of George III. (that king having, in an accidental interview with him
+    at Frogmore, suggested the possibility of his family having come to England at the
+    time of the Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
+    protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon his purely
+    Norman blood,&mdash;blood that in the baronial wars had helped to establish the
+    earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that had flowed from knightly
+    veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De Quincey came into England with William
+    the Conqueror, uniting with whose fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal
+    baron, founding the line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
+    evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,&mdash;that his armorial device was
+    inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of eminent
+    distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St. Paul's.</p>
+    <p>And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily diverted
+    to the American branch of this family, at the head of which stands the Hon. Josiah
+    Quincy, (the aristocratic <i>De</i> being omitted,)&mdash;a branch which fled from
+    England in the early part of the seventeenth century, to avoid a strife which had
+    then become too intense and fiery to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a
+    few years after their withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the
+    inevitableness of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
+    critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,&mdash;as indicating how surely
+    the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will continue to track our
+    flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of ocean, that ought, if anything
+    could, to interpose an effectual barrier between us and all pursuers, and, having
+    caught up with us in our fancied <a name="page355" id="page355"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 355]</span> retreat, will precipitate upon our devoted heads its
+    accumulated violence,&mdash;as demonstrating thus the melancholy persistence with
+    which that ugly Sphinx who impersonates Justice in our human affairs doggedly insists
+    on having her questions answered, and, coming by a circuitous route upon those who by
+    good luck have escaped her direct path, through an incarnation of unusual terror
+    compels her dread alternative,&mdash;it is interesting to note how this same family,
+    separated by over seven generations from one political revolution, the momentous
+    crisis of which was by them successfully evaded, are now, after an interval of
+    unsound and hollow peace, compelled to witness the precise reiteration of that storm,
+    in the very land to which they fled for refuge,&mdash;a reiteration that repeats,
+    only on a different stage, and under an aggravation of horror as to minute details,
+    not merely two antagonistic races corresponding on either side to those which met in
+    battle on Marston Moor, but also interests far outweighing any that could possibly
+    attach to a conflict between royalty and democracy.</p>
+    <p>But the Earls of Winchester, in England, whatever may have been their prosperity
+    during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came suddenly to an abrupt
+    termination, abutting at length on some guilty traitor in the line, who, like a
+    special Adam for the family, involved in his own ruin that prosperity which would
+    else have continued to his successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal
+    estate, however, remained in possession of separate members of the family, as De
+    Quincey tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last vestige
+    slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together with the name, held
+    also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above the diluvial wreck of the
+    Winchester estates there has arisen an estate far more royal and magnificent, and
+    beneath a far-reaching bow of promise, sealed in magical security against a similar
+    disaster. For just here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the
+    family freshly grounded upon a second heritage,&mdash;one sublime in its order above
+    that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever imperishable,&mdash;namely, the
+    large domain which the gigantic intellect of Thomas De Quincey has absolved from
+    aboriginal darkness and brought under distinct illumination for all time to come.
+    These are the vast acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,&mdash;acres
+    that have been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into the
+    mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some measure bridged over
+    infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have extended the fluctuating
+    boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey himself, in view of that monumental
+    structure which rises above the shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above
+    the mummied dust of Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought
+    in their lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that, possibly,
+    by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been robbed of an
+    earldom,&mdash;or even that, during a life which by some years overlapped the average
+    allotment to humanity, and through which were daily accumulating the most splendid
+    results in the very highest departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations
+    nevertheless went on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in
+    all Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these years, as
+    formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and to Sir William
+    Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of such merely <i>nominal</i>
+    titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in them little that is monumental, and
+    the pretty tinsel, with which they gild monuments already based on substantial worth,
+    is easily, and without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
+    the loving remembrances of human hearts.</p>
+    <p>But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal conditions
+    <a name="page356" id="page356"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 356]</span> in the case
+    of De Quincey,&mdash;though, assuredly, there was never a man upon earth whom these
+    conditions, considered as a&euml;rial hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and
+    magnificence, would more consistently fit,&mdash;we cannot thus easily set aside
+    those other outward conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their
+    presence or absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
+    earliest tendencies and impulses,&mdash;in that season of immature preparation when
+    the channels of habit are in the process of formation, and while yet a marvellous
+    uncertainty hangs and broods over the beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet
+    yet dandled and tended by its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain
+    elements which rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for
+    instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the force and
+    swiftness of a torrent,&mdash;yet how shifting are the mountain-winds, chilling into
+    frosty silence or quickening with Favonian warmth, and how shifting the flying
+    clouds, which, whether marshalled in mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a
+    real conflict, forever sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced
+    childhood, do the scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably,
+    to determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely material,
+    and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in conjunction with
+    heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in this period, with which above
+    all others we associate influences the most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory,"
+    those influences which are purely material are the most efficiently operative.
+    Against the former, adult man, in whom reason is developed, <i>may</i> battle, though
+    ignobly, and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he
+    <i>must</i> struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
+    for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields him from all
+    conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though, because impotent and
+    unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to material circumstance,&mdash;a slavery
+    which he cannot escape, and which, during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his
+    very blood, bone, and nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child
+    succumbs; on the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
+    weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and fortunate indeed
+    it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our first years is thus a gentle
+    dealing with us, fertilizing our powers with the rich juices of an earthly
+    prosperity. And in this respect De Quincey <i>was</i> eminently fortunate. The powers
+    of heaven and of earth and&mdash;if we side with Milton and <i>other</i> pagan
+    mythologists in attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty&mdash;the
+    dark powers <i>under</i> the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in his
+    behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his name they
+    postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him the happiest of all
+    childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining whatever substantial benefits in
+    constitutional temperament and susceptibilities <i>could</i> be thence derived,
+    although lacking, as Pope also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy
+    heralding of this distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of
+    aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely against the
+    assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any one in tolerably
+    comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most trivial hint of possible
+    want,&mdash;against all necessity of limitation or retrenchment in any normal line of
+    expenditure.</p>
+    <p>He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine, died, leaving
+    to his family&mdash;a wife and six children&mdash;an estate yielding annually an
+    income of sixteen hundred pounds. And as at his father's death De Quincey was seven
+    years old, we may reasonably infer, that, during this previous period, while his
+    father was still living, and adding to this <a name="page357" id="page357"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 357]</span> fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains,
+    (which to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the
+    family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly realization of
+    between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time when Napoleon had not as
+    yet meddled with the financial affairs of Europe, nor by his intimidations caused
+    even pounds and shillings to shrink into less worth and significance than they
+    formerly had,&mdash;in view of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great
+    (as in a famous anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the
+    "snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" in the way of crowns and a few dozen sceptres,
+    what a heinous charge must be brought against this Corsican as universal pickpocket!
+    This pecuniary depreciation De Quincey himself realized some years later, when,
+    determining to quit school, he thought himself compelled<a id="footnotetag7"
+    name="footnotetag7" href="#footnote7"><sup>7</sup></a> to cut off all communication
+    with his guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh mountains,
+    wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most scanty means of
+    support,&mdash;for just then the Allies were in full rig against France, and the
+    shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's pocket became palpably evident in view
+    of the increased price of his dinner.</p>
+    <p>The time <i>did</i> come at length when the full epos of a remarkable prosperity
+    was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the unseen future. To the
+    child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy lines that bounded his oasis of
+    flowers into the fruitless waste abroad. Poverty, want, at least so great as to
+    compel the daily exercise of his mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing
+    from the rear; but the sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening
+    years of luxurious opulence and ease.</p>
+    <p>I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's earliest
+    surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice merely as an
+    accident,) because, although not a <i>potential</i> element, capable of producing or
+    of adding one single iota to the essential character of genius, it is yet a negative
+    condition&mdash;a <i>sine qua non</i>&mdash;to the displays of genius in certain
+    directions and under certain aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be
+    intensified. So may it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of
+    power, there still remains a question as to its <i>kind</i>. So deep is the sky: but
+    of what <i>hue</i>, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol but
+    what the <i>mellowness</i>? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite force: but
+    of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister to Moloch, or to Apollo?
+    Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa? Why, the simple fact that the rich
+    blue sky over-arches this earth of ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our
+    veins, is sufficient to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the
+    question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from outward
+    circumstances, but what coloring, what mood. Here it is that a Mozart differs from a
+    Mendelssohn. The important difference which obtains, in this respect, between great
+    powers in literature, otherwise co&ouml;rdinate, will receive illustration from a
+    comparison between De Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a
+    degree rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should say,
+    of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this general office they
+    stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal purple; both have caused to rise
+    between earth and heaven miracles of grandeur, such as never Cheops <a name="page358"
+    id="page358"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 358]</span> wrought through his myriad
+    slaves, or Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
+    <i>modus operandi</i>, of their architecture, they stand apart <i>toto coelo</i>.
+    Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or humanity; but
+    they are those elements only which are allied to gloom, for he builds in suspicion
+    and distrust, and upon the basis of a cynicism that has been nurtured in his very
+    flesh and blood from birth; he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens
+    all human hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
+    archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the bright hopes
+    and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have originated such a Pandemonian
+    monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative
+    power, and nearly the most striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to
+    the sea, in "Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
+    susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And <i>how</i>? Is it
+    through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the movements of
+    destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of the ruin itself,&mdash;ruin
+    revealed upon a scale so vast and under conditions of terror the most
+    appalling,&mdash;ruin wrought under the semblance of an almighty passion for revenge
+    directed against the human race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea
+    maintains toward man, we have the following passage of &AElig;schylian grandeur, but
+    also of &AElig;schylian gloom:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Thou dost arise
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And send'st him, shivering in thy <i>playful</i> spray,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;His petty hope in some near port or bay,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of darkness
+    the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such lamentable lack of faith
+    in the purity and soundness of human affections, have given utterance to a sentiment
+    like this:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        An <i>unseen</i> seraph we believe in thee"?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>or the following:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Who loves, raves,&mdash;'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>and again:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Few&mdash;<i>none</i>&mdash;find what they love or could have loved,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &gt;Necessity of loving having removed
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Antipathies"?
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,&mdash;the removal of all
+    antipathies! But even these</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"recur erelong,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And circumstance&mdash;that unspiritual god
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And miscreator&mdash;makes and helps along
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Whose touch turns hope to dust,&mdash;the dust which all have trod."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such hollow basis
+    for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity, repeated the pomps of joy or
+    of sorrow, as evolved out of universal human nature, and as, through sunshine and
+    tempest, typified in the outside world,&mdash;but never for one instant did he seek
+    alliance, on the one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or,
+    on the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be found on a
+    single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating even a latent sympathy
+    with the power which builds only to crush, or with the intellect that denies, and
+    that against the dearest objects of human faith fulminates its denials and shocking
+    recantations solely for the purposes of scorn.</p>
+    <p>Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace back to the
+    first haunts of childhood the steps <a name="page359" id="page359"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 359]</span> of these two fugitives, each of whom has passed
+    thence, the one into a desert <i>mirage</i>, teeming with processions of the
+    gloomiest falsities in life, and the other&mdash;also into the desert, but where he
+    is yet refreshed and solaced by an unshaken faith in the genial verities of life,
+    though separated from them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where,
+    however apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels, and
+    no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their overmastering
+    seductions to</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Allure, or terrify, or undermine."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by itself.
+    But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with which the conditions
+    of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine the main temper and disposition of
+    our lives. For it is underneath the multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious
+    efforts, born of reason, and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial
+    stand-point, seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the
+    undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled and nurtured
+    with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice, branching out into our
+    specific choices of certain directions and aims among all opposite directions and
+    aims, and which, although we rarely recognize its important functions, is in all
+    cases the arbiter of our destiny. And in the very word <i>disposition</i> is
+    indicated the finality of its arbitraments as contrasted with all
+    <i>proposition</i>.</p>
+    <p>Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but it is the
+    external structure of circumstance, built up or building about childhood,&mdash;to
+    shelter or imprison,&mdash;which, more than all else, gives it its determinate
+    character; and though this outward structure may in after-life be thoroughly
+    obliterated, or replaced by its opposite,&mdash;porcelain by clay, or clay by
+    porcelain,&mdash;yet will the tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway
+    almost uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that preside
+    over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial
+    temperament,&mdash;one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward a
+    centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of strife; secondly,
+    profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence, which, although of all three
+    it is the most negative, the most material condition, is yet practically the most
+    important, because of the degree in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited
+    prosperity of the other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of
+    temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to tender years,
+    or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents' hearts, check the free play
+    of domestic love!&mdash;and in all cases where such limitations are present, even in
+    the gentlest form, there must be a cramping up of the human organization and
+    individuality somewhere; and everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be
+    sensibly felt the absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections
+    of home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a sunshine
+    which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the soul.</p>
+    <p>As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was prosperous;
+    afterwards, vicissitudes came,&mdash;mighty changes capable of affecting all other
+    transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the inwrought grace of a
+    pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's childhood was, in all these
+    elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his mother's heart by the faithless
+    desertion of her husband, after the desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted
+    upon him, and intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
+    outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift himself out of
+    the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been thrust, any more than Vulcan
+    could have cured that crooked gait of his, which dated from <a name="page360"
+    id="page360"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 360]</span> some vague infantile
+    remembrances of having been rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements,
+    one summer's day,&mdash;for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
+    "Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve&mdash;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        <i>A summer's day</i>."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all his other
+    early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian god. Among the
+    guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that, receiving an ample place in his
+    victim's heart, stood demoniacally his ground through life, transmuting love to hate,
+    and what might have been benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on
+    the contrary, a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
+    teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest hours of life:
+    an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images of which, and their echoed
+    festivals, far outlasted the splendor of their material substance.</p>
+    <p>"We,&mdash;the children of the house,&mdash;" says De Quincey, in his
+    "Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier in the social
+    scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of Agur&mdash;'Give me neither
+    poverty nor riches'&mdash;was realized for us. That blessing we had, being neither
+    too high nor too low. High enough we were to see models of good manners, of
+    self-respect, and of simple dignity; obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of
+    solitudes. Amply furnished with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with <i>extra</i>
+    means of health, of intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand
+    we knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the consciousness of
+    privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by privileges too aspiring, we
+    had no motives for shame, we had none for pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am,
+    that, amidst luxuries in all things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of
+    diet,&mdash;that we fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And
+    if (after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks to
+    Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation, these four I would
+    single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I lived in a rural solitude; that
+    this solitude was in England; that my infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of
+    sisters, and not by horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful
+    and loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."</p>
+    <p>Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let him suppose,
+    for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of seven, and having now at
+    least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his peace, could annul his own infancy, and
+    in its place substitute that of one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same
+    age, (and many such could be found,) among those with whom daily the military
+    predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable conflict. Instead of
+    the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be substituted the cotton-dust of the
+    Lancashire mills. The contrast, even in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the
+    irrepressible fires of human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these
+    instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the instance of
+    Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that men have sometimes been
+    nourished by bears or by she-wolves. Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman
+    nurture. The Greeks, on the contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of
+    violets,&mdash;if we may believe the Pindaric odes,&mdash;set over them a divine
+    watch, and fed them with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.</p>
+    <p>And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect
+    <i>leisure</i>. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the subjective
+    relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection with these has the
+    element just introduced any value, since leisure, which <a name="page361"
+    id="page361"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 361]</span> is the atmosphere, the
+    breathing-place of genius, is also cap and bells for the fool. In relation to power,
+    it is, like solitude, the open heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow
+    into the penetralian recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of
+    thought, or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility <i>had</i>
+    been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss of a sister,
+    his favorite and familiar playmate,&mdash;a grief so profound, that he, somewhere, in
+    speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its presence in the hour of death; and
+    thought, also, had been prematurely awakened, both under the influence of this
+    overmastering pathos of sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to
+    meditation. Both the pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the
+    halcyon peace of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
+    childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and expressed itself,
+    not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in abiding love, and the hauntings of
+    meditative power." His, at least, was the felicity of this echoless peace.</p>
+    <p>In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence should be
+    given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a striking peculiarity in his
+    life. If it were not so, I should have seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's
+    attention so long upon a point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no
+    sufficient, at least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
+    cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and just in that
+    ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life itself, No stream can rise
+    above the level of its source. No life, which lacks a prominent interest as to its
+    beginnings, can ever, in its entire course, develop any distinguishing features of
+    interest. This is true of any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others
+    on record, that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
+    repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,&mdash;but with what marvellous
+    transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed, when, for all its future
+    course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No longer does it flow along its natural
+    path, and beneath the open sky, but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Through caverns measureless to man,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Down to the sunless sea."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and the
+    saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its inward, noiseless
+    peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet heaven through the Arethusan font
+    of death. Easily, then, is it to be seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted,
+    both in his conscious reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams,
+    from a life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity of its
+    earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the fatal wreck of life,
+    was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary solace, if not upon the rich argosies
+    that spread their happier sails above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the
+    dream which Milton<a id="footnotetag8" name="footnotetag8"
+    href="#footnote8"><sup>8</sup></a> gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and
+    tired:&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"There he slept,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        He saw the prophet also, how he fled
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Into the desert, and how there he slept
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        He found his supper on the coals prepared,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And eat the second time after repose,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe necessities of
+    the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus solicited and baffled even in
+    dreams,&mdash;if, by the lowest of mortal appetites, <a name="page362"
+    id="page362"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 362]</span> they could be so humiliated
+    and eclipsed as to revel in the shadowy visions of merely human plenty,&mdash;then by
+    how much more must the human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of
+    sorrow and of dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
+    revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands, be carried
+    back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy, flower-strewn fields of some
+    far happier place and time!</p>
+    <p>The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is as natural,
+    therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral antiphonies. Henceforth, as the
+    reader already understands, we are not permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised
+    life, unless we draw aside a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of
+    Isis or the poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this <i>papaverian</i> mask it is likely to
+    be best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater" that he is
+    most generally recognized. It was through his Opium-Confessions, popular both as to
+    matter and style, that he first conciliated and charmed the reading public,&mdash;and
+    to such a degree that great expectations were awakened as to anything which
+    afterwards he might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case
+    it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the public, without
+    its being aware of the nauseating potion, or experiencing any uncomfortable
+    consequences. The flood of popularity produced by the Opium-Confessions among that
+    large intellectual class of readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet
+    insist upon the graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving
+    interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of heavier
+    freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.</p>
+    <p>The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey <i>personally</i> is also
+    very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an opium-eater willing to
+    breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of his situation and its hidden
+    mysteries, or "<i>suspiria de profundis</i>." This interest is partly of that vulgar
+    sort which connects itself with all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in
+    the human mind, with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied
+    with a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a philosophical order,
+    inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal development. It is rarely the
+    case that human vision is especially or deliberately directed to the sun or the moon,
+    except at the marvellous season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty
+    of the appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual nature of
+    the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the people inhabiting this
+    globe are excited by something which calls off their attention from terrestrial
+    trifles to that which connects them with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos,
+    we should, at such times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating
+    monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best, through horrid
+    yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a tremendous counter-irritation upon
+    the earth that should tell mightily on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the
+    heavens. But since we are neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any
+    sort, we take defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is
+    only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of courtesy, to foreign
+    worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come within the circle of human
+    knowledge or notice, which is it that may be said to enjoy the most continuous round
+    of attentions, and to live in excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It
+    is the comet, which no sooner gets out of reach of <i>our</i> flying compliments than
+    she becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth deprecating
+    murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder brother, who, from all
+    such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible under the paternal <a name="page363"
+    id="page363"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 363]</span> wings of the Sun. No one of
+    these erratic visitors can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere
+    in the universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would not have
+    been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict <i>prima donnas</i>.</p>
+    <p>Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that which we
+    manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or the eccentric comet that
+    bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this interest, considered in its vulgar aspects,
+    De Quincey would suffer gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I
+    am certain that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about
+    him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his long
+    sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever description, no
+    tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been able to vie with him in the
+    picturesque <i>d&eacute;shabill&eacute;</i> of the whole "turnout." Picture to
+    yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and patches"&mdash;for, to the outward
+    sense, he seems that now&mdash;has been "at large" for days, perhaps for two or three
+    weeks; he has been unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no
+    restraint upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with
+    panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain impressive
+    recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a trifle too uncanny even
+    for them. As to his subsistence during these rambles, it would be very difficult to
+    say how he managed that affair, at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be
+    that the prophetic limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of
+    his return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,&mdash;that he has made
+    plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his waistcoat-pocket. Like
+    Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering purposely and at his own sweet will, or
+    rather where his feet have taken him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever
+    sleep may have chanced to find him.</p>
+    <p>The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the matted hair,
+    the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what gives the finishing touch to
+    this grotesque picture is his utter unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his
+    situation, as they appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an
+    &AElig;son-like rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that
+    anxiously await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in
+    the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this transformation is
+    effected, let us suppose the case of his being set down in the streets of London,
+    somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside. What an eddying of stragglers about this
+    new-found focus of attraction! what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if,
+    indeed, he be find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests,
+    some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian or not,
+    neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster such a rabble at his
+    heels, supposing <i>him</i> to appear on Cheapside!</p>
+    <p>In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar notice as
+    from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of him in such situations,
+    except for the purpose of showing that he had very much in his outward habit that
+    would readily attract such a notice. In the same light we are to regard some
+    illustrations which J. Hill Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features
+    in his character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for, although
+    they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a book-form, they are still
+    unpublished to many of my readers.</p>
+    <p>Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he was
+    seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who entertained novel
+    and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of Apuleius. The festivities of the
+    afternoon are far on, when a commotion is heard in the hall, as if some <a
+    name="page364" id="page364"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 364]</span> dog or other
+    stray animal had forced its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the
+    arrival; he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
+    street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle great-coat, very
+    threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to the chin, where it meets the
+    fragments of a party-colored belcher handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes,
+    covered with snow, for it is a stormy winter night; and the trousers,&mdash;some one
+    suggests that they are inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that
+    Papaverius never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey, led
+    on by the current of his own thoughts,&mdash;though he was always too courteous to
+    absorb the entire conversation,&mdash;talks on "till it is far into the night, and
+    slight hints and suggestions are propagated about separation and home-going. The
+    topic starts new ideas on the progress of civilization, the effect of habit on men in
+    all ages, and the power of the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the
+    specials, he could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
+    other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his own door, he
+    knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either couldn't or wouldn't hear him,
+    so he scrambled over a wall, and, having taken his repose in a furrow, was able to
+    testify to the extreme unpleasantness of such a couch?"</p>
+    <p>"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore, he glided
+    in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing on him with round eyes
+    of astonishment, and suggesting that he should get a penny and go home,&mdash;a
+    proposal which he subjected to some philosophical criticism very far wide of its
+    practical tenor. How far he had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even
+    whether he had eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
+    articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to be refreshed
+    was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the hard he could not eat.
+    Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of that vegetable unguent to which he
+    had given a sort of lustre, and it might be supposed that there were some fifty cases
+    of acute toothache to be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops!
+    nonsense! If the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal
+    size, there was no risk,&mdash;and so the weary is at rest for a time.</p>
+    <p>"At early morn, a triumphant cry of '<i>Eureka!</i>' calls me to his place of
+    rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a considerable
+    heap of them around him. That one which specially claims his attention&mdash;my
+    best-bound quarto&mdash;is spread upon a piece of bedroom-furniture readily at hand,
+    and of sufficient height to let him pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor,
+    with only one article of attire to separate him from the condition in which
+    Archimedes, according to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had
+    discovered a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a very
+    important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face from the book
+    with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it occurred to me that I had
+    seen something like the scene in Dutch paintings of the Temptation of St.
+    Anthony."</p>
+    <p>I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example, illustrative of
+    the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered merely the immediate and
+    pressing exigencies of the present. "He arrives very late at a friend's door, and on
+    gaining admission,&mdash;a process in which he often endured impediments,&mdash;he
+    represents, with his usual silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity
+    of his being then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
+    realm,&mdash;the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he very
+    freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or fancying he
+    discovers, that his eloquence is likely <a name="page365" id="page365"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 365]</span> to prove unproductive, he is fortunately reminded,
+    that, should there be any difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of
+    the loan, he is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to
+    deposit with the lender,&mdash;a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to remove any
+    feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could experience in the
+    circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which develops miscellaneous and
+    varied, but as yet by no means valuable, possessions, he at last comes to the object
+    of his search, a crumpled bit of paper, and spread it out,&mdash;a fifty-pound
+    bank-note! All sums of money were measured by him through the common standard of
+    immediate use; and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the
+    bank-note, might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had
+    hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to him at the
+    time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded in negotiating a loan
+    of two-pence."</p>
+    <p>These pictures, though true to certain phases of De Quincey's outward life, are
+    yet far from personally representing him, even to the eye. They satisfy curiosity,
+    and that is about all. As to the real character of the man, they are negative and
+    unessential; they represent, indeed, his utter carelessness as to all that, like
+    dress, may at pleasure be put on or off, but "the human child incarnate" is not thus
+    brought before us. For, could we but once look upon his face in rest, then should we
+    forget these inferior attributes; just as, looking upon the Memnonian statues, one
+    forgets the horrid nicknames of "Shandy" and "Andy" which they have received from
+    casual travellers, observing merely their grotesque features. Features of this latter
+    sort "dislimn" and yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the
+    divine countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De Quincey's
+    face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as with an Homeric antiquity;
+    arid it is, and sallow, as parchment. Through a certain Bedouin-like
+    conformation,&mdash;which, however, is idealized by the lofty, massive forehead, and
+    by the prevailing subtilty of the general expression,&mdash;it seems fitted to desert
+    solitudes; and in this respect it is truly Memnonian. In another respect, also, is it
+    Memnonian,&mdash;that, whenever should rest upon its features the morning sunlight,
+    we should surely await its responsive requiem or its trembling <i>jubilate</i>. By a
+    sort of instinctive palmistry (applied, not to the hands, but to the face) we
+    interpret symbols of ineffable sorrow and of ineffable peace. These, too, are
+    Memnonian,&mdash;as is also that infinite distance which seems to interpose between
+    its subtile meanings and the very possibility of interpretation. This air of
+    remoteness, baffling the impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which
+    has gathered for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply
+    sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises from that
+    childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle undulations of the
+    features,&mdash;undulations as of happy wavelets set in motion ages since, and that
+    cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born of a dream-like, brooding eternity of
+    speculation, which we can trace neither to the eye alone, nor to the mouth, but
+    rather to the effect which both together produce in the countenance.</p>
+    <p>This is the face which for more than half a century opium veiled to mortal eyes,
+    and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the most fugitive and
+    impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of mystery from which mere curiosity
+    stands aloof. This is the head which we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a
+    triple wreath of glory: the laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his
+    impassioned dreams, and roses for his most gentle and loving nature.</p>
+    <p>How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium? Very little as to
+    quality, but very much as to the <a name="page366" id="page366"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 366]</span> degree and the peculiar manner in which original
+    qualities and dispositions are developed, for here it is that the only field of
+    influence open to abnormal agencies lies. Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only
+    individual worthy of notice in the same connection. Had <i>he</i> also confessed, it
+    is uncertain what new revelations might have been made. It is certain that opium
+    exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his dose that his
+    remarkable intellectual displays occurred. These displays were mostly confined to his
+    conversations, which were usually long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a
+    continued series of abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending
+    upon a sort of poetic construction. A pity it is that we must content ourselves with
+    empty descriptions of this nature. Here, doubtless, if anywhere, opium was an
+    auxiliary to Coleridge. For a laudanum negus, whatever there may be about it that is
+    pernicious, will, to a mind that is metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares
+    of thought which are raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead
+    into the region of the shadowy. Show us the man who habitually carries pills of
+    <i>any</i> sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and we can
+    assure you that that man is an <i>a&euml;robat</i>,&mdash;that somehow, in one sense
+    or another, he walks in the air above other men's heads. Whatever disturbs the
+    healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to metaphysics, because it
+    attracts the mental attention to the organism through which thought is carried on.
+    Numerous are the instances of men who would never have been heard of as thinkers or
+    as reflective poets, if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against
+    their teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the
+    superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.<a id="footnotetag9"
+    name="footnotetag9" href="#footnote9"><sup>9</sup></a> If Tacitus had fared in any
+    sort like his brother,&mdash;if there had been anything like an equitable division
+    between them of muscle and brain, it is more than probable that we should have lost
+    the illustrious historian.</p>
+    <p>Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was increased by
+    opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured Coleridge's poetic
+    faculties; which probably was the case, since in genuine poetry the mind is
+    prominently realistic, its motions are all outward, and therefore excessive indolence
+    must of necessity be fatal.</p>
+    <p>De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to opium: it
+    demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No temptation so strong
+    <i>could</i> have been presented to Coleridge. De Quincey really craved the drug. His
+    stomach was deranged, and was still suffering from the sad results of his youthful
+    wanderings in London. It seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course
+    into which he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
+    gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place to a specific
+    one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like the daughters of the
+    horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the last, this craving became, in De
+    Quincey's solemn <a name="page367" id="page367"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    367]</span> belief, an animal incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the
+    following fashion:&mdash;It is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either
+    for the fact of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
+    conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion of each meal
+    as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller, just as a voracious Greek or
+    Roman would have attributed no small part of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as
+    eating by proxy through the mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case
+    reported of Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever he
+    ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his left leg.</p>
+    <p>No less was De Quincey <i>psychologically</i> preconformed to opium. The
+    prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the narcotic
+    despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader sees from this how much
+    depends upon predispositions as to the effect of opium. De Quincey himself says that
+    the man whose daily talk is of oxen will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams.
+    Opium originates nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a
+    certain direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
+    energies and velocities. What was De Quincey <i>without</i> opium? is, therefore, the
+    question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in him was due to opium. This
+    question has already been answered in the remarks made concerning his childhood. His
+    meditative tendencies were especially noticed as most characteristic. There was
+    besides this a natural leaning toward the mysterious,&mdash;the mysterious, I mean,
+    as depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which excites gloom
+    or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable as moving in darkness. Take,
+    for example, the idea of a grand combination of human energies mustered together in
+    secret, and operating through invisible agencies for the downfall of
+    Christianity,&mdash;an idea which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through
+    the Abb&eacute; Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing
+    throughout Europe: this was the sort of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
+    thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful grandeur in
+    his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great cities such as London,
+    which he call the "Nation of London," where even Nature is mimicked, both in her
+    strict regularity of results, and in the seeming unconsciousness of all her outward
+    phases, hiding all meaning under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this
+    effect it was absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
+    standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance; there must
+    have been more than this,&mdash;namely, a network of occult influences, a vast
+    organization, wheeling in and out upon itself, gyrating in mystic cycles and
+    epicycles, repeating over and again its dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a
+    never-ending variety of shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the
+    most inviting. It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
+    history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved: for the demon
+    that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all others had been pronounced
+    undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was to his eye that for the first time there
+    seemed to be an unknown element that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented
+    by the religious sect among the Hebrews entitled the <i>Essenes</i>. Admitting the
+    character and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it no
+    special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey that the general
+    assumption was the farthest removed from the truth,&mdash;than there was an unknown
+    <i>x</i> in the problem, which could be satisfied by no such meagre
+    hypothesis,&mdash;that, to meet the urgent demands of the case, there must be
+    substituted for this Jewish <a name="page368" id="page368"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 368]</span> sect an organization of no less importance than the
+    Christian Church itself,&mdash;that this organization, thus suddenly brought to
+    light, was one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
+    from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very name, to
+    itself only in secret recesses of silence:&mdash;from the moment that all this was
+    revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit to his profound interest. Two
+    separate essays he wrote on this subject,<a id="footnotetag10" name="footnotetag10"
+    href="#footnote10"><sup>10</sup></a> of which he seemed never to tire.</p>
+    <p>"Klosterheim" is from beginning to end only the development, through regular
+    stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile nature. Oftentimes De
+    Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder; but the mere fact of a murder,
+    however shocking, was not sufficient to arrest him. With the celebrated Williams
+    murders, on the contrary, he was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in
+    accordance with designs not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the
+    skill of a decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony. Here were murders that
+    revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and that at every
+    stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden mysteries of universal human
+    nature. I know of no writer but De Quincey who invests mysteries of this tragic order
+    with their appropriate drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the
+    full measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.</p>
+    <p>This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their very
+    existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material limitations of
+    every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal <i>proscenium</i>; their <i>dramatis
+    person&aelig;</i>, however familiar nominally, and however much derived from material
+    suggestions, are yet in all their motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as
+    is possible to the ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves.
+    We should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency towards
+    this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his "Autobiographic
+    Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of seven, and before he knew of even
+    the existence of opium, the least material hint which bordered on the shadowy was
+    sufficient to lift him up into a&euml;rial structures, and to lead his infant
+    footsteps amongst the clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were
+    furnished by certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
+    the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus introduced mere
+    fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they were self-sustained and
+    majestic.</p>
+    <p>The natural effects of opium were concurrent with pre&euml;xisting tendencies of
+    De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he had been
+    indolent,&mdash;if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it invited a Titanic
+    energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it as simply dark or
+    obscure,&mdash;if his natural subtilty of reflection had been less, or if he had been
+    endowed with inferior powers in the sublime architecture of impassioned
+    expression,&mdash;then might he as well have smoked a <a name="page369"
+    id="page369"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 369]</span> meerschaum, taken snuff or
+    grog or any other stimulant, as to have gone out of his way for the more refined
+    pleasures of opium.</p>
+    <p>The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at this point,
+    by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two heads: first, the
+    <i>external</i>, and, secondly, the <i>internal</i>. Properly speaking, all the
+    <i>positive</i> effects of opium must be internal; for all its movements are inward
+    in their direction, being refluent upon the focal centres of life. Thus, one of the
+    most noticeable phenomena connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting
+    back upon the heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
+    most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very reflux of
+    sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which are purely negative.
+    This latter class of effects Homer has indicated with considerable accuracy, in the
+    ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he notices specifically an air of carelessness
+    regarding external things,&mdash;carelessness as to the mutual interchange of
+    conversation by question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
+    disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more fully developed in
+    Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        To each; but whoso did receive of them,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And music in his ears his beating heart did make."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium deepens the
+    consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes and connections that in
+    ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if new materials were found for a
+    history of the individual life,&mdash;materials which, like freshly discovered
+    records, sound the deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the
+    past. Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll which
+    hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,&mdash;symbols which are not
+    sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even syllables of words, since the most
+    trivial hint or whisper of them has hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it
+    is that even the still more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only
+    images and echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
+    enlarged.</p>
+    <p>There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis between his
+    every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius. In the latter, there is
+    beautiful order, as in a symphony of Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from
+    without, all seems confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind;
+    but here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire the
+    <i>en</i>centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw forth
+    laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same agencies which
+    undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked the earth with desert sands;
+    and De Quincey's outward life was thus masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue
+    heaven in which he revelled might be infinitely exalted.</p>
+    <p>Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with transcendent
+    sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the generous margins of a
+    splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious words, that might perhaps have found
+    some more fit vehicle to the composer's eye, could have found no deeper place in our
+    hearts. We look at the hatless sleeper among the mountains: his face seems utterly
+    blank and meaningless, and to all intents and purposes he seems as good as dead; but
+    let us ascend with him in his dreams, and we shall soon forget that under God's
+    heavens there exists mortality <a name="page370" id="page370"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 370]</span> or the commonplace uses of mortality.</p>
+    <p>As we ascend from grotesque features to such as are more intellectual, that
+    peculiarity of his character which most strikes us is his inimitable courtesy. Mr.
+    F.,&mdash;to whom I am indebted for the most novel and interesting portions of this
+    memorial,&mdash;from his own personal interviews with the man, among many other
+    things, retains this chiefly in remembrance,&mdash;that De Quincey was the perfectest
+    gentleman he had ever seen.</p>
+    <p>I take the liberty here of particularizing somewhat in regard to one visit which
+    this friend of De Quincey's paid him, particularly as it introduces us to the man
+    towards the last of his life (1851). Mr. F., curious as it may seem, found but one
+    person in Edinburgh who could inform him definitely as to De Quincey's whereabouts.
+    In return to a note, giving De Quincey information of his arrival, etc., the latter
+    replies in a letter which is very characteristic, and which may well be highly
+    prized, so rarely was it that any friend was able to obtain from him such a memento.
+    The style, perhaps, is as familiar as it was ever his habit to indulge in; and it
+    shows how impossible it was for him, even on the most temporary summons, to dispense
+    with his usual regularity of expression or with any logical nicety of method. The
+    letter runs thus:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p><i>Thursday evening, August 26, 1851</i>.</p>
+      <p>"My dear Sir,&mdash;The acccompanying billet from my daughter, short at any rate
+      under the pressure of instant engagements, has been cut shorter by a sudden and
+      very distressing headache; I, therefore, who (from a peculiar nervousness connected
+      with the act of writing) so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the
+      letter-writing department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say
+      mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for other people's.
+      Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute refusal on the part of the
+      Commissioner to grant me a certificate of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a
+      necessity not to be evaded, I am affecting the large bounties of supererogation. I
+      appear to be vaporing in a spirit of vainglory; and yet it is under the mere
+      coercion of '<i>salva necessitas</i>' that I am surprised into this unparalleled
+      instance of activity. Do you walk? That is, do you like walking for four hours
+      '<i>on end</i>'&mdash;(which is our archaic expression for <i>continuously</i>)? If
+      I knew <i>that</i>, I would arrange accordingly for meeting you. The case as to
+      distance is this. The Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley station, brings you to
+      Esk Bank. That is its nearest approach,&mdash;its <i>perihelion</i>, in relation to
+      ourselves; and it is precisely two and three-quarters miles distant from <i>Mavis
+      Bush</i>,&mdash;the name of our cottage. Close to us, and the most noticeable
+      object for guiding your inquiries, is <i>Mr. Annandale's Paper-Mills</i>.</p>
+      <p>"Now, then, accordingly as you direct my motions, I will&mdash;rain being
+      supposed absent&mdash;join you at your hotel in Edinburgh any time after 11 A.M.
+      and walk out the whole distance, (seven miles from the Scott monument,) or else I
+      will meet you at Esk Bank; or, if you prefer coming out in a carriage, I will await
+      your coming here in that state of motionless repose which best befits a
+      philosopher. Excuse my levity; and believe that with sincere pleasure we shall
+      receive your obliging visit.</p>
+      <p>"Ever your faithful servant,</p>
+      <p>"THOMAS DE QUINCEY."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>In order to appreciate the physical powers of him who proposed a walk of the
+    distance indicated in the letter, we must remember that he was then just sixty-six
+    years <i>plus</i> ten days old. He was now living with his daughters, in the utmost
+    simplicity. On his arrival, Mr. F. found De Quincey awaiting him at the door of his
+    cottage,&mdash;a short man, with small head, and eyes that were absolutely
+    indescribable as human features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but
+    with the most urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till <a name="page371"
+    id="page371"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 371]</span> dark, the time is spent in
+    conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence is there in this
+    humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of Olympian sweetness moves on, now
+    in laughing ripples, and again in a solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring
+    before ourselves! what a present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was
+    the friend of Wilson,&mdash;and&mdash;what furnishes a more sublime
+    suggestion&mdash;this is he that knows by heart the mountain-fells and the mysterious
+    recesses of hidden valleys for miles around; and we think, if he could convey us from
+    the haunts of this Lasswade of his old age to those which glorified the Grasmere of
+    his youth, what new chords he might touch,&mdash;of human love, for there it was that
+    the sweetness of his wedded life had been buried and embalmed in a thousand outward
+    memorials of happy hours long gone by,&mdash;and of human sadness, for there it was
+    that he had experienced the reversal of every outward fortune, and the alienations of
+    friendships which he most highly valued. But the remembrances of Grasmere and of
+    youth seem now to have been removed as into some other life: the man of a past
+    generation walks alone, and amid other scenes. And yonder is the study in which he
+    spends hours that are most holy,&mdash;hours consecrated to what specific employments
+    is known to none, since across its threshold no feet save his have passed for years.
+    Now and then some grand intellectual effort proceeds forth from its sacred precincts;
+    but that only happens when pecuniary necessities compel the exertion. How is it that
+    the time not thus occupied is spent?&mdash;in what remembrances, in what hidden
+    thoughts, what passing dreams?</p>
+    <p>As it grows dark, De Quincey's guest, having spent most precious moments which he
+    feels ought never to cease, signifies the necessity of his taking his departure. To
+    take leave of this strange man, however, is not so easy a matter as one might rashly
+    suppose. There is a genius of procrastination about him. Was he ever known to make
+    his appearance at any dinner in season, or indeed at any entertainment? Yes, he did
+    <i>once</i>, at the recital of a Greek tragedy on the Edinburgh stage; but that
+    happened through a trick played on him by an acquaintance, who, to secure some remote
+    chance of his seeing the performance, told him that the doors opened at half-past
+    six, whereas, in fact, they opened at seven. How preposterous, then, to suppose that
+    he would let an opportunity pass for procrastinating other people, and putting all
+    manner of snares about their feet! It is dangerous with such a man to hint of late
+    hours; for just that lateness is to him the very jewel of the thing. In mentioning
+    the circumstance, you only suggest to him the infinite pleasure connected with the
+    circumstance. Perhaps he will deliberately set to work to prove that candle-light is
+    the one absolutely indispensable condition to genial intercourse,&mdash;which would
+    doubtless suggest a great contrast, in that respect, between the ancient and modern
+    economy,&mdash;and where, then, <i>is</i> there to be an end? All attempts to
+    extricate yourself by unravelling the net which is being woven about you are
+    hopelessly vain; you cannot keep pace with <i>him</i>. The thought of delay enchants
+    him, and he dallies with it, as a child with a pet delicacy. Thus, he is at the house
+    of a friend; it storms, and a reasonable excuse is furnished for his favorite
+    experiment. The consequence is, that, once started in this direction, the delay is
+    continued for a year. Late hours were particularly potent to "draw out" De Quincey;
+    and, understanding this, Professor Wilson used to protract his dinners almost into
+    the morning, a tribute which De Quincey doubtless appreciated.</p>
+    <p>So that it is better to be on the sly about saying "Good bye" to this host of
+    yours. When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De Quincey forthwith
+    insisted on accompanying his guest. What, then, was to be done? Ominously the sky
+    looked down upon them, momently threatening a storm. No resource was there but to
+    give the man his way, and accept his offer of companionship <a name="page372"
+    id="page372"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 372]</span> for a short distance,
+    painfully conscious though you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must,
+    during this same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your side,
+    who now lacks barely four years of life's average allotment. Thus you move on: and
+    the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer approaches, warnings of which
+    propagate themselves all around you in every sound of the wind and every rustle of
+    the forest-leaves. Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of
+    your companion: every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for conversation.
+    Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and your guide stops to tell you
+    that in this house may have been committed most strange and horrible murders, that,
+    in spite of the tempestuous mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be
+    specially and solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a perfect
+    stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side, takes off his
+    hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her passage,&mdash;and you, poor
+    astonished mortal that you are, lest you should yourself seem scandalously
+    uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise. In this incident we see what infinite
+    majesty invested the very semblance of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and
+    something of the same remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who
+    uniformly addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every one
+    of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.</p>
+    <p>Onward you proceed,&mdash;one,&mdash;two,&mdash;three miles, and you can endure no
+    longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus at every
+    step the burden of his journey back. You have, reached the Esk bank and the bridge
+    which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened begins now to let loose its rage
+    against all unsheltered mortals. Here De Quincey consents to bid you
+    good-bye,&mdash;to you his last good-bye; and as here you leave him, so is he forever
+    enshrined in your thoughts, together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm,
+    of human tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close. It is a
+    source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very disagreeable thing
+    to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic justice; for assuredly he was in
+    the habit of saying all the malicious things <i>he</i> could about his friends. If
+    there was anything in a man's face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De
+    Quincey for noticing <i>that</i>. Even Wordsworth he could not let off without a
+    Parthian shot at his awkward legs and round shoulders; Dr. Parr he rated soundly on
+    his mean proportions; and one of the most unfortunate things which ever happened to
+    the Russian Emperor Alexander was to have been seen in London by De Quincey, who,
+    even amid the festivities of national and international congratulation on the fall of
+    Napoleon, could not forget that this imperial ally was a very commonplace-looking
+    fellow, after all. But, in regard to physical superiority, De Quincey lived in a
+    glass house too fragile to admit of his throwing many stones at his neighbors. The
+    very fact that he valued personal appearance at so low an estimate takes away the
+    sting from his remarks on the deformities of other people: he could not have meant
+    any detraction, but simply wished to present a perfect picture to the eye, preserving
+    the ugly features with the faultless, just as we all insist on doing in regard to
+    those we love. De Quincey and myself, therefore, are likely to part good friends.
+    Surely, if there was anything which vexed the tender heart of this man, it was "the
+    little love and the infinite hate" which went to make up the sum of life. If morbid
+    in any direction, it was not in that of spite, but of love; and as an instance of
+    almost unnatural intensity of affection, witness his insane grief over little Kate
+    Wordsworth's grave,&mdash;a grief which satisfied <a name="page373"
+    id="page373"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 373]</span> itself only by reasonless
+    prostrations, for whole nights, over the dark mould which covered her from his
+    sight.</p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>It only remains for us to look in upon De Quincey's last hours. We are enabled to
+    take almost the position of those who were permitted really to watch at his bedside,
+    through a slight unpublished sketch, from the hand of his daughter, in a letter to an
+    American friend. I tremble almost to use materials that personally are so sacred; but
+    sympathy, and the tender interest which is awakened in our hearts by such a life, are
+    also sacred, and in privilege stand nearest to grief.</p>
+    <p>During the few last, days of his life De Quincey wandered much, mixing up "real
+    and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things." He complained, one night, that his
+    feet were hot and tired. His daughter arranged the blankets around them, saying, "Is
+    that better, papa?" when he answered, "Yes, my love, I think it is; you know, my dear
+    girl, these are the feet that Christ washed."</p>
+    <p>Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children. He aroused
+    one day, and said suddenly,&mdash;"You must know, my dear, the Edinburgh cabmen are
+    the most brutal set of fellows under the sun. I must tell you that I and the little
+    children were all invited to supper with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great
+    honor. I thought I must buy new dresses for the little ones; and&mdash;would you
+    believe it possible?&mdash;when I went out with the children, these wretches laughed
+    at their new dresses."</p>
+    <p>"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those that are alive,
+    as if they were his own brothers. One night he said, when I entered the
+    room,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"'Is that you, Horace?'</p>
+    <p>"'No, papa.'</p>
+    <p>"'Oh, I see! I thought you were Horace; for he was talking to me just now, and I
+    suppose has just left the room.'"</p>
+    <p>Speaking of his father, one day, suddenly and without introduction, he
+    exclaimed,&mdash;"There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know my dear
+    father better; for I am sure a better, kinder, or juster man could never have
+    existed."</p>
+    <p>When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that a telegram should be
+    sent to the eldest daughter,<a id="footnotetag11" name="footnotetag11"
+    href="#footnote11"><sup>11</sup></a> who resided in Ireland, but he forbade any
+    mention of this fact to the patient. De Quincey seemed to have a prophetic feeling
+    that she was on her way to him, saying, "Has M. got to that town yet, that we stopped
+    at when we went to Ireland? How many hours will it be before she can be here? Let me
+    see,&mdash;there are eight hours before I can see her, and three added to that!" His
+    daughter came sooner than the family expected; but the time tallied very nearly with
+    the computation he had made. On the morning his daughter arrived occurred the first
+    intimation his family had seen that the hand of death was laid upon him. He had
+    passed a quiet, but rather sleepless night, appearing "much the same, yet more than
+    ordinarily loving." After greeting his child, he said, "And how does mamma's little
+    girl like her leaving her?" "Oh, they were very glad for me to come to grandpapa, and
+    they sent you this kiss,&mdash;which they did of their own accord." He seemed much
+    pleased. It was evident that M. presented herself to him as the mother of children,
+    the constant theme of his wanderings. Once when his daughter quitted the room, he
+    said, "They are all leaving me but my <i>dear</i> little children." "I heard him
+    call, one day, distinctly, 'Florence! Florence! Florence!'&mdash;again, 'My dear,
+    dear mother!'&mdash;and to the last he called us 'my love,' and it sounded like no
+    other <a name="page374" id="page374"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 374]</span> sound
+    ever uttered. I never heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every tone of his
+    voice. It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all understanding."</p>
+    <p>During the next night he was thought dying, "but he lingered on and on till half
+    past nine the next morning. He told me something about 'to-morrow morning,' and
+    something about sunshine; but the thought that he was talking about what he would
+    never see drove the exact idea out of my head, though I am sure it was morning in
+    another world he was talking of."</p>
+    <p>"There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both for some time
+    before and after death. He looked more like a boy of fourteen, and very beautiful. We
+    did not like to let in the morning light, and the candle was burning at nine o'clock,
+    when the post brought the following letter, which my sister and myself glanced over
+    by the candle-light, just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the
+    moment it did not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
+    coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did.</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"'<i>Brighton, Dec. 7th, 1859</i>.</p>
+      <p>"'My Dear De Quincey,&mdash;Before I quit this world, I most ardently desire to
+      see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than sixty years ago, we were
+      school-fellows together and mutually attached; nay, I remember a boyish paper ("The
+      Observer") in which we were engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career,
+      mine far from brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological student. It seems
+      a pity we should not once more recognize one another before quitting the stage. I
+      have often read your works, and never without remembering the promise of your
+      talents at Winkfield. My life has been almost a domestic tragedy. I have four
+      children in lunatic-asylums. Thank God, it is now drawing to a close; but it would
+      cheer the evening of my days to receive a line from you, for I am, with much
+      sincerity,</p>
+      <p>"'Your old and attached friend,</p>
+      <p>"'E.H.G.'</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>"I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward constantly recurred in
+    his wanderings.</p>
+    <p>"Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last pathetic sighs,
+    so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor, worn-out garment laid aside."
+    Just before he died, he looked around the room, and said very tenderly to the nurse,
+    the physician, and his daughters, who were present, "Thank you,&mdash;thank you all!"
+    Sensible thus to the very last of kindness, he breathed out his life in simple
+    thanks, swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy that had ruled his
+    life.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page375" id="page375"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 375]</span>
+    <h2>MRS. LEWIS.</h2>
+    <center>
+      A STORY IN THREE PARTS.
+    </center>
+    <center>
+      PART I.
+    </center>
+    <h3>I.</h3>
+    <p>"Here's something Gus Lewis would like to send by you, mother," said my hasty boy
+    John, plunging into the room at nine in the evening, and stumbling over two trunks,
+    three valises, and bandboxes countless.</p>
+    <p>The floor was strewn with bundles, and the mantel-piece adorned with letters,
+    directed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and New York.</p>
+    <p>"Oh! ah! yes. Any packages, if not too large," said I, wistfully eying the box, (a
+    foot square,) full of fresh maple-sugar, with its card of direction to "<i>Mrs. Lulu
+    L., by the politeness of Mrs. Prince</i>." Boy-like.</p>
+    <p>"First of all, my John, go you to bed, where Charley has been this half-hour, and
+    say good-bye, for we shall be off before you are up."</p>
+    <p>"See, then, father, if you are!" retorted the wide-awake youth, going out of the
+    room in ground and lofty tumbling, and up-stairs in somersets.</p>
+    <p>"I don't see," said I, pettishly, "how I <i>am</i> to get this bundle into my
+    trunk, nor where in the world this great box of sugar is to go. See! not a direction!
+    but I suppose she is in New York somewhere."</p>
+    <p>"We shall see her at all events, which is something. I should like to know what
+    she is like,&mdash;not to look after her boy for two mortal years," said the
+    Dominie.</p>
+    <p>"I hope not like Gus. He'd make an ugly woman, with his black hair and heavy
+    eyebrows, and his big, black eyes always staring. He don't look like an American
+    child."</p>
+    <p>"If we could only say what an American type is. At present, it is a little of
+    everything."</p>
+    <p>"I mean a New-Englander,&mdash;an original American."</p>
+    <p>"Well, he don't.&mdash;What do you say to these trunks? Shall we try again to
+    compress the gigantic genie into the copper vessel? I thought it was a dangerous
+    move, that last one of yours, taking out Tirzah White's quilted coat. And what's to
+    be done with these three packages?"</p>
+    <p>"Well! we can't sit here!" said I, briskly; "half-past nine already, and only one
+    trunk packed! Never mind. You can put these three bundles in with your clothes."</p>
+    <p>"Bursting the lock, now."</p>
+    <p>"How easy 'tis to pack other people's things! But what, then, have you in
+    there,&mdash;I mean, besides your shirts, etc.?"</p>
+    <p>"<i>Imprimis</i>. Eight volumes of Scott's Commentaries, brought by Deacon
+    Boardman. I am to exchange them. They are imperfect. <i>Item</i>. A dozen of 'Sinbad
+    the Sailor,' sent by mistake to the Association, instead of Doddridge. These books
+    won't press nor give, more than sound doctrine; and I must have room for my gown,
+    without which I am nothing."</p>
+    <p>The clock struck ten, and we were still struggling with unabated ardor to compress
+    Lorana Briggs's shawl, and the flat packages from Burt's, into the largest
+    carpet-bag, that there might be room for the seventeen letters on top of the
+    minister's luggage, inside the sanctuary of his silk gown.</p>
+    <p>"We can carry a good deal in your coat-pocket, my dear," said I, cheerfully; for
+    really we seemed to be coming to daylight, a little.</p>
+    <p>"Full."</p>
+    <p>The knocker sounded.</p>
+    <p>"My galoches at last! Deacon, I can't ask you to come in, we are so untidy; but I
+    couldn't pack as I meant to, this afternoon."</p>
+    <p>How we dreaded his coming in,&mdash;half deacon, half shoemaker, and two-thirds <a
+    name="page376" id="page376"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 376]</span> missionary,
+    with his "Panoplist" sticking out of his coat-pocket, and his ears evermore pricked
+    up for the latest news from Bombay! and how angry I had been for three weeks because
+    I couldn't get those indispensable galoches!</p>
+    <p>It seemed as if he never would go from the half-open door. He reckoned the York
+    folks would stare to see so many patches; he expected ministers down to York warn't
+    quite so carfle and troubled about many things, as they be to Weston; but he added,
+    with a grim joyfulness,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"We took up a good collection, though, last Sabbath! eight dollars and fifteen
+    cents, clear!"</p>
+    <p>"Yes, Deacon," responded the minister, with as much heartiness as he could muster,
+    between the pushings, puffings, and pressings at the carpet-bag; "a cup of cold water
+    shall in no wise lose its reward, we're told.&mdash;These carpet-bags stretch
+    well!"</p>
+    <p>"Them poor, dear heathen!" groaned the Deacon.</p>
+    <p>"Oh, dreadful!" chimed I; "give me that biggest shawl, will you?&mdash;no, the
+    other,&mdash;Ursula Drury's! Shall we ever finish packing?"</p>
+    <p>"S'pose ye'll see th' A.B.C.F.M.!&mdash;Lucina Rand's put in 'the avails of a
+    hen,'&mdash;and Semela Briggs sold the silver thimble her aunt gin her. 'T all helps
+    the good work. I told the Widow Rand she'd ough' to do somethin' for the heathen, so
+    she's gone to raisin' mustard. She said she hadn't more 'n a grain o' that to spare,
+    she was so poor; but I told her 't would be blest, I guessed. Widow Rand's rather
+    worldly-minded, I'm afraid."</p>
+    <p>A minute more and we should have had Hindostan, Harriet Newell, and Juggernaut.
+    Happily, somebody came for the Deacon, and we were left to our packing again.</p>
+    <h3>II.</h3>
+    <p>This was the second week in May, in the year 1830. We were a promising country,
+    but had not yet performed. Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor cheap postage had been
+    established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked their fingers in garrets, waiting for
+    the good time coming; and philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain,
+    in Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose, their fine
+    sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of eloquence, and fell flat
+    to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled by stage-coaches; and postage for over
+    a hundred miles rose to eighteen cents. Not a lover's sigh for a cent less; and it
+    took a fortune for persons of sensibility to exchange sentiments.</p>
+    <p>The consequence to country-people of this last-mentioned fact was, that everybody
+    who went anywhere took everybody's letters, and, as there were no expresses, added,
+    of course, everybody's packages and messages. And the consequence of this was, that
+    everybody made everybody's purchases, whether gowns, books, bonnets, or what not. It
+    mattered little who did errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one
+    store-keeper bought our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods,
+    and our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter weather. I
+    remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the &aelig;sthetic conversation
+    at one of our parties, where Art was on the <i>tapis</i>, made a comical mistake, but
+    one natural enough, too,&mdash;stating that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes
+    for ten dollars. We were not thinking of exactly the same kind of Vandyke that he
+    was.</p>
+    <p>Many a time have I carried in my trunk more letters than the mail-bag did to
+    Boston, and conscientiously finished all the parish's business before touching my
+    own.</p>
+    <p>A certain amount of self-complacency and satisfaction is felt, and laudably
+    earned, by being intrusted with commissions; and I flatter myself few persons ever
+    set off for New York with such an array of them as I did on this occasion.</p>
+    <a name="page377" id="page377"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 377]</span>
+    <p>Looking over my list, I must confess to a flush of real enjoyment at finding
+    <i>carte blanche</i> for a scarf. "Now, that is something like!" said I. "I can see
+    now how pleasantly an artist feels, or would feel, at an order for a
+    picture,&mdash;'your own subject,&mdash;your own terms.' Miss Patty Jones knows what
+    is what, and shall be my patroness."</p>
+    <p>And did I not vindicate triumphantly Miss Patty's confidence? I knew better than
+    to buy her a gray and brown thing, merely because she, too, was gray and brown. I
+    wreathed her with lilies and hyacinths and French green leaves, and she blossomed
+    under it like a rose. If she were not the garland, she wore it, and so borrowed bloom
+    and gay freshness. She extolled my taste to all Weston.</p>
+    <p>Then Mrs. Eben Loring had concluded on the whole that I should buy her a hat, in
+    Maiden Lane, at the very tip-top milliner's. The thought of my return was somewhat
+    embittered by the prospective necessity of carrying two very large bandboxes in my
+    lap, in case of rain. Rain might not unreasonably be expected in the course of a
+    three days' journey. Think of all the bandboxes that in such a case would be put in
+    at the coach-window by the driver, to be held in the hapless laps of the nine
+    passengers! Almost I was persuaded to leave my own black satin bonnet, and
+    perambulate the streets of New York in my travelling-calash, which looked exactly
+    like, and was nearly of the size of, a "bellows-top shay."</p>
+    <p>I was thinking of this last sacrifice, when my husband said, in a dreamy,
+    bewildered way,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Here are five boxes, mother, two bundles, and the rest of these books. I give
+    up!"</p>
+    <p>"Give up? Not I! Now, where a man's energies are exhausted, a woman's just begin
+    to show themselves. First and foremost, lock this trunk, and let me put the key in my
+    pocket. That's one thing done, and can't be undone."</p>
+    <p>He stepped back from the trunk.</p>
+    <p>"What's this? all your clothes on the floor!"</p>
+    <p>"Well, yes, my dear, most of 'em. You see, I couldn't leave Zipporah Haven's shawl
+    out, which she sends to her grandmother; and I must put in these bundles of the
+    Burts's, and Mary Skinner's box of linen thread. If my own things are lost, why, they
+    must be replaced, you know, my dear; that is all."</p>
+    <p>"And we must keep a good lookout, ourselves, that our bandboxes and bundles don't
+    fall off behind," replied the Dominie, faintly.</p>
+    <p>"Yes; and you can put the small trunk under my feet, and the big basket under your
+    own, and you will keep an eye on my red shawl,&mdash;and pray don't lose the
+    umbrella, nor your great-coat, nor your cane. I will, on my part, see to these three
+    small bundles, and my parasol. Doubtless we shall go on smoothly as need be, only I
+    am afraid you won't be able to think up many sermons on the highway. There! I forgot
+    the jar of currant-jelly to go to Ruth Hoyt's aunt! However, we must manage somehow.
+    You are sure our names are down at the stage-office?"</p>
+    <p>But, like Charles XII., "after Pultowa's dreadful day," when the tale-teller
+    listened for his sympathy,</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "The king had been an hour asleep."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>I am ashamed to say that I must have lost myself after that, though I thought I
+    was only thinking of the Day of Judgment. But I must have dreamed it, or how should I
+    have thought it the last trumpet, when it was only the stage-driver's warning
+    knock?</p>
+    <p>It was delightful to hear the knock, and the simultaneous clang of pots and pans
+    which assured us, that, though night had been no night to us, the dark morning would
+    usher in our breakfast with coffee by the faithful Polly. The driver coming in again
+    before we had finished, we seduced him without scruple into taking a cup of boiling
+    comfort, while we guiltily collected the waifs and strays of our multifarious
+    luggage. Many a time I have waited, myself, in the coach, while similar orgies were
+    going on among the unready, <a name="page378" id="page378"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 378]</span> so I know just how vexed and impatient the passengers
+    were. But what use to go on without the driver? At last we squeezed into the full
+    stage.</p>
+    <h3>III.</h3>
+    <p>No sooner in than out, however. I was determined not to die before my time, as I
+    was sure to do on the back-seat of an overloaded stage, with nine passengers, besides
+    numerous, because gratuitously earned, children. "For who," as it was sometimes
+    pertinently asked, "would charge anything for a poor little innocent child?" The
+    younger, the more innocent, of course, and the more numerous.</p>
+    <p>"If you'll set up here 'long o' me, Miss Prince, there's a plenty o'
+    room,&mdash;and for you, too, Parson," said the good-natured driver.</p>
+    <p>Extricating ourselves from the Black Hole, we delightedly clambered to the heights
+    above, regardless of risk, and catching at wheel and step like Alpine hunters. How
+    comfortable the seat was, with the fresh, early morning air blowing freely in our
+    faces! How small the horses looked in the dim light of three o'clock! How oddly the
+    wheel-horses looked, all backs and no legs!&mdash;and how mysteriously many were the
+    reins that were tied round and round the iron lantern-rod!</p>
+    <p>"Just let me put the mail-bag under your feet, Miss Prince. Here we are, now, all
+    right, and nothin' to do but go along!"</p>
+    <p>"Now, then!"</p>
+    <p>"Come up! come! come!"</p>
+    <p>But in vain were caresses; in vain were chirrups, duckings, and kisses, wafted to
+    the nigh leader. Like the rebellious South of to-day, he had taken his attitude, and
+    stood now on four legs, now on two, pawing only the dark air, and regardless of the
+    general welfare behind him.</p>
+    <p>"Now what will you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally afraid of
+    horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence: partly in the staid, heavy
+    mass of determination beside me, who looked so calm and good-natured; and partly in
+    the queer, elfin look of the beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary
+    connection with our safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to
+    get on with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the
+    occasion by plunges, rearings, and kickings.</p>
+    <p>Still gathering the reins lightly in his large hand, the stable and sure
+    intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his long whip at
+    the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping galled his proud neck! How
+    his black back curved, and his small head tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce,
+    but just pawed like a fairy horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or
+    to herald in the morning.</p>
+    <p>"He'll start by-'m-by,&mdash;he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos start,"
+    remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness, the unerring switch
+    every half minute.</p>
+    <p>What acted on the capricious thing at last,&mdash;whether the Inevitability behind
+    him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the "beautiful disdain" left
+    his black back and tossing mane in a moment, and he buckled down to his work with an
+    energy worthy of the cause, and with a good-will that was an example to the other
+    three.</p>
+    <p>"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin' wantin' but
+    the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I won't never drive 'em
+    together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He says they'd run till they dropped
+    down dead. I guess they would. He's a putty critter enough, and well made, but
+    dreadful ugly. Now, I like that 'ere wheeler!"&mdash;he pointed his whip towards the
+    horse below my foot. "She's kind,&mdash;that mare is; and she's fast enough, and
+    handsome. Broad back,&mdash;short legs,&mdash;goes like a duck!"</p>
+    <p>In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
+    own?&mdash;a man of means,&mdash;owning his team,&mdash;and with more knowledge of
+    his district than most members of Congress have? <a name="page379"
+    id="page379"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 379]</span> Indeed, I believe he's in
+    Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody knows a hill by
+    experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green Mountains are full of
+    comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns their highest and tallest tops; but
+    the hills of New Hampshire are Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the
+    roads of old time made by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no
+    circuitous, soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
+    deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the shortest
+    air-line between places.</p>
+    <p>Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a steep
+    place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the foot of a long hill,
+    of a two-mile stretch, the driver generally stopped, to indicate the propriety of the
+    male passengers, at least, ascending the hill on foot. And often the whole stage-load
+    gladly availed itself of the permission. It was handy for the owners of bandboxes, to
+    pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now and then; and the four
+    beasts, like those in Revelation, said "Amen" to the kindly impulse of humanity that
+    lightened their load, and left them to scramble comfortably from one side to the
+    other of the still ascending path. When they did get to the top of some of those
+    Walpole hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the
+    far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!</p>
+    <h3>IV.</h3>
+    <p>We had the mails to change at the post-offices, and a seemingly inexhaustible
+    store, intrusted to the care and courtesy of the driver, and surrounding him like a
+    rampart,&mdash;of newspapers, bundles, cans, pillow-cases full of dried apples, and
+    often letters.</p>
+    <p>At the red house near the mill below Surrey, a sweet-looking girl ran out, as we
+    passed, holding her hand forward for a letter, which our driver pretended to drop
+    half a dozen times, on purpose to tantalize her. It was pretty to see her blushing,
+    sparkling face, as the blood danced to her brow with hope, and back with the baffled
+    expectancy to her heart.</p>
+    <p>"Neouw, Sil, be still! give to me, yeouw!"</p>
+    <p>If it hadn't been Yankee, it was soft and melodious enough for an Italian peasant.
+    As picturesque, too, was her short, blue woollen petticoat, and white short-gown,
+    that "half hid and half revealed" the unconstrained grace of healthy mountain-nature;
+    and more modest the happy look with which she received the letter at last, and flew
+    with it like a bird back to the red nest.</p>
+    <p>"A love-letter, I suppose," said I, answering the twinkle of the driver's
+    good-natured eye.</p>
+    <p>"Wal, I expect 's likely. They've been sparking now over a year. And it's a pity,
+    too, such a real clever girl as that is! She a'n't so dreadful bright, but she's real
+    clever, and ough' to hev a better chance 'n Jim Ruggles."</p>
+    <p>"A bad match for her?"</p>
+    <p>"Wal, Jim's a good feller enough, but he drinks. I don't mean to say nothin' agin
+    moderate drinkin'. I drink myself moderately. But Jim's a real sponge. He'd drink all
+    day hard and never show it, without it is bein' cross, maybe, and paler 'n common.
+    Now I say,&mdash;and I a'n't no 'reformed inebriate,' nor Father Matthew
+    sort,&mdash;but I do say, and will hold to it, such a man at twenty-one makes a poor
+    beginnin'. If he lives, he'll be a poor shote, and no mistake. I'm sorry for the
+    gal."</p>
+    <p>"Somebody ought to tell her. Why not you?"</p>
+    <p>"Wal, what's the good on 't? She wouldn't hear a word. When a woman's once sot her
+    mind, don't do no good to talk. For that matter, talkin' never did do much, I'm
+    thinkin',&mdash;exceptin' preachin'. We're bound to hear that, Parson," he added,
+    laughing, and with a nod which might seem respectful.</p>
+    <p>In three hours we had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this of a <a
+    name="page380" id="page380"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 380]</span> warm day, and
+    with a full complement of passengers. We had watched the sun rise over Walpole hills,
+    and the specks in the distance where the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The
+    breaking day, the bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the
+    welcoming day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are all
+    sharp for the ready breakfast, at six o'clock.</p>
+    <p>Then, as I am talking of the past, and not of the present, there was time enough:
+    time enough for the comfortable discussion of breakfast, for the changing of raiment
+    among the babies, for chatting in the bar-room, for the interchange of news among the
+    men, and even for glasses of milk-punch. Tell it not in modern Gath that even the
+    Dominie spiced his half-mug of flip with an anecdote, and that every man and woman
+    took cider as well as coffee.</p>
+    <p>How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during this journey
+    of three days and a half to New York? Modern travellers, who are, or are not, as it
+    happens, run off the track, smashed up, or otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed
+    of, have little notion of our successive and amusing accidents, and of how they
+    diversified and occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the <i>ennui</i> which
+    comes from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one of
+    accident.</p>
+    <p>That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,&mdash;that one of the leaders had
+    fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our driver, who was
+    in hopes the critter wouldn't have 'em that day,)&mdash;that the coach wholly
+    collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into a promiscuous heap of
+    unbroken bones,&mdash;this, and such as this, will be easily believed by any
+    New-England traveller who remembers thirty years back. But how we fell so softly that
+    the brains were never damaged,&mdash;why falling into ditches at night wasn't an
+    unhealthy process,&mdash;and, above all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps,
+    strings, and nails should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully
+    adapted to every emergency,&mdash;that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
+    amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that almost think,
+    and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted his natural tact, expediency,
+    and invention. With string and nail in his pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus
+    to get away from a Yankee, or his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only
+    been a Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered with
+    roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own powers, knew all
+    about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the light of a pine-knot in his
+    father's kitchen. This rude culture is the commonest fact among our mountaineers.</p>
+    <p>We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their bright,
+    concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like to know who would stop
+    anywhere now to see anything! One might as well be put into a gun and fired off to
+    New York as go there now by steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not
+    unlike a "resonant steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the
+    other.</p>
+    <p>But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as <i>was</i> a
+    journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you entered their hearts and
+    took lodgings,&mdash;sometimes for life.</p>
+    <p>Then the country! You saw that, too,&mdash;not the poorest part of it, scooting
+    round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole way flat, and are glad
+    to shut your eyes and listen to the engine, rather than have them ache with seeing
+    everything you would never wish to look at!</p>
+    <p>All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we leave the
+    Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long, dreary reaches of unfertile
+    pastures, and its wealth of stone <a name="page381" id="page381"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 381]</span> wall,&mdash;so abundant that travellers wonder where
+    the stones came from to build it, seeing no lack in the road or field,&mdash;from the
+    time we enter on trim, well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new
+    interest and beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
+    ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and enter for
+    the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of fine landscape,
+    maturity. With and under the old oaks and birches rest the sad-colored houses that
+    have held life and experience,&mdash;birth, death, and old historic adventure.</p>
+    <p>Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and
+    Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of Indian
+    struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in caves, or bursting out
+    like white spirits to lead and avenge. The air is peopled with traditions far back
+    from the present, but with which the grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems
+    still to sympathize.</p>
+    <p>In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire spring into the
+    exultant richness of the winged butterfly,&mdash;into white, fragrant fields of
+    blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.</p>
+    <p>In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in ever
+    varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my fellow-passengers, and,
+    except in listening to some communicative old women, might really, as far as society
+    was concerned, as well have been travelling in the style of to-day. Beyond the casual
+    acquaintances I made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who
+    interested me until we reached Springfield. There, at the top of the first short hill
+    outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing in the river-mist
+    like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody whom my prophetic soul announced
+    as a companion, looking wholly unlike a ghost, and very unlike a mist. He raised his
+    hand, just as we were about passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver
+    suddenly reined in his team.</p>
+    <p>A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest, showed us a
+    traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.</p>
+    <p>He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for himself just
+    above us among the countless boxes.</p>
+    <p>"Don't let me disturb you, Madam All right. Just room for my bag. Go on,
+    driver."</p>
+    <p>"Fine day," said we.</p>
+    <p>"A warm morning. I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,&mdash;but the sun
+    is too hot for me."</p>
+    <p>He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his broad brow
+    with his handkerchief. Then he looked at us with clear blue eyes, and tossed back his
+    curling brown hair. He had a gray travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but
+    which was then a novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson
+    lips, and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
+    American. So much the better.</p>
+    <h3>V.</h3>
+    <p>I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of investigating, at
+    least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once, evidently. A country-parson and
+    his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I will promise faithfully that it shall be the
+    last time I will refer to myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be
+    absolutely necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this man
+    and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the next five years.
+    Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with my husband, and nodding from
+    time to time gravely at me, as If to take me into the conversation,&mdash;little
+    thought I of the shadow he <a name="page382" id="page382"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 382]</span> would one day cast over both of our lives!</p>
+    <p>He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten minutes,
+    toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's cooking-stove six inches
+    square, a curious invention, new then, and a wonderful convenience.</p>
+    <p>"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good bread and
+    sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often walk fifty miles
+    together."</p>
+    <p>We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the world nobody
+    walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if not a chaise; and he must
+    be miserable indeed who did not own at least one horse. Nobody in his sober senses
+    demeaned himself to walking. Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers
+    instituted the custom, to be as unlike the British as possible,&mdash;as they did of
+    making their houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.</p>
+    <p>This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with fresh air,
+    jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We looked at his six feet of
+    height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained
+    supernatural vigor from natural contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free
+    step, as a child approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the
+    topics he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
+    connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops, of great
+    walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath; never of the solemn
+    hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing or whispering: no, all about him
+    sounded like the free, dashing, rushing water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry
+    lips, and wind-crimsoned cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly
+    to the outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort of
+    purposeless activity,&mdash;energy for its own sake. While his energies harmonized
+    with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of knowledge, one felt that he would
+    have much power for good. But suppose his activities to take a wrong direction, all
+    his powers would help him to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would
+    have the same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
+    balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure; yet,
+    according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to have elevated and
+    refined him far more than it had done.</p>
+    <p>Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was good-natured,
+    impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,&mdash;that he loved himself and his own enjoyment
+    too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress another. There is a little difference
+    between this and kindness. No matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he
+    looks sharply enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
+    continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would walk
+    rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them bleeding under his
+    heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had lived at least thirty-five
+    years, and was too old to be made over into anything else by any experience.</p>
+    <p>His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he said. He
+    had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite sure, that, if he had
+    lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth century, he would have ruined
+    himself twenty times over for a favorite bulb, even without being a Dutchman.</p>
+    <p>His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without scruple every
+    other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in professing a similar passion, on
+    purpose to confound him with a description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of
+    jessamine and Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
+    azaleas <a name="page383" id="page383"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 383]</span> and
+    gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers, and hollyhocks.</p>
+    <p>"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I had said,
+    that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for day-lilies or tulips; "promise
+    me that I may show you my tulips, and I will promise you that you shall like botany
+    hereafter."</p>
+    <p>We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which I said I
+    would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs he gave me on the top
+    of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in the taste of Weston; and some
+    climbing plants, from his house afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have
+    displaced the old glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston,
+    which happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine clambering
+    over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were extinguished forever.</p>
+    <p>I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not matter at all.
+    He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for introduction. We met freely
+    on that platform, and it was pleasant to us to talk on so many subjects outside of
+    personal interest. He had travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way,
+    of much that he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.</p>
+    <p>Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Halloo, old boy, get up here!"</p>
+    <p>He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so attenuated
+    that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean against, and removed a cane
+    and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his bones.</p>
+    <p>It was about half an hour before I saw that the new man was not at all an invalid,
+    but of the natural gaunt frame and pallid complexion of my countrymen. My eyes had
+    become so full of the fresh, rosy life of the Englishman's face, that the new man's
+    face was bleached and unhealthy to me. I happened to glance back from him to the
+    Dominie, and saw, that, allowing for green spectacles, they were both of a color. We
+    were so arranged on the top of the coach, that with reasonable twisting of necks we
+    were able to maintain an animated conversation, and soon found our account in the new
+    element.</p>
+    <p>"Well, Remington!"</p>
+    <p>"Well, Lewis!"</p>
+    <p>"Where from now?"</p>
+    <p>"From Niagara, and home by the White Hills."</p>
+    <p>"And what of the last, or of both?"</p>
+    <p>"Miss Rugg has fallen into the one, and Miss Somebody has been to the top of the
+    other. Had to be brought down, though. Women shouldn't climb mountains."</p>
+    <p>"There has been some talk of a road, or practicable path at least, to the top of
+    Mount Washington."</p>
+    <p>"Never'll be done. Impossible on the face of the thing."</p>
+    <p>"Nothing is impossible to Yankees, Remington."</p>
+    <p>"This is. And now, Lewis, whence come you, and whither go?"</p>
+    <p>"From Weston, and to New York."</p>
+    <p>Here was a <i>denouement!</i> We looked at him with new interest, and saw at once,
+    such was the force of imagination, the very eyes and eyebrows of Gus Lewis. However,
+    it proved afterwards to be only imagination. When we told him we came from Weston
+    only two days and a half before, the conversation assumed the native style of New
+    England, and for the next quarter of an hour we talked of each other and each other's
+    affairs.' Mr. Lewis was delighted to see us, had stayed only an hour in Weston, and
+    there heard of our trip from Auguste,&mdash;profanely called Gus,&mdash;took the box
+    of maple-sugar in charge at once, laughed at the boy-like direction without even a
+    surname, and ended with recommending us to go at once to Miss Post's, on Broadway,
+    where himself and his wife were at present boarding. All the particulars of life,
+    character, and relative interests were discussed between ourselves <a name="page384"
+    id="page384"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 384]</span> and Mr. Lewis with the relish
+    and zest of compatriots. I had forgotten how close a tie was that of Yankee birth,
+    and how like an unknown tongue our talk was to the Englishman, till we stopped and
+    turned to him to say something, and found him fast asleep. Then I was glad that he
+    hadn't heard my satirical description of "donation-parties" at Weston, nor the
+    account I gave of our two boys, our salary of five hundred dollars, and the various
+    comical shifts we had to make to live comfortably on that sum and support aged
+    parents and graceless relations. Little touches told Mr. Lewis the whole story. I
+    knew very well that Mr. Remington would be entirely abroad about such a social
+    existence as ours in Weston, travel he ever so long or widely.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Lewis had black eyes and hair, and bent like an habitual student. He had a
+    scar on his right eyebrow, which he had got by a fall, and by which he had saved the
+    life of Mr. Remington, who was a connection of his wife's. This he told us,
+    afterwards, and I amused myself with drawing parallels between his face and his mind.
+    One side was gentle, sweet-humored, sentimental, with a touch of melancholy. The
+    other, disfigured with the scar, seemed to have been turned harsh, suspicious, proud,
+    reserved, and unrelenting. These were many qualities, all to depend on a scar, to be
+    sure; but they generally herd together, and he might be one man or another, as life
+    presented its dark or sunny side to him. To me, he was very interesting, from the
+    first; and my husband was delighted with him. The Dominie starved in Weston for
+    congenial intellectual nutriment. Nobody but myself could tell what a drain it was on
+    him always to impart, always to simplify, to descend, to walk on the ground with
+    wings folded flat to his back, and the angel in him habitually kept out of view. The
+    most he could do was to insinuate now and then a thought above the farming interest,
+    and in a direction aside from Bombay. More than that exposed him to suspicion, and
+    hindered his usefulness in Co&ouml;s County.</p>
+    <p>Somehow, we got talking of Mr. Remington, which we might well do, seeing him there
+    before us, sleeping like a baby.</p>
+    <p>"That he could always do, like Napoleon," said Mr. Lewis, "and so can accomplish
+    much without fatigue."</p>
+    <p>"Is he married?" said I.</p>
+    <p>"Yes. His wife is in delicate health."</p>
+    <p>I was surprised to hear that he was married.</p>
+    <p>"He hasn't a married look, has he?"</p>
+    <p>"You are talking about me," said Remington, waking up. "I felt it mesmerically.
+    And, to give you a good opportunity, I will walk a mile or two. Give me a good
+    character, Lewis. Hold up, driver!"</p>
+    <p>Springing down, he went on, laughing, before us, now and then calling back to ask
+    if we were nearly through?</p>
+    <p>"He has not the 'subdued domestic smile upon his features mild', that marks the
+    man who has a wife at home," said I.</p>
+    <p>"No. He is a man, however, born under a lucky star, and his cup filled with
+    good-fortune to the brim. His self-lordship has been to him no heritage of woe, thus
+    far."</p>
+    <p>"A certain happiness, but necessarily of a poor quality, comes from being able to
+    gratify our wishes. If he has no more, it is poor enough."</p>
+    <p>"Do you mean that pleasure must be an outgrowth of pain to be properly
+    appreciated?" said Mr. Lewis.</p>
+    <p>"Somewhat,&mdash;mostly," said the minister; "since the insensibility that
+    protects one from pain prevents also delicate picture. I think, indeed, a rational
+    being must suffer in order to enjoy, after infancy."</p>
+    <p>"His eyes don't look as if they had been in training of any sort," said I, without
+    knowing what my words implied, till I saw the harsh expression on Mr. Lewis's
+    face.'</p>
+    <p>"I mean that they have a sort of undisciplined expression, as if he had never been
+    tamed by suffering or sorrow of any sort," said I.</p>
+    <p>"That sadness is the true human look," said the minister, "the look that redeems
+    <a name="page385" id="page385"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 385]</span> us from the
+    mere animal expression of enjoyment. It is the stamp God puts on those He loves. He
+    chastens them; after that, they are no more servants, but sons of the house."</p>
+    <p>I saw by Mr. Lewis's eyes that he understood and felt this. Also, that from his
+    nature he bought his enjoyments every step of the way of life. How differently his
+    cousin laid hold on the cornucopia of enjoyment, and covered himself with bountiful
+    beauty, drinking in at every sense pleasure! The former, as could be seen too, held
+    his title to happiness by the most uncertain tenure; the nervous quiver betraying,
+    and the sensitive blood witnessing, how keenly he felt and how dearly he paid for
+    every passing pleasure. I remember, as I saw his purple, thrilling face, that I hoped
+    his home-life was happy, feeling that to such a man it must be everything. Yet I was
+    sure, from what he did not say, with eye or lips, that he had not learned religious
+    trust. Still, he did not listen to the mere minister, but to the friend; and there
+    sprang up between the two the corresponding interest and respect belonging to natures
+    kindred in depth and sensibility, though of widely differing experience. In
+    after-years, he who had already attained was able frequently to hold out a helping
+    hand to his younger brother; but now, only a smile and a look told much. This
+    acquaintance of the soul is very fascinating. In the two or three steps we take
+    together, with cognizance and measure of each other, what a long path opens before us
+    of alternate shade and sunshine, and how imagination borders every step of the way
+    with richest heart-blossoms! In friendship, all is glowing and enriching. As it has
+    not the depth of love, it neither anticipates nor requires sacrifice. We do not think
+    of doing or suffering for a friend; but the friend ministers to our weakness, and
+    exalts our strength. He sympathizes gently with our self-love, he magnifies every
+    excellence. He is perpetually charmed, alike with the novelty and the similarity of
+    our experience, and unwearied in comparing thoughts and balancing opinions. All, and
+    more, that he gives us, he receives; and so an incipient friendship is one of the
+    most intoxicating delights of life. What long leaps in acquaintance we took during
+    our first hour, and while Mr. Remington still walked up-hill before us!</p>
+    <p>"You will probably have an opportunity to see and judge for yourselves of Mr.
+    Remington, as we are together a great deal, and he is a cousin of Mrs. Lewis's. This
+    will be better than for me to attempt a description, I think, and, on the whole, more
+    satisfactory. He annoys me, and offends me frequently; and then I am not just to him,
+    of course. But he is a fine fellow, honorable and agreeable; and with a love of
+    natural science that leads him, for the time, like a dog. Just now, he is wild with
+    floriculture. Last year, it was geology. You will see."</p>
+    <p>And then, as if he feared to trust himself with his cousin's character, or that it
+    was a distasteful subject for some reason, he turned to the minister, and began
+    talking about Cherry Mountain and the scenery in Co&ouml;s.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Remington called out, at the top of the hill,&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"Now it is my turn! Let me ride, and I will give your character!"</p>
+    <p>"Oh! we don't need it, I assure you," said I; "we understand him entirely."</p>
+    <p>"Not a bit of it!" said he, shaking his brown curls; "I am the transparent
+    one."</p>
+    <p>He stepped up on the wheel-hub to get his bag, and to say he should strike off for
+    Middleton on foot. He would see us very soon in New York, and claim our promise to
+    visit him.</p>
+    <p>Being relieved from the fascination of personal beauty and presence, with only the
+    impression of character remaining, I was a little ashamed to find how much I had
+    liked, without being at all able to esteem him. It was with a very different feeling
+    that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually
+    transfigured with emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he
+    impressed one as a living soul; <a name="page386" id="page386"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 386]</span> and this inward light gave a translucent beauty to
+    the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal advantages of form
+    and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes of un-sounded depth, and a voice
+    whose rich cadences had an answering rhythm in the inward man, showed what his
+    attractions might be, or were, to a woman. We became curious to see Mrs. Lewis, of
+    whom we gained no idea from his casual references to her.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <h2>LYRICS OF THE STREET.</h2>
+    <h3>VI.</h3>
+    <h3>PLAY.</h3>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          From yon den of double-dealing,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;With its Devil's host,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Come I, maddened out of healing:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          So the false wine cannot blind me,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Nor the braggart toast;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          But I know that Hell doth bind me:
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Where the lavish gain attracts us,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;And the easy cost,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          While the damning dicer backs us,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Blest the rustic in his furrows,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Toil- and sweat-embossed;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Blest are honest souls in sorrows.
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Wifely love, the closer clinging
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;When men need thee most,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Shall I come, dishonor bringing?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Babe in silken cradle lying,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;To low music tossed,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Will they wake thee for my dying?
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+      <div class="stanza">
+        <div class="line">
+          Yonder where the river grimly
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;Whitens, like a ghost,
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          Must I plunge and perish dimly;
+        </div>
+        <div class="line">
+          &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;All is lost!
+        </div>
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page387" id="page387"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 387]</span>
+    <h2>INTERESTING MANUSCRIPTS OF EDMUND BURKE.</h2>
+    <p>Macaulay opens his most remarkable article on Milton by saying, "The dexterous
+    Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a saint, till they have
+    awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors by exhibiting some relic of
+    him,&mdash;a thread of his garment, a lock of his hair, or a drop of his blood." If
+    we were in the mood, we might take advantage of interesting manuscripts of Edmund
+    Burke, which are now before us, to say something of this remarkable character. But we
+    shall confine ourselves for the present to a passing glance at the manuscripts which
+    have strayed across the Atlantic.<a id="footnotetag12" name="footnotetag12"
+    href="#footnote12"><sup>12</sup></a></p>
+    <p>The authentic manuscripts of Burke have passed through several hands. On his
+    death, they were intrusted to the eminent civilian, Dr. French Lawrence, of Doctors'
+    Commons, and to Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of Rochester. To these two gentlemen we
+    are indebted for the first eight volumes of the London octavo edition of Burke's
+    Works. The career of Dr. Lawrence was cut short by death in 1809. His associate had
+    the exclusive charge of the papers till 1812, when the venerable widow of Burke died
+    at Beaconsfield, and by her last will gave to Earl Fitzwilliam, the Bishop of
+    Rochester, and the Right Honorable William Elliott the entire direction of the
+    printing and publishing of such parts of the works of her late husband as were not
+    published before her decease,&mdash;bequeathing to them all the printed and
+    manuscript papers for this purpose. Eight more volumes were published by the Bishop,
+    who died in 1828, a few months after the publication of the fifteenth and sixteenth
+    volumes. Mr. Elliott had already died in 1818. The papers now came into the sole
+    possession of Earl Fitzwilliam, the distinguished nobleman associated with the latter
+    portion of Burke's life, from whom they descended to his son, the late Earl
+    Fitzwilliam, who, in conjunction with Sir Richard Bourke, published, in 1844, the
+    four volumes of correspondence, with a few notes of unpublished speeches.</p>
+    <p>We have personal reason to know that there are yet other unpublished manuscripts
+    of Burke in the hands of Lord Fitzwilliam, some of which it was our fortune many
+    years ago to inspect. Mr. Macknight, it appears, applied to the present Earl for
+    permission to publish some of those which are preserved in the archives of Wentworth
+    House, but, "out of obedience to the expressed wish of his father, who published all
+    he thought necessary, he declined to sanction any further publication of these
+    documents."<a id="footnotetag13" name="footnotetag13"
+    href="#footnote13"><sup>13</sup></a></p>
+    <p>There are also letters of Burke which from time to time have seen the light, as
+    they were communicated by their possessors. Among these none equals in interest that
+    addressed to Pitt with regard to his pension, which has been printed recently by Lord
+    Stanhope, in his small, but rich and rare collection, entitled "Miscellanies." This
+    important letter came to light among the papers of Pitt, and has been described by
+    Macaulay as "interesting and very characteristic."</p>
+    <p>The manuscripts now before us are none of these. They have a history of their
+    own.</p>
+    <p>They constitute a thin volume in folio, neatly bound, having a book-mark, and arms
+    with the name of <i>Fillingham</i>. Here are four familiar autograph-letters from
+    Burke to his amanuensis, Swift, all of them written from Margate, on the sea-shore,
+    <a name="page388" id="page388"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 388]</span> and bearing
+    Burke's frank as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a
+    member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the superscription,
+    while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower corner. But English law, while
+    the privilege of franking existed, required also that the name of the place where the
+    letter was pasted, and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should
+    appear in the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in
+    this collection:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"Margate July seventeenth, 1791<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;"Mr Swift,<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Mr Burke's Chambers<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"4 Stone Buildings<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"Lincoln's Inn<br />
+      &nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;&nbsp;"London.<br />
+       "Edm. Burke."</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of them that
+    "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest dependants with whom he
+    was thrown into any human relationship"; they also "show the statesman, when at the
+    height of literary fame, as busy and anxious in sending his sheets through the press,
+    and making corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs";
+    and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as illustrations of
+    Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to the Nagles in former years." It
+    seems that the amanuensis to whom they were addressed had at his death other similar
+    letters in his possession; but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately
+    committed them to the names, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr.
+    Macknight adds, in a note,&mdash;"These letters I owe to the kindness of John
+    Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the originals."<a
+    id="footnotetag14" name="footnotetag14" href="#footnote14"><sup>14</sup></a></p>
+    <p>Of one of these letters there is an accurate <i>fac-simile</i>, which will be
+    found in the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of Burke.</p>
+    <p>But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript of the
+    "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the <i>identical copy</i> from
+    which the surreptitious publication was made which disturbed the last hours of Burke.
+    The body of it is in the handwriting of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters
+    were addressed; but it shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute
+    and elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of these
+    pages there is an accurate <i>fac-simile</i> in the third volume of Mr. Macknight,
+    who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister, after his death, to the
+    gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect it." <a id="footnotetag15"
+    name="footnotetag15" href="#footnote15"><sup>15</sup></a></p>
+    <p>These manuscripts&mdash;both the letters and the Observations&mdash;all concern
+    the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between himself and Fox,
+    to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate their value, we must glance at
+    the scene by which the memorable friendship of these men was closed.</p>
+    <p>Few political events in English history are read with more interest than the
+    separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but the French
+    Revolution, which separated so many persons in France, reached across the Channel to
+    separate them. They differed so radically with regard to this portentous, undeveloped
+    movement, that their relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed.
+    Burke, in the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most earnestly
+    inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet in me at my time of
+    life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to friends to desert me." Fox whispered,
+    "There is no loss of friends." Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes,
+    there is a loss of friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my <a
+    name="page389" id="page389"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 389]</span> duty at the
+    expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished, Burke walked
+    across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between Pitt and Dundas on the
+    Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears streamed down his face. In the course
+    of his remarks he intimated that Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious
+    terms. Burke at once said that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox
+    replied, "My right honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of
+    his mind. Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish a
+    recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and
+    forgotten."</p>
+    <p>But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth again. "I
+    complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my defence by the right
+    honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was brought to me and evinced the most
+    promising talents, which I used my best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has
+    arrived at the maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever
+    existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of my
+    principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend", but as "the
+    right honorable gentleman", and said, in a taunting style, that "all he had to do was
+    to repent, and his friends would be ready to receive him back and love him as they
+    had previously done". Burke was indignant. He said,&mdash;"I have gone through my
+    youth without encountering any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so
+    unfortunate as to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's
+    friendship, nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the other."
+    <a id="footnotetag16" name="footnotetag16" href="#footnote16"><sup>16</sup></a> This
+    most important and historic friendship was at an end.</p>
+    <p>The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke turned away
+    from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly productions of his pen,
+    entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in
+    the collection before us, addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last
+    corrections of this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is
+    the letter of which a <i>fac-simile</i> is given by Mr. Macknight.</p>
+    <p>Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed and intense.
+    The Whig Club declared, "that their confidence in Mr. Fox was confirmed,
+    strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against him." Burke and some forty-five
+    noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the club. It was then that Burke, in
+    justification of himself and his friends, took the pen, and drew up what his
+    biographer Prior calls the "famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of
+    the Minority, particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke
+    of Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third volume of
+    Bonn's edition of his Works.</p>
+    <p>This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections to the
+    course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of that distinguished
+    gentleman. But it was not intended for publication, at least at that time. It was
+    transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with a letter, asking that it might not even be
+    read at once, but that the Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his
+    library-table, and when a day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn
+    to it. Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if not
+    always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the amanuensis whom
+    Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This was none other than Swift, to
+    whom the familiar letters were addressed. Unknown to his employer, he had
+    appropriated to himself a copy in his own handwriting, with corrections and additions
+    by Burke, which seems to have come between the original rough draught and the final
+    copy transmitted <a name="page390" id="page390"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    390]</span> to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke was in his
+    last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless scrivener communicated this
+    copy to an equally faithless publisher, by whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four
+    Articles of Impeachment against the Eight Honorable C.J. Fox." When this was seen by
+    Mrs. Burke, she felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband,
+    that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was relieved so far as
+    it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by the affidavit of Mr. Rivington,
+    succeeded in obtaining an injunction against the publisher on the very day when the
+    tract appeared. But two thousand copies had already stolen abroad.</p>
+    <p>It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to her husband,
+    learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two o'clock in the afternoon
+    of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to him his newspapers and correspondence
+    for the past week. He was less disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does
+    vex me," he said; "but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at
+    anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more exact and full.
+    Many temperaments and explanations there would have been, if ever I had had a notion
+    that it should meet the public eye." He was justly indignant at the knavish
+    publisher, whose conduct surpassed that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But
+    he was at a loss to know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that
+    the Duke of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and
+    incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr. Lawrence,
+    about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to deliver back. He had
+    forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and corrected by himself.</p>
+    <p>This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated to attract
+    attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his last words. Pitt read it
+    with delight, and declared it to be a model in that style of composition. But his
+    latest biographer says of it, that "it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever
+    wrote the 'Observations on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least
+    pleasing of all his compositions."<a id="footnotetag17" name="footnotetag17"
+    href="#footnote17"><sup>17</sup></a> In style, it is direct, terse, and compact,
+    beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended for the
+    public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the manuscript now before
+    us exhibits the minute care with which it was executed. Here also may be traced
+    varieties of expression, constituting the different forms which a thought assumed,
+    not unlike the various drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.</p>
+    <p>But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now dealing with
+    this relic.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page391" id="page391"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 391]</span>
+    <h2>HARVARD'S HEROES.</h2>
+    <p>The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London cannot fail to
+    notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the choir. It is composed of
+    rare and costly marbles and other precious stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it
+    is, its greatest value lies in the circumstance which placed it there. It is a
+    memorial, the tribute of affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms
+    to a noble officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a [Greek:
+    kt&ecirc;ma es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller
+    in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches, in stately
+    cathedrals,&mdash;wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be arrested, whereever the
+    pride of country is most deeply stirred, wherever the sentiment of loyalty is
+    consecrated by religion,&mdash;the Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names
+    of his honored dead. There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense
+    local pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the scenes
+    of their early lives.</p>
+    <p>"It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo; "think what
+    they will say of us at home!"&mdash;and this simple sentence went straight to the
+    heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home is the prevailing thought in
+    each young soldier's heart as he goes into his first fight. And "home" does not mean
+    for him so much broad England as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the
+    school where he was trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in
+    times gone by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory!
+    whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after the morning
+    service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be for him the memorial window
+    through whose blazoned panes the sunlight will fall softly across the "squire's pew,"
+    where as a boy he knelt and worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the
+    marble effigies of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a
+    place among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the school-room at
+    Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,&mdash;that future boys, playing where he played,
+    shall talk of him whom they never knew as "one of ours." For he is well aware that he
+    is making fame not for himself alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most
+    loved and happiest.</p>
+    <p>We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the intense
+    working of such influences upon a people in whom the local association and sentiment
+    are ingrained. We are but just beginning where Englishmen began eight centuries and
+    more ago. Hence our glorifying of the past has been a little indiscriminate, and
+    withal has sought to commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years
+    have taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated energy,
+    compress the work of years into days, and which mark the water-sheds of history. The
+    United States of 1865 will be as unlike the same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike
+    the child. Life is measured by action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first
+    Persian invasion was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule,
+    and "fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look back upon a
+    past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be but natural, as it will be
+    most wise, that we take heed of those elements which have ever been so potent in
+    strengthening national character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet
+    it may be undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole country
+    cannot <a name="page392" id="page392"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 392]</span>
+    participate, which will not for the remainder of this century be thought of by one
+    section without shame and confusion of face, and which will only tend to keep alive
+    the sad old jealousies and hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental
+    columns upon the fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon
+    the slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is ended, and
+    the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of the returning citizens
+    to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to level the earthworks of Vicksburg and
+    Port Hudson. In the city where mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law,
+    no one cares to keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade,
+    though they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for they
+    witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly forget. The only
+    memorial that a wise and high-souled nation <i>can</i> erect after this war will be
+    the single monument which shall commemorate the hour of peace restored.</p>
+    <p>But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting than brass
+    the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we are doubly bound in
+    gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who have deserved well of their country
+    in the hour of utmost need. We ought to do this also in that temper which shall look
+    most singly to the noble end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future
+    land. I know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in New-England's
+    foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself, the starry roll of its
+    heroes links it with all the fortunes of our history. Men who sat in the Long
+    Parliament, and who may have seen the Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their
+    early degrees upon Harvard's first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King
+    Philip, were colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of
+    Wolfe and Amherst, and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight years'
+    struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence. Alumni still survive
+    who did military duty in the second war with England. The men of Harvard were with
+    Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec
+    capital. Of these the only record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of
+    the "Triennial."</p>
+    <p>For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid aside the
+    gown for the sash and shoulder-strap, who, first in the bloodless triumphs of the
+    regatta and in "capital training" for the great race of life where literary and
+    professional fame are the prizes, went forth to venture all for honor and country,
+    the Alma Mater surely should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because
+    of her high responsibility in the education of "ingenuous youth," she can do no less.
+    I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal thousands of her
+    surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as he reads the story of her
+    children amid their "baptism of fire." There is a notable peculiarity about this the
+    most purely New-England of our colleges,&mdash;the continual recurrence of familiar
+    patronymics. I take up the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five
+    hundred names I can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots,
+    Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells,&mdash;they come with every
+    Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a hundred and
+    fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent of nobility in this,
+    such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the coronet which marks the union of
+    birth and worth. We cannot, we, the Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep
+    unhonored. Those who shall come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old
+    Harvard, shall occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and
+    Holworthy, have a right not only to count <a name="page393" id="page393"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 393]</span> the academic wreaths which have been won in past days
+    by their namesakes, but also to be taught the inspiring lesson of holy love of
+    country, of highest courage and truth and soldierly virtue.</p>
+    <p>And how shall this be done? Let these few remaining lines suggest at least one
+    plan. Harvard's chief want is a hall for her Alumni, one worthy, in architecture and
+    convenience, of her children's fame, which Harvard Hall is not. That long, awkward
+    room, very hot and cramped to dine in at midsummer, hotter and more cramped still for
+    the Class-day dances, is just fit for one purpose,&mdash;the declamation-exercises of
+    the Sophomore year. Let us have a hall fit for Commencements, for Alumni and Phi-Beta
+    orations, for our annual dinners, worthy of the "Doctor's" poems and the "General's"
+    speeches, with a wainscot, not of vulgar plaster, but of noble oak, against which
+    Copley's pictures and Story's busts may properly be placed.</p>
+    <p>Then let its windows be filled, as in the glorious halls and chapels of England,
+    with memorial glass. Let one of these, if no more, be formed, of the costliest and
+    most perfect workmanship our art can compass, to the memory of the Heroes of Harvard.
+    It shall be the gift of every class which counts among its members one of these.
+    There, amid the gorgeous emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year,
+    their battles.</p>
+    <p>Or, if this may not be, because our Alma Mater is still too poor or too humble to
+    offer to her returning children such banqueting-place,&mdash;if there is no Wykcham
+    or Waynflete or Wolsey to arch for us the high-embowed roof, let us place our
+    memorial in the Library, along its shaded alcoves and above its broad portals. There
+    the bright shadows shall sleep and pass with the sliding day, where the young
+    scholars mused and studied. There the future student, as he walks, shall read as
+    noble a lesson as he can glean from any of the groaning shelves and dusty tomes.
+    There shall be for Harvard her <i>Libro d'Oro</i> wherein she has written the names
+    of her best-beloved.</p>
+    <p>Some token let us have that they are unforgotten. It was no quarrel of vulgar
+    ambition in which they fell. It was the sacred strife for which the mother armed them
+    when she sent them forth. For her they fought, for culture, generous learning, noble
+    arts, for all that makes a land great and glorious, against the barbarism of anarchy
+    and the baseness of a system founded upon wrong and oppression. We cannot, indeed,
+    forget them while we live to come up to our annual gathering, and see the vacant
+    places amid familiar ranks. There will then be question and reply, saddening, but
+    proud. "He fell at Port Hudson, cheering on the forlorn hope." "He lies beneath the
+    forest-trees of Chancellorsville." "He was slain upon the glacis of Fredericksburg."
+    "He died in the foul prisons of Richmond." We cannot forget them, and we would fain
+    leave the memorial of them to future generations. Their fame belongs to Harvard; for
+    what they learned there could not be other than noble, inspiring, manly. Let Harvard
+    make the plan, and give the call, and all of us, from our distant homes and according
+    to our ability, will offer our gifts with gladness. Let the graduates who have
+    leisure and taste and means, and who are still dwelling under the pleasant shades of
+    the Cambridge elms, come together and take up the matter while love and gratitude and
+    pride are fresh.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page394" id="page394"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 394]</span>
+    <h2>WHO IS ROEBUCK?</h2>
+    <p>An inquiring American mind, seeking the solution of this momentous question, would
+    naturally turn to Appleton's "New Cyclop&aelig;dia," Vol. XIV., page 131. The
+    inquiring mind would be enlightened in a somewhat bewildering manner by the
+    description there laid down of a little animal, some of whose qualities are thus set
+    forth in the first article on the page indicated above:&mdash;</p>
+    <blockquote>
+      <p>"ROEBUCK. A small European deer of the genus <i>Capreolus</i>.... The skull has
+      a very small, shallow suborbital pit, ... tear-bag indistinct, hoofs narrow and
+      triangular.... The color in summer is reddish brown, in winter olive, with paler
+      shades; inside of the ears fulvous, and a black spot at the angles of the mouth....
+      It is about four feet long.... The horns are used for knife-handles.... They
+      congregate in small families, but not in herds.... From their strong scent they are
+      easily hunted; though they frequently escape by their speed, doublings, springing
+      to cover, and other artifices.... The roebucks are represented in North America by
+      the Virginia deer."</p>
+      <p>Inquiring mind, not wishing for researches in the direction of Natural History,
+      albeit the subject of parallelisms is a somewhat curious study and in special cases
+      infinitely amusing, passes on to the next article in the Cyclop&aelig;dia.</p>
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>It is sufficiently obvious that it requires neither fame nor greatness to excite
+    public curiosity. A notorious criminal or an unusually eccentric lunatic frequently
+    gives rise to a larger share of newspaper-comment and general discussion than the
+    wisest and most virtuous of mankind. It must be well remembered by those who have
+    read Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon that a dwarf was attracting thousands to the
+    Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, while the historical painter, stung to madness
+    by the neglect of the frivolous crowd, committed the hideous and ghastly suicide
+    which threw a tragic darkness over the close of his strange and troubled existence.
+    The desperate and dangerous frequently succeed in placing themselves on a bad
+    eminence, from which they are conspicuous enough; and if to be talked of and pointed
+    at be the sole object of their ambition, they can, of course, be congratulated on
+    their success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand quiet
+    firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread widely, and the
+    tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any public man or politician, whose
+    taste is so morbidly depraved and whose aim in life is so debased as to prefer
+    notoriety to honest, useful service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being
+    the especial theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that
+    so many of our fellow-countrymen are at this moment asking the question with which we
+    head these pages,&mdash;"Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <p>An unhappy culprit, who combined with an innocent taste for green peas a thievish
+    method of acquiring their usual savory accompaniment, is reported to have been
+    addressed by an English judge in the following felicitous terms:&mdash;"Prisoner at
+    the bar, Providence has endowed you with health and strength, <i>instead of which</i>
+    you go about the country stealing ducks." Providence has endowed John Arthur Roebuck,
+    member of the Parliament of Great Britain, with fair talents and some power of
+    speech, <i>instead of which</i> (to use the accurate judicial ellipsis) he goes about
+    using violent and vulgar words of menace against those who have never offended him,
+    and scattering firebrands as if there were no gun-powder anywhere to ignite and
+    explode. This would be a mean and mischievous occupation for the dullest man; but for
+    one who has proved by his very failures <a name="page395" id="page395"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 395]</span> that he is not devoid of intellect or energy, it is a
+    monstrous perversion of mental gifts, even if they are small.</p>
+    <p>A portion of the fiery heat of his nature may be traced, perhaps, to the fact that
+    he was born at Madras; but as on the mother's side he is descended from the poet
+    Tickell, the friend of Addison, it would not be altogether unreasonable to have
+    expected in him some few of the amenities of the <i>liter&aelig; humaniores</i>. He
+    soon, however, exchanged the torrid scenes of Oriental life for the snows of Canada,
+    where he received his education; and when we remember what the bizarre oddities of
+    his subsequent career have been, it might be interesting, if we had the materials for
+    the purpose, to inquire what that education was. The British Provinces, however, were
+    not deemed a sufficiently ample theatre of action for the energy of the capacious
+    soul that dwelt in that not over-capacious body; and so, at the age of twenty-three,
+    he repaired to England and commenced his studies for the profession of the law.</p>
+    <p>He was called to the bar in 1832. He had, however, by no means paid an exclusive
+    attention to the study of the law, or his success in his profession might have been
+    greater, and the world might have had a good lawyer instead of a bad politician. The
+    period of his Inner-Temple student-life was a very stirring time in England. Old
+    principles were dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider
+    theories of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian rushed
+    with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most reckless and noisy
+    debating-club spouters of the day. In speaking of the Reform Bill at a meeting at a
+    tavern in London, he said, that, if the bill did not pass, he for one should like to
+    "wade the streets of the capital knee-deep in blood." It was consoling to reflect,
+    even at the time, that the atrocious aspiration was mitigated by the reflection that
+    it would not require a deluge of gore to reach the knees of such a Zacch&aelig;us as
+    Roebuck. "Pretty wicious that for a child of six!" said the amiable Mr. Squeers on
+    one occasion; and pretty sanguinary that, say we, for a rising little demagogue of
+    thirty.</p>
+    <p>As England was at that time in a seething ferment of excitement, men who were
+    unscrupulous in their language were at a premium in the political market, and the
+    respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place of Bath, in Somersetshire,
+    elected the fierce little man as their representative in the Imperial Parliament.
+    This was a great start in life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated
+    his overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation and honest
+    adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful position, and been saved, at
+    least, from the indignity of fetching and carrying for the Emperor of Austria, and
+    from the impertinence of intruding himself into the august presence of Mr. Kinglake's
+    amiable and virtuous friend, the Emperor of France. The English nation might then
+    possibly have pointed to his portrait in their historical gallery as that of an
+    efficient public servant who had deserved well of his country, and he might have
+    escaped a ludicrous immortality as the Dog Tear-'em, in the recent admirable sketch
+    in "Punch."</p>
+    <p>But, in the words of a political song,&mdash;</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;"There weren't no such luck
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;For John A. Roebuck,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        And he thought he would teach the whole nation
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;That the Tories were fools,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        &nbsp;&nbsp;And the Whigs only tools,
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        But Roebuck was England's salvation."
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>And he, according to this programme, set himself to reform the Constitution and
+    protect the Colonies.</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,"
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>he was an eclectic in politics,&mdash;acknowledged no leader, had himself no
+    followers. A chief without a party, an apostle without disciples, a critic without
+    the merest ordinary penetration, a cynic whose bitterness was not enlivened by wit or
+    humor, a spouter whose arguments, when he had any, were usually furnished from the
+    mint, John Arthur Roebuck was for many <a name="page396" id="page396"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 396]</span> years that impersonation of terrific honesty, glaring
+    purity, and indignant virtue, known in English politics as an INDEPENDENT member of
+    Parliament. When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are disposed to be
+    unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they win or retain place and
+    power, such a position, occupied with judgment and fortified by modesty and good
+    sense, is a most powerful and a most beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on
+    by one whose obtrusive egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any
+    serious or permanent influence on his fellow-men. When a Pocket-Diogenes rolls his
+    little tub into the House of Commons, and complains that everybody is standing
+    between him and the sun,&mdash;why, in an assembly of educated and sensible men the
+    sham is soon discovered, the pseudo-cynic seen through, and his affected misanthropy
+    deservedly gains for him universal derision and scorn. Some years after he entered
+    Parliament, Mr. Disraeli, with whom he had many encounters, in which he was
+    invariably worsted, made the House roar with laughter by taunting Roebuck with his
+    "Sadler's Wells sarcasms and melodramatic malignities," and drew a most amusing
+    picture of him as "a solitary sentinel pacing round the deserted citadel of his own
+    opinions."</p>
+    <div class="poem">
+      <div class="line">
+        "He who surpasses or subdues mankind
+      </div>
+      <div class="line">
+        Must look down on the hate of those below";
+      </div>
+    </div>
+    <p>but as Mr. Roebuck has done neither the one nor the other, his only chance of not
+    being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated, by his contemporaries, is
+    to continue his work of mischief, and merely change the object of his puny attacks as
+    one becomes more prominent than another, and as he can manage to maintain his own
+    quasi-importance by attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike
+    for this country; so far from that, he admired and praised us, as by an extract from
+    one of his books we will presently prove; but since he has become a self-appointed
+    lackey, has donned imperial livery, and as a volunteer does the dirty work of
+    despots, he must have lost all sympathy with and all regard for an independent, free,
+    and brave people. We hope and believe that this country vastly prefers his censure to
+    his praise, and, as far as it has leisure at the present crisis for any serious
+    consideration of his erratic pranks, would rather have his enmity than his
+    friendship. <i>Non tali auxilio!</i></p>
+    <hr class="short" />
+    <p>But we must recur to his inconsistent and rather uninteresting career, and so
+    satisfy, and perhaps weary, the curiosity of any reader who is still disposed to ask
+    the momentous question, "Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <p>In 1835, he was appointed the agent&mdash;the <i>paid</i> agent&mdash;of the House
+    of Assembly of Lower Canada, during the dispute then raging between the Executive
+    Government and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially plume themselves on
+    the fact that the members of their legislative bodies are unremunerated, it is
+    somewhat difficult to understand how this exception was made in John Arthur's favor.
+    As a precedent it is to be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious
+    that such an arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members,
+    might throw grave suspicions on the purity of public men, and introduce a wholesale
+    venality into public life. If such a system is permitted, any foreign monarch or any
+    foreign government may secure the services of a British senator as his agent and
+    representative. It is quite appalling to think that the chivalrous Earl of Derby or
+    the conscientious Mr. Gladstone should be shocked by the offer of a handsome annual
+    salary paid quarterly, (not deducting the income-tax,) made by the King of Dahomey
+    for an eloquent defence of his humane and enlightened rule, or by an equally
+    munificent donative from the famous and merry monarch of the Cannibal Islands for the
+    support of himself and his loyal subjects in their copious consumption of human
+    flesh. We should be sorry wantonly to raise so dreadful a suspicion; but if British
+    M.P.s are permitted, <a name="page397" id="page397"></a><span class="newpage">[pg
+    397]</span> according to the Roebuck precedent, to be PAID agents, why has not
+    Southern money found its way into senatorial pockets? Greedy Mr. Laird, and
+    unscrupulous, money-loving Mr. Lindsay,<a id="footnotetag18" name="footnotetag18"
+    href="#footnote18"><sup>18</sup></a> always resolutely grubbing for the main chance,
+    are perhaps sufficiently paid by indirect, though heavy gains in shipbuilding. Needy
+    Mr. Roebuck may be salaried by the Emperor of Austria, though there is nothing to
+    prove, except his own open-mouthed and loud-tongued professions of purity, that he is
+    not "<i>paid</i> agent" of the Confederate Government. The indulgence of the evil
+    feelings of malice and uncharitableness may, however, sufficiently recompense him;
+    and to him, perhaps, his virtue may be its own reward. But if paid agencies are not
+    permitted, a very serious suspicion fastens on that hard-mouthed, rising lordling,
+    Robert Cecil, son of the Marquis of Salisbury, and one of the most active and
+    energetic champions of the slave-mongers of the South. The young lord, it is well
+    known, stepped down from the lofty pedestal of a bad pedigree to marry the fair, but
+    portionless daughter of an English judge; his father is proverbially mean and stingy,
+    and the young lord himself proportionately poor; and in the intervals of his
+    strenuous advocacy of the claims of the Rebels to European recognition he laudably
+    ekes out his very narrow income by writing articles for the London newspapers and
+    reviews; and rumor says that he communicates gossiping letters, full of piquant and
+    satirical sketches of the proceedings of the House of Commons to two or three of the
+    provincial papers. He is under these circumstances peculiarly open to suspicion. If
+    the proceeding in question is a usual one, why does he not openly avow it? If it is
+    unusual or improper, why does he not deny the soft impeachment so much credited both
+    in this country and in his own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck,
+    after being the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become such
+    a <i>purist</i> as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the Commons, and
+    scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he had touched the yellow and
+    handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable Indian princes and rajahs who come to
+    England with complaints of grievances, sometimes real, and sometimes fictitious,
+    against the British Government.</p>
+    <p>During the period of the "paid agency" Roebuck was tolerably industrious with his
+    pen; but in literature and journalism he proved his utter incapacity for joining in
+    any combined action. Such was his dogged self-assertion and indomitable egotism that
+    none of the ordinary channels would answer his purpose; and so he issued a series of
+    political papers, entitled "Pamphlets for the People," to which the curious may
+    sometimes refer, but which have now lost all their significance and interest. His
+    quarrels with editors and publishers were notorious; and an altercation with Mr.
+    Black, the well-known editor of the "Morning Chronicle," eventuated in a duel so
+    bloodless as to be ridiculous. David's pebble did not reach Goliath, and Goliath was
+    equally merciful to David. In these pamphlets he violently assailed the whole body of
+    editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the papers of any note. And the
+    more accustomed he became to the House of Commons, the greater liberties did he take
+    with the conventional fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility
+    were so indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most
+    unpopular member of the House.</p>
+    <p>In 1837 he lost his election for Bath, <a name="page398" id="page398"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 398]</span> but was reelected in 1841. In a subsequent contest at
+    Bath he was successfully opposed by Lord Ashley, the present Earl of Shaftesbury. On
+    this occasion he exhibited even more than his usual bad temper and bad taste. He
+    declined to accept Lord Ashley's proffered hand; and in the chagrin and vexation
+    occasioned by unexpected defeat he uttered a rabid invective against the
+    Non-Conformist ministers of the place, to whose influence he rightly attributed his
+    rival's success. Lord Ashley was a well-known philanthropist, and his consistent
+    support and patronage of many religious and charitable societies had naturally given
+    him popularity among the Protestant clergy of all denominations,&mdash;a popularity
+    heightened in the case of the Evangelical and Calvinistic ministers by his Lordship's
+    strict Sabbatarianism and his belief in cold dinners on Sunday. On the other hand,
+    Mr. Roebuck was openly accused of private professions of skepticism in matters of
+    religion; and this report, so dangerous to the repute of any public man in England,
+    (where theology and politics so frequently cross each other,) considerably damaged
+    his chance of success. Lord Ashley, however, was in no way responsible for the rumor;
+    and the difference between the conduct of the two during the contest was this, that
+    Lord Ashley behaved like a gentleman and Mr. Roebuck did not.</p>
+    <p>During his retirement into private life, after this defeat in 1847, he wrote his
+    work entitled "The History of the Whig Ministry of 1830,"&mdash;a book in the
+    preparation of which he is said to have received considerable and valuable assistance
+    from no less a person than Lord Brougham. Despite the aid that he received, it is
+    amusing to find in his preface a characteristic vaunting of his entire difference
+    with Lord Brougham about the character of King William IV. "Lord Brougham," he
+    writes, "is accustomed to describe William IV as frank, just, and straightforward. We
+    believe him to have been very weak and very false, a finished dissembler, and always
+    bitterly hostile to the Whig Ministry and their great measure of Reform." This is
+    Roebuck all over. He would infinitely rather argue that white was black than quietly
+    coincide in any generally received opinion.</p>
+    <p>While on the subject of his writings, we will mention the book in which he
+    vouchsafed to praise those whom he now so elaborately vilifies. In 1849 he published
+    an octavo volume of two hundred and forty-eight pages on "The Colonies of England."
+    Speaking (page 84) of the vast and rapid progress made by this country, he
+    says:&mdash;</p>
+    <p>"We are led to inquire by what machinery, by what favoring circumstances, such a
+    result has been brought about. The people, be it remarked, are the same as
+    ourselves,&mdash;the original Thirteen States were the work of Englishmen. English
+    heads, English hearts, English hands brought those new communities into existence. No
+    longer connected by government with us, they nevertheless retained the
+    characteristics of the race from which they sprang, and proceeding in the great work
+    to which they were destined, they strode across the continent, the fairest portion of
+    which they could now call their own. In planting new settlements they were aided by
+    our own people,&mdash;the very elements <i>out of which we endeavor to frame
+    colonies, and with which we do produce sickly, miserable communities that can only be
+    said to exist, and to linger on in a sort of half-life</i>, without the spirit of a
+    young, or the amenities and polish of an old community, and, above all, <i>without
+    any spirit of independence</i>."</p>
+    <p>Again, speaking of colonization In this country as opposed to Canada and other
+    English colonies, he writes (page 88):&mdash;"Certain adventurous persons, the
+    'pioneers' of civilization, wishing to make new settlements beyond the boundaries of
+    Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands belonging to the United States, made
+    formal application to the Government of the United States at Washington, who, being
+    bound to afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land surveyed
+    and laid out <a name="page399" id="page399"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 399]</span>
+    into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are also indicated, and at once the law
+    exists; and security, guarantied by the authority of the United States, immediately
+    follows, both for person and property; and all the machinery known to the Common Law,
+    and needed for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law's
+    decrees, is at once adopted. A municipal authority comes into existence; a
+    court-house, a jail, a school-room, arise in the wilderness; and although these
+    buildings be humble, and the men who exercise authority in them may appear to be in
+    some degree rude, yet is the law there in all its useful majesty. To it a reverent
+    obedience is rendered; and the plain magistrate, who, in a hunter's frock, may, in
+    the name of the United States, pronounce the law's decree, commands an obedience as
+    complete and sincere as that which is paid to the Chief-Justice of the Supreme Court
+    at Washington, or to the ermined judge who presides in the courts of our Lady the
+    Queen in Westminster Hall."</p>
+    <p>This in 1849; but what a very different tone has he thought fit to adopt now! Was
+    any agency then expected which has not been forthcoming? Or, having degenerated from
+    being a supporter of liberal opinions in his youth to being the fond and fatuous
+    admirer of autocrats in his old age, does he think that it is absolutely necessary
+    that the firm friend of Austrian despotism should be the malignant assailant of the
+    Government and people of the United States? The man is consistent in nothing but his
+    spiteful vindictiveness and love of mischief. He is now the general object of
+    deserved ridicule and contempt for his flunkyistic attendance at the Tuileries. At
+    the time of Louis Napoleon's visit to London, Roebuck raved and ranted about his
+    "perjured lips having kissed the Queen of England."</p>
+    <p>He has, on some occasions, put himself prominently forward, and in such a way as
+    to make himself an influential member of Parliament. He moved the vote of confidence
+    in the Whig Government in 1850, when the great debate ensued in which the late Sir
+    Robert Peel made his last speech, and they were kept in office by a poetical majority
+    of nine. But the speech with which Roebuck introduced the motion was entirely
+    eclipsed by the magnificent declamation of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the present
+    Lord-Chief-Justice of England. On another great occasion, in January, 1855, he
+    brought forward in the House of Commons a motion for inquiry into the conduct of the
+    Crimean War. Lord Aberdeen's Government was defeated by an immense majority, and, of
+    course, resigned. Mr. Roebuck was chairman of the Committee of Inquiry; but the
+    cabinet that came in discreetly declined to give him any official post in their
+    ranks. They knew too well the terrible uncertainty and inconsistency of the man's
+    conduct. They could place no reliance either on his temper or his discretion. In 1855
+    he was one of the numerous candidates for the chairmanship of the Metropolitan Board
+    of Works, but failed to inspire the electors with any confidence in his capacity for
+    the post. In the following year he became the chairman of the Administrative Reform
+    Association, and although the league had at first been highly successful, and aided
+    much in awaking public attention to the miscarriages and mismanagement in the Crimea,
+    yet, under this fatal presidency, it became speedily and ingloriously defunct. This
+    was his last great failure, before abdicating all his early liberal principles. He
+    has of late years endeavored to solace himself for the now irretrievable blunders of
+    his career by an exaggerated indulgence in his idiosyncratic waywardness, paradox,
+    and eccentricity. He is proud of being considered the acquaintance of the Emperor of
+    Austria, and rather pleased than otherwise at being assailed on this account. He
+    affects the society and friendship of conservative members of the House of Commons.
+    He has become tolerant of lords. He may be seen sitting next to Lord Robert Cecil,
+    indulging in ill-natured jocosities, from which his Lordship probably borrows when <a
+    name="page400" id="page400"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 400]</span> he indites
+    ill-natured articles for the misguided "Saturday Review."<a id="footnotetag19"
+    name="footnotetag19" href="#footnote19"><sup>19</sup></a> He hates the Manchester
+    school of politicians, because their liberality and their sympathy with the cause of
+    freedom and civilization in this country remind Roebuck of his own deflection from
+    the right path.</p>
+    <p>His private undertakings have not been more fortunate than his public acts. He was
+    chairman of a bank, which was unsuccessful, to say the least of it. He has been
+    connected with other enterprises, which soon courted and obtained failure.</p>
+    <p>What he has recently said and done in reference to this country is too fresh in
+    our memories to require that we should recite or recapitulate it here. His past
+    career, as we have reviewed it, may account for the now intolerable acerbity of
+    temper and the ludicrous vanity which disgrace him. Never was a Nemesis more just
+    than that which has for the present consigned him to a melancholy obscurity. The
+    political extinguisher has certainly dropped upon his head, and this burning and
+    shining light has gone out with an unpleasant odor into utter darkness.</p>
+    <p>In summing up his character, it is evident that excessive vanity is his besetting
+    sin. He is not too clever or too honest to act in union with other people, but he is
+    too <i>vain</i>. He is by no means too good for the rest of the world; but he is too
+    conceited and self-opinionated to condescend to co&ouml;perate with them. As, at some
+    of the minor theatres, a single actor may play an army, so, in the House of Commons,
+    Roebuck is a host in himself,&mdash;is his own party, and leads it. His occasional
+    popularity in his own country is due to the fact, that, in his own character, he, to
+    a certain extent, represents and crystallizes a few of the good and many of the bad
+    qualities of Englishmen. He has their courage and audacity, their independence and
+    pride, their generally defiant front to the rest of the world; but he is also vain,
+    obstinate, bigoted, prejudiced, narrow in his views, and boastful in his language.
+    His vulgar swagger, for instance, about the navy sweeping the seas, would have been
+    condemned here, if it had been addressed by the most violent of demagogues to the
+    most ignorant of Irish mobs.</p>
+    <p>We have heard him speak in the House of Commons in his palmier days, before he was
+    as decrepit in mind as he is in body. He had great fluency, some power of invective,
+    and a vast stock of assurance. We listened to him upon one occasion, when, without
+    the slightest provocation, he used the most undignified personalities to the late Sir
+    Robert Peel,&mdash;to which Sir Robert, very wisely, never replied.</p>
+    <p>We cannot say that we feel any profound interest as to his future. He has compared
+    himself to a dog,&mdash;but, on behalf of that faithful and valued companion of man,
+    we protest against the similitude. He has the kind of pugnacity which prompts a cur
+    or a puppy to attack a Newfoundland or a mastiff. He has not the fidelity and many
+    other good qualities of the canine race. At any rate, he has become a mischievous
+    dog,&mdash;and a dull dog,&mdash;and will soon be a "sad dog."</p>
+    <p>We would venture to suggest, that he should at once be raised to the peerage,
+    under the title of Baron Tear-'em. He might then aid the good cause of the
+    slave-mongers of the South, and act in unison with that just, generous, moral, and
+    virtuous nobleman, the Marquis of Clanricarde.</p>
+    <p>We ought to apologize to our readers for so lengthy an account of so undeserving a
+    person,&mdash;but, at any rate, they ought by this time to know "Who is Roebuck?"</p>
+    <hr />
+    <a name="page401" id="page401"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 401]</span>
+    <h2>REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.</h2>
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>Six Months in the Federal States</i>. By EDWARD DICEY. In Two Volumes. London
+      and Cambridge: Macmillan &amp; Co.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>This is a very <i>gentlemanly</i> book. Whatever excellence of commendation
+    belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr. Dicey. And it is
+    ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British tourists who have preceded him. For,
+    to make no mention of the vulgar buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that
+    neither the exalted and irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the
+    cleverish magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony
+    Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition. It is no mean praise
+    to say that the word <i>gentlemanly</i> naturally applies itself to a traveller's
+    work. And it is necessary to allow that the majority of Americans who have printed
+    their impressions of a scamper over Europe have fallen as hopelessly below it as a
+    few have risen far above it. Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the
+    sterling sentences of "English Traits"; some epithet of more rare and subtile
+    significance is suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with
+    which Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the "Atlantic." But after the
+    manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would emphatically
+    credit as an American <i>gentleman</i> might speak of six months in England, so has
+    Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal States.</p>
+    <p>And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or
+    "stereographic" descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us which Mr. Dicey
+    offers to his countrymen. To such loyal Americans as these volumes may reach they
+    will give a heart not to be found in Dr. Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the
+    dashing effects of popular Mr. Trollope, nor even&mdash;making all allowance for the
+    sanative influence of counter-irritation&mdash;in the weekly malignity of that
+    <i>ex</i>-Moral Minstrel whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent
+    slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out what petty
+    enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly, English way of accepting
+    the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis he came to study. He seldom gets
+    entangled in trivial events, but knows how to use them as illustrations of great
+    events. It is really refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily
+    delivered from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is not
+    called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the hardships of
+    indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of New-York hackmen. There is
+    scarcely an offence against good taste or good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and
+    whatever American homes may have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more
+    readily than to most publishing tourists from the mother-land.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Dicey clearly exhibits the bearing of the Rebellion upon the fate of the
+    servile population of the South, and confesses that his deep sympathy with the
+    Federal cause came from the conviction that the supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was
+    intimately connected with the success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the
+    necessity that was upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their
+    society, he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign
+    well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the Free States.
+    He has the sagacity to perceive that the genius and development of the graduates of
+    Northern school-houses are totally opposed to a military rule. Mr. Dicey cordially
+    recognizes the democratic idea which sanctifies our convulsion, and displays a
+    careful observation in noting "the self-restraint, the moderation, and the patience
+    of the American people in the conduct of the people's war." He is not over-disturbed
+    because this same people loved law and order more than freedom itself, and with few
+    murmurs committed high principles to the championship of whatever petty men happened
+    to represent them. Indeed, one of the best sayings he reports is that of an old
+    Polish exile, who congratulates himself that there will be no saviours of society, no
+    fathers of their country, <a name="page402" id="page402"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 402]</span> to be provided for when the war is over.</p>
+    <p>Throughout these two volumes British readers may discern something more than the
+    barren facts of our struggle: they may catch glimpses of its energy and movement;
+    they may see it as reflected from the most generous American minds. For it seems to
+    have been Mr. Dicey's good fortune in this country to have gained admission to the
+    society of men and women of high intelligence, in whom the religious sentiment was
+    living and powerful; and he appears to estimate the full weight of testimony such
+    persons offered in sending their loved ones to Virginia to fall beneath the rifle of
+    some Southern boor. It is this silent public opinion of the North which our foreign
+    critics have generally failed to comprehend. They have been so long accustomed to
+    parody the rhetorical elation of our third-rate political speakers, and to represent
+    this as a universal American characteristic, that they signally failed to estimate
+    the genuine emotion with which it is never connected. When the cherished barbarism of
+    slaveholders arose and threatened our Western civilization, those who most felt and
+    have best wrought for their country were cautious in their speech. They knew that the
+    principle underlying the struggle must submit itself to the checks and counter-checks
+    of constitutional law. While the fire of liberty burned at the heart of citizens of
+    abiding loyalty, it seemed best, that, like the Psalmist, they should hold their
+    peace even from good words. Many thought it an act of necessary self-restraint to
+    dwell only upon the Union as a symbol of that universal freedom which they felt the
+    Union must finally represent. The dread of overleaping the restraints of law, which,
+    perchance, has prolonged the conflict, has been most creditable to the genuine
+    democracy we have represented. We are proud to remember many intelligent soldiers who
+    used no language of passionate denunciation towards the guilty institution which
+    called them to the field, yet who knew the end when they gave their lives to a cause
+    utterly antagonistic to its despotic claims.</p>
+    <p>By the representations of Secessionists encountered in the Free States, as well as
+    from disloyal newspapers which the "Lincoln despotism" never sought to suppress, Mr.
+    Dicey was convinced that the sole purpose of the Rebellion was to get possession of
+    the vast regions which lie west of the Mississippi, wherein to establish Slave States
+    and Territories. "The North," he declares, "is fighting against, the South is
+    fighting for, the power of extending slavery across the American continent; and if
+    this was all that could be said, it is clear on which side must be the sympathies of
+    any one who really and honestly believes that slavery is an evil and a sin." But it
+    is not here that Mr. Dicey rests the case of the North as appealing to the Christian
+    sentiment of the world. He shows that the inexorable logic of facts must work the
+    overthrow of slavery where it now exists. The suppression of the slave-trade, the
+    recognition of Hayti, abolition in the District of Columbia, and finally the
+    Proclamation of January have one tendency and can have but one result. We state these
+    views as one more confirmation of the fact, that, whether agreeable to us or not, the
+    sympathies of liberal men in Europe are to be had on the sole ground that ours is an
+    anti-slavery war.</p>
+    <p>Mr. Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although discriminating,
+    estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored to serve their country by
+    leaving the level commonplaces of respectable citizenship. It is no slight praise to
+    say that his chapter upon the New-England Abolitionists is clear and just. Their
+    points of disagreement with the Republican party are stated with no common accuracy.
+    Careful sentences give the precise position of Garrison and his adherents: the
+    intrinsic essence of the movement of these reformers is divested of the subordinate
+    and trivial facts so often put forward to misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey
+    endeavors not to commit himself upon the vital differences in the agitation of
+    anti-slavery sentiments by the Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very
+    evident that he inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of
+    disunion, acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical
+    compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense conviction of the
+    national sin.</p>
+    <p>We have dwelt thus upon Mr. Dicey's views of the war, and of the great moral
+    question with which it is connected, because these portions of his volumes are <a
+    name="page403" id="page403"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 403]</span> most pertinent
+    to us, as well as creditable to him. His sketches of public characters are good
+    common-sense grasps at them, which generally get their externals, and occasionally
+    something more. The description of the President is forcible, though a little too
+    graphic for perfect courtesy. Caleb Cushing impresses the traveller as one of the
+    ablest of our public men, and Wendell Phillips as by far the most eloquent speaker he
+    ever heard. General Butler, however, is not to Mr. Dicey's taste. Indeed, he is
+    hardly behind the "Saturday Review" in the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man
+    who he acknowledges "was associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms,
+    and by some means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost of
+    either men or money." It is rather late to renew discussion about the notorious order
+    relating to the women of the subjected city. But Mr. Dicey chooses to express his
+    belief in an infamous intention of General Butler at the time of its
+    issue,&mdash;though he declares that "the strictest care was taken lest the order
+    should be abused," and that the "Southern ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their
+    behavior to the Union soldiers, using <i>language and gestures</i> which, in a city
+    occupied by troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, <i>without
+    orders</i>, to the coarsest retaliation." To which we have only to reply, that
+    General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool. Nobody doubts
+    that he has military or civil aspirations for the future, and, for such ends, if for
+    nothing else, wishes the approbation of his loyal countrymen. Now Mr. Dicey testifies
+    to "the almost morbid sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to
+    women": he tells us that "it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female
+    influences"; also, that this same "sentiment" among us "protects women from the
+    natural consequences of their own misconduct." These characteristics of his
+    countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler as they are patent to Mr. Dicey;
+    and we hold it to be simply incredible that one who is at least a very shrewd
+    politician used language which <i>he intended</i> should convey a meaning that must
+    necessarily consign his future career to privacy and infamy. It is perhaps not
+    wonderful that men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system
+    which consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil
+    interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to <i>acts</i> which, in civilized
+    States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one purpose. Neither is it
+    very astonishing that such persons as have been employed to pump the New-York sewers
+    into the <i>cloaca maxima</i> which sets towards us from Printing-House Square should
+    share the sensitive chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do. But
+    it is passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey, one so
+    appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of its representatives,
+    should join in an accusation whose absurdity is only lost in its infinite
+    offence.</p>
+    <p>There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of carelessness or
+    repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances allowed time for revision,
+    might have been avoided. It would require the "Pathfinder" himself to discover
+    "Fremont Street" in the city where we write; the "Courier" is <i>not</i> "the most
+    largely circulated of any Boston paper"; and our Ex-Mayor "Whiteman" requires no
+    fanciful orthography to free his name from the obloquy of an over-devotion to the
+    interests of colored citizens. These are local illustrations of mistakes which are
+    excusable in view of the commendable expedition with which the work was
+    issued,&mdash;for, in the late crisis of our affairs, an Englishman who had any good
+    words to give us fulfilled the proverb by giving twice in giving quickly. But,
+    whatever trifling details might be subjected to criticism, the total impression of
+    what Mr. Dicey has written bears honorable testimony to the accuracy of his
+    observation, as well as to his powers of comparison and judgment.</p>
+    <p>As has been already remarked, we cannot be blind to the fact that our only
+    supporters in England are those men who recognize at the heart of our contest that
+    genuine principle of Liberty which is not to be limited to caste or to race. And it
+    is only by hastening to justify their confidence that we can win to our cause the
+    great people they address. If we cannot gain the national sympathy of England, we
+    must do without the true sympathy of any nation. It was, indeed, remarked by De
+    Tocqueville, that, "in the eyes of the English, the cause which is most useful to <a
+    name="page404" id="page404"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 404]</span> England is
+    always the cause of justice." But the rare insight of the philosopher assigns the
+    phenomenon, not to a political Machiavelism, but to a "laudable desire to connect the
+    actions of one's country with something more stable than interest." The English have
+    a peculiar gift of fixing their whole attention upon certain traits or single
+    circumstances which they desire to see. We doubt not that a portion of their sympathy
+    with the energy and endurance of those in arms against their country is estimable
+    according to its light. But as the dignity of our mission in this struggle becomes
+    more and more apparent, the moral intelligence of England will be forced to unite
+    itself with the Government of the United States. Let that day come when it will,
+    posterity will remember its obligations to those Englishmen who did so much to avert
+    the hideous calamity of a war between the two liberal powers of the world. And to us
+    of this present generation it is grateful to know that our brave and generous young
+    men have not died wholly unrecognized in the land of their ancestors. Mill, Ellison,
+    Hughes,&mdash;what need to name the rest?&mdash;have stood up to report them and
+    their cause aright to the unsatisfied: in which roll of the honorable and honored we
+    are glad to write the name of Edward Dicey.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>Hospital Transports</i>. A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and Wounded
+      from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Compiled and published at the
+      Request of the Sanitary Commission. Boston: Ticknor and Fields.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>If pure benevolence was ever organized and utilized into beneficence, the name of
+    the institution is the Sanitary Commission. It is a standing answer to Samson's
+    riddle, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." Out of the very depths of the agony
+    of this cruel and bloody war springs this beautiful system, built of the noblest and
+    divinest attributes of the human soul. Amidst all the heroism of daring and enduring
+    which this war has developed, amidst all the magnanimity of which it has shown the
+    race capable, the daring, the endurance, and the greatness of soul which have been
+    discovered among the men and women who have given their lives to this work shine as
+    brightly as any on the battle-field,&mdash;in some respects even more brightly. They
+    have not the bray of trumpets nor the clash of swords to rouse enthusiasm, nor will
+    the land ever resound with their victories. Theirs is the dark and painful side, the
+    menial and hidden side, but made light and lovely by the spirit that shines in and
+    through it all. Glimpses of this agency are familiar to our people; but not till the
+    history of its inception, progress, and results is calmly and adequately written out
+    and spread before the public will any idea be formed of the magnitude and importance
+    of the work which it has done. Nor even then. Never, till every soldier whose last
+    moments it has soothed, till every soldier whose flickering life it has gently
+    steadied into continuance, whose waning reason it has softly lulled into quiet, whose
+    chilled blood it has warmed into healthful play, whose failing frame it has nourished
+    into strength, whose fainting heart it has comforted with sympathy,&mdash;never,
+    until every full soul has poured out its story of gratitude and thanksgiving, will
+    the record be complete; but long before that time, ever since the moment that its
+    helping hand was first held forth, comes the Blessed Voice, "Inasmuch as ye have done
+    it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."</p>
+    <p>An institution asking of Government only permission to live and opportunity to
+    work, planting itself firmly and squarely on the generosity of the people, subsisting
+    solely by their free-will offerings, it is a noble monument of the intelligence, the
+    munificence, and the efficiency of a free people, and of the alacrity with which it
+    responds when the right chord is rightly touched. It is, however, not unnatural that
+    doubts should exist as to the success of a plan so far-reaching in its aims and
+    hitherto so untried. Stories have been circulated of a mercenary disposition of its
+    stores and trickery among its officers. Where these stories have found considerable
+    credence, they have been tracked to their source and triumphantly refuted; but it
+    would indeed be hardly less than miraculous, if an institution ramifying so widely,
+    with agents so numerous, and resources so extensive, should have no knaves among its
+    servants, and no waste in its circulation. The wonder is, that more <a name="page405"
+    id="page405"></a><span class="newpage">[pg 405]</span> leakage has not been proved
+    than has ever been suspected. All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to
+    convince all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all
+    hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of what it has
+    done, is doing, and purposes to do. This information the Commission has, at different
+    times, and by piecemeal, furnished: necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book
+    justly remarks, the immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its
+    operations in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in the
+    reading as in the performance. In this little volume we have, photographed, a single
+    phase of its operations. It consists simply of extracts from letters and reports.
+    There is no attempt at completeness or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate
+    grouping would probably fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work
+    and its ways as these unpretending fragments. It delights us to see the&mdash;we can
+    hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the "self-sacrifice" which
+    benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about&mdash;but, rather, the gay, lively,
+    merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold of. Men and women seem to
+    have gone into the service with good-will and hearty love and buoyant spirits. It
+    refreshes and strengthens us like a tonic to read of their taking the wounded,
+    festering, filthy, miserable men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and
+    beef-tea, and putting them abed and asleep. There is not a word about "devotion" or
+    "ministering angels," (we could wish there were not quite so much about "ladies,")
+    but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains and quick hands, now
+    bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be rewarded with one grateful smile from
+    the parting soul,&mdash;now standing in the way of a procession of the slightly
+    wounded, to pour a little brandy down their throats, or put an orange into their
+    hands, just to keep them up till they reach food and rest,&mdash;now running up the
+    river in a steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they
+    go,&mdash;now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents of rain,
+    into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, "calling back to life those in
+    despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again catching for mother or wife the
+    last faint whispers of the dying,"&mdash;now leaving their compliments to serve a
+    disappointed colonel instead of his dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by
+    dragging away the stove with its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood
+    pot-holes;&mdash;and let the sutler's name be wreathed with laurel who not only
+    permitted this, but offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and
+    would take no pay!</p>
+    <p>The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of thousands who
+    love their country and their kind, rest upon those who originated, and those who
+    sustain, this noble work. Let the people's heart never faint and its hand never
+    weary; but let it, of its abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed
+    down, shaken together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen,
+    its divine footsteps may follow,&mdash;that, wherever the red hand of war is lifted
+    to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,&mdash;that its work may never cease
+    until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or until peace once more reigns
+    throughout the land. And even then, gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory,
+    shall never die out of the hearts of the American people.</p>
+    <hr />
+    <blockquote>
+      <i>The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all Churches,
+      Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith</i>. By WILLIAM HOWITT.
+      Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott &amp; Co.
+    </blockquote>
+    <p>There has been a great change of late years in connection with the science of
+    Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it. There was a revolution of opinion on
+    this subject in the middle of the last century; there is a counter-revolution
+    to-day.</p>
+    <p>The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during the course
+    of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclop&aelig;dism of French philosophy. The
+    grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the supernatural were fiercely
+    attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove the insufficiency of such grounds were
+    assumed to prove more than lack of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs,
+    that, in the nature of things, there <a name="page406" id="page406"></a><span
+    class="newpage">[pg 406]</span> is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
+    the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of mortals,
+    except that which relates to the physical,&mdash;to this earth, as the only phase of
+    existence,&mdash;to the vital body, as the all of the human being. Emotional and
+    intellectual phenomena were but results of material organization, as heat is the
+    result of combustion: they exhibited themselves so long as vitality continued; they
+    disappeared when death supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the
+    cessation of combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
+    phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but the mere fancy
+    of an excited imagination.</p>
+    <p>Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this materialistic
+    influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and, more or less, of the rest
+    of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it. The tendency, all over the civilized
+    world, was towards unbelief, not merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual.
+    Science, with her strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
+    direction.</p>
+    <p>It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the Encyclop&aelig;dian
+    school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an insufficient argument is
+    brought forward to prove it. It does not appear to have occurred to skeptical
+    physicists that there may be laws of Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as
+    fixed, as invariable, as those which decide the succession of geological phenomena
+    and the products of chemical combinations.</p>
+    <p>Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God adapts the
+    proofs of that which it is important that man should know to the intellectual
+    progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same evidence which sufficed for the
+    foundation of religious faith five hundred years ago will suffice equally well
+    to-day? Truths are eternal; laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts
+    there is a childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
+    arguments suited to various stages of progress.</p>
+    <p>Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the economy of
+    human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present phase, (that phase being
+    but the preparation for another and a higher,) may it not be, that, as the world
+    advances, men may gradually be permitted, occasionally and to a limited extent, to
+    become aware of influences exerted from a more advanced phase of existence over this?
+    May it not be that the links connecting the two phases of existence are gradually to
+    become more numerous and apparent?</p>
+    <p>Such are the general views which William Howitt's work is intended to illustrate
+    and enforce. He selects, as a title-page motto, an axiom from Butler's
+    "Analogy,"&mdash;"There are two courses of Nature: the ordinary and the
+    extraordinary." By the supernatural he does not mean phenomena out of the course of
+    Nature, but such comparatively rare phenomena as are governed by laws with which we
+    are unacquainted, and as are, therefore, to us something extraordinary, something to
+    be wondered at,&mdash;miracles.</p>
+    <p>The author travels over a vast extent of ground,&mdash;more, we think, than can be
+    properly explored in the compass of two duodecimo volumes. All ages, all countries,
+    all faiths, furnish their quota towards his collection. It is curious, interesting,
+    suggestive, rather than conclusive. It exhibits more industry than logic. It consists
+    rather of abundant materials for others to use, than of materials worked up by the
+    collector. It gives evidence of learning, research, and a comprehensive study of the
+    subject. It is a <i>thesaurus</i> of pneumatological knowledge, collected with German
+    assiduity. It will set many to thinking, though it may convince but few, except of
+    the one truth, that the faith in the supernatural has been a universal faith,
+    pervading all nations, persisting through all ages.</p>
+    <p>The number of those who take an interest in the subject treated of in Mr. Howitt's
+    book, and who believe that great truths underlie popular superstitions, increases day
+    by day; and the work will probably have a wide circulation.</p>
+    <hr class="full" />
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote1" name="footnote1"></a> <b>Footnote 1</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag1">return</a>)
+      <p>The "Florestan" of the "Sc&egrave;nes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is Clara herself;
+      "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote2" name="footnote2"></a> <b>Footnote 2</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag2">return</a>)
+      <p>See Dwight's <i>Journal of Music</i>, Vol. VIII. No. 3.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote3" name="footnote3"></a> <b>Footnote 3</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag3">return</a>)
+      <p>How d' y' do?</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote4" name="footnote4"></a> <b>Footnote 4</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag4">return</a>)
+      <p>Among the other facts showing that Kirkdale Cave had been the den of these
+      animals, and not tenanted as their home by any of the other creatures whose remains
+      occurred there, were the excrements of the Hyenas found in considerable quantity by
+      Dr. Buckland, and identified as such by the keeper of a menagerie. Any one who may
+      wish to read the whole history of Dr. Buckland's investigations of this matter,
+      showing the patience and sagacity with which he collected and arranged the
+      evidence, will find a full account of Kirkdale Cave and other caverns containing
+      fossil bones in his "Reliqui&aelig; Diluvian&aelig;."</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote5" name="footnote5"></a> <b>Footnote 5</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag5">return</a>)
+      <p>"<i>In any thinking mind</i>." Yet it must be confessed that there <i>does</i>
+      exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey in quarters from which
+      better things might be expected. Misappreciation it cannot be called, where no
+      trouble has been taken to estimate claims that needed only to be weighed to be
+      truly valued. Up to this time, there has never been published in England a single
+      essay on the life or the genius of De Quincey that indicated even a good
+      acquaintance, on the part of the writer, with that author's works; and in such a
+      case, of course, not much could be looked for in the way of just interpretation.
+      Gilfillan did him gross injustice: indeed, from what he condescended to say of the
+      man, it would be difficult to conjecture that a greater than Gilfillan was there.
+      And, will the reader believe it? in Professor Craik's "English Literature"&mdash;a
+      work of great excellence&mdash;the name of De Quincey is not mentioned! "Sam
+      Johnson," says Craik, "was the last king that sat upon the throne of English prose
+      literature." Let it be that Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De
+      Quincey was legitimately his successor. First, in the matter of time: Sam died in
+      1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the regal line.
+      What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors? Was it learning? De
+      Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is no writer in the language who in
+      that matter may look down on De Quincey.</p>
+      <p>If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De Quincey. Some
+      stupid writer for the London "Athen&aelig;um," for instance, dared to compliment
+      the poor "opium-chewer" after the following style:&mdash;"He possessed taste, but
+      <i>he lacked creative energy</i>; and his subtle and highly refined intellect was
+      ingenious and acute rather than powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once
+      passed upon Shakspeare by a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had
+      considerable genius, but very little taste!</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote6" name="footnote6"></a> <b>Footnote 6</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag6">return</a>)
+      <p>Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that it always reminded him
+      of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without any doubt, an elephant could dance
+      after an elephantine fashion; but surely you would never catch him going through
+      the movements of a jig or a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he
+      is an elephant. So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from
+      <i>his</i> humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
+      you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a tragedy of
+      pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.</p>
+      <p>There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen Aristophaneses.
+      There was something, too, in its order, by which it resembled the gigantesque
+      features of the old Greek master. I will illustrate my meaning by a single instance
+      from each. In Aristophanes's "Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the
+      Socratic <i>Phrontisterium</i>, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs
+      his pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the moon
+      only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm about his ears with
+      lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks paid, or refused to pay, regularly
+      on the last day of the month,)&mdash;and here it is that the opportunity is offered
+      for a monstrous stroke of humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim,
+      "Some magic is it, O Socrates, about the moon? Well! since you are up to that sort
+      of thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old monster
+      out of her course for a generation or so?" Now for the parallel case from De
+      Quincey. It is from his paper on "California," a politico-economical treatise. The
+      author's object is to illustrate the fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its
+      non-existence, but to the difficulty of obtaining it. "Emeralds and sapphires,"
+      says he, "are lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no
+      policeman is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from
+      pocketing as many as we please. We are also at perfect liberty to pocket the
+      anchors of Her Majesty's ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty guns,) and to
+      sell them for old iron. Pocket them by all means, and I engage that the magistrate
+      sitting at the Thames police-office will have too much respect for your powers to
+      think of detaining you. If he does, your course is to pocket the police-office, and
+      all which it inherits. The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer,
+      but not a customer to be sneezed at." This strikes us as very similar to
+      Strepsiades's bagging the moon.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote7" name="footnote7"></a> <b>Footnote 7</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag7">return</a>)
+      <p>But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was only by the lack on
+      his part of that frankness which the kindness of his guardians deserved that he had
+      brought so much misery upon himself in after-life. His younger brother,
+      Richard,&mdash;the Pink of the "Autobiographic Sketches,"&mdash;made the same
+      mistake, a mistake which in his case was never rectified, but led to a life of
+      perilous wanderings and adventures.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote8" name="footnote8"></a> <b>Footnote 8</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag8">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Paradise Regained</i>, Book II.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote9" name="footnote9"></a> <b>Footnote 9</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag9">return</a>)
+      <p>It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's immortality, that
+      frequently, as physical power declines, the mind exhibits unusual activity. But the
+      argument moves in the opposite direction. For of what sort is this unusual
+      activity? That which results from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that
+      not only are the physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause
+      has impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is
+      manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane brilliancy; as,
+      for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who occupied the last minutes of
+      his ebbing life with a very subtile mathematical discourse concerning the
+      exceeding, the excruciating smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts.
+      And strange as it may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a
+      triumphant vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian
+      faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary glimmerings
+      of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same purpose.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote10" name="footnote10"></a> <b>Footnote 10</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag10">return</a>)
+      <p>Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without being distinctly
+      conscious of having written a previous one. It was no uncommon thing for him to
+      forget his own writings. In one case it is known that for a long time he persisted
+      in disowning his production. His American editor&mdash;a fact which is little
+      known&mdash;selected, from among the mass of periodical writings in the various
+      magazines for which De Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide
+      him than, their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey's pen.
+      In one instance,&mdash;as to the "Traditions of the Rabbins,"&mdash;after
+      considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De Quincey, to
+      set himself right. The latter disowned the essay: he had forgotten it. Mr. F.,
+      however, after another examination, concluded, that, notwithstanding De Quincey's
+      denial of the fact, he <i>must</i> have written it; accordingly, at his own risk,
+      he published it. Afterwards De Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all
+      disputed cases of this nature to his Boston publishers.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote11" name="footnote11"></a> <b>Footnote 11</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag11">return</a>)
+      <p>De Quincey, at his death, had two sons and three daughters. The, eldest of the
+      daughters became the wife of Robert Craig of Ireland. It was this one, and the
+      youngest, who were present during his last hours. The second daughter, Florence,
+      was with her husband (a colonel of the British army) in India. The two sons were
+      both absent: one in India, a captain in the army; the other, a physician, in
+      Brazil.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote12" name="footnote12"></a> <b>Footnote 12</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag12">return</a>)
+      <p>These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Hon. Charles Sumner, who is
+      also the fortunate owner of the <i>Album Amicorum</i> containing the autograph of
+      John Milton.&mdash;ED.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote13" name="footnote13"></a> <b>Footnote 13</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag13">return</a>)
+      <p>Macknight's <i>Life of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 737.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote14" name="footnote14"></a> <b>Footnote 14</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag14">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Life of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 410.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote15" name="footnote15"></a> <b>Footnote 15</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag15">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Lifo of Burke</i>, Vol. III. p. 700.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote16" name="footnote16"></a> <b>Footnote 16</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag16">return</a>)
+      <p><i>Parliamentary History</i> Vol. XXIX. p. 426.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote17" name="footnote17"></a> <b>Footnote 17</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag17">return</a>)
+      <p>Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote18" name="footnote18"></a> <b>Footnote 18</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag18">return</a>)
+      <p>Lindsay's fawning, plastic sycophancy is well known this side the water. After
+      shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from Northern business-transactions, he
+      now turns about, kicks his old friends, who always half suspected his knavish
+      propensities, bows, cap in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some
+      honest pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion. A
+      "fool's gudgeon" will surely reward his laborious endeavors for Southern gold, that
+      article growing beautifully less every day.</p>
+    </div>
+    <div class="footnote">
+      <a id="footnote19" name="footnote19"></a> <b>Footnote 19</b>: (<a
+      href="#footnotetag19">return</a>)
+      <p>This journal is now owned by Mr. Alexander James Beresford Beresford-Hope, (we
+      dare not omit any portion of this august name,) who has ample means to enlist the
+      talents of reckless, "smart" young men in search of employment for any work he may
+      require, no matter how unprincipled the job in hand.</p>
+    </div>
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+<pre>
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
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+  </body>
+</html>
+
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@@ -0,0 +1,9260 @@
+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September, 1863, No. LXXI.
+       A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
+
+Author: Various
+
+Release Date: October 5, 2004 [EBook #13631]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. XII. ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Joshua Hutchinson, the PG Online Distributed Proofreading
+Team, and Cornell University
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+THE
+
+ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
+
+A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+VOL. XII.--SEPTEMBER, 1863.--NO. LXXI.
+
+
+Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1863, by TICKNOR AND
+FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of
+Massachusetts.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE PURITAN MINISTER.
+
+
+It is nine o'clock upon a summer Sunday morning, in the year sixteen
+hundred and something. The sun looks down brightly on a little forest
+settlement, around whose expanding fields the great American wilderness
+recedes each day, withdrawing its bears and wolves and Indians into an
+ever remoter distance,--not yet so far but that a stout wooden gate at
+each end of the village street indicates that there is something outside
+which must stay outside, if possible. It would look very busy and
+thriving in this little place, to-day, but for the Sabbath stillness
+which broods over everything with almost an excess of calm. Even the
+smoke ascends more faintly than usual from the chimneys of these
+abundant log-huts and scanty framed houses, and since three o'clock
+yesterday afternoon not a stroke of this world's work has been done.
+Last night a preparatory lecture was held, and now comes the
+consummation of the whole week's life, in the solemn act of worship. In
+which settlement of the Massachusetts Colony is the great observance to
+pass before our eyes? If it be Cambridge village, the warning drum is
+beating its peaceful summons to the congregation. If it be Salem
+village, a bell is sounding its more ecclesiastic peal, and a red flag
+is simultaneously hung forth from the meeting-house, like the
+auction-flag of later periods, but offering in this case goods without
+money and beyond price. But if it be Haverhill village, then Abraham
+Tyler has been blowing his horn assiduously for half an hour, a service
+for which Abraham, each year, receives a half-pound of pork from every
+family in town.
+
+Be it drum, bell, or horn, which gives the summons, we will draw near to
+this important building, the centre of the village, the one public
+edifice,--meeting-house, town-house, school-house, watch-house, all in
+one. So important is it, that no one can legally dwell more than a
+half-mile from it. And yet the people ride to meeting, short though the
+distance be, for at yonder oaken block a wife dismounts from behind her
+husband;--and has it not, moreover, been found needful to impose a fine
+of forty shillings on fast trotting to and fro? All sins are not modern
+ones, young gentlemen.
+
+We approach nearer still, and come among the civic institutions. This is
+the pillory, yonder the stocks, and there is a large wooden cage, a
+terror to evil-doers, but let us hope empty now. Round the meeting-house
+is a high wooden paling, to which the law permits citizens to tie their
+horses, provided it be not done too near the passage-way. For at that
+opening stands a sentry, clothed in a suit of armor which is painted
+black, and cost the town twenty-four shillings by the bill. He bears
+also a heavy matchlock musket; his rest, or iron fork, is stuck in the
+ground, ready to support the weapon; and he is girded with his
+bandoleer, or broad leather belt, which sustains a sword and a dozen tin
+cartridge-boxes.
+
+The meeting-house is the second to which the town has treated itself,
+the first having been "a timber fort, both strong and comely, with flat
+roof and battlements,"--a cannon on top, and the cannonade of the gospel
+down below. But this one cost the town sixty-three pounds, hard-earned
+pounds, and carefully expended. It is built of brick, smeared outside
+with clay, and finished with clay-boards, larger than our clapboards,
+outside of all. It is about twenty-five feet square, with a chimney half
+the width of the building, and projecting four feet above the thatched
+roof. The steeple is in the centre, and the bell-rope, if they have one,
+hangs in the middle of the broad aisle. There are six windows, two on
+each of the two sides, and two more at the end, part being covered with
+oiled paper only, part glazed in numerous small panes. And between the
+windows, on the outside, hang the heads of all the wolves that have been
+killed in the township within the year. But the Quakers think that the
+wolves have cheated the parish and got inside, in sheep's clothing.
+
+The people are assembling. The Governor has passed by, with his four
+vergers bearing halberds before him. The French Popish ambassadors, who
+have just arrived from Canada, are told the customs of the place, and
+left to stay quietly in the Governor's house, with sweetmeats, wines,
+and the liberty of a private walk in the garden. The sexton has just
+called for the minister, as is his duty twice every Sunday, and,
+removing his cocked hat, he walks before his superior officer. The
+minister enters and passes up the aisle, dressed in Geneva cloak, black
+skull-cap, and black gloves open at thumb and finger, for the better
+handling of his manuscript. He looks round upon his congregation, a few
+hundred, recently _seated_ anew for the year, arranged according to rank
+and age. There are the old men in the pews beneath the pulpit. There are
+the young men in the gallery, or near the door, with ruffs, showy belts,
+gold and silver buttons, "points" at the knees, and great boots. There
+are the young women, with "silk or tiffany hoods or scarfs,"
+"embroidered or needle-worked caps," "immoderate great sleeves," "cut
+works,"--a mystery,--"slash apparel,"--another mystery,--"immoderate
+great vayles, long wings," etc.,--mystery on mystery, but all recorded
+in the statutes, which forbid these splendors to persons of mean estate.
+There are the wives of the magistrates in prominent seats, and the
+grammar-school master's wife next them; and in each pew, close to the
+mother's elbow, is the little wooden cage for the youngest child, still
+too young to sit alone. All boys are held too young to sit alone also;
+for, though the emigrants left in Holland the aged deaconess who there
+presided, birch in hand, to control the rising generation in Sunday
+meetings, yet the urchins are now herded on the pulpit- and
+gallery-stairs, with four constables to guard them from the allurements
+of sin. And there sits Sin itself embodied in the shrinking form of some
+humiliated man or woman, placed on a high stool in the principal aisle,
+bearing the name of some dark crime written on paper and pinned to the
+garments, or perhaps a Scarlet Letter on the breast.
+
+Oh, the silence of this place of worship, after the solemn service sets
+in! "People do not sneeze or cough here in public assemblies," says one
+writer, triumphantly, "so much as in England." The warning caution, "Be
+short," which the minister has inscribed above his study-door, claims no
+authority over his pulpit. He may pray his hour, unpausing, and no one
+thinks it long; for, indeed, at prayer-meetings four persons will
+sometimes pray an hour each,--one with confession, one with private
+petitions, a third with petitions for church and kingdom, and a fourth
+with thanksgiving,--neither part of the quartette being for an instant
+confused with the other. Then he may preach his hour, and, turning his
+hour-glass, may say,--but that he will not anticipate the levity to be
+born in a later century with Mather Byles,--"Now, my hearers, we will
+take another glass."
+
+In short, this is the pomp and circumstance of glorious preaching. Woe
+to any one who shall disturb its proprieties! It is written in the
+statute, "If any one interrupt or oppose a preacher in season of
+worship, they shall be reproved by the magistrate, and on repetition
+shall pay L5, or stand two hours on a block four feet high, with this
+inscription in capitals, 'A Wanton Gospeller.'" Nor this alone, but the
+law stands by the minister's doctrine even out of the meeting-house. It
+is but a few days since Nathaniel Hadlock was sentenced to be severely
+whipped for declaring that he could receive no profit from Mr. H----'s
+preaching,--since Thomas Maule was mauled to the extent of ten stripes
+for declaring that Mr. H---- preached lies, and that his instruction was
+the doctrine of devils,--since even the wife of Nicholas Phelps was
+sentenced to pay five pounds or be whipped, for asserting that this same
+Mr. H---- sent abroad his wolves and bloodhounds among the sheep and
+lambs. Truly, it is a perilous thing to attend public worship in such
+reverential days. However, it is equally dangerous to stay at home;
+there are tithing-men to look after the absentees, and any one
+unnecessarily absent must pay five shillings. He may be put in the
+stocks or in the wooden cage, if delinquent for a month together.
+
+But we must give our attention to the sermon. It is what the
+congregation will pronounce "a large, nervous, and golden discourse," a
+Scriptural discourse,--like the skeleton of the sea-serpent, all
+backbone and a great deal of that. It may be some very special and
+famous effort. Perhaps Increase Mather is preaching on "The Morning
+Star," or on "Snow," or on "The Voice of God in Stormy Winds"; or it may
+be his sermon entitled "Burnings Bewailed," to improve the lesson of
+some great conflagration, which he attributes partly to Sabbath-breaking
+and partly to the new fashion of monstrous periwigs. Or it may be Cotton
+Mather, his son, rolling forth his resounding discourse during a
+thunder-storm, entitled "Brantologia Sacra,"--consisting of seven
+separate divisions or thunderbolts, and filled with sharp lightning from
+Scripture and the Rabbinical lore, and Cartesian natural philosophy.
+Just as he has proclaimed, "In the thunder there is the voice of the
+glorious God," a messenger comes hastening in, as in the Book of Job, to
+tell him that his own house has just been struck, and though no person
+is hurt, yet the house hath been much torn and filled with the
+lightnings. With what joy and power he instantly wields above his
+audience this providential surplus of excitement, reminding one
+irresistibly of some scientific lecturer who has nearly blown himself up
+by his own experiments, and proceeds beaming with fresh confidence, the
+full power of his compound being incontestably shown. Rising with the
+emergency, he tells them grandly, that, as he once had in his house a
+magnet which the thunder changed instantly from north to south, so it
+were well if the next bolt could change their stubborn souls from Satan
+to God. But afterward he is compelled to own that Satan also is
+sometimes permitted to have a hand in the thunder, which is the reason
+why it breaks oftener on churches than on any other buildings; and again
+he admits, pensively, at last, that churches and ministers' houses have
+undoubtedly the larger share.
+
+The sermon is over. The more demoralized among the little boys, whose
+sleepy eyes have been more than once admonished by the hare's-foot wand
+of the constables,--the sharp paw is used for the boys, the soft fur is
+kept for the smooth foreheads of drowsy maidens,--look up thoroughly
+awakened now. Bright eyes glance from beneath silk or tiffany hoods, for
+a little interlude is coming. Many things may happen in this pause after
+the sermon. Questions may be asked of the elders now, which the elders
+may answer,--if they can. Some lay brother may "exercise" on a text of
+Scripture,--rather severe exercise, it sometimes turns out. Candidates
+for the church may be proposed. A baptism may take place. If it be the
+proper month, the laws against profaning the Sabbath may be read. The
+last town-regulations may be read; or, far more exciting, a new marriage
+may be published. Or a darker scene may follow, and some offending
+magistrate may be required to stand upon a bench, in his worst garments,
+with a foul linen cap drawn close to his eyes, and acknowledge his sins
+before the pious people, who reverenced him so lately.
+
+These things done, a deacon says impressively, "Brethren, now there is
+time for contribution; wherefore, as God hath prospered you, so freely
+offer." Then the people in the galleries come down and march two
+abreast, "up one ile and down the other," passing before the desk, where
+in a long "pue" sit the elders and deacons. One of these holds a
+moneybox, into which the worshippers put their offerings, usually
+varying from one to five shillings, according to their ability and
+good-will. Some give paper pledges instead; and others give other
+valuables, such as "a fair gilt cup, with a cover," for the
+communion-service. Then comes a psalm, read, line after line, by some
+one appointed, out of the "Bay Psalm-Book," and sung by the people.
+These psalms are sung regularly through, four every Sunday, and some ten
+tunes compose the whole vocal range of the congregation. Then come the
+words, "Blessed are they who hear the word of the Lord and keep it," and
+then the benediction.
+
+And then the reverend divine descends from his desk and walks down the
+aisle, bowing gravely right and left to his people, not one of whom
+stirs till the minister has gone out; and then the assembly disperses,
+each to his own home, unless it be some who have come from a distance,
+and stay to eat their cold pork and peas in the meeting-house.
+
+Roll aside the panorama of the three-hours' Sunday service of two
+centuries ago, lest that which was not called wearisome in the passing
+prove wearisome in the delineation now. It needed all this accumulation
+of small details to show how widely the externals of New-England
+church-going have changed since those early days. But what must have
+been the daily life of that Puritan minister for whom this exhausting
+service was but one portion of the task of life! Truly, they were "pious
+and painful preachers" then, as I have read upon a stone in the old
+Watertown graveyard;--"princely preachers" Cotton Mather calls them. He
+relates that Mr. Cotton, in addition to preaching on Sunday and holding
+his ordinary lecture every Thursday, preached thrice a week besides, on
+Wednesday and Thursday early in the morning, and on Saturday afternoon.
+He also held a daily lecture in his house, which was at last abandoned
+as being too much thronged, and frequent occasional days occurred, when
+he would spend six hours "in the word and in prayer." On his voyage to
+this country, he being accompanied by two other ministers, they commonly
+had three sermons a day,--one after every meal. He was "an universal
+scholar and a walking library,"--he studied twelve hours a day, and
+said he liked to sweeten his mouth with a piece of Calvin before he went
+to sleep.
+
+A fearful rate of labor; a strange, grave, quaint, ascetic, rigorous
+life. It seems a mystery how the Reverend Joshua Moody could have
+survived to write four thousand sermons, but it is no mystery why the
+Reverend John Mitchell was called "a truly aged young man" at
+thirty,--especially when we consider that he was successor at Cambridge
+to "the holy, heavenly, sweet-affecting, and soul-ravishing Mr.
+Shepard," in continuance of whose labors he kept a monthly lecture,
+"wherein he largely handled man's misery by sin and made a most
+entertaining exposition of the Book of Genesis."
+
+For the minister's week-days were more arduous than his Sundays, and to
+have for each parish both pastor and teacher still left a formidable
+duty for each. He must visit families during several afternoons in every
+week, sending previous notice, so that children and domestics might be
+ready for catechizing. He was "much visited for counsel" in his own
+home, and must set apart one day in the week for cases of conscience,
+ranging from the most fine-drawn self-tormentings up to the most
+unnatural secret crimes. He must often go to lectures in neighboring
+towns, a kind of religious dissipation which increased so fast that the
+Legislature at last interfered to restrict it. He must have five or six
+separate seasons for private prayer daily, devoting each day in the week
+to special meditations and intercessions,--as Monday to his family,
+Tuesday to enemies, Wednesday to the churches, Thursday to other
+societies, Friday to persons afflicted, and Saturday to his own soul. He
+must have private fasts, spending whole days locked in his study and
+whole nights prostrate on the floor. Cotton Mather "thought himself
+starved," unless he fasted once a month at farthest, while he often did
+it twice in a week. Then there were public fasts quite frequently,
+"because of sins, blastings, mildews, drought, grasshoppers,
+caterpillars, small pox," "loss of cattle by cold and frowns of
+Providence." Perhaps a mouse and a snake had a battle in the
+neighborhood, and the minister must expound it as "symbolizing the
+conflict betwixt Satan and God's poor people," the latter being the
+mouse triumphant. Then if there were a military expedition, the minister
+might think it needful to accompany it. If there were even a muster, he
+must open and close it with prayer, or, in his absence, the captain must
+officiate instead.
+
+One would naturally add to this record of labors the attendance on
+weddings and funerals. It is strange how few years are required to make
+a usage seem ancestral, or to reunite a traditional broken one. Who now
+remembers that our progenitors for more than a century disused religious
+services on both these solemn occasions? Magistrates alone could perform
+the marriage ceremony; though it was thought to be carrying the monopoly
+quite too far, when Governor Bellingham, in 1641, officiated at his own.
+Prayer was absolutely forbidden at funerals, as was done also by Calvin
+at Geneva, by John Knox in Scotland, by the English Puritans in the
+Westminster Assembly, and by the French Huguenots. The bell might ring,
+the friends might walk, two and two, to the grave; but there must be no
+prayer uttered. The secret was, that the traditions of the English and
+Romish Churches must be avoided at all sacrifices. "Doctor," said King
+James to a Puritan divine, "do you go barefoot because the Papists wear
+shoes and stockings?" Even the origin of the frequent New-England habit
+of eating salt fish on Saturday is supposed to have been the fact that
+Roman Catholics eat it on Friday.
+
+But if there were no prayers said on these occasions, there were
+sermons. Mr. John Calf, of Newbury, described one specimen of funeral
+sermon in immortal verse:--
+
+  "On Sabbath day he went his way,
+      As he was used to do,
+  God's house unto, that they might know
+      What he had for to show;
+
+  God's holy will he must fulfil,
+      For it was his desire
+  For to declare a sermon rare
+      Concerning Madam Fryer."
+
+The practice of wedding discourses was handed down into the last
+century, and sometimes beguiled the persons concerned into rather
+startling levities. For instance, when Parson Smith's daughter Mary was
+to marry young Mr. Cranch,--(what graceful productions of pen and pencil
+have come to this generation from the posterity of that union!)--the
+father permitted the saintly maiden to decide on her own text for the
+sermon, and she meekly selected, "Mary hath chosen the better part,
+which shall not be taken away from her," and the discourse was duly
+pronounced. But when her wild young sister Abby was bent on marrying a
+certain Squire Adams, called John, whom her father disliked and would
+not even invite to dinner, she boldly suggested for _her_ text, "John
+came, neither eating bread nor drinking wine, and ye say he hath a
+devil." But no sermon stands recorded under this prefix, though Abby
+lived to be the wife of one President of the United States and mother of
+another.
+
+The Puritan minister had public duties also upon him. "New England being
+a country," said Cotton Mather, "whose interests are remarkably
+enwrapped in theological circumstances, ministers ought to interest
+themselves in politics." Indeed, for many years they virtually
+controlled the franchise, inasmuch as only male church-members could
+vote or hold office, at least in the Massachusetts Colony. Those
+malecontents who petitioned to enlarge the suffrage were fined and
+imprisoned in 1646, and even in 1664 the only amendment was by
+permitting non-church-members to vote on a formal certificate to their
+orthodoxy from the minister. The government they aimed at was not
+democracy, but theocracy: "God never did ordain democracy as a fit
+government," said Cotton. Accordingly, when Cotton and Ward framed their
+first code, Ward's portion was rejected by the colony as heathen,--that
+is, based on Greek and Roman models, not Mosaic,--and Cotton's was
+afterwards rebuked in England as "fanatical and absurd." But the
+government finally established was an ecclesiastical despotism, tempered
+by theological controversy.
+
+In Connecticut it was first the custom, and then the order, lasting as
+late as 1708, that "the ministers of the gospel should preach a sermon,
+on the day appointed by law for the choice of civil rulers, proper for
+the direction of the town in the work before them." They wrote
+state-papers, went on embassies, and took the lead at town-meetings. At
+the exciting gubernatorial election in 1637, Rev. John Wilson, minister
+of the First Church in Boston, not satisfied with "taking the stump" for
+his candidate, took to a full-grown tree and harangued the people from
+among the boughs. Perhaps the tree may have been the Great Elm which
+still ornaments the Common; but one sees no chips of that other old
+block among its branches now.
+
+One would expect that the effect of this predominant clerical influence
+would have been to make the aim of the Puritan codes lofty, their
+consistency unflinching, their range narrow, and their penalties
+severe,--and it certainly was so. Looking at their educational
+provisions, they seem all noble; looking at their schedule of sins and
+retributions, one wonders how any rational being could endure them for a
+day. Communities, like individuals, furnish virtues piecemeal. Roger
+Williams, with all his wise toleration, bequeathed to Rhode Island no
+such system of schools as his persecutors framed for Massachusetts. But
+the children who were watched and trained thus carefully might be put to
+death, if they "cursed their orderly parents" after the age of
+sixteen;--not that the penalty ever was inflicted, but it was on the
+statute-book. Sabbath-breaking was placed on a level with
+murder,--though Calvin himself allowed the old men to play at bowls and
+the young men to practise military training, after afternoon service,
+at Geneva. Down to 1769 not even a funeral could take place on Sunday in
+Massachusetts, without license from a magistrate. Then the stocks and
+the wooden cage were in frequent use, though "barbarous and cruel"
+punishments were forbidden in 1641. Scolds and railers were set on a
+ducking-stool and dipped over head and ears three times, in running
+water, if possible. Mrs. Oliver, a troublesome theologian, was silenced
+with a cleft stick applied to her tongue. Thomas Scott, in 1649, was
+sentenced for some offence to learn "the chatachise," or be fined ten
+shillings, and, after due consideration, paid the fine. Sometimes
+offenders, with a refinement of cruelty, were obliged to "go and talk to
+the elders." And if any youth made matrimonial overtures to a young
+female without the consent of her parents, or, in their absence, of the
+County Court, he was first fined and then imprisoned. A new etymology
+for the word "courting."
+
+An exhibition of this mingled influence was in the relation of the
+ministers to the Indian wars. Roger Williams, even when banished and
+powerless, could keep the peace with the natives. But when the brave
+Miantonimo was to be dealt with for suspected treason, and the civil
+authorities decided, that, though it was unsafe to set him at liberty,
+they yet had no ground to put him to death, the matter being finally
+referred to five "elders," Uncas was straightway authorized to slay him
+in cold blood. The Pequots were first defeated and then exterminated,
+and their heroic King Philip, a patriot according to his own standard,
+was hunted like a wild beast, his body quartered and set on poles, his
+head exposed as a trophy for twenty years on a gibbet in Plymouth, and
+one of his hands sent to Boston: then the ministers returned thanks, and
+one said that they had _prayed_ the bullet into Philip's heart. Nay, it
+seems that in 1677, on a Sunday in Marblehead, "the women, as they came
+out of the meeting-house, fell upon two Indians, that had been brought
+in as captives, and in a tumultuous way very barbarously murdered them,"
+in revenge for the death of some fishermen: a moral application which
+certainly gives a singular impression of the style of gospel prevailing
+inside the meeting-house that day. But it is good to know, on the other
+side, that, when the Commissioners of the United Colonies had declared
+an Indian war, and the Massachusetts Colony had become afterwards
+convinced that the war was unrighteous, the troops were recalled, though
+already far towards the field, and no pride or policy prevented the
+order from being rescinded.
+
+These were some of the labors of the clergy. But no human being lives
+without relaxation, and they may have had theirs. True, "ministers have
+little to joy in in this world," wrote old Norton; and one would think
+so, to read the dismal diaries, printed or manuscript, of those days. "I
+can compare with any man living for fears," said Hooker. "I have sinned
+myself into darkness," said Bailey. "Many times have I been ready to lay
+down my ministry, thinking God had forsaken me." "I was almost in the
+suburbs of hell all day." Yet who can say that this habit of agonizing
+introspection wholly shut out the trivial enjoyments of daily life? Who
+drank, for instance, that twelve gallons of sack and that six gallons of
+white wine which the General Court thought it convenient that the
+Auditor should send, "as a small testimony of the Court's respect, to
+the reverend assembly of Elders at Cambridge," in 1644? Did the famous
+Cambridge Platform rest, like the earth in the Hebrew cosmology, upon
+the waters,--strong waters? Was it only the Derry Presbyterians who
+would never give up a p'int of doctrine, nor a pint of rum? It is
+startling to remember that in 1685 it was voted, on occasion of a public
+funeral, that "some person be appointed to look after the burning of the
+wine and the heating of the cider," and to hear that on this occasion
+there were thirty-two gallons of wine and still more of cider, with one
+hundred and four pounds of that ensnaring accessory, sugar. Francis
+Higginson, in writing back to the mother country that one sup of New
+England's air was better than a whole draught of Old England's ale, gave
+convincing proof that he had tasted both beverages. But, after all, the
+very relaxations of the Puritan minister were more spiritual than
+spirituous, and to send forth a good Nineteenthly from his own lips was
+more relishing than to have the best Double X go in.
+
+In spite of the dignity of this influential class, they were called only
+Elders for a long time. Titles were carefully adjusted in those days.
+The commonalty bore the appellations of Goodman and Goodwife, and one of
+Roger William's offences was his wishing to limit these terms to those
+who gave some signs of deserving them. The name "Mr." was allowed to
+those who had taken the degree of Master of Arts at College, and also to
+professional men, eminent merchants, military officers, and mates of
+vessels, and their wives and daughters monopolized the epithet "Mrs."
+Mr. Josiah Plastow, when he had stolen four baskets of corn from the
+Indians, was degraded into plain Josiah. "Mr." seems to have meant
+simply "My Sir," and the clergy were often called "Sir" merely, a title
+given also to college graduates, on Commencement programmes, down to the
+time of the Revolution. And so strong was the Puritan dislike to the
+idolatry of saints' names, that the Christian Apostles were sometimes
+designated as Sir Paul, Sir Peter, and Sir James.
+
+In coming to the private affairs of the Puritan divines, it is
+humiliating to find that anxieties about salary are of no modern origin.
+The highest compensation I can find recorded is that of John Higginson
+in 1671, who had L160 voted him "in country produce," which he was glad,
+however, to exchange for L120 in solid cash. Solid cash included
+beaver-skins, black and white wampum, beads, and musket-balls, value one
+farthing. Mr. Woodbridge in Newbury at this same time had L60, and Mr.
+Epes preached in Salem for twenty shillings a Sunday, half in money and
+half in provisions. Holy Mr. Cotton used to say that nothing was cheap
+in New England but milk and ministers. Down to 1700, Increase Mather
+says, most salaries were less than L100, which he thinks "might account
+for the scanty harvests enjoyed by our farmers." He and his son Cotton
+both tell the story of a town where "two very eminent ministers were
+only allowed L30 per annum" and "the God who will not be mocked made
+them lose L300 worth of cattle that year." The latter also complains
+that the people were very willing to consider the ministers the stars,
+rather than the mere lamps, of the churches, provided they, like the
+stars, would shine without earthly contributions.
+
+He also calls the terms of payment, in one of his long words,
+"Synecdotical Pay,"--in allusion to that rhetorical figure by which a
+part is used for the whole. And apparently various causes might produce
+this Synecdoche. For I have seen an anonymous "Plea for Ministers of the
+Gospel," in 1706, which complains that "young ministers have often
+occasion in their preaching to speak things offensive to some of the
+wealthiest people in town, on which occasion they may withhold a
+considerable part of their maintenance." It is a comfort to think how
+entirely this source of discomfort, at least, is now eradicated from the
+path of the clergy; and it is painful to think that there ever was a
+period when wealthy parishioners did not enjoy the delineation of their
+own sins.
+
+However, the ministerial households contrived to subsist, in spite of
+rhetorical tropes and malecontent millionnaires. The Puritan divine
+could commonly afford not only to keep house, but to keep horse
+likewise, and to enjoy the pet professional felicity of printing his own
+sermons. As to the last privilege there could have been no great
+trouble, for booksellers were growing rich in New England as early as
+1677,--not that it is always an inevitable inference that authors
+are,--and Cotton Mather published three hundred and eighty-two
+different works for his own share. Books were abundant enough at that
+day, though somewhat grim and dingy, and two complete Puritan libraries
+are preserved in the rich collection of the American Antiquarian Society
+at Worcester,--without whose treasures, let me add, this modest
+monograph never could have been written. As for the minister's horse,
+the moral sentiment of the community protected him faithfully; for a man
+was fined in Newbury for "killing our elder's mare, and a special good
+beast she was." The minister's house was built by the town; in Salem it
+was "13 feet stud, 23 by 42, four chimnies and no gable-ends,"--so that
+the House with Seven Gables belonged to somebody else;--and the
+Selectmen ordered all men to appear with teams on a certain day and put
+the minister's grounds in order.
+
+Inside the parsonage-house, however, there was sometimes trouble. Rev.
+Ezekiel Rogers wrote in 1657 to his brother in England,--"Much ado I
+have with my own family; hard to get a servant who enjoys catechising or
+family duties. I had a rare blessing of servants in England, and those I
+brought over were a blessing; but the young brood doth much afflict me."
+Probably the minister's wife had the worst of this; but she seems to
+have been generally, like the modern minister's wife, a saint, and could
+bear it. Cotton Mather, indeed, quotes triumphantly the Jewish phrase
+for a model female,--"one who deserved to marry a priest"; and one of
+the most singular passages in the history of the human heart is the old
+gentleman's own narrative, in his manuscript diary, of a passionate
+love-adventure, in his later years, with a fascinating young girl, an
+"ingenious child," as he calls her, whom his parish thought by no means
+a model female, but from whom it took three days of solitary fasting and
+prayer to wean him at last.
+
+He was not the only Puritan minister who bestowed his heart somewhat
+strangely. Rev. John Mitchell, who succeeded the soul-ravishing Shepard
+at Cambridge, as aforesaid, married his predecessor's widow "on the
+general recommendation of her," and the college students were greatly
+delighted, as one might imagine. Rev. Michael Wigglesworth, in 1691,
+wooed the Widow Avery in a written discourse, which I have seen in
+manuscript, arranged under twelve different heads,--one of which treats
+of the prospect of his valuable life being preserved longer by her care.
+She having children of her own, he offers mysteriously to put some of
+his own children "out of the way," if necessary,--a hint which becomes
+formidable when one remembers that he was the author of that once famous
+theological poem, "The Day of Doom," in which he relentingly assigned to
+infants, because they had sinned only in Adam, "the easiest room in
+hell." But he wedded the lady, and they were apparently as happy as if
+he had not been a theologian; and I have seen the quaint little
+heart-shaped locket he gave her, bearing an anchor and a winged heart
+and "Thine forever."
+
+Let us glance now at some of the larger crosses of the Puritan minister.
+First came a "young brood" of heretics to torment him. Gorton's
+followers were exasperating enough; they had to be confined in irons
+separately, one in each town, on pain of death, if they preached their
+doctrines,--and of course they preached them. But their offences and
+penalties were light, compared with those of the Quakers. When the
+Quakers assembled by themselves, their private doors might be broken
+open,--a thing which Lord Chatham said the king of England could not do
+to any one,--they might be arrested without warrant, tried without jury,
+for the first offence be fined, for the second lose one ear, for the
+third lose the other ear, and for the fourth be bored with red-hot iron
+through the tongue,--though this last penalty remained a dead letter.
+They could be stripped to the waist, tied to a cart, and whipped through
+town after town,--three women were whipped through eleven towns, eighty
+miles,--but afterwards the number was limited to three. Their testimony
+was invalid, their families attainted, and those who harbored them were
+fined forty shillings an hour. They might be turned out shelterless
+among wolves and bears and frosts: they could be branded H for Heretic,
+and R for Rogue; they could be sold as slaves; and their graves must not
+be fenced to keep off wild beasts, lest their poor afflicted bodies
+should find rest there.
+
+Yet in this same age female Quakers had gone as missionaries to Malta
+and to Turkey and returned unharmed. No doubt the monks and the Sultan
+must have looked on the plain dress much as some clerical gentlemen have
+since regarded the Bloomer costume,--and the Inquisition imprisoned the
+missionaries, though the Sultan did not. But meanwhile the Quaker women
+in New England might be walking to execution with their male
+companions,--like Mary Dyer in Boston,--under an armed guard of two
+hundred, led on by a minister seventy years old, and the fiercer for
+every year. When they asked Mary Dyer, "Are you not ashamed to walk thus
+hand in hand between two young men?" she answered, "No, this is to me an
+hour of the greatest joy I could enjoy in this world. No tongue could
+utter and no heart understand the sweet influence of the Spirit which
+now I feel." Then they placed her on the scaffold, and covered her face
+with a handkerchief which the Reverend Mr. Wilson lent the hangman; and
+when they heard that she was reprieved, she would not come down, saying
+that she would suffer with her brethren. And suffer death she did, at
+last, and the Reverend Mr. Wilson made a pious ballad on her execution.
+
+It is no wonder, if some persons declare that about this time the wheat
+of Massachusetts began to be generally blasted, and the peas to grow
+wormy. It is no wonder, that, when the witchcraft excitement came on,
+the Quakers called it a retribution for these things. But let us be
+just, even to the unjust. Toleration was a new-born virtue in those
+days, and one which no Puritan ever for a moment recognized as such, or
+asked to have exercised toward himself. In England they did not wish to
+be tolerated for a day as sectaries, they claimed to have authority as
+the one true church. They held with Pym, that "it is the duty of
+legislators to establish the true religion and to punish false,"--a
+doctrine equally fatal, whether applied to enforce the right theology or
+the wrong. They objected to the Church of England, not that it
+persecuted, but that its persecution was wrongly aimed. It is,
+therefore, equally absurd to praise them for a toleration they never
+professed, or to accuse them of any inconsistency when they practised
+intolerance. They have been so loosely praised, that they are as loosely
+blamed. What was great in them was their heroism of soul, not their
+largeness. They sought the American wilderness not to indulge the whims
+of others, but their own. They said to the Quakers, "We seek not your
+death, but your absence." All their persecution, after all, was an
+alternative sentence; all they asked of the Quakers was to keep out of
+their settlements and let them alone. Moreover, their worst penalties
+were borrowed from the English laws, and only four offenders were put to
+death from the beginning;--of course, four too many.
+
+Again, it is to be remembered that the Quaker peculiarities were not
+theological only, but political and social also. Everything that the
+Puritan system of government asserted the Quakers denied; they rendered
+no allegiance, owned no laws, paid no taxes, bore no arms. With the best
+possible intentions, they subverted all established order. Then their
+modes of action were very often intemperate and violent. One can hardly
+approve the condemnation pronounced by Cotton Mather upon a certain
+Rarey among the Friends in those days, who could control a mad bull that
+would rend any other man. But it was oftener the Quakers who needed the
+Rareys. Running naked through the public streets,--coming into meeting
+dressed in sackcloth, with ashes on their heads and nothing on their
+feet,--or sitting there with their hats on, groaning and rocking to and
+fro, in spite of elders, deacons, and tithing-men: these were the
+vagaries of the zealots, though always repudiated by the main body. The
+Puritans found themselves reproached with permitting these things, and
+so took refuge in outrageous persecutions, which doubled them. Indeed,
+the Quakers themselves began to persecute, on no greater provocation, in
+Philadelphia, thirty years afterwards,--playing over again upon George
+Keith and his followers the same deluded policy of fines and
+imprisonment from which they had just escaped;--as minorities have
+persecuted sub-minorities ever since intolerance began.
+
+Indeed, so far as mere language went, the minority always watched the
+majority. Grave divines did not like to be pelted with such epithets as
+these: "Thou fiery fighter and green-headed trumpeter! thou hedgehog and
+grinning dog! thou mole! thou tinker! thou lizard! thou bell of no metal
+but the tone of a kettle! thou wheelbarrow! thou whirlpool! thou
+whirligig! thou firebrand! thou moon-calf! thou ragged tatterdemalion!
+thou gormandizing priest! thou bane of reason and beast of the earth!
+thou best to be spared of all mankind!"--all of which are genuine
+epithets from the Quaker books of that period, and termed by Cotton
+Mather, who collected them, "quills of the porcupine." They surpass even
+Dr. Chauncy's catalogue of the unsavory epithets used by Whitefield and
+Tennent a century later; and it was not likely that they would be
+tolerated by a race whose reverence for men in authority was so
+comprehensive that they actually fined some one for remarking that Major
+Phillips's old mare was as lean as an Indian's dog.
+
+There is a quaint anecdote preserved, showing the continuance of the
+Quaker feud in full vigor as lately as 1705. A youth among the Friends
+wished to espouse a fair Puritan maiden; but the Quakers disapproved his
+marrying out of their society, and the Congregationalists his marrying
+into theirs; so in despair he thus addressed her:--"Ruth, let us break
+from this unreasonable bondage. I will give up my religion, and thou
+shalt give up thine; and we will marry and go into the Church of
+England, and go to the Devil together." And they fulfilled the
+resolution, the Puritan historian says, _so far_ as going into the
+Church, and marrying, and staying there for life. But probably the
+ministers thought it to be another case of synecdoche.
+
+With the same careful discrimination we must try to study the
+astonishing part played by the ministers in the witchcraft delusions. It
+must be remembered that the belief in this visitation was no new or
+peculiar thing in New England. The Church, the Scriptures, the mediaeval
+laws, had all made it a capital crime. There had been laws against it in
+England for a hundred years. Bishop Jewel had complained to Queen
+Elizabeth of the alarming increase of witches and sorcerers. Sir Thomas
+Browne had pronounced it flat atheism to doubt them. High legal and
+judicial authorities, as Dalton, Keeble, Sir Matthew Hale, had described
+this crime as definitely and seriously as any other. In Scotland four
+thousand had suffered death for it in ten years; Cologne, Nuremberg,
+Geneva, Paris, were executing hundreds every year; even in 1749 a girl
+was burnt alive in Wuertzburg; and is it strange, if, during all that
+wild excitement, Massachusetts put to death twenty? The only wonder is
+in the independence of the Rhode Island people, who declared that "there
+were no witches on the earth, nor devils,--except" (as they profanely
+added) "the New-England ministers, and such as they."
+
+John Higginson sums it up best:--"They proceeded in their integrity with
+a zeal of God against sin, according to their best light and law and
+evidence." "_But there is a question_," he wisely adds, "whether some of
+the laws, customs, and privileges used by judges and juries in England,
+which were followed as patterns here, were not insufficient." Cotton
+Mather also declared that he observed in judges and juries a
+conscientious endeavor to do the thing which was right, and gives a long
+list of the legal authorities whom they consulted; observing, finally,
+that the fact of fifty confessions was, after all, the one irresistible
+vindication of their strong measures.
+
+It must have been so. Common sense and humanity might have refuted every
+other evidence than that of the victims themselves. But what were the
+authorities to do, when, in addition to all legal and Scriptural
+precedents, the prisoners insisted on entering a plea of guilty? When
+Goody E---- testified that she and two others rode from Andover to a
+witch-meeting on a broomstick, and the stick broke and she fell and was
+still lame from it,--when her daughter testified that she rode on the
+same stick, and confirmed all the details of the casualty,--when the
+grand-daughter confirmed them also, and added, that she rode on another
+stick, and they all signed Satan's book together,--when W. B----, aged
+forty, testified that Satan assembled a hundred fine blades near Salem
+Meeting-House, and the trumpet sounded, and bread and wine were carried
+round, and Satan was like a black sheep, and wished them to destroy the
+minister's house, (by thunder probably,) and set up his kingdom, and
+"then all would be well,"--when one woman summoned her three children
+and some neighbors and a sister and a domestic, who all testified that
+she was a witch and so were they all,--what could be done for such
+prisoners by judge or jury, in an age which held witchcraft a certainty?
+It was only the rapid rate of increase which finally stopped the
+convictions.
+
+One thing is certain, that this strange delusion, a semi-comedy to
+us,--though part of the phenomena may find their solution in laws not
+yet unfolded,--was the sternest of tragedies to those who lived in it.
+Conceive, for an instant, of believing in the visible presence and
+labors of the arch-fiend in a peaceful community. Yet from the bottom of
+their souls these strong men held to it, and they waged a hand-to-hand
+fight with Satan all their days. Very inconveniently the opponent
+sometimes dealt his blows, withal. Surely it could not be a pleasant
+thing to a sound divine, just launched upon his seventeen-headed
+discourse, to have a girl with wild eyes and her hair about her ears
+start up and exclaim, "Parson, your text is too long,"--or worse yet,
+"Parson, your sermon is too long,"--or most embarrassing of all,
+"There's a great yellow bird sitting on the parson's hat in the pulpit."
+But these formidable interruptions veritably happened, and received the
+stern discipline in such cases made and provided.
+
+But beside Quakers and witches, the ministers had other female
+tormentors to deal with. There was the perpetual anxiety of the
+unregenerated toilet. "Immodest apparel, laying out of hair, borders,
+naked necks and arms, or, as it were, pinioned with superfluous
+ribbons,"--these were the things which tried men's souls in those days,
+and the statute-books and private journals are full of such plaintive
+inventories of the implements of sin. Things known as "slash apparel"
+seem to have been an infinite source of anxiety; there must be only one
+slash on each sleeve and one in the back. Men also must be prohibited
+from shoulderbands of undue width, double ruffs and cuffs, and
+"immoderate great breeches." Part of the solicitude was for modesty,
+part for gravity, part for economy: none must dress above their
+condition. In 1652, three men and a woman were fined ten shillings each
+and costs for wearing silver-lace, another for broad bone-lace, another
+for tiffany, and another for a silk hood. Alice Flynt was accused of a
+silk hood, but, proving herself worth more than two hundred pounds,
+escaped unpunished. Jonas Fairbanks, about the same time, was charged
+with "great boots," and the evidence went hard against him; but he was
+fortunately acquitted, and the credit of the family saved.
+
+The question of veils seems to have rocked the Massachusetts Colony to
+its foundations, and was fully discussed at Thursday Lecture, March 7th,
+1634. Holy Mr. Cotton was utterly and unalterably opposed to veils,
+regarding them as a token of submission to husbands in an unscriptural
+degree. It is pleasant to think that there could be an unscriptural
+extent of such submission, in those times. But Governor Endicott and
+Rev. Mr. Williams resisted stoutly, quoting Paul, as usual in such
+cases; so Paul, veils, and vanity carried the day. But afterward Mr.
+Cotton came to Salem to preach for Mr. Skelton, and did not miss his
+chance to put in his solemn protest against veils; he said they were a
+custom not to be tolerated; and so the ladies all came to meeting
+without their veils in the afternoon. Probably the most astounding
+visible result from a single sermon within the memory of man.
+
+Beginning with the veils, the eye of authority was next turned on what
+was under them. In 1675 it was decided, that, as the Indians had done
+much harm of late, and the Deity was evidently displeased with
+something, the General Court should publish a list of the evils of the
+time. And among the twelve items of contrition stood this: "Long hair
+like women's hair is worn by some men, either their own or others' hair
+made into periwigs;--and by some women wearing borders of hair, and
+their cutting, curling, and immodest laying out of their hair," (does
+this hint at puff-combs?) "which practice doth increase, especially
+among the younger sort." Not much was effected, however,--"divers of the
+elders' wives," as Winthrop lets out, "being in some measure partners in
+this disorder." The use of wigs also, at first denounced by the clergy,
+was at last countenanced by them: in portraits later than 1700 they
+usually replace the black skull-cap of earlier pictures, and in 1752 the
+tables had so far turned that a church-member in Newbury refused
+communion because "the pastor wears a wigg." Yet Increase Mather thought
+they played no small part in producing the Boston Fire. "Monstrous
+Periwigs, such as some of our church-members indulge in, which make them
+resemble the Locusts that came out of y'e Bottomless Pit. Rev. ix. 7,
+8,--and as an eminent Divine calls them, _Horrid Bushes of Vanity_; such
+strange apparel as is contrary to the light of Nature and to express
+Scripture. 1 Cor. xi. 14, 15. Such pride is enough to provoke the Lord
+to kindle fires in all the towns in the country."
+
+Another vexation was the occasional arrival of false prophets in a
+community where every man was expected to have a current supply of
+religious experiences always ready for circulation. There was a certain
+hypocritical Dick Swayn, for instance, a seafaring man, who gave much
+trouble; and E.F.,--for they mostly appear by initials,--who, coming to
+New Haven one Saturday evening, and being dressed in black, was taken
+for a minister, and asked to preach: he was apparently a little insane,
+and at first talked "demurely," but at last "railed like Rabshakeh,"
+Cotton Mather says. There was also M.J., a Welsh tanner, who finally
+stole his employer's leather breeches and set up for a preacher,--less
+innocently apparelled than George Fox. But the worst of all was one
+bearing the since sainted name of Samuel May. This vessel of wrath
+appeared in 1699, indorsed as a man of a sweet gospel spirit,--though,
+indeed, one of his indorsers had himself been "a scandalous fire-ship
+among the churches." Mather declares that every one went a-Maying after
+this man, whom he maintains to have been a barber previously, and who
+knew no Latin, Greek, Hebrew, nor even English,--for (as he indignantly
+asserts) "there were eighteen horrid false spells, and not one point, in
+one very short note I received from him." This doubtful personage copied
+his sermons from a volume by his namesake, Dr. Samuel Bolton,--"Sam the
+Doctor and Sam the Dunce," Mather calls them. Finally, "this eminent
+worthy stranger," Sam, who was no dunce, after all, quarrelled with his
+parish for their slow payments, and "flew out like a Dragon, spitting
+this among other fire at them:--'I see, no longer pipe, no longer
+dance,'--so that they came to fear he was a cheat, and wish they had
+never seen him." Then "the guilty fellow, having bubbled the silly
+neighbors of an incredible number of pounds, on a sudden was gone," and
+Cotton Mather sent a letter after him, which he declares to have been
+the worst penalty the man suffered.
+
+It is safer to say little of the theological scheme of the Puritan
+ministers, lest the present writer be pronounced a Wanton Gospeller, and
+have no tithingman to take his part. But however it may be with the
+regular standards of theology of that period, every one could find a
+sufficient variety to suit him among its heresies. Eighty-two "pestilent
+heresies" were counted as having already sprung up in 1637; others say
+one hundred and six; others, two hundred and ten. The Puritans kept
+Rhode Island for what housekeepers call an "odd drawer," into which to
+crowd all these eccentricities. It was said, that, if any man happened
+to lose his religious opinion, he might be sure to find it again at some
+village in Rhode Island. Thither went Roger Williams and his Baptists;
+thither went Quakers and Ranters; thither went Ann Hutchinson, that
+extraordinary woman, who divided the whole politics of the country by
+her Antinomian doctrines, denouncing the formalisms around her, and
+converting the strongest men, like Cotton and Vane, to her opinions.
+Thither went also Samuel Gorton, a man of no ordinary power, who
+proclaimed a mystical union with God in love, thought that heaven and
+hell were in the mind alone, but esteemed little the clergy and the
+ordinances. The colony was protected also by the thoughtful and
+chivalrous Vane, who held that water baptism had had its day, and that
+the Jewish Sabbath should give place to the modern Sunday. All these,
+and such as these, were called generally "Seekers" by the Puritans,--who
+claimed for themselves that they had found that which they sought. It is
+the old distinction; but for which is the ship built, to be afloat or to
+be at anchor?
+
+Such were those pious worthies, the men whose names are identified with
+the leadership of the New-England colonies,--Cotton, Hooker, Norton,
+Shepard, the Higginsons, the Mathers. To these might be added many an
+obscurer name, preserved in the quaint epitaphs of the
+"Magnalia":--Blackman, "in spite of his name, a Nazarene whiter than
+snow";--Partridge, "a hunted partridge," yet "both a dove and an
+eagle";--Ezekiel Rogers, "a tree of knowledge, whose apples the very
+children might pluck";--Nathaniel Rogers, "a very lively preacher and a
+very preaching liver, he loved his church as if it had been his family
+and he taught his family as if it had been his church";--Warham, the
+first who preached with notes, and who suffered agonies of doubt
+respecting the Lord's Supper;--Stone, "both a loadstone and a flint
+stone," and who set the self-sacrificing example of preaching only one
+hour.
+
+These men had mingled traits of good and evil, like all mankind,--nobler
+than their descendants in some attributes, less noble in others. The
+most strait-laced Massachusetts Calvinist of these days would have been
+disciplined by them for insufferable laxity, and yet their modern
+successor would count it utter shame, perhaps, to own a slave in his
+family or to drink rum-punch at an ordination,--which Puritan divines
+might do without rebuke. Not one of them has left on record a statement
+so broad and noble as that of Roger Williams:--"To be content with food
+and raiment,--to mind, not our own, but every man the things of
+another,--yea, and to suffer wrong, and to part with what we judge to be
+right, yea, our own lives, and, as poor women martyrs have said, as many
+as there be hairs upon our heads, for the name of God and for the Son of
+God's sake,--this is humanity, this is Christianity; the rest is but
+formality and picture-courteous idolatry, and Jewish and Popish
+blasphemy against the Christian religion." And yet the mind of Roger
+Williams was impulsive, erratic, and unstable, compared with theirs; and
+in what respect has the work they left behind them proved, after the
+testing of two centuries, less solid or durable than his?
+
+These men were stern even to cruelty against all that they held
+evil,--Satan and his supposed emissaries, witches, Quakers, Indians,
+negligent parishioners, disobedient offspring, men with periwigs, and
+women in slash apparel. Yet the tenderest private gentleness often lay
+behind this gloomy rigor of the conscience. Some of them would never
+chastise a son or daughter, in spite of Solomon; others would write in
+Greek characters in their old almanacs quaint little English verses on
+the death of some beloved child. That identical "Priest Wilson" who made
+the ballad at Mary Dyer's execution attended a military muster one day.
+"Sir," said some one, "I'll tell you a great thing: here's a mighty body
+of people, and there's not seven of them all but loves Mr. Wilson."
+"Sir," it was replied, "I'll tell you as good a thing: here's a mighty
+body of people, and there's not one of them all but Mr. Wilson loves
+him." Mr. Cotton was a terror to evil-doers, yet, when a company of men
+came along from a tavern and said, "Let us put a trick upon Old Cotton,"
+and one came and cried in his ear, "Cotton, thou art an old fool,"--"I
+know it, I know it," retorted cheerily the venerable man, and pungently
+added, "The Lord make both me and thee wiser!" Mr. Hooker was once
+reproving a boy in the street, who boldly replied, "I see you are in a
+passion; I will not answer you," and so ran away. It contradicts all
+one's notions of Puritan propriety, and yet it seems that the good man,
+finding afterwards that the boy was not really guilty, sent for him to
+apologize, and owned himself to have been wrong.
+
+What need to speak of the strength and courage, the disinterestedness
+and zeal, with which they bore up the fortunes of the colony on their
+shoulders, and put that iron into the New-England blood which has since
+supplied the tonic for a continent? It was said of Mr. Hooker, that he
+was "a person who, while doing his Master's work, would put a king in
+his pocket"; and it was so with them all: they would pocket anything but
+a bribe to themselves or an insult to God or their profession. They
+flinched from no reproof that was needed: "Sharp rebukes make sound
+Christians" was a proverb among them. They sometimes lost their tempers,
+and sometimes their parishes, but never their independence. I find a
+hundred anecdotes of conscientious cruelty laid up against them, but not
+one of cowardice or of compromise. They may have bored the tongues of
+others with a bar of iron, but they never fettered their own tongues
+with a bar of gold,--as some African tribes think it a saintly thing to
+do, and not African tribes alone.
+
+There was such an absolute righteousness among them, that to this day
+every man of New-England descent lives partly on the fund of virtuous
+habit they accumulated. And, on the other hand, every man of the many
+who still stand ready to indorse everything signed by a D.D.--without
+even adding the commercial E.E., for Errors Excepted--is in part the
+victim of the over-influence they obtained. Yet there was a kind of
+democracy in that vast influence also: the Puritans were far more
+thorough Congregationalists than their successors; they recognized no
+separate clerical class, and the "elder" was only the highest officer of
+his own church. Each religious society could choose and ordain its own
+minister, or dispense with all ordaining services at will, without the
+slightest aid or hindrance from council or consociation. So the stern
+theology of the pulpit only reflected the stern theology of the pews;
+the minister was but the representative man. If the ministers were
+recognized as spiritual guides, it was because they were such to the
+men of their time, whatever they might be to ours. Demonax of old, when
+asked about the priests' money, said, that, if they were really the
+leaders of the people, they could not have too much payment,--or too
+little, if they were not. I believe that on these conditions the Puritan
+ministers well earned their hundred and sixty pounds a year, with a
+discount of forty pounds, if paid in wampum-beads, beaver-skins, and
+musket-balls. What they took in musket-balls they paid back in the
+heavier ammunition of moral truth. Here is a specimen of their
+grape-shot:--"My fathers and brethren," said John Higginson, "this is
+never to be forgotten, that our New England is originally a plantation
+of religion, and not a plantation of trade. Let merchants and such as
+are making cent. per cent. remember this. Let others who have come over
+since at sundry times remember this, that worldly gain was not the end
+and design of the people of New England, but religion. And if any man
+among us make religion as twelve and the world as thirteen, let such a
+man know he hath neither the spirit of a true New-England man, nor yet
+of a sincere Christian."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THOREAU'S FLUTE.
+
+
+  We, sighing, said, "Our Pan is dead;
+    His pipe hands mute beside the river;--
+    Around it wistful sunbeams quiver,
+  But Music's airy voice is fled.
+  Spring mourns as for untimely frost;
+    The bluebird chants a requiem;
+    The willow-blossom waits for him;--
+  The Genius of the wood is lost."
+
+  Then from the flute, untouched by hands,
+    There came a low, harmonious breath:
+    "For such as he there is no death;--
+  His life the eternal life commands;
+  Above man's aims his nature rose:
+    The wisdom of a just content
+    Made one small spot a continent,
+  And tuned to poetry Life's prose.
+
+  "Haunting the hills, the stream, the wild,
+    Swallow and aster, lake and pine,
+    To him grew human or divine,--
+  Fit mates for this large-hearted child.
+  Such homage Nature ne'er forgets,
+    And yearly on the coverlid
+    'Neath which her darling lieth hid
+  Will write his name in violets.
+
+  "To him no vain regrets belong,
+    Whose soul, that finer instrument,
+    Gave to the world no poor lament,
+  But wood-notes ever sweet and strong.
+  O lonely friend! he still will be
+    A potent presence, though unseen,--
+    Steadfast, sagacious, and serene:
+  Seek not for him,--he is with thee."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+MR. MARTIN'S DISAPPOINTMENTS.
+
+
+The circumstances of a first meeting so color long years of
+acquaintanceship, that, should these circumstances be comic in their
+nature, the intercourse which follows partakes much of the grotesque.
+Thus, perhaps, it is, that the misfortunes of Edward Martin, apart from
+the whimsical demeanor of the man himself, provoke in my memory a smile
+rather than a sigh.
+
+Some years ago, journeying on foot through Northern Connecticut, it
+became necessary for me to stop overnight at the quiet inn of Deacon
+S----.
+
+Sharon I had visited, fair as Berkshire, but less an old story; I had
+lingered about the twin lakes of Salisbury; I had carried away many
+sweet memories of Warramaug and its mountain; and I now found myself in
+the neighborhood of Gramley Bridge, eager for fresh water, clean towels,
+and the plenty of a country tea-table,--not averse to strawberry
+short-cake, or the snowy delights of cottage-cheese.
+
+It was rapidly growing dark, when, as I hurried on toward my cheerful
+welcome, a bend in the road brought me in sight of a figure that filled
+me with curiosity and amazement.
+
+  "Was it a man?
+  A devil infernal?
+  An angel supernal?"
+
+Was it were-wolf spectral, or bear aboriginal? It lived and moved, and,
+as I cautiously neared the spot, I seemed to recognize a human being in
+the singular form,--stooping, squatting, and groping before me.
+
+The man, for such it proved, was performing most wondrous gymnastics
+upon the ground,--smelling here, smelling there, too agile to be tipsy,
+too silent to be mad. I had no desire to be alone in a lonely road at
+nightfall with a maniac, and I was not sorry when my nearer approach
+resolved these strange phenomena into a well-dressed pedestrian on
+all-fours in the middle of a dusty highway.
+
+He rose as I approached, and I smiled to see that the spectacles astride
+his handsome nose were minus one lens. He seemed half blind and wholly
+bewildered. I looked at once for the lost glass, and there it lay
+shining at me from the very spot where he had been so industriously
+peering. He laughed grimly as I handed it to him, fitted his treasure
+into its wonted rim, took out his watch, and with a low chuckle said,--
+
+"Twenty-five minutes is a long time to search for a bit of such small
+circumference. Thank you. Do you go to the Deacon's?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"So do I."
+
+We walked on together in silence, till we reached our journey's end,--I
+too tired, he too reserved, too preoccupied, or too shy, to speak again;
+but when, at last, we were seated with our cigars on the Deacon's
+door-step, he turned suddenly to me and asked,--
+
+"Are you fond of the country?"
+
+"Why, yes! What else is there?" I answered, laughing.
+
+"Ah, you are an artist!"
+
+"I hope to be one."
+
+"Its a bad business," said he, testily,--"a very bad business. If I were
+you, I would give it up."
+
+"Have you ever tried it?"
+
+"Tried it?" he ejaculated, kicking the gravel-walk,--"yes, and
+everything else, I believe. If I thought it would do you any good, I
+would give you the benefit of my experience; but you'd only laugh, and
+make a good story of it to your wife."
+
+"Alas! I have no such incumbrance."
+
+"The worse for you, if you have genius and the modesty of genius. A true
+artist, who seeks to interpret Nature in its purest and most exquisite
+relations, who penetrates the deepest temples of the woods and the
+silent sanctuaries of the mountains, must be a true, pure, and good man.
+He must be a happy man,--happy in a sweet and natural way. A man whose
+life is passed in a daily delight that gently stirs without feverish
+excitement will be tender and most lovely to women. He _ought_ to
+marry."
+
+"Did you ever write poetry?" I asked.
+
+"I began to compose when I was six years old. I wrote a poem on the sea,
+commencing,--
+
+  'O thou earthly sea,
+  Every person thinks of thee,--
+  The sailor, and the busy bee,
+  And the Chinese drinking tea!'
+
+I thought it very fine. I have written many things since then, and they
+seemed good to me at the time. I would not venture to say how they
+struck others."
+
+He smiled pleasantly.
+
+"Do not be frightened by the shadow of a possible wife from unfolding
+your history," said I. "Chance has thrown us together; befriend me with
+your experience."
+
+"Take warning, then, if need be.
+
+"In college I was thought 'a very able fellow,' one 'who held the pen of
+a ready writer'; and I graduated as vain of my supposed talents as a
+young miss of her first conquest.
+
+"My earliest literary essay was in a new magazine, which, as it was just
+rising into notice, would be, I imagined, greatly assisted by my
+condescension. It was a charity, indeed, to give my support to this
+fledgling, and I sent to it a long article, entitled, 'The Cultivated,
+as Moving and Educational Powers.' My manuscripts were returned, with
+this quiet bit of advice:--'Before "X.Y.Z." institutes any other
+reforms, we would advise him to reperuse his English Grammar.' Far from
+having a salutary effect, this rebuff only rankled in my soul. I
+determined to revenge myself on the paltry malignant who dared to
+despise my efforts. I therefore wrote a slashing criticism for one of
+the evening papers, demolishing (as I thought) the delinquent
+periodical, and denouncing its whole corps of writers as frivolous and
+almost illiterate. My satire was returned, being too personal for
+publication.
+
+"Just at this time I chanced to fall in love with Miss Ellen Wilson, now
+Mrs. Martin. Fancying my passion unrequited, I poured forth my feelings
+in ten melancholy stanzas, beginning,--
+
+  'Oh! what avails it, if the spring be bright?'
+
+These verses were very morbid and dreary, but they were published in the
+'Tri-Weekly Tribune,' and 'Hope revived again.'
+
+"The drama I next deemed worthy of my attention, and wrote a play, the
+plot of which I thought quite new and original. A large fortune is left
+to my hero, who forthwith becomes enamored of a fair damsel; but,
+fearful lest the beloved object should worship his money more than his
+merits, he disguises himself in a wig and blue spectacles, becomes tutor
+to her brother, and wins her affections while playing pedagogue. On her
+acknowledging her attachment, he flings his disguises into the sea, and,
+in the wildness of his joy at being adored for his profundity in Latin,
+Greek, Hebrew, French, Spanish, German, Mathematics, Natural Science,
+and Civil Engineering, folds his loved one in his arms, and springs into
+the surf, where both are drowned.
+
+"This, you see, was quite new."
+
+"Quite," I replied, laughing.
+
+"I published it at my own expense, and I must say I have yet to receive
+the first remittance for this truly original work.
+
+"During the next season, I met with Hans Andersen's inimitable
+'Maerchen,' and, immediately setting myself to work, I wrote 'Uncle Job's
+Legacies,' a series of children's tales, full, as I fondly fancied, of
+poetry, pleasantry, and information. I sent them to 'The Juvenile
+Weekly,' then published in the city. They were accepted with a profusion
+of thanks; and in a few days I called, by request, at the office,
+expecting large compensation for services so eagerly received.
+
+"I went up a dirty staircase, into a mean, slovenly back-office, where a
+small, uncleanly man sat tipped back in his chair, picking his teeth. He
+seemed the personification of _nonchalance_, impudence, and conceit. As
+I entered, he looked up with a lazy insolence, which, had I been a
+woman, would have brought a hot flush of indignation to my face, and, on
+my mentioning my name, he rose and extended a very dirty hand.
+
+"'Glad to see you, Sir,--hope you'll continue your contributions,--Uncle
+Job,--good idea, Sir,--love the little ones? So do we, Sir,--work very
+hard for them,--don't pay at all,--poor business,--pure charity,--that's
+all.'
+
+"'But you don't mean to say,' I exclaimed, 'that your contributors are
+expected to work from charity?'
+
+"'Glad to pay them, if we could, but we can't afford it,--more
+contributions than we can use,--best authors in the country write for
+us,--pure love for the little ones, I assure you.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said. 'I do not vouchsafe to
+bestow my time and thoughts for nothing. If you do not pay, I can offer
+them to others who do.'
+
+"'You won't find a child's paper in the United States that pays,' he
+growled. 'We don't care for contributions. Me and my partner writes most
+of the articles ourselves.'
+
+"'Will you give me my manuscripts?' I said again, anxious to put an end
+to the interview, and disgusted with the fellow's falsehood.
+
+"'Hallo! Mortimer, do you know where them are?'
+
+"'Sorry I can't oblige you,' said a fat man, dirtier and greasier than
+the first, emerging from an inner den; 'they're gone to press.'
+
+"'If you tell me any more lies,' cried I, becoming furious, 'I shall
+take measures that you will not at all relish. If you will not _give_ me
+my manuscripts, I shall _take_ them'; and, suiting the action to the
+word, I snatched them from a shelf, where they lay conspicuous, and
+carried them off without further parley.
+
+"This cured me for a while of all literary ambition. But the unquiet
+spirit within me would not rest, and during the following summer I wrote
+a sentimental tale, full of aspirations, large adjectives, and soft
+epithets. It was accepted by a well-known monthly, then supposed to be
+in the height of its prosperity. This was a grain of comfort, and I
+looked forward confidently to a long future of remuneration and renown,
+when a letter of regret arrived from the fair editress, returning my
+story, and explaining, that, being unable to meet her engagements, the
+magazine had been sold to pay her debts.
+
+"This was bad; but my story was my own, and I accordingly despatched it
+to 'The Salmagundian,' a periodical of the highest reputation. There it
+was published, praised, and further contributions requested. Several
+weeks passed away. I indited a poem, entitled, 'Past and Future, or,
+Golden and Leaden Hours.' This also appeared in print, and my thirst for
+fame was beginning to be satisfied, when a polite note reached me from
+'The Salmagundian' office, begging for another tale, and offering to pay
+me in _back numbers of the magazine_. I wrote no more."
+
+"Art beguiled you then, perhaps?"
+
+"Alas, yes, the siren! I had taken lessons from a very clever colorist,
+and was thoroughly imbued with his enthusiasm. 'I, too, am a painter,' I
+took for my motto; and, hiring a small studio in ---- Street, I bought a
+large canvas, on which I sketched out a picture which cost me much
+money, more time, and many anxious thoughts.
+
+"It represented the interior of a church, at the dim end of which a
+marriage was being solemnized. In the foreground, a group of ten people,
+in anomalous costumes, was gathered round a youth supposed to be a
+rejected and despairing lover, who had fallen on the ground in a swoon.
+It was very affecting, I thought.--it would be very effective. Were
+_she_ to see it, she would be stung with remorse,--she would behold the
+probable effects of her present indifference,--she would relent.
+
+"No one knew of my painting. I would keep it a profound secret, till it
+was a complete and glorious success. So I worked on in my quiet studio,
+draping before a cheval-glass for my women, attitudinizing and agonizing
+for my men, until the last touches were on, the varnish dry, and it was
+all ready for the Spring Exhibition. Then came doubts and speculations.
+Would it be accepted? Was it good, after all? Would Ellen like it? How
+would it seem among so many others? Should I take her to look at it?
+Should I tell her it was mine? Who would buy it?
+
+"I had hired my studio under an assumed name, and under an assumed name
+sent my picture to the Academy. Now, when I went to see it, I found it,
+by some strange chance, hung next to a beautiful portrait by Huntington.
+The juxtaposition gave me a new idea. I saw at once what a villanous
+daub mine was, and went away oppressed with shame and a new-found
+modesty. Some time after this I strolled again into the Exhibition, in
+the hope of finding Miss Wilson; as I entered the vestibule, I met her
+coming out.
+
+"'Oh, Mr. Martin!' she exclaimed, 'I am just going away, but I _must_
+turn back, and show you the _funniest_ picture! So theatrical! So
+distorted!'
+
+"'Does it hang next to a lady in a purple shawl, by Huntington?'
+
+"'Yes. Of course I might have known you would appreciate it, you are
+such a good critic of pictures. Isn't it the very worst specimen of art
+you ever saw?'
+
+"Can you imagine my feelings?"
+
+"I think I can."
+
+"This was not all, however. That afternoon I went to my now forsaken
+studio, previous to taking my departure from it forever. I was carefully
+packing my materials, when I heard a knock at the door. I opened it, and
+an elderly, shrewd-looking man walked into the room.
+
+"'Are you T. Markham Worthington?' he asked.
+
+"'I am a friend of his.'
+
+"'Authorized to sell his picture in the Academy, Number ----?'
+
+"'Yes.'
+
+"'How much does he ask for it?'
+
+"'How much are you willing to give?'
+
+"'Not more than twenty-five dollars,'
+
+"'That will do. Where shall it be sent?'
+
+"He paid the money, wrote the address, and, bowing, left the studio.
+Twenty-five dollars just paid for the frame. Who had bought my picture?
+I looked at the card:--
+
+    'PARKER J. SPERRY,
+    '_Yankee Pie Depot_,
+    '126 ---- Street.'"
+
+"Did you ever paint again?"
+
+"Once only. I made a portrait of my sister-in-law, and sent it to her in
+a gorgeous frame. I happened to go into her sitting-room, one morning,
+when she was out, and found my picture hanging with its face to the
+wall. I turned it round. Directly across the mouth was pasted a white
+label, on which I saw neatly printed in India-ink,--'Queen of the
+Deplorables.' I took it home with me, and hung it in my library as a
+lesson to me for all future time.
+
+"So," said Martin, throwing away the of his third cigar, "you have heard
+my experience. May you profit by it! I am now in the pork-packing
+business, and make a handsome income for my wife and two children.
+To-morrow I go to New York, to bring them into these wilds for change of
+air. And now, good night."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+ROBERT AND CLARA SCHUMANN.
+
+FLORESTAN'S STORY.
+
+
+I.
+
+In every person's memory there are niches fixed, and in those niches are
+sacred persons. These are such as never obtruded themselves upon you,
+staining the pane through which their light shone with their own images,
+but who became perfectly transparent to the word they uttered, the song
+they sang, or the work they did. Such a sacred person to me is the
+gifted woman who first interpreted for me Schumann's Albums. Many years
+ago it was, as she told me, that she one day stood unperceived in the
+half-open door of her master, near the lesson-hour, and heard him softly
+rendering a theme which stole far into places of her heart, which had
+been awaiting its spell unconsciously. Presently he felt that there was
+a listener, and, hastily brushing away a tear, he placed the music in a
+far corner of the room, away from his _repertoire_. She confessed, that,
+afterward, when he was not present, she had looked on that which he
+evidently desired to conceal; she saw written, in pencil, upon it,
+"Sternenkranz." Thenceforth shops and catalogues were ransacked, but no
+"Sternenkranz" was found,--the word was evidently her master's own
+fancy; so she summoned all her heroism, one day, when Herr Otto
+complained of her indifference to the pieces he set before her, and
+informed him that she should perish at his feet, unless he would give
+her "Sternenkranz." Of course her guilt was manifest, and Herr Otto, in
+a spasm of anger at "prying women," as he called them, brought out the
+treasure, and with it others of a very rare album of Schumann's, to
+which he had given no names, leaving them to whisper their own names to
+each soul that could receive them: Star-Wreath it might be to one, Bower
+of Lilies to another. It was the same as with that white stone which the
+Seer of Patmos saw,--within it "a name written which no man knoweth,
+saving he that receiveth it."
+
+This piece was to the lady a touch of consecration. Thenceforth she was
+known among us as "the Schumannite woman." I verily believe that to-day,
+next to the divine Clara herself, she is the best interpreter of Robert
+Schumann's works living; and if the love she has obtained for him is not
+as universal, it is just as fervent. Many silent and holy hours have I
+sat communing, through her, with him whom the Germans love to call their
+Tone-Poet; and the music remained to clothe with the full vesture of
+romance the meagre paragraphs of the journals which hinted his love, his
+sorrow, and at length his insanity and death. More, however, I longed to
+know of him,--of the wedlock of these Brownings of music; and more I
+came to know, in the way which, with this preface, I now proceed to
+relate.
+
+A bitter December evening found me tumbling through snow and ice to
+accommodate a certain lyceum in one of our Northwestern cities. Cold
+winds from over the Lakes made me wish that the Modern Athens had kept
+its lecture-system at home; for it has always seemed to me, that,
+wherever this has gone, her eastern storms have gone with it. Such ugly
+thoughts were shamed, however, by the beaming welcome which shone from
+the face of the kindest of landladies, and at length completely thawed
+out of me by the glowing fire to which she introduced me, and which
+animated the coziest of rooms. Why has not some poet celebrated the
+experience of thawing? How deliciously each fibre of the thawee responds
+to the informing ray, evolving its own sweet sensation of release until
+all unite in a soft choral reverie! Carried thus, in a few moments, from
+the Arctic to the Tropic, I thought, as dear Heine says, my "sweet
+nothing-at-all thoughts," until a subtile breath of music won me back to
+life.
+
+Heavens! what is that? A strain, strong and tender, pressed its way into
+the room, soothed my temples, then broke over me in a shower of pearls.
+Confused, I started up; and it was some moments before I understood that
+the music proceeded from the room adjoining mine in the hotel. Not
+altogether unfamiliar was the theme; the priestess of whom I have spoken
+had once brought it from the Holy of Holies, when she was appointed to
+stand; and now, remembering, I broke out with the word, "Florestan!"
+
+As I uttered it, the music ceased with the dreary fall of an octave.
+Whether the musician had heard the exclamation, or whether such a
+terrible termination was in the music, I knew not: the latter was quite
+probable, for, alas! such fearful Icarus-falls are not rare in poor
+Schumann's music. However, I did not consider long, but, rising quickly,
+passed into the hall, and knocked gently at the door of the next room.
+
+"Enter," replied a voice, eagerly, but softly.
+
+Enter I did, and stood before a man of about forty winters. His face was
+so swart that I could see only the German in the blue eye, and at once
+imagined that a stream of Plutonic fire had streamed into his veins from
+some more Oriental race. I stammered out an apology for my intrusion,
+but told him how irresistible were such subtile threads as Schumann's
+"Carnival" had projected through the walls which separated our rooms.
+
+"Florestan," I said, "was too much for me."
+
+Then his eye lighted up as might that of some Arctic voyager, which,
+having for bleak months rested only on the glittering scales of the
+ice-dragon coiled about him, is suddenly filled with the warm spread of
+the Polar Sea. Taking my hand, he said,--
+
+"In me, wanderer that I am,--in me, with the _Heimweh_ in my heart never
+to be stilled but in that home where Schumann has already gone,--you see
+Florestan."
+
+"Louis Boehner!"
+
+Filled with wonder, and scarcely knowing what I did, I took a little
+piece of paper which he unwrapped from many folds and placed in my hand.
+On it these words were written:--
+
+
+     "_Peace and joy attend thee, Louis Boehner! and mayst thou never
+     want for such a friend as thou hast been to_
+
+     ROBERT SCHUMANN."
+
+I could say no word; never have I felt a profounder emotion than when,
+at this moment, I drew so near one whose brow Art had crowned with a
+living halo.
+
+Students of German music and composers will need no word to bring before
+them the fulness of this incident. But to others I may briefly mention
+some facts connected with Schumann's "Carnival, or _Scenes Mignonnes_,
+on Four Notes." Not by any means representing the pure depths of
+Schumann's soul, this strange medley is yet pregnant with historic
+associations. The composer wrote it in his young days, stringing
+twenty-two little pieces on four letters composing the name of Asch, a
+town of Saxony, "whither," according to Sobolewski, "Schumann's thoughts
+frequently strayed, because at that time there was an object there
+interesting to his sensitive soul." In the letters A, S, C, H, it must
+be remembered that the H in German stands for our B natural, and S or
+_es_ for E flat. The Leipsic "Neue Zeitschrift fuer Musik" was begun and
+for ten years edited by Schumann,--in what spirit we may gather from his
+own words:--"The musical state of Germany, at that time, was not very
+encouraging. On the stage Rossini yet reigned, and on the piano Herz and
+Huenten excluded all others. And yet how few years had passed since
+Beethoven, Weber, and Schubert lived among us! True, Mendelssohn's star
+was ascending, and there were wonderful whispers of a certain Pole,
+Chopin; but it was later that these gained their lasting influence. One
+day the idea took possession of our young and hot heads,--Let us not
+idly look on; take hold, and reform it; take hold, and the Poetry of Art
+shall be again enthroned!" Then gathered together a Protestant-league of
+music, whose Luther and Melancthon in one was Schumann. The Devil at
+which they threw their inkstands and semi-breves was the _Philistines_,
+which is the general term amongst German students, artists, poets, etc.,
+for prosaic, narrow, hard, ungenial, commonplace respectabilities.
+"Young Germany" was making itself felt in all cooerdinate directions:
+forming new schools of plastic Art in Munich and Dresden,--a sharp and
+spirited Bohemian literature at Frankfort, under the lead of Heine and
+Boerne; and now, music being the last to yield in Germany, because most
+revered, as it is with religion in other countries, a new vitality
+brought together in Kuehne's cellar in Leipsic the revolutionists, "who
+talked of Callot, Hoffmann, and Jean Paul, of Beethoven and Franz
+Schubert, and of the three foreign Romanticists beyond the Rhine, the
+friends of the new phenomenon in French poetry, Victor Hugo." This was
+the _Davidsbund_, or League of David (the last of the "Scenes Mignonnes"
+is named "Marche des _Davidsbuendler_ contre les Philistines"). An
+agreeable writer in the "Weimarer Somitagsblatt" has given us a fine
+sketch of this company, which we will quote.
+
+"The head of the table was occupied by a lively, flexible man of middle
+age, intellectual in conversation, and overflowing with sharp and witty
+remarks. He was the instructor of more than one of the young musicians
+around him, who all listened to his observations with profound
+attention. He was very fond of monopolizing the conversation and
+suffering himself to be admired. For he called many a young, highly
+promising musician his pupil, and had, besides, the certain
+consciousness of having moulded his daughter Clara, at that time a girl
+of fourteen, into a prodigy, whose first appearance delighted the whole
+world, and whose subsequent artist-activity became the pride of her
+native city, Leipsic. By his side sat a quiet, thoughtful young man of
+twenty-three, with melancholy eyes. But lately a student in Heidelberg,
+he had now devoted himself entirely to music, had removed to Leipsic and
+was now a pupil of the 'old schoolmaster,' as the father of Clara Wieck
+liked to be called. Young Robert Schumann had good reason to be
+melancholy. After long struggles, he had only been able to devote
+himself entirely to music comparatively late in life, and had been
+obliged to pass a part of his precious youth in studies which were as
+uncongenial as possible to his artist-spirit. He had finally decided for
+the career of a _virtuoso_, and was pursuing the study of the piano with
+an almost morbid zeal, when the disabling of one of his fingers, a
+consequence of his over-exertions, obliged him to give up this career
+forever. He did not yet suspect that this accident would prove fortunate
+for him in the end, by directing him to his true vocation, composition.
+Perhaps, too, it was the first germ of love, in the garb of admiration
+for the wondrous talent of Clara, which made young Robert so quiet and
+dreamy. His companions were all the more lively. There sat the eccentric
+Louis Boehner,[A] who long ago had served as the model for E.T.A.
+Hoffmann's fantastic pictures. Here J.P. Lyser, a painter by profession,
+but a poet as well, and a musician besides. Here Carl Bauck, the
+indefatigable, yet unsuccessful composer of songs,--now, in his capacity
+of critic, the paper bugbear of the Dresden artists. He had just
+returned from Italy, and believed himself in possession of the true
+secret of the art of singing, the monopoly of which every singing-master
+is wont to claim for himself. C.F. Becker, too, the eminent organist and
+industrious collector, belonged to this circle, as well as many more
+young and old artists of more or less merit and talent."[B]
+
+[Footnote A: The "Florestan" of the "Scenes Mignonnes"; "Chiara" is
+Clara herself; "Eusebius" was Robert Schumann.]
+
+[Footnote B: See Dwight's _Journal of Music_, Vol. VIII. No. 3.]
+
+Florestan then stood before me; and with him, although invisible, stood
+that sacred circle, which had unconsciously borne within it the germs of
+so many future sorrows and glories.
+
+"With him," said Louis Boehner, "I began life, when we were boys
+together at Heidelberg; with him I stood when the dawn of a better day,
+which since has blessed hill and vale, was glowing for his eye alone;
+this breast held his sorrows and his hopes, when he was struggling to
+reach his Clara; these hands saved him when in his madness he cast
+himself into the Rhine; these eyes dropped their hot tears on his
+eyelids when they were closed in death."
+
+Overcome by his emotion, he sat down and sobbed aloud.
+
+At that moment, hearing my name called loudly in the hall, I went out,
+and was informed that my audience was waiting at the Lyceum, and had
+been waiting nearly fifteen minutes!
+
+
+II.
+
+Next morning, bright and early, I was in the artist-pilgrim's room,
+listening to that which it thrilled him to tell and me to hear. And
+first he told me the story of Schumann's love.
+
+The "old schoolmaster," Wieck, trained his daughter more ambitiously
+than judiciously; and, indeed, none but one of the elect would ever have
+survived the tasks imposed on her childhood. Indeed, she had no
+childhood: at the piano she was kept through all the bright days, roving
+only from scale to scale, when she should have been roving from flower
+to flower. At length her genius asserted itself, and she entered into
+her destiny; thenceforth flowers bloomed for her out of exercise-books,
+and she could touch the notes which were sun-bursts, and those which
+were mosses beneath them. From this training she came before the best
+audience in Germany, and stood a sad-eyed, beautiful child of fourteen
+summers, and by acclamation was crowned the Queen of the Piano. Franz
+Liszt remembered his enthusiasm of that period, and many years afterward
+wrote in his extravagant way,--"When we heard Clara Wieck in Vienna,
+fifteen years ago, she drew her hearers after her into her poetic world,
+to which she floated upward in a magical car drawn by electric sparks
+and lifted by delicately prismatic, but nervously throbbing winglets."
+At her performance of Beethoven's F Minor Sonata, Grillparzer was
+inspired to write the following verses:--
+
+  "A weird magician, weary of the world,
+  In sullen humor locked his charms all up
+  Within a diamond casket, firmly clasped,
+  And threw the key into the sea, and died.
+  The manikins here tried with all their might;
+  In vain! no tool can pick the flinty lock;
+  His magic arts still slumber, like their master.
+  A shepherd's child, along the sea-shore playing,
+  Watches the waves, in hurrying, idle chase.
+  Dreaming and thoughtless, as young maidens are,
+  She dippeth her white fingers in the flood,
+  And grasps, and lifts, and holds it! 'Tis the key.
+  Up springs she, up, her heart still beating higher.
+  The casket glances, as with eyes, before her.
+  The key fits well, up flies the lid. The spirits
+  All mount aloft, then bow themselves submissive
+  To this their gracious, innocent, sweet mistress,
+  Who with white fingers guides them in her play."
+
+The first, perhaps, to recognize the surpassing ability of that child
+was the young editor of the "Zeitschrift." Robert Schumann. On her first
+appearance, he wrote,--"Others make poetry,--she is a poem." And soon
+afterward,--"She early lifted the veil of Isis. The child looks calmly
+up,--the man would, perhaps, be dazzled by the brilliancy."
+
+From this moment there was an elasticity and purpose about the young
+composer, the secret of which no one knew, not even himself. Like one
+caught in the whorls of some happy dream, who will not pause to ask,
+"Whither?" he poured out before this child the half-revealed hopes
+striving within him; an equal spell was woven about her ingenuous and
+earnest heart, and their souls were joined in that purple morning; in
+due time they were to be rather _clenched_, through pain. It was under
+this baptismal touch of Love that Schumann wrote his first
+sonata,--"Florestan and Eusebius." It gained him at once a fame with all
+from whom fame was graceful.
+
+In the light of this period of his life must be interpreted those
+wonderful little "pieces" which mystify whilst they fascinate; without
+it their meaning is as strange as their names. Often did he say,--"I can
+write only where my life is in unison with my works." "Listen now to
+these," said Florestan, as he opened an album and struck the piano;
+"these are the voices of a new life." The "Alternatives," with song, "My
+peace is o'er"; "Evening Thoughts"; "Impromptus," (whose first theme was
+written by Clara): these; seemed like the emotion of some newly winged
+aspirant released from its chrysalis, resting on its first flower. But
+faster than planets through the abysses Love moves on. Florestan ceased,
+and there was a long silence; and then he told the unspeakable portion
+of his story by performing these two: "Sternenkranz," "Warum." Who has
+ever scaled the rapture of the former, or fathomed the pathos of the
+latter? Every summit implies its precipice; and the star-wreath that
+crowned Love was snatched at by the Fate which soon burdened two hearts
+with the terrible questioning, _Wherefore?_
+
+Thus: before these two were fully conscious of the love they bore each
+other, the shrewd eye of old Wieck had caught a glimpse of what was
+coming to pass. He had educated this girl to be an artist to bring _him_
+fame; alas, it must be confessed that he thought also of certain
+prospective thalers. Willing as he was that all Leipsic should admire
+his daughter, he did not like the enthusiasm of the "Zeitschrift." He
+then began to warn Clara against "this Faust in modern garb, who, when
+he had gained one finger, would soon have the whole hand, and finally
+the poor soul into the bargain!" Stupid old schoolmaster, thou shouldst
+have known that it is Mephistopheles, and not Faust, that women hate!
+
+The old man, finding that his warnings were of no avail, forbade all
+acquaintance, forbade Robert's visits to his house. Then, inaugurating
+at once Clara's career as a _virtuoso_, he took her to Vienna.
+
+No wonder, that, when she appeared there, it was to be as the priestess
+of Beethoven. It takes something besides an academy to train artists up
+to Beethoven. Robert was forbidden to write to her; but the
+"Schwaermibriefe of Eusebius to Chiara," utterly unintelligible to the
+general reader of the "Zeitschrift," who, doubtless, fancied that its
+editor had gone mad, were quite clear to a certain little lady in
+Vienna, who consequently pined less than her father had anticipated.
+
+"Amid all our musical soul-feasts," he writes, "there always peeps out
+an angel-face, which more than resembles a certain Clara. Why art thou
+not with us? (_Warum!_) And how thou wilt have thought of us last
+night, from the 'Meeresstille' to the flaming close of the A major
+symphony! I also thought of thee then, Chiara, pure one, bright one,
+whose hands are stretched towards Italy, whither thy longing draws thee,
+but thy dreamy eye still turned to us."
+
+At length a sun-burst. In 1840 appeared the first number of Schumann's
+"Myrthen," whose dedication, _Seiner geliebten Braut_, breaks forth in
+the passionate and beautiful song,--"Thou my soul, O thou my heart!"
+
+But this word _Braut_ means Bride in the German sense of "affianced";
+and although the joy of this relation passed over Schumann like the
+breath of a Tropic, bringing forth, amongst other gorgeous fruits, his
+glorious First Symphony, which some one has well called the Symphony of
+Bliss, yet, ere this bliss was more than an elusive vision, the two
+passed through fierce wildernesses, and drank together of bitter Marahs.
+"But of all this," said Florestan, "you will know, if you have the right
+to know, from these,"--his "Voice from afar," and his "Night-Pieces."
+
+Neither of us dared break the silence claimed by these exquisite pieces
+when they ceased; we shook hands and parted without a word.
+
+
+III.
+
+But another mystery about the loved and lost master, which I longed to
+have revealed, would not let me leave the city. In the afternoon I
+sought Boehner, and asked him to walk with me. As soon as we had alluded
+to the one subject that bound us together, I requested him to tell me,
+what had not yet been given to the world, the details of Schumann's
+insanity and death.
+
+Then, as one who takes up a heavy burden to bear it, he proceeded:--
+
+"The heart of Robert Schumann was a lyre so delicate, and with strings
+so sensitive, that the effect of his pains and his joys, both always in
+extremes, was as if you gave an AEolian harp to be swept now by a cold
+north-wind and now by a hot sirocco. His spirit wore on to the confines
+of his flesh, and was not warmly covered thereby, but only veiled. Under
+his grief he seemed stronger; but when his joy came, when Clara was his
+own, and went through Europe with him, giving expression to the voices
+within, which, to him, had been unutterable,--then we saw that the
+emotions which would have been safe, had they been suffered to well up
+gently from the first, could come forth now only as a fierce and perhaps
+devastating torrent.
+
+"Schumann saddened his intimate friends by times of insanity, five or
+six years before the world at large knew anything of it. At such times
+he imagined himself again cruelly separated from the patient and tender
+being who never left his side; and he would write pieces full of
+distractions, in the midst of each of which, however, some touchingly
+beautiful theme would float up, like a fair island through seething
+seas. Then there were longer intervals, of seven and eight months, in
+which he was perfectly sane; at which times he would write with a
+wearing persistence which none could restrain: he would put our advice
+aside gently, saying,--'A long life is before me; but it must be lived
+in a few years.' And, indeed, the works which have reached farthest into
+hearts that loved him most deeply date from these times. I remember,
+that, when he sat down to compose his last symphony, he said,--'It is
+almost accomplished; but the invisible mansion needs another chamber.'
+
+"Once when I was at Frankfort, Clara Schumann sent me this word:
+'Hasten.' I left all my affairs, and came to watch for many months
+beside this beloved one. It was not a wild delirium which had taken
+possession of him; the only fit of that kind was that in which he tried
+to drown himself in the Rhine,--at the time when the papers got hold of
+the terrible secret. His insanity was manifested in his conviction that
+he was occupied by the souls of Beethoven and Schubert. Much in the
+manner of your American mediums, he would be seized by a controlling
+power,--would snatch a pencil, and dash out upon paper the wildest
+discords. These we would play for him, at his request, from morning till
+night,--during much of which time he would seem to be in a happy trance.
+Of this music no chord or melody was true; they were jangling memories
+of his earlier works.
+
+"One day he called his wife and myself, and took our hands in his
+own:--'Beethoven says that my earthly music is over; it cannot be
+understood here; he writes for angels, and I shall write for them.'
+Then, turning to me, he said,--'Louis, my friend, farewell! This is my
+last prayer for you,'--handing me the paper which I have shown you; 'and
+now leave us, to come again and kiss me when I am cold.'
+
+"Then I left him alone with his Clara.
+
+"A month from that time, Schumann was no more."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Out under the glowing sunset, I clasped hands parting with Louis
+Boehner, and said, as my voice would let me.--"Take this paper, and when
+you would have a friend, such as you have been to Robert Schumann, come
+and help me to be that friend."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE FREEDMEN AT PORT ROYAL.
+
+
+Two questions are concerned in the social problem of our time. One is,
+Will the people of African descent work for a living? and the other is,
+Will they fight for their freedom? An affirmative answer to these must
+be put beyond any fair dispute before they will receive permanent
+security in law or opinion. Whatever may be the theses of philosophers
+or the instincts of the justest men, the general sense of mankind is not
+likely to accord the rights of complete citizenship to a race of
+paupers, or to hesitate in imposing compulsory labor on those who have
+not industry sufficient to support themselves. Nor, in the present
+development of human nature, is the conscience of great communities
+likely to be so pervasive and controlling as to restrain them from
+disregarding the rights of those whom it is perfectly safe to injure,
+because they have not the pluck to defend themselves. Sentiment may be
+lavished upon them in poetry and tears, but it will all be wasted. Like
+all unprivileged classes before them, they will have their full
+recognition as citizens and men when they have vindicated their title to
+be an estate of the realm, and not before. Let us, then, take the world
+as we find it, and try this people accordingly. But it is not pertinent
+to any practical inquiry of our time to predict what triumphs in art,
+literature, or government they are to accomplish, or what romance is to
+glow upon their history. No Iliad may be written of them and their woes.
+No Plutarch may gather the lives of their heroes. No Vandyck may delight
+to warm his canvas with their forms. How many or how few astronomers
+like Banneker, chieftains like Toussaint, orators like Douglass they may
+have, it is not worth while to conjecture. It is better to dismiss these
+fanciful discussions. To vindicate their title to a fair chance in the
+world as a free people, it is sufficient, and alone sufficient, that it
+appear to reasonable minds that they are in good and evil very much like
+the rest of mankind, and that they are endowed in about the same degree
+with the conservative and progressive elements of character common to
+ordinary humanity.
+
+It is given to the people of this country and time, could they realise
+it, to make a new chapter of human experience. The past may suggest, but
+it can do little either in directing or deterring. There is nothing in
+the gloomy vaticinations of Tocqueville, wise and benevolent as he is,
+which should be permitted to darken our future. The mediaeval antagonisms
+of races, when Christianity threw but a partial light over mankind, and
+before commerce had unfolded the harmony of interests among people of
+diverse origin or condition, determine no laws which will fetter the
+richer and more various development of modern life. Nor do the results
+of emancipation in the West Indies, more or less satisfactory as they
+may be, afford any measure of the progress which opens before our
+enfranchised masses. The insular and contracted life of the colonies,
+cramped also as they were by debt and absenteeism, has no parallel in
+the grand currents of thought and activity ever sweeping through the
+continent on which our problem is to be solved.
+
+In the light of these views, the attempt shall be made to report
+truthfully upon the freedmen at Port Royal. A word, however, as to the
+name. Civilization, in its career, may often be traced in the
+nomenclatures of successive periods. These people were first called
+contrabands at Fortress Monroe; but at Port Royal, where they were next
+introduced to us in any considerable number, they were generally
+referred to as freedmen. These terms are milestones in our progress; and
+they are yet to be lost in the better and more comprehensive designation
+of citizens, or, when discrimination is convenient, citizens of African
+descent.
+
+The enterprise for the protection and development of the freedmen at
+Port Royal has won its way to the regard of mankind. The best minds of
+Europe, as well as the best friends of the United States, like Cairnes
+and Gasparin, have testified much interest in its progress. An English
+periodical of considerable merit noticed at some length "Mr. Pierce's
+Ten Thousand Clients." In Parliament, Earl Russell noted it in its
+incipient stage, as a reason why England should not intervene in
+American affairs. The "Revue des Deux Mondes," in a recent number,
+characterizes the colony as "that small pacific army, far more important
+in the history of civilization than all the military expeditions
+despatched from time to time since the commencement of the civil war."
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+No little historical interest covers the region to which this account
+belongs. Explorations of the coast now known as that of the Carolinas,
+Georgia, and Florida, involving the rival pretensions of Spain and
+France, were made in the first half of the sixteenth century. They were
+conducted by Ponce de Leon, Vasquez, Verrazani, and Soto, in search of
+the fountain of perpetual youth, or to extend empire by right of
+discovery. But no permanent settlement by way of colony or garrison was
+attempted until 1562.
+
+In that year,--the same in which he drew his sword for his faith, and
+ten years before the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, in which he fell the
+most illustrious victim,--Admiral Coligny, the great Protestant chief,
+anxious to found beyond the seas a refuge for persecuted Huguenots,
+fitted out the expedition of Jean Ribault, which, after a voyage of over
+three months across the ocean and northward along the coast, cast anchor
+on May 27th in the harbor of Port Royal, and gave it the name which it
+retains to this day. That year was also to be ever memorable for another
+and far different enterprise, which was destined to be written in dark
+and perpetual lines on human history. Then it was that John Hawkins
+sailed for Africa in quest of the first cargo of negroes ever brought to
+the New World. The expedition of Ribault was the first visit of
+Europeans to Port Royal or to any part of South Carolina, and the
+garrison left by him was the first settlement under their auspices ever
+made on this continent north of Mexico. There is not space or need to
+detail here the mutiny and suffering of this military colony, their
+abandonment of the post, the terrible voyage homeward, or the
+perseverance of Coligny in his original purpose. Nor is it within the
+compass of this narrative to recount the fortunes of the second
+garrison, which was founded on the St. John's, the visit of John Hawkins
+in 1565 with timely relief, the return of Ribault from France and his
+sad fate, the ferocity of Melendez against all heretic Frenchmen, and
+the avenging chivalry of Dominic de Gourges. The student is baffled in
+attempts to fix localities for the deeds and explorations of this
+period, even with the help of the several accounts and the drawings of
+Le Moyne; and, besides, these later vicissitudes did not involve any
+permanent occupation as far north as Port Royal, that region having been
+abandoned by the French, and being then visited by the Spanish only for
+trade or adventure.
+
+Some merchants of Barbados, in 1663, sent William Hilton and other
+commissioners to Florida, then including Port Royal, to explore the
+country with reference to an emigration thither. Hilton's Narration,
+published in London the year after, mentions St. Ellens as one of the
+points visited, meaning St. Helena, but probably including the Sea
+Islands under that name. The natives were found to speak many Spanish
+words, and to be familiar enough with the report of guns not to be
+alarmed by it. The commissioners, whose explorations were evidently
+prompted by motives of gain, close a somewhat glowing description of the
+country by saying, "And we could wish that all they that want a happy
+settlement of our English nation were well transported thither."
+
+Hitherto England had borne no part in exploring this region. But,
+relieved of her civil wars by the Restoration, she began to seek
+colonial empire on the southern coast of North America. In 1663, Charles
+II. granted a charter to Clarendon, Monk, Shaftsbury,--each famous in
+the conflicts of those times,--and to their associates, as proprietors
+of Carolina. The genius of John Locke, more fitted for philosophy than
+affairs, devised a constitution for the colony,--an idle work, as it
+proved. In 1670, the first emigrants, under Governor William Sayle,
+arrived at Port Royal, with the purpose to remain there; but, disturbed
+probably with apprehensions of Spanish incursions from Florida, they
+removed to the banks of the Ashley, and, after another change of site,
+founded Charleston.
+
+In 1682, a colony from Scotland under Lord Cardross was founded at Port
+Royal, but was driven away four years later by the Spanish. No permanent
+settlement of the Beaufort district appears to have succeeded until
+1700. This district is divided into four parishes, St. Peter's, St.
+Luke's, St. Helena, and Prince William, being fifty-eight miles long and
+thirty-two broad, and containing 1,224,960 acres. St. Helena parish
+includes the islands of St. Helena, Ladies, Port Royal, Paris, and a few
+smaller islands, which, together with Hilton Head, make the district
+occupied by our forces. The largest and most populous of these islands
+is St. Helena, being fifteen miles long and six or seven broad,
+containing fifty plantations and three thousand negroes, and perhaps
+more since the evacuation of Edisto. Port Royal is two-thirds or
+three-quarters the size of St. Helena, Ladies half as large, and Hilton
+Head one-third as large. Paris, or Parry, has five plantations, and
+Coosaw, Morgan, Cat, Cane, and Barnwell have each one or two. Beaufort
+is the largest town in the district of that name, and the only one at
+Port Royal in our possession. Its population, black and white, in time
+of peace may have been between two and three thousand. The first lots
+were granted in 1717. Its Episcopal church was built in 1720. Its
+library was instituted in 1802, had increased in 1825 to six or eight
+hundred volumes, and when our military occupation began contained about
+thirty-five hundred.
+
+The origin of the name Port Royal, given to a harbor at first and since
+to an island, has already been noted. The name of St. Helena, applied to
+a sound, a parish, and an island, originated probably with the
+Spaniards, and was given by them in tribute to Saint Helena, the mother
+of Constantine the Great, whose day in the calendar is August 18th.
+Broad River is the equivalent of La Grande, which was given by Ribault.
+Hilton Head may have been derived from Captain Hilton, who came from
+Barbados. Coosaw is the name of a tribe of Indians. Beaufort is likely
+to have been so called for Henry, Duke of Beauford, one of the lord
+proprietors, while Carolina was a province of Great Britain.
+
+The Beaufort District is not invested with any considerable
+Revolutionary romance. In 1779, the British forces holding Savannah sent
+two hundred troops with a howitzer and two field-pieces to Beaufort.
+Four companies of militia from Charleston with two field-pieces,
+reinforced by a few volunteers from Beaufort, repulsed and drove them
+off. The British made marauding incursions from Charleston in 1782, and
+are said to have levied a military contribution on St. Helena and Port
+Royal Islands.
+
+There are the remains of Indian mounds and ancient forts on the islands.
+One of these last, it is said, can be traced on Paris Island, and is
+claimed by some antiquaries to be the Charles Fort built by Ribault.
+There are the well-preserved walls of one upon the plantation of John J.
+Smith on Port Royal Island, a few miles south of Beaufort, now called
+Camp Saxton, and recently occupied by Colonel Higginson's regiment. It
+is built of cemented oyster-shells. Common remark refers to it as a
+Spanish fort, but it is likely to be of English construction. The site
+of Charles Fort is claimed for Beaufort, Lemon Island, Paris Island, and
+other points.
+
+The Sea Islands are formed by the intersection of the creeks and arms of
+the sea. They have a uniform level, are without any stones, and present
+a rather monotonous and uninteresting scenery, spite of the raptures of
+French explorers. The creeks run up into the islands at numerous points,
+affording facilities for transportation by flats and boats to the
+buildings which are usually near them. The soil is of a light, sandy
+mould, and yields in the best seasons a very moderate crop, say fifteen
+bushels of corn and one hundred or one hundred and thirty pounds of
+ginned cotton to the acre,--quite different from the plantations in
+Mississippi and Texas, where an acre produces five or six hundred
+pounds. The soil is not rich enough for the cultivated grasses, and one
+finds but little turf. The coarse saline grasses, gathered in stacks,
+furnish the chief material for manure. The long-fibred cotton peculiar
+to the region is the result of the climate, which is affected by the
+action of the salt water upon the atmosphere by means of the creeks
+which permeate the land in all directions. The seed of this cotton,
+planted on the upland, will produce in a few years the cotton of coarser
+texture; and the seed of the latter, planted on the islands, will in a
+like period produce the finer staple. The Treasury Department secured
+eleven hundred thousand pounds from the islands occupied by our forces,
+including Edisto, being the crop, mostly unginned, and gathered in
+storehouses, when our military occupation began.
+
+The characteristic trees are the live-oak, its wood almost as heavy as
+lignum-vitae, the trunk not high, but sometimes five or six feet in
+diameter, and extending its crooked branches far over the land, with the
+long, pendulous, funereal moss adhering to them,--and the palmetto,
+shooting up its long, spongy stem thirty or forty feet, unrelieved by
+vines or branches, with a disproportionately small cap of leaves at the
+summit, the most ungainly of trees, albeit it gives a name and
+coat-of-arms to the State. Besides these, are the pine, the red and
+white oak, the cedar, the bay, the gum, the maple, and the ash. The soil
+is luxuriant with an undergrowth of impenetrable vines. These
+interlacing the trees, supported also by shrubs, of which the cassena is
+the most distinguished variety, and faced with ditches, make the
+prevailing fences of the plantations. The hedges are adorned in March
+and April with the yellow jessamine, (_jelseminum_,)--the cross-vine
+(_bignonia_,) with its mass of rich red blossoms,--the Cherokee rose,
+(_loevigata_,) spreading out in long waving wreaths of white,--and, two
+months later, the palmetto royal, (_yucca gloriosa_,) which protects the
+fence with its prickly leaves, and delights the eyes with its
+pyramid-like clusters of white flowers. Some of these trees and shrubs
+serve a utilitarian end in art and medicine. The live-oak is famous in
+shipbuilding. The palmetto, or cabbage-palmetto, as it is called,
+resists destruction by worms, and is used for facing wharves. It was
+employed to protect Fort Moultrie in 1776, when bombarded by the British
+fleet; and the cannon-balls were buried in its spongy substance. The
+moss (_tillandsia usneoides_) served to calk the rude vessel of the
+first French colonists, longing for home. It may be used for bedding
+after its life has been killed by boiling water, and for the subsistence
+of cattle when destitute of other food. The cassena is a powerful
+diuretic.
+
+The game and fish, which are both abundant and of desirable kinds, and
+to the pursuit of which the planters were much addicted, are described
+in Eliot's book. Russell's "Diary" may also be consulted in relation to
+fishing for devil and drum.
+
+The best dwellings in Beaufort are capacious, with a piazza on the first
+and second stories, through each of which runs a large hall to admit a
+free circulation of air. Only one, however, appeared to have been built
+under the supervision of a professional architect. Those on the
+plantations, designed for the planters or overseers, were, with a few
+exceptions, of a very mean character, and a thriving mechanic in New
+England would turn his back on them as unfit to live in. Their yards are
+without turf, having as their best feature a neighboring grove of
+orange-trees. One or two dwellings only appear to be ancient. Indeed,
+they are not well enough built to last long. The estates upon Edisto
+Island are of a more patrician character, and are occasionally
+surrounded by spacious flower-gardens and ornamental trees fancifully
+trimmed.
+
+The names of the planters indicated mainly an English origin, although
+some may be traced to Huguenot families who sought a refuge here from
+the religious persecutions of France.
+
+The deserted houses were generally found strewn with religious
+periodicals, mainly Baptist magazines. This characteristic of Southern
+life has been elsewhere observed in the progress of our army.
+Occasionally some book denouncing slavery as criminal and ruinous was
+found among those left behind. One of these was Hewatt's history of
+South Carolina, published in 1779, and reprinted in Carroll's
+collection. Another was Gregoire's vindication of the negro race and
+tribute to its distinguished examples, translated by Warden in 1810.
+These people seem, indeed, to have had light enough to see the infinite
+wrong of the system, and it is difficult to believe them entirely
+sincere in their passionate defence of it. Their very violence, when the
+moral basis of slavery is assailed, seems to be that of a man who
+distrusts the rightfulness of his daily conduct, has resolved to persist
+in it, and therefore hates most of all the prophet who comes to confront
+him for his misdeeds, and, if need be, to publish them to mankind.
+
+Well-authenticated instances of cruelty to slaves were brought to notice
+without being sought for. The whipping-tree is now often pointed out,
+still showing the place where it was worn by the rope which bound the
+sufferer to it. On the plantation where my own quarters were was a woman
+who had been so beaten when approaching the trials of maternity as to
+crush out the life of the unborn child. But this planter had one
+daughter who looked with horror on the scenes of which she was the
+unwilling witness. She declared to her parents and sisters that it was
+hell to live in such a place. She was accustomed to advise the negroes
+how best to avoid being whipped. When the war began, she assured them
+that the story of the masters that the Yankees were going to send them
+to Cuba was all a lie. Surely a kind Providence will care for this noble
+girl! This war will, indeed, emancipate others than blacks from bonds
+which marriage and kindred have involved. But it is unpleasant to dwell
+on these painful scenes of the past, constant and authentic as they are;
+and they hardly concern the practical question which now presses for a
+solution. Nor in referring to them is there any need of injustice or
+exaggeration. Human nature has not the physical endurance or moral
+persistence to keep up a perpetual and universal cruelty; and there are
+fortunate slaves who never received a blow from their masters. Besides,
+there was less labor exacted and less discipline imposed on the loosely
+managed plantations of the Sea Islands than in other districts where
+slave-labor was better and more profitably organized and directed.
+
+The capture of Hilton Head and Bay Point by the navy, November 7th,
+1861, was followed by the immediate military occupation of the Sea
+Islands. In the latter part of December, the Secretary of the Treasury,
+Mr. Chase, whose foresight as a statesman and humane disposition
+naturally turned his thoughts to the subject, deputed a special agent to
+visit this district for the purpose of reporting upon the condition of
+the negroes who had been abandoned by the white population, and of
+suggesting some plan for the organization of their labor and the
+promotion of their general well-being. The agent, leaving New York
+January 13th, 1862, reached that city again on his way to Washington on
+the 13th of February, having in the mean time visited a large number of
+the plantations, and talked familiarly with the negroes in their cabins.
+The results of his observations, in relation to the condition of the
+people, their capacities and wishes, the culture of their crops, and the
+best mode of administration, on the whole favorable, were embodied in a
+report. The plan proposed by him recommended the appointment of
+superintendents to act as guides of the negroes and as local
+magistrates, with an adequate corps of teachers. It was accepted by the
+Secretary with a full indorsement, and its execution intrusted to the
+same agent. The agent presented the subject to several members of
+Congress, with whom he had a personal acquaintance, but, though they
+listened respectfully, they seemed either to dread the magnitude of the
+social question, or to feel that it was not one with which they as
+legislators were called upon immediately to deal. The Secretary himself,
+and Mr. Olmsted, then connected with the Sanitary Commission, alone
+seemed to grasp it, and to see the necessity of immediate action. It is
+doubtful if any member of the Cabinet, except Mr. Chase, took then any
+interest in the enterprise, though it has since been fostered by the
+Secretary of War. At the suggestion of the Secretary, the President
+appointed an interview with the agent. Mr. Lincoln, who was then chafing
+under a prospective bereavement, listened for a few moments, and then
+said, somewhat impatiently, that he did not think he ought to be
+troubled with such details,--that there seemed to be an itching to get
+negroes into our lines; to which the agent replied, that these negroes
+were within them by the invitation of no one, being domiciled there
+before we commenced occupation. The President then wrote and handed to
+the agent the following card:--
+
+"I shall be obliged if the Sec. of the Treasury will in his discretion
+give Mr. Pierce such instructions in regard to Port Royal contrabands as
+may seem judicious.
+
+"A. LINCOLN.
+
+"Feb. 15, 1862."
+
+The President, so history must write it, approached the great question
+slowly and reluctantly; and in February, 1862, he little dreamed of the
+proclamations he was to issue in the September and January following.
+Perhaps that slowness and reluctance were well, for thereby it was given
+to this people to work out their own salvation, rather than to be saved
+by any chief or prophet.
+
+Notwithstanding the plan of superintendents was accepted, there were no
+funds wherewith to pay them. At this stage the "Educational Commission,"
+organized in Boston on the 7th of February, and the "Freedmen's Relief
+Association," organized in New York on the 20th of the same month,
+gallantly volunteered to pay both superintendents and teachers, and did
+so until July 1st, when the Government, having derived a fund from the
+sale of confiscated cotton left in the territory by the Rebels,
+undertook the payment of the superintendents, the two societies,
+together with another organized in Philadelphia on the 3d of March, and
+called the "Port Royal Relief Committee," providing for the support of
+the teachers.
+
+When these voluntary associations sprang into being to save an
+enterprise which otherwise must have failed, no authoritative assurance
+had been given as to the legal condition of the negroes. The Secretary,
+in a letter to the agent, had said, that, after being received into our
+service, they could not, without great injustice, be restored to their
+masters, and should therefore be fitted to become self-supporting
+citizens. The President was reported to have said freely, in private,
+that negroes who were within our lines, and had been employed by the
+Government, should be protected in their freedom. No official assurance
+of this had, however, been given; and its absence disturbed the
+societies in their formation. At one meeting of the Boston society
+action was temporarily arrested by the expression of an opinion by a
+gentleman present, that there was no evidence showing that these people,
+when educated, would not be the victims of some unhappy compromise. A
+public meeting in Providence, for their relief, is said to have broken
+up without action, because of a speech from a furloughed officer of a
+regiment stationed at Port Royal, who considered such a result the
+probable one. But the societies, on reflection, wisely determined to do
+what they could to prepare them to become self-supporting citizens, in
+the belief, that, when they had become such, no Government could ever be
+found base enough to turn its back upon them. These associations, it
+should be stated, have been managed by persons of much consideration in
+their respective communities, of unostentatious philanthropy, but of
+energetic and practical benevolence, hardly one of whom has ever filled
+or been a candidate for a political office.
+
+There was a pleasant interview at this time which may fitly be
+mentioned. The venerable Josiah Quincy, just entered on his ninety-first
+year, hearing of the enterprise, desired to see one who had charge of
+it. I went to his chamber, where he had been confined to his bed for
+many weeks with a fractured limb. He talked like a patriot who read the
+hour and its duty. He felt troubled lest adequate power had not been
+given to protect the enterprise,--said that but for his disability he
+should be glad to write something about it, but that he was living "the
+postscript of his life"; and as we parted, he gave his hearty
+benediction to the work and to myself. Restored in a measure to
+activity, he is still spared to the generation which fondly cherishes
+his old age; and recently, at the organization of the Union Club, he
+read to his fellow-citizens, gathering close about him and hanging on
+his speech, words of counsel and encouragement.
+
+On the morning of the 3d of March, 1862, the first delegation of
+superintendents and teachers, fifty-three in all, of whom twelve were
+women, left the harbor of New York, on board the United States
+steam-transport Atlantic, arriving at Beaufort on the 9th. It was a
+voyage never to be forgotten. The enterprise was new and strange, and it
+was not easy to predict its future. Success or defeat might be in store
+for us; and we could only trust in God that our strength would be equal
+to our responsibilities. As the colonists approached the shores of South
+Carolina, they were addressed by the agent in charge, who told them the
+little he had learned of their duties, enjoined patience and humanity,
+impressed on them the greatness of their work, the results of which were
+to cheer or dishearten good men, to settle, perhaps, one way or the
+other, the social problem of the age,--assuring them that never did a
+vessel bear a colony on a nobler mission, not even the Mayflower, when
+she conveyed the Pilgrims to Plymouth, that it would be a poorly written
+history which should omit their individual names, and that, if faithful
+to their trust, there would come to them the highest of all recognitions
+ever accorded to angels or to men, in this life or the next,--"Inasmuch
+as ye have done it unto the least of these, ye have done it unto Me."
+
+This first delegation of superintendents and teachers were distributed
+during the first fortnight after their arrival at Beaufort, and at its
+close they had all reached their appointed posts. They took their
+quarters in the deserted houses of the planters. These had all left on
+the arrival of our army, only four white men, citizens of South
+Carolina, remaining, and none of those being slaveholders, except one,
+who had only two or three slaves. Our operations were, therefore, not
+interfered with by landed proprietors who were loyal or pretended to be
+so. The negroes had, in the mean time, been without persons to guide and
+care for them, and had been exposed to the careless and conflicting talk
+of soldiers who chanced to meet them. They were also brought in
+connection with some _employes_ of the Government, engaged in the
+collection of cotton found upon the plantations, none of whom were doing
+anything for their education, and most of whom were in favor of leasing
+the plantations and the negroes upon them as _adscripti gleboe_ looking
+forward to their restoration to their masters at the close of the war.
+They were uncertain as to the intentions of the Yankees, and were
+wondering at the confusion, as they called it. They were beginning to
+plant corn in their patches, but were disinclined to plant cotton,
+regarding it as a badge of servitude. No schools had been opened, except
+one at Beaufort, which had been kept a few weeks by two freedmen, one
+bearing the name of John Milton, under the auspices of the Rev. Dr.
+Peck. This is not the place to detail the obstacles we met with, one
+after another overcome,--the calumnies and even personal violence to
+which we were subjected. These things occurred at an early period of our
+struggle, when the nation was groping its way to light, and are not
+likely to occur again. Let unworthy men sleep in the oblivion they
+deserve, and let others of better natures, who were then blind, but now
+see, not be taunted with their inconsiderate acts. The nickname of
+Gibeonites, applied to the colonists, may, however, be fitly remembered.
+It may now justly claim rank with the honored titles of Puritan and
+Methodist. The higher officers of the army were uniformly respectful and
+disposed to cooeperation. One of these may properly be mentioned. Our
+most important operations were in the district under the command of
+Brigadier-General Isaac I. Stevens, an officer whose convictions were
+not supposed to be favorable to the enterprise, and who, during the
+political contest of 1860, had been the chairman of the National
+Breckinridge Committee. But such was his honor as a gentleman, and his
+sense of the duty of subordination to the wishes of the Government,
+that his personal courtesies and official aid were never wanting. He
+received his mortal wound at Chantilly, Virginia, on the first of
+September following, and a braver and abler officer has not fallen in
+the service.
+
+Notwithstanding our work was commenced six weeks too late, and other
+hindrances occurred, detailed in the second report of the agent, some
+eight thousand acres of esculents,--a fair supply of food,--and some
+four thousand five hundred acres of cotton (after a deduction for
+over-estimates) were planted. This was done upon one hundred and
+eighty-nine plantations, on which were nine thousand and fifty people,
+of whom four thousand four hundred and twenty-nine were field-hands,
+made up of men, women, and children, and equivalent, in the usual
+classification and estimate of the productive capacity of laborers, to
+three thousand eight hundred and five and one-half full hands. The
+cotton-crop produced will not exceed sixty-five thousand pounds of
+ginned cotton. Work enough was done to have produced five hundred
+thousand pounds in ordinary times; but the immaturity of the pod,
+resulting from the lateness of the planting, exposed it to the ravages
+of the frost and the worm. Troops being ordered North, after the
+disasters of the Peninsular campaign, Edisto was evacuated in the middle
+of July, and thus one thousand acres of esculents, and nearly seven
+hundred acres of cotton, the cultivation of which had been finished,
+were abandoned. In the autumn, Major-General Mitchell required forty
+tons of corn-fodder and seventy-eight thousand pounds of corn in the
+ear, for army-forage. These are but some of the adverse influences to
+which the agricultural operations were subjected.
+
+It is fitting here that I should bear my testimony to the
+superintendents and teachers commissioned by the associations. There was
+as high a purpose and devotion among them as in any colony that ever
+went forth to bear the evangel of civilization. Among them were some of
+the choicest young men of New England, fresh from Harvard, Yale, and
+Brown, from the divinity-schools of Andover and Cambridge,--men of
+practical talent and experience. There were some of whom the world was
+scarce worthy, and to whom, whether they are among the living or the
+dead, I delight to pay the tribute of my respect and admiration.
+
+Four of the original delegation have died. William S. Clark died at
+Boston, April 25th, 1863, a consumptive when he entered on the work,
+which he was obliged to leave six months before his death. He was a
+faithful and conscientious teacher. Though so many months had passed
+since he left these labors, their fascination was such that he dwelt
+fondly upon them in his last days.
+
+The colony was first broken by the death of Francis E. Barnard, at St.
+Helena Island, October 18th, 1862. He was devoted, enthusiastic,--and
+though not fitted, as it at first appeared, for the practical duties of
+a superintendent, yet even in this respect disappointing me entirely. He
+was an evangelist, also, and he preached with more unction than any
+other the gospel of freedom,--always, however, enforcing the duties of
+industry and self-restraint. He was never sad, but always buoyant and
+trustful. He and a comrade were the first to be separated from the
+company, while at Hilton Head, and before the rest went to
+Beaufort,--being assigned to Edisto, which had been occupied less than a
+month, and was a remote and exposed point; but he went fearlessly and
+without question. The evacuation of Edisto in July, the heat, and the
+labor involved in bringing away and settling his people at the village
+on St. Helena Island, a summer resort of the former residents, where
+were some fifty vacant houses, were too much for him. His excessive
+exertions brought on malarious fever. This produced an unnatural
+excitement, and at mid-day, under a hot sun, he rode about to attend to
+his people. He died,--men, women, and children, for whom he had toiled,
+filling the house with their sobs during his departing hours. His
+funeral was thronged by them, his coffin strewn with flowers which they
+and his comrades had plucked, and then his remains were borne to his
+native town, where burial-rites were again performed in the old church
+of Dorchester. Read his published journal, and find how a noble youth
+can live fourscore years in a little more than one score. One high
+privilege was accorded to him. He lived to hear of the immortal edict of
+the twenty-second of September, by which the freedom of his people was
+to be secured for all time to come.
+
+Samuel D. Phillips was a young man of much religions feeling, though he
+never advertised himself as having it, and a devout communicant of the
+Episcopal Church. He was a gentleman born and bred, inheriting the
+quality as well as adding to it by self-discipline. He had good
+business-capacity, never complained of inconveniences, was humane, yet
+not misled by sentiment, and he gave more of his time, otherwise
+unoccupied, to teaching than almost any other superintendent. I was
+recently asking the most advanced pupils of a school on St. Helena who
+first taught them their letters, and the frequent answer was, "Mr.
+Phillips." He was at home in the autumn for a vacation, was at the
+funeral of Barnard in Dorchester, and though at the time in imperfect
+health, he hastened back to his charge, feeling that the death of
+Barnard, whose district was the same as his own, rendered his immediate
+return necessary to the comfort of his people. He went,--but his health
+never came back to him. His quarters were in the same house where
+Barnard had died, and in a few days, on the 5th of December, he followed
+him. He was tended in his sickness by the negroes, and one day, having
+asked that his pillow might be turned, he uttered the words, "Thank
+God," and died. There was the same grief as at Barnard's death, the same
+funeral-rites at the St. Helena Church, and his remains were borne North
+to bereaved relatives.
+
+Daniel Bowe was an alumnus of Yale College, and a student of the Andover
+Theological Seminary, not yet graduated when he turned from his
+professional studies at the summons of Christian duty. He labored
+faithfully as a superintendent, looking after the physical, moral, and
+educational interests of his people. He had a difficult post, was
+overburdened with labor, and perhaps had not the faculty of taking as
+good care of himself as was even consistent with his duties. He came
+home in the summer, commended the enterprise and his people to the
+citizens and students of Andover, and returned. He afterwards fell ill,
+and, again coming North, died October 30th, a few days after reaching
+New York. The young woman who was betrothed to him, but whom he did not
+live to wed, has since his death sought this field of labor; and on my
+recent visit I found her upon the plantation where he had resided,
+teaching the children whom he had first taught, and whose parents he had
+guided to freedom. Truly, the age of Christian romance has not passed
+away!
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+On the first of July, 1862, the administration of affairs at Port Royal
+having been transferred from the Treasury to the War Department, the
+charge of the freedmen passed into the hands of Brigadier-General Rufus
+Saxton, a native of Massachusetts, who in childhood had breathed the
+free air of the valley of the Connecticut, a man of sincere and humane
+nature; and under his wise and benevolent care they still remain. The
+Sea Islands, and also Fernandina and St. Augustine in Florida, are
+within our lines in the Department of the South, and some sixteen or
+eighteen thousand negroes are supposed to be under his jurisdiction.
+
+The negroes of the Sea Islands, when found by us, had become an abject
+race, more docile and submissive than those of any other locality. The
+native African was of a fierce and mettlesome temper, sullen and
+untamable. The master was obliged to abate something of the usual rigor
+in dealing with the imported slaves. A tax-commissioner, now at Port
+Royal, and formerly a resident of South Carolina, told me that a native
+African belonging to his father, though a faithful man, would
+perpetually insist on doing his work in his own way, and being asked the
+threatening question, "A'n't you going to mind?" would answer, with
+spirit, "No, a'n't gwine to!" and the master desisted! Severe discipline
+drove the natives to the wilderness, or involved a mutilation of person
+which destroyed their value for proprietary purposes. In 1816, eight
+hundred of these refugees were living free in the swamps and everglades
+of Florida. There the ancestors of some of them had lived ever since the
+early part of the eighteenth century, rearing families, carrying on
+farms, and raising cattle. They had two hundred and fifty men fit to
+bear arms, led by chiefs brave and skilful. The story of the Exiles of
+Florida is one of painful interest. The testimony of officers of the
+army who served against them is, that they were more dangerous enemies
+than the Indians, fighting the most skilfully and standing the longest.
+The tax-commissioner before referred to, who was a resident of
+Charleston during the trial and execution of the confederates of Denmark
+Vesey, relates that one of the native Africans, when called to answer to
+the charge against him, haughtily responded,--"_I was a prince in my
+country, and have as much right to be free as you!_" The Carolinians
+were so awe-struck by his defiance that they transported him. Another,
+at the execution, turned indignantly to a comrade about to speak, and
+said, "_Die silent, as I do!_" and the man hushed. The early newspapers
+of Georgia recount the disturbances on the plantations occasioned by
+these native Africans, and even by their children, being not until the
+third generation reduced to obedient slaves.
+
+Nowhere has the deterioration of the negroes from their native manhood
+been carried so far as on these Sea Islands,--a deterioration due to
+their isolation from the excitements of more populous districts, the
+constant surveillance of the overseers, and their intermarriage with
+each other, involving a physical degeneracy with which inexorable Nature
+punishes disobedience to her laws. The population with its natural
+increase was sufficient for the cultivation of the soil under existing
+modes, and therefore no fresh blood was admitted, such as is found
+pouring from the Border States into the sugar and cotton regions of the
+Southwest. This unmanning and depravation of the native character had
+been carried so far, that the special agent, on his first exploration,
+in January, 1862, was obliged to confess the existence of a general
+disinclination to military service on the part of the negroes; though it
+is true that even then instances of courage and adventure appeared,
+which indicated that the more manly feeling was only latent, to be
+developed under the inspiration of events. And so, let us rejoice, it
+has been. You may think yourself wise, as you note the docility of a
+subject race; but in vain will you attempt to study it until the burden
+is lifted. The slave is unknown to all, even to himself, while the
+bondage lasts. Nature is ever a kind mother. She soothes us with her
+deceits, not in surgery alone, when the sufferer, else writhing in pain,
+is transported with the sweet delirium, but she withholds from the
+spirit the sight of her divinity until her opportunity has come. Not
+even Tocqueville or Olmsted, much less the master, can measure the
+capacities and possibilities of the slave, until the slave himself is
+transmuted to a man.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+My recent visit to Port Royal extended from March 25th to May 10th. It
+was pleasant to meet the first colonists, who still toiled at their
+posts, and specially grateful to receive the welcome of the freedmen,
+and to note the progress they had made. There were interesting scenes to
+fill the days. I saw an aged negro, Caesar by name, not less than one
+hundred years old, who had left children in Africa, when stolen away.
+The vicissitudes of such a life were striking,--a free savage in the
+wilds of his native land, a prisoner on a slave-ship, then for long
+years a toiling slave, now again a freeman under the benign edict of the
+President,--his life covering an historic century. A faithful and
+industrious negro, Old Simon, as we called him, hearing of my arrival,
+rode over to see me, and brought me a present of two or three quarts of
+pea-nuts and some seventeen eggs. I had an interview with Don Carlos,
+whom I had seen in May, 1862, at Edisto, the faithful attendant upon
+Barnard, and who had been both with him and Phillips during their last
+hours,--now not less than seventy years of age, and early in life a
+slave in the Alston family, where he had known Theodosia Burr, the
+daughter of Aaron Burr, and wife of Governor Alston. He talked
+intelligently upon her personal history and her mysterious fate. He had
+known John Pierpont, when a teacher in the family of Colonel Alston, and
+accompanying the sons on their way North to college after the completion
+of their preparatory studies. Pierpont was a classmate of John C.
+Calhoum at Yale College, and, upon graduating, went South as a private
+tutor.
+
+Aunt Phillis was not likely to be overlooked,--an old woman, with much
+power of expression, living on the plantation where my quarters had
+formerly been. The attack on Charleston was going on, and she said, "If
+you're as long beating Secesh everywhere as you have been in taking the
+town, guess it'll take you some time!" Indeed, the negroes had somewhat
+less confidence in our power than at first, on account of our not having
+followed up the capture of Bay Point and Hilton Head. The same quaint
+old creature, speaking of the disregard of the masters for the feelings
+of the slaves, said, with much emphasis, "They thought God was dead!"
+
+I visited Barnwell Island, the only plantation upon which is that of
+Trescot, formerly Secretary of Legation at London, a visit to whom
+Russell describes in his "Diary." But the mansion is not now as when
+Russell saw it. Its large library is deposited in the Smithsonian
+Institution at Washington. Its spacious rooms in the first and second
+stories, together with the attics, are all filled with the families of
+negro refugees. From this point, looking across the water, we could see
+a cavalry-picket of the Rebels. The superintendent who had charge of the
+plantation, and accompanied me, was Charles Follen, an inherited name,
+linked with the struggles for freedom in both hemispheres.
+
+The negro graveyards occasionally attracted me from the road. They are
+usually in an open field, under a clump of some dozen or twenty trees,
+perhaps live-oaks, and not fenced. There may be fifty or a hundred
+graves, marked only by sticks eighteen inches or two feet high and about
+as large as the wrist. Mr. Olmsted saw some stones in a negro graveyard
+at Savannah, erected by the slaves, and bearing rather illiterate
+inscriptions; but I never succeeded in finding any but wooden memorials,
+not even at Beaufort. Only in one case could I find an inscription, and
+that was in a burial-place on Ladies Island. There was a board at the
+head of the grave, shaped something like an ordinary gravestone, about
+three feet high and six inches wide. The inscription was as follows:--
+
+  OLd Jiw
+  de PArt his
+  Life on the
+  2 of WAY
+  Re st frow
+  LAuer
+
+On the foot-board were these words:--
+
+  We ll
+  d OW N.
+
+The rude artist was Kit, the son of the old man. He can read, and also
+write a little, and, like his deceased father, is a negro preacher. He
+said that he used to carry his father in his arms in his old age,--that
+the old man had no pain, and, as the son expressed it, "sunk in years."
+I inquired of Kit concerning several of the graves; and I found, by his
+intelligent answers, that their tenants were disposed in families and
+were known. These lowly burial-places, for which art has done nothing,
+are not without a fascination, and in some hours of life they take a
+faster hold on the sentiments than more imposing cemeteries, adorned
+with shafts of marble and granite, and rich in illustrious dead.
+
+There were some superstitions among the people, perhaps of African
+origin, which the teachers had detected, such as a belief in hags as
+evil spirits, and in a kind of witchcraft which only certain persons can
+cure. They have a superstition, that, when you take up and remove a
+sleeping child, you must call its spirit, else it will cry, on awaking,
+until you have taken it back to the same place and invoked its spirit.
+They believe that turning an alligator on his back will bring rain; and
+they will not talk about one when in a boat, lest a storm should thereby
+be brought on.
+
+But the features in the present condition of the freedmen bearing
+directly on the solution of the social problem deserve most
+consideration.
+
+And, first, as to _education_. There are more than thirty schools in the
+territory, conducted by as many as forty or forty-five teachers, who are
+commissioned by the three associations in Boston, New York, and
+Philadelphia, and by the American Missionary Association. They have an
+average attendance of two thousand pupils, and are more or less
+frequented by an additional thousand. The ages of the scholars range in
+the main from eight to twelve years. They did not know even their
+letters prior to a year ago last March, except those who were being
+taught in the single school at Beaufort already referred to, which had
+been going on for a few weeks. Very many did not have the opportunity
+for instruction till weeks and even months after. During the spring and
+summer of 1862 there were not more than a dozen schools, and these were
+much interrupted by the heat, and by the necessity of assigning at times
+some of the teachers to act as superintendents. Teachers came for a
+brief time, and upon its expiration, or for other cause, returned home,
+leaving the schools to be broken up. It was not until October or
+November that the educational arrangements were put into much shape; and
+they are still but imperfectly organized. In some localities there is as
+yet no teacher, and this because the associations have not had the funds
+wherewith to provide one.
+
+I visited ten of the schools, and conversed with the teachers of others.
+There were, it may be noted, some mixed bloods in the schools of the
+town of Beaufort,--ten in a school of ninety, thirteen in another of
+sixty-four, and twenty in another of seventy. In the schools on the
+plantations there were never more than half a dozen in one school, in
+some cases but two or three, and in others none.
+
+The advanced classes were reading simple stories and didactic passages
+in the ordinary school-books, as Hillard's Second Primary Reader,
+Willson's Second Reader, and others of similar grade. Those who had
+enjoyed a briefer period of instruction were reading short sentences or
+learning the alphabet. In several of this schools a class was engaged on
+an elementary lesson in arithmetic, geography, or writing. The eagerness
+for knowledge and the facility of acquisition displayed in the beginning
+had not abated.
+
+On the 25th of March I visited a school at the Central Baptist Church on
+St. Helena Island, built in 1855, shaded by lofty live-oak trees, with
+the long, pendulous moss everywhere hanging from their wide-spreading
+branches, and surrounded by the gravestones of the former proprietors,
+which bear the ever-recurring names of Fripp and Chaplin. This school
+was opened in September last, but many of the pupils had received some
+instruction before. One hundred and thirty-one children were present on
+my first visit, and one hundred and forty-five on my second, which was a
+few days later. Like most of the schools on the plantations, it opened
+at noon and closed at three o'clock, leaving the forenoon for the
+children to work in the field or perform other service in which they
+could be useful. One class, of twelve pupils, read page 70th in
+Willson's Reader, on "Going Away." They had not read the passage before,
+and they went through it with little spelling or hesitation. They had
+recited the first thirty pages of Towle's Speller, and the
+multiplication-table as high as fives, and were commencing the sixes. A
+few of the scholars, the youngest, or those who had come latest to the
+school, were learning the alphabet. At the close of the school, they
+recited in concert the Psalm, "The Lord is my shepherd," requiring
+prompting at the beginning of some of the verses. They sang with much
+spirit hymns which had been taught them by the teachers, as,--
+
+  "My country, 'tis of thee,
+  Sweet land of liberty";
+
+also,--
+
+  "Sound the loud timbrel";
+
+also, Whittier's new song, written expressly for this school, the
+closing stanzas of which are,--
+
+  "The very oaks are greener clad,
+    The waters brighter smile;
+  Oh, never shone a day so glad
+    On sweet St. Helen's Isle!
+
+  "For none in all the world before
+    Were ever glad as we,--
+  We're free on Carolina's shore,
+    We're all at home and free!"
+
+Never has that pure Muse, which has sung only of truth and right, as the
+highest beauty and noblest art, been consecrated to a better service
+than to write the songs of praise for these little children, chattels no
+longer, whom the Saviour, were he now to walk on earth, would bless as
+his own.
+
+The prevalent song, however, heard in every school, in church, and by
+the way-side, is that of "John Brown," which very much amuses our white
+soldiers, particularly when the singers roll out,--
+
+  "We'll hang Jeff Davis on a sour apple tree!"
+
+The children also sang their own songs, as,--
+
+  "In de morning' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus. Huddy oh?[A]
+  In de mornin' when I rise,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  I wash my hands in de mornin' glory,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+  Pray, Tony, pray, boy, you got de order,
+    Tell my Jesus, Huddy oh?
+
+  "Pray, Rosy, pray, gal," etc.
+
+[Footnote A: How d' y' do?]
+
+Also,--
+
+  "I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go,
+  I would not let you go, my Lord,
+    I would not let you go.
+
+  "Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+    Dere's room enough in de heab'nly groun',
+  Dere's room enough, dere's room enough,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+  De angels march all roun' de trone,
+      I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "I can't stay behin', my Lord.
+    I can't stay behin',
+  I can't stay behin', my Lord,
+    I can't stay behin'.
+
+  "Dere's room enough," etc.
+
+Other songs of the negroes are common, as, "The Wrestling Jacob," "Down
+in the lonesome valley," "Roll, Jordan, roll," "Heab'n shall-a be my
+home." Russell's "Diary" gives an account of these songs, as he heard
+them in his evening row over Broad River, on his way to Trescot's
+estate.
+
+One of the teachers of this school is an accomplished woman from
+Philadelphia. Another is from Newport, Rhode Island, where she had
+prepared herself for this work by benevolent labors in teaching poor
+children. The third is a young woman of African descent, of olive
+complexion, finely cultured, and attuned to all beautiful sympathies, of
+gentle address, and, what was specially noticeable, not possessed with
+an overwrought consciousness of her race. She had read the best books,
+and naturally and gracefully enriched her conversation with them. She
+had enjoyed the friendship of Whittier; had been a pupil in the
+Grammar-School of Salem, then in the State Normal School in that city,
+then a teacher in one of the schools for white children, where she had
+received only the kindest treatment both from the pupils and their
+parents,--and let this be spoken to the honor of that ancient town. She
+had refused a residence in Europe, where a better social life and less
+unpleasant discrimination awaited her, for she would not dissever
+herself from the fortunes of her people; and now, not with a superficial
+sentiment, but with a profound purpose, she devotes herself to their
+elevation.
+
+At Coffin Point, on St. Helena Island, I visited a school kept by a
+young woman from the town of Milton, Massachusetts, "the child of
+parents passed into the skies," whose lives have both been written for
+the edification of the Christian world. She teaches two schools, at
+different hours in the afternoon, and with different scholars in each.
+One class had read through Hillard's Second Primary Reader, and were on
+a review, reading Lessons 19, 20, and 21, while I was present. Being
+questioned as to the subjects of the lessons, they answered
+intelligently. They recited the twos of the multiplication-table,
+explained numeral letters and figures on the blackboard, and wrote
+letters and figures on slates. Another teacher in the adjoining
+district, a graduate of Harvard, and the son of a well-known Unitarian
+clergyman of Providence, Rhode Island, has two schools, in one of which
+a class of three pupils was about finishing Ellsworth's First
+Progressive Reader, and another, of seven pupils, had just finished
+Hillard's Second Primary Header. Another teacher, from Cambridge,
+Massachusetts, on the same island, numbers one hundred pupils in his two
+schools. He exercises a class in elocution, requiring the same sentence
+to be repeated with different tones and inflections, and one could not
+but remark the excellent imitations.
+
+In a school at St. Helena village, where were collected the Edisto
+refugees, ninety-two pupils were present as I went in. Two ladies were
+engaged in teaching, assisted by Ned Loyd White, a colored man, who had
+picked up clandestinely a knowledge of reading while still a slave. One
+class of boys and another of girls read in the seventh chapter of St.
+John, having begun this Gospel and gone thus far. They stumbled a little
+on words like "unrighteousness" and "circumcision"; otherwise they got
+along very well. When the Edisto refugees were brought here, in July,
+1862, Ned, who is about forty or forty-five years old, and Uncle Cyrus,
+a man of seventy, who also could read, gathered one hundred and fifty
+children into two schools, and taught them as best they could for five
+months until teachers were provided by the societies. Ned has since
+received a donation from one of the societies, and is now regularly
+employed on a salary. A woman comes to one of the teachers of this
+school for instruction in the evening, after she has put her children to
+bed. She had become interested in learning by hearing her younger sister
+read when she came home from school; and when she asked to be taught,
+she had learned from this sister the alphabet and some words of one
+syllable. Only a small proportion of the adults are, however, learning.
+
+On the 8th of April, I visited a school on Ladies Island, kept in a
+small church on the Eustis estate, and taught by a young woman from
+Kingston, Massachusetts. She had manifested much persistence in going to
+this field, went with the first delegation, and still keeps the school
+which she opened in March, 1862. She taught the pupils their letters.
+Sixty-six were present on the day of my visit. A class of ten pupils
+read the story which commences on page 86th of Hillard's Second Primary
+Reader. One girl, Elsie, a full black, and rather ungainly withal, read
+so rapidly that she had to be checked,--the only case of such fast
+reading that I found. She assisted the teacher by taking the beginners
+to a corner of the room and exercising them upon an alphabet card,
+requiring them to give the names of letters taken out of their regular
+order, and with the letters making words, which they were expected to
+repeat after her. One class recited in Eaton's First Lessons in
+Arithmetic; and two or three scholars with a rod pointed out the states,
+lakes, and large rivers on the map of the United States, and also the
+different continents on the map of the world, as they were called. I saw
+the teacher of this school at her residence, late in the afternoon,
+giving familiar instruction to some ten boys and girls, all but two
+being under twelve years, who read the twenty-first chapter of the Book
+of Revelation, and the story of Lazarus in the eleventh chapter of St.
+John. Elsie was one of these. Seeing me taking notes, she looked archly
+at the teacher, and whispered,--"he's putting me in the book"; and as
+Elsie guessed, so I do. The teacher was instructing her pupils in some
+dates and facts which have had much to do with our history. The
+questions and answers, in which all the pupils joined, were these:--
+
+"Where were slaves first brought to this country?"
+
+"Virginia."
+
+"When?"
+
+"1620."
+
+"Who brought them?"
+
+"Dutchmen."
+
+"Who came the same year to Plymouth, Massachusetts?"
+
+"Pilgrims."
+
+"Did they bring slaves?"
+
+"No."
+
+A teacher in Beaufort put these questions, to which answers were given
+in a loud tone by the whole school:--
+
+"What country do you live in?"
+
+"United States."
+
+"What State?"
+
+"South Carolina."
+
+"What island?"
+
+"Port Royal."
+
+"What town?"
+
+"Beaufort."
+
+"Who is your Governor?"
+
+"General Saxton."
+
+"Who is your President?"
+
+"Abraham Lincoln."
+
+"What has he done for you?"
+
+"He's freed us."
+
+There were four schools in the town of Beaufort, all of which I visited,
+each having an average attendance of from sixty to ninety pupils, and
+each provided with two teachers. In some of them writing was taught. But
+it is unnecessary to describe them, as they were very much like the
+others. There is, besides, at Beaufort an industrial school, which meets
+two afternoons in a week, and is conducted by a lady from New York, with
+some dozen ladies to assist her. There were present, the afternoon I
+visited it, one hundred and thirteen girls from six to twenty years of
+age, all plying the needle, some with pieces of patchwork, and others
+with aprons, pillow-cases, or handkerchiefs.
+
+Though I have never been on the school-committee, I accepted invitations
+to address the schools on these visits, and particularly plied the
+pupils with questions, so as to catch the tone of their minds; and I
+have rarely heard children answer with more readiness and spirit. We had
+a dialogue substantially as follows:--
+
+"Children, what are you going to do when you grow up?"
+
+"Going to work, Sir."
+
+"On what?"
+
+"Cotton and corn, Sir."
+
+"What are you going to do with the corn?"
+
+"Eat it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the cotton?"
+
+"Sell it."
+
+"What are you going to do with the money you get for it?"
+
+One boy answered in advance of the rest,--
+
+"Put it in my pocket, Sir."
+
+"That won't do. What's better than that?"
+
+"Buy clothes, Sir."
+
+"What else will you buy?"
+
+"Shoes, Sir."
+
+"What else are you going to do with your money?"
+
+There was some hesitation at this point. Then the question was put,--
+
+"What are you going to do Sundays?"
+
+"Going to meeting."
+
+"What are you going to do there?"
+
+"Going to sing."
+
+"What else?"
+
+"Hear the parson."
+
+"Who's going to pay him?"
+
+One boy said,--"Government pays him"; but the rest answered,--
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+"Well, when you grow up, you'll probably get married, as other people
+do, and you'll have your little children; now, what will you do with
+them?"
+
+There was a titter at this question; but the general response came,--
+
+"Send 'em to school, Sir."
+
+"Well, who'll pay the teacher?"
+
+"We's pays him."
+
+One who listens to such answers can hardly think that there is any
+natural incapacity in these children to acquire with maturity of years
+the ideas and habits of good citizens.
+
+The children are cheerful, and, in most of the schools, well-behaved,
+except that it is not easy to keep them from whispering and talking.
+They are joyous, and you can see the boys after school playing the
+soldier, with corn-stalks for guns. The memory is very susceptible in
+them,--too much so, perhaps, as it is ahead of the reasoning faculty.
+
+The labor of the season has interrupted attendance on the schools, the
+parents being desirous of having the children aid them in planting and
+cultivating their crops, and it not being thought best to allow the
+teaching to interfere in any way with industrious habits.
+
+A few freedmen, who had picked up an imperfect knowledge of reading,
+have assisted our teachers, though a want of proper training materially
+detracts from their usefulness in this respect. Ned and Uncle Cyrus have
+already been mentioned. The latter, a man of earnest piety, has died
+since my visit. Anthony kept four schools on Hilton Head Island last
+summer and autumn, being paid at first by the superintendents, and
+afterwards by the negroes themselves; but in November he enlisted in the
+negro regiment. Hettie was another of these. She assisted Barnard at
+Edisto last spring, continued to teach after the Edisto people were
+brought to St. Helena village, and one day brought some of her pupils to
+the school at the Baptist Church, saying to the teachers there that she
+could carry them no farther. They could read their letters and words of
+one syllable. Hettie had belonged to a planter on Wadmelaw Island, a
+kind old gentleman, a native of Rhode Island, and about the only citizen
+of Charleston who, when Samuel Hoar went on his mission to South
+Carolina, stood up boldly for his official and personal protection.
+Hettie had been taught to read by his daughter; and let this be
+remembered to the honor of the young woman.
+
+Such are the general features of the schools as they met my eye. The
+most advanced classes, and these are but little ahead of the rest, can
+read simple stories and the plainer passages of Scripture; and they
+could even pursue self-instruction, if the schools were to be suspended.
+The knowledge they have thus gained can never be extirpated. They could
+read with much profit a newspaper specially prepared for them and
+adapted to their condition. They are learning that the world is not
+bounded north by Charleston, south by Savannah, west by Columbia, and
+east by the sea, with dim visions of New York on this planet or some
+other,--about their conception of geography when we found them. They are
+acquiring the knowledge of figures with which to do the business of
+life. They are singing the songs of freemen. Visit their schools;
+remember that a little more than a twelve-month ago they knew not a
+letter, and that for generations it has been a crime to teach their
+race; then contemplate what is now transpiring, and you have a scene
+which prophets and sages would have delighted to witness. It will be
+difficult to find equal progress in an equal period since the morning
+rays of Christian truth first lighted the hill-sides of Judea. I have
+never looked on St. Peter's, or beheld the glories of art which Michel
+Angelo has wrought or traced; but to my mind the spectacle of those poor
+souls struggling in darkness and bewilderment to catch the gleams of the
+upper and better light transcends in moral grandeur anything that has
+ever come from mortal hands.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to _industry_. The laborers, during their first year under the
+new system, have acquired the idea of ownership, and of the security of
+wages, and have come to see that labor and slavery are not the same
+thing. The notion that they were to raise no more cotton has passed
+away, since work upon it is found to be remunerative, and connected with
+the proprietorship of land. House-servants, who were at first
+particularly set against it, now generally prefer it. The laborers have
+collected the pieces of the gins which they destroyed on the flight of
+their masters, the ginning being obnoxious work, repaired them, and
+ginned the cotton on the promise of wages. Except upon plantations in
+the vicinity of camps, where other labor is more immediately
+remunerative, and an unhealthy excitement prevails, there is a general
+disposition to cultivate it. The culture of the cotton is voluntary, the
+only penalty for not engaging in it being the imposition of a rent for
+the tenement and land adjacent thereto occupied by the negro, not
+exceeding two dollars per month. Both the Government and private
+individuals, who have become owners of one-fourth of the land by the
+recent tax-sales, pay twenty-five cents for a standard day's-work, which
+may, by beginning early, be performed by a healthy and active hand by
+noon; and the same was the case with the tasks under the slave-system on
+very many of the plantations. As I was riding through one of Mr.
+Philbrick's fields one morning, I counted fifty persons at work who
+belonged to one plantation. This gentleman, who went out with the first
+delegation, and at the same time gave largely to the benevolent
+contributions for the enterprise, was the leading purchaser at the
+tax-sales, and combining a fine humanity with honest sagacity and close
+calculation, no man is so well fitted to try the experiment. He bought
+thirteen plantations, and on these has had planted and cultivated eight
+hundred and sixteen acres of cotton where four hundred and ninety-nine
+and one twelve-hundredth acres were cultivated last year,--a larger
+increase, however, than will generally be found in other districts, due
+mainly to prompter payments. The general superintendent of Port Royal
+Wand said to me,--"We have to restrain rather than to encourage the
+negroes to take land for cotton." The general superintendent of Hilton
+Head Island said, that on that island the negroes had, besides adequate
+corn, taken two, three, and in a few cases four acres of cotton to a
+hand, and there was a general disposition to cultivate it, except near
+the camps. A superintendent on St. Helena Island said, that, if he were
+going to carry on any work, he should not want bettor laborers. He had
+charge of the refugees from Edisto, who had been brought to St. Helena
+village, and who had cleared and fenced patches for gardens, felling the
+trees for that purpose.
+
+The laborers do less work, perhaps, than a Yankee would think they might
+do; but they do about as much as he himself would do, after a residence
+of a few years in the same climate, and when he had ceased to work under
+the influence of Northern habits. Northern men have sometimes been
+unjust to the South, when comparing the results of labor in the
+different sections. God never intended that a man should toil under a
+tropical sun with the same energy and constancy as in our bracing
+latitude. There has been less complaint this year than last of "a pain
+in the small of the back," or of "a fever in the head,"--in other words,
+less _shamming_. The work has been greatly deranged by the draft, some
+features of which have not been very skilfully arranged, and by the
+fitfulness with which the laborers have been treated by the military
+authorities. The work both upon the cotton and the corn is done only by
+the women, children, and disabled men. It has been suggested that
+field-work does not become women in the new condition; and so it may
+seem to some persons of just sympathies who have not yet learned that no
+honest work is dishonorable in man or woman. But this matter may be left
+to regulate itself. Field-work, as an occupation, may not be consistent
+with the finest feminine culture or the most complete womanliness; but
+it in no way conflicts with virtue, self-respect, and social
+development. Women work in the field in Switzerland, the freest country
+of Europe; and we may look with pride on the triumphs of this
+generation, when the American negroes become the peers of the Swiss
+peasantry. Better a woman with the hoe than without it, when she is not
+yet fitted for the needle or the book.
+
+The negroes were also showing their capacity to organize labor and apply
+capital to it. Harry, to whom I referred in my second report, as "my
+faithful guide and attendant, who had done for me more service than any
+white man could render," with funds of his own, and some borrowed money,
+bought at the recent tax-sales a small farm of three hundred and
+thirteen acres for three hundred and five dollars. He was to plant
+sixteen and a half acres of cotton, twelve and a half of corn, and one
+and a half of potatoes. I rode through his farm on the 10th of April, my
+last day in the territory, and one-third of his crop was then in.
+Besides some servant's duty to an officer, for which he is well paid, he
+does the work of a full hand on his place. He hires one woman and two
+men, one of the latter being old and only a three-quarters hand. He has
+two daughters, sixteen and seventeen years of age, one of whom is
+likewise only a three-quarters hand. His wife works also, of whom he
+said, "She's the best hand I got"; and if Celia is only as smart with
+her hoe as I know her to be with her tongue, Harry's estimate must be
+right. He has a horse twenty-five years old and blind in both eyes, whom
+he guides with a rope,--carrying on farming, I thought, somewhat under
+difficulties. Harry lives in the house of the former overseer, and
+delights, though not boastingly, in his position as a landed proprietor.
+He has promised to write me, or rather dictate a letter, giving an
+account of the progress of his crop. He has had much charge of
+Government property, and when Captain Hooper, of General Saxton's staff,
+was coming North last autumn, Harry proposed to accompany him; but at
+last, of his own accord, gave up the project, saying, "It'll not do for
+all two to leave together."
+
+Another case of capacity for organization should be noted. The
+Government is building twenty-one houses for the Edisto people, eighteen
+feet by fourteen, with two rooms, each provided with a swinging
+board-window, and the roof projecting a little as a protection from
+rain. The journey-carpenters are seventeen colored men, who have fifty
+cents per day without rations, working ten hours. They are under the
+direction of Frank Barnwell, a freedman, who receives twenty dollars a
+month. Rarely have I talked with a more intelligent contractor. It was
+my great regret that I had not time to visit the village of improved
+houses near the Hilton Head camp, which General Mitchell had
+extemporized, and to which he gave so much of the noble enthusiasm of
+his last days.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Next as to the _development of manhood_. This has been shown, in the
+first place, in the prevalent disposition to acquire land. It did not
+appear upon our first introduction to these people, and they did not
+seem to understand us when we used to tell them that we wanted them to
+own land. But it is now an active desire. At the recent tax-sales, six
+out of forty-seven plantations sold were bought by them, comprising two
+thousand five hundred and ninety-five acres, sold for twenty-one hundred
+and forty-five dollars. In other cases the negroes had authorized the
+superintendent to bid for them, but the land was reserved by the United
+States. One of the purchases was that made by Harry, noted above. The
+other five were made by the negroes on the plantations combining the
+funds they had saved from the sale of their pigs, chickens, and eggs,
+and from the payments made to them for work,--they then dividing off the
+tract peaceably among themselves. On one of these, where Kit, before
+mentioned, is the leading spirit, there are twenty-three field-hands,
+who are equivalent to eighteen full hands. They have planted and are
+cultivating sixty-three acres of cotton, fifty of corn, six of potatoes,
+with as many more to be planted, four and a half of cow-peas, three of
+pea-nuts, and one and a half of rice. These facts are most significant.
+The instinct for land--to have one spot on earth where a man may stand,
+and whence no human being can of right drive him--is one of the most
+conservative elements of our nature; and a people who have it in any
+fair degree will never be nomads or vagabonds.
+
+This developing manhood is further seen in their growing consciousness
+of rights, and their readiness to defend themselves, even when assailed
+by white men. The former slaves of a planter, now at Beaufort, who was a
+resident of New York when the war broke out, have generally left the
+plantation, suspicious of his presence, saying that they will not be his
+bondmen, and fearing that in some way he may hold them, if they remain
+on it. A remarkable case of the assertion of rights occurred one day
+during my visit. Two white soldiers, with a corporal, went on Sunday to
+Coosaw Island, where one of the soldiers, having a gun, shot a chicken
+belonging to a negro. The negroes rushed out and wrested the gun from
+the corporal, to whom the soldier had handed it, thinking that the
+negroes would not take it from an officer. They then carried it to the
+superintendent, who took it to head-quarters, where an order was given
+for the arrest of the trespasser. Other instances might be added, but
+these are sufficient.
+
+Another evidence of developing manhood appears in their desire for the
+comforts and conveniences of household life. The Philadelphia society,
+for the purpose of maintaining reasonable prices, has a store on St.
+Helena Island, which is under the charge of Friend Hunn, of the good
+fellowship of William Penn. He was once fined in Delaware three thousand
+dollars for harboring and assisting fugitive slaves; but he now harbors
+and assists them at a much cheaper rate. Though belonging to a society
+which is the advocate of peace, his tone is quite as warlike as that of
+the world's people. In this store alone--and there are others on the
+island, carried on by private enterprise--two thousand dollars' worth of
+goods are sold monthly. To be sure, a rather large proportion of these
+consists of molasses and sugar, "sweetening," as the negroes call it,
+being in great demand, and four barrels of molasses having been sold the
+day of my visit. But there is also a great demand for plates, knives,
+forks, tin ware, and better clothing, including even hoop-skirts.
+Negro-cloth, as it is called, osnaburgs, russet-colored shoes,--in
+short, the distinctive apparel formerly dealt out to them, as a uniform
+allowance,--are very generally rejected. But there is no article of
+household-furniture or wearing apparel, used by persons of moderate
+means among us, which they will not purchase, when they are allowed the
+opportunity of labor and earning wages. What a market the South would
+open under the new system! It would set all the mills and workshops
+astir. Four millions of people would become purchasers of all the
+various articles of manufacture and commerce, in place of the few
+coarse, simple necessaries, laid in for them in gross by the planters.
+Here is the solution of the vexed industrial question. The indisposition
+to labor is overcome in a healthy nature by instincts and motives of
+superior force, such as the love of life, the desire to be well clothed
+and fed, the sense of security derived from provision for the future,
+the feeling of self-respect, the love of family and children, and the
+convictions of duty. These all exist in the negro, in a state of greater
+or less development. To give one or two examples. One man brought
+Captain Hooper seventy dollars in silver, to keep for him, which he had
+obtained from selling pigs and chickens,--thus providing for the future.
+Soldiers of Colonel Higginson's regiment, having confidence in the same
+officer, intrusted him, when they were paid off, with seven hundred
+dollars, to be transmitted by him to their wives, and this besides what
+they had sent home in other ways,--showing the family-feeling to be
+active and strong in them. They have also the social and religious
+inspirations to labor. Thus, early in our occupation of Hilton Head,
+they took up, of their own accord, a collection to pay for the candles
+for their evening meetings, feeling that it was not right for the
+Government longer to provide them. The result was a contribution of two
+dollars and forty-eight cents. They had just fled from their masters,
+and had received only a small pittance of wages, and this little sum was
+not unlike the two mites which the widow cast into the treasury. Another
+collection was taken, last June, in the church on St. Helena Island,
+upon the suggestion of the pastor that they should share in the expenses
+of worship. Fifty-two dollars was the result,--not a bad collection for
+some of our Northern churches. I have seen these people where they are
+said to be lowest, and sad indeed are some features of their lot, yet
+with all earnestness and confidence I enter my protest against the
+wicked satire of Carlyle.
+
+Is there not here some solution of the question of prejudice or caste
+which has troubled so many good minds? When these people can no longer
+be used as slaves, men will try to see how they can make the most out of
+them as freemen. Your Irishman, who now works as a day-laborer, honestly
+thinks that he hates the negro; but when the war is over, he will have
+no objection to going South and selling him groceries and
+household-implements at fifty per cent. advance on New-York prices, or
+to hiring him to raise cotton for twenty-five or fifty cents a day. Our
+prejudices, under any reasonable adjustment of the social system,
+readily accommodate themselves to our interests, even without much aid
+from the moral sentiments.
+
+Let those who would study well this social question, or who in public
+trusts are charged with its solution, be most careful here. Every motive
+in the minds of these people, whether of instinct, desire, or duty, must
+be addressed. All the elements of human nature must be appealed to,
+physical, moral, intellectual, social, and religious. Imperfect indeed
+is any system which, like that at New Orleans, offers wages, but does
+not welcome the teacher. It is of little moment whether three dollars or
+thirty per month be paid the laborer, so long as there is no school to
+bind both parent and child to civil society with new hopes and duties.
+
+There are some vices charged upon these people, or a portion of them,
+and truth requires that nothing be withheld. There is said to be a good
+deal of petty pilfering among them, although they are faithful to
+trusts. This is the natural growth of the old system, and is quite
+likely to accompany the transition-state. Besides, the present
+disturbed and unorganized condition of things is not favorable to the
+rigid virtues. But inferences from this must not be pressed too far.
+When I was a private soldier in Virginia, as one of a three-months'
+regiment, we used to bide from each other our little comforts and
+delicacies, even our dishes and clothing, or they were sure to
+disappear. But we should have ridiculed an adventurous thinker upon the
+characteristics of races and classes, who should have leaped therefrom
+to the conclusion that all white men or all soldiers are thieves. And
+what inferences might not one draw, discreditable to all traders and
+manufacturers, from the universal adulteration of articles of food!
+These people, it is said, are disposed to falsehood in order to get
+rations and small benefits,--a natural vice which comes with slavery,
+and too often attends on poverty without slavery. Those of most
+demonstrative piety are rarely better than the rest, not, indeed,
+hypocritical, but satisfying their consciences by self-depreciation and
+indulgence in emotion,--psychological manifestations which one may find
+in more advanced communities. They show no special gratitude to us for
+liberating them from bonds. Nor do they ordinarily display much
+exhilaration over their new condition,--being quite unlike the Italian
+revolutionist who used to put on his toga, walk in the forum, and
+personate Brutus and Cassius. Their appreciation of their better lot is
+chiefly seen in their dread of a return of their masters, in their
+excitement when an attack is feared, in their anxious questionings while
+the assault on Charleston was going on, and in their desire to get their
+friends and relatives away from the Rebels,--an appreciation of freedom,
+if not ostentatious, at least sensible.
+
+But away with such frivolous modes of dealing with the rights of races
+to self-development! Because Englishmen may be classified as hard and
+conceited, Frenchmen as capricious, Austrians as dull, and the people of
+one other nation are sometimes thought to be vainglorious, shall these
+therefore be slaves? And where is that model race which shall sway them
+all? A people may have grave defects, but it may not therefore be
+rightfully disabled.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+During my recent visit, I had an opportunity, on three different
+occasions, to note carefully Colonel T.W. Higginson's colored regiment,
+known as the First Regiment of South-Carolina Volunteers. Major-General
+Hunter's first regiment was mainly made up of conscripts, drafted May
+12th, 1862, and disbanded August 11th, three months afterwards, there
+being no funds wherewith to pay them, and the discharged men going home
+to find the cotton and corn they had planted overgrown with weeds. On
+the 10th of October, General Saxton, being provided with competent
+authority to raise five thousand colored troops, began to recruit a
+regiment. His authority from the War Department bore date August 25th,
+and the order conferring it states the object to be "to guard the
+plantations, and protect the inhabitants from captivity and murder."
+This was the first clear authority ever given by the Government to raise
+a negro regiment in this war. There were, indeed, some ambiguous words
+in the instructions of Secretary Cameron to General Sherman, when the
+original expedition went to Port Royal, authorizing him to organize the
+negroes into companies and squads for such services as they might be
+fitted for, but this not to mean a general arming for military service.
+Secretary Stanton, though furnishing muskets and red trousers to General
+Hunter's regiment, did not think the authority sufficient to justify the
+payment of the regiment. The first regiment, as raised by General
+Saxton, numbered four hundred and ninety-nine men when Colonel Higginson
+took command of it on the 1st of December; and on the 19th of January,
+1863, it had increased to eight hundred and forty-nine. It has made
+three expeditions to Florida and Georgia,--one before Colonel Higginson
+assumed the command, described in Mrs. Stowe's letter to the women of
+England, and two under Colonel Higginson, one of which was made in
+January up the St. Mary's, and the other in March to Jacksonville, which
+it occupied for a few days until an evacuation was ordered from
+head-quarters. The men are volunteers, having been led to enlist by duty
+to their race, to their kindred still in bonds, and to us, their allies.
+Their drill is good, and their time excellent. They have borne
+themselves well in their expeditions, quite equalling the white
+regiments in skirmishing. In _morale_ they seemed very much like white
+men, and with about the same proportion of good and indifferent
+soldiers. Some I saw of the finest metal, like Robert Sutton, whom
+Higginson describes in his report as "the real conductor of the whole
+expedition at the St. Mary's," and Sergeant Hodges, a master-carpenter,
+capable of directing the labors of numerous journeymen. Another said,
+addressing a meeting at Beaufort, that he had been restless, nights,
+thinking of the war and of his people,--that, when he heard of the
+regiment being formed, he felt that his time to act had come, and that
+it was his duty to enlist,--that he did not fight for his rations and
+pay, but for wife, children, and people.
+
+These men, as already intimated, are very much like other men, easily
+depressed, and as easily reanimated by words of encouragement. Many have
+been reluctant to engage in military service,--their imagination
+investing it with the terrors of instant and certain death. But this
+reluctance has passed away with participation in active service, with
+the adventure and inspiration of a soldier's life, and the latent
+manhood has recovered its rightful sway. Said a superintendent who was
+of the first delegation to Tort Royal in March, 1862,--a truthful man,
+and not given to rose-colored views,--"I did not have faith in arming
+negroes, when I visited the North last autumn, but I have now. They will
+be not mere machines, but real tigers, when aroused; and I should not
+wish to face them." One amusing incident may be mentioned. A man
+deserted from the regiment, was discovered hidden in a chimney in the
+district where he had lived, was taken back to camp, went to Florida in
+Higginson's first expedition, bore his part well in the skirmishes,
+became excited with the service, was made a sergeant, and, receiving a
+furlough on his return, went to the plantation where he had hid, and
+said he would not take five thousand dollars for his place.
+
+But more significant, as showing the success of the experiment, is the
+change of feeling among the white soldiers towards the negro regiment, a
+change due in part to the just policy of General Saxton, in part to the
+President's Proclamation of January 1st, which has done much to clear
+the atmosphere everywhere within the army-lines, but more than all to
+the soldierly conduct of the negroes themselves during their
+expeditions. I had one excellent opportunity to note this change. On the
+6th of April, Colonel Higginson's regiment was assigned to picket-duty
+on Port Royal Island,--the first active duty it had performed on the Sea
+Islands,--and was to relieve the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth. When, after a
+march of ten miles, it reached the advanced picket-station, there were
+about two hundred soldiers of the Pennsylvania Fifty-Fifth awaiting
+orders to proceed to Beaufort. I said, in a careless tone, to one of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, who was looking at Higginson's regiment as it
+stood in line,--
+
+"Isn't this rather new, to be relieved by a negro regiment?"
+
+"All right," said he. "They've as much right to fight for themselves as
+I have to fight for them."
+
+A squad of half a dozen men stood by, making no dissent, and accepting
+him as their spokesman. Moving in another direction, I said to a
+soldier,--
+
+"What do you think of that regiment?"
+
+The answer was,--
+
+"All right. I'd rather they'd shoot the Rebels than have the Rebels
+shoot me"; and none of the by-standers dissented.
+
+As one of the negro companies marched off the field to picket a station
+at the Ferry, they passed within a few feet of some twenty of the
+Pennsylvania soldiers, just formed into line preparatory to marching to
+Beaufort. The countenances of the latter, which I watched, exhibited no
+expression of disgust, dislike, or disapprobation, only of curiosity.
+Other white soldiers gave to the weary negroes the hominy left from the
+morning meal. The Major of the Fifty-Fifth, highest in command of the
+relieved regiment, explained very courteously to Colonel Higginson the
+stations and duties of the pickets, and proffered any further aid
+desired. This was, it is true, an official duty, but there are more ways
+than one in which to perform even an official duty. I rode back to
+Beaufort, part of the way, in company with a captain of the First
+Massachusetts Cavalry, who was the officer of the day. He said "he
+wasn't much of a negro-man, but he had no objection to their doing our
+fighting." He pronounced the word as spelled with two _g_s; but I prefer
+to retain the good English. Colonel Montgomery, who had a partly filled
+regiment, most of whom were conscripts, said that on his return from
+Jacksonville he sent a squad of his men ashore in charge of some
+prisoners he had taken. Some white soldiers seeing them approach from
+the wharf, one said,--
+
+"What are those coming?"
+
+"Negro soldiers," (word pronounced as in the former case,) was the
+answer.
+
+"Damn 'em!" was the ejaculation.
+
+But as they approached nearer, "What have they got with 'em?" was
+inquired.
+
+"Why, some Secesh prisoners."
+
+"Bully for the negroes!" (the same pronunciation as before,) was then
+the response from all.
+
+So quick was the transition, when it was found that the negroes had
+demonstrated their usefulness! It is, perhaps, humiliating to remember
+that such an unreasonable and unpatriotic prejudice has at any time
+existed; but it is never worth while to suppress the truth of history.
+This prejudice has been effectually broken in the Free States; and one
+of the pageants of this epoch was the triumphal march through Boston, on
+the 28th of May, on its way to embark for Port Royal, of the
+Fifty-Fourth Regiment of Massachusetts Volunteers, the first regiment of
+negro soldiers which the Free States have sent to the war. On the day
+previous, May 27th, a far different scene transpired on the banks of the
+Mississippi. Two black regiments, enlisted some months before in
+Louisiana under the order of Major-General Butler, both with line and
+one with field officers of their own lineage, made charge after charge
+on the batteries of Port Hudson, and were mown down like summer's grass,
+the survivors, many with mutilated limbs, closing up the thinned ranks
+and pressing on again, careless of life, and mindful only of honor and
+duty, with a sublimity of courage unsurpassed in the annals of war, and
+leaving there to all mankind an immortal record for themselves and their
+race.
+
+I cannot here forbear a momentary tribute to Wentworth Higginson.
+Devoting himself heroically to his great work, absorbed in its duties,
+and bearing his oppressive responsibility as the leader of a regiment in
+which to a great extent are now involved the fortunes of a race, he adds
+another honorable name to the true chivalry of our time.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Homeward-bound, I stopped for two days at Fortress Monroe, and was again
+among the familiar scenes of my soldier-life. It was there that
+Major-General Butler, first of all the generals in the army of the
+Republic, and anticipating even Republican statesmen, had clearly
+pointed to the cause of the war. At Craney Island I met two accomplished
+women of the Society of Friends, who, on a most cheerless spot, and with
+every inconvenience, were teaching the children of the freedmen. Two
+good men, one at the fort and the other at Norfolk, were distributing
+the laborers on farms in the vicinity, and providing them with
+implements and seeds which the benevolent societies had furnished.
+Visiting Hampton, I recognized, in the shanties built upon the charred
+ruins, the familiar faces of those who, in the early days of the war,
+had been for a brief period under my charge. Their hearty greetings to
+one whom they remembered as the first to point them to freedom and cheer
+them with its prospect could hardly be received without emotion. But
+there is no time to linger over these scenes.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Such are some of the leading features in the condition of the freedmen,
+particularly at Port Royal. The enterprise for their aid, begun in
+doubt, is no longer a bare hope or possibility. It is a fruition and a
+consummation. The negroes will work for a living. They will fight for
+their freedom. They are adapted to civil society. As a people, they are
+not exempt from the frailties of our common humanity, nor from the vices
+which hereditary bondage always superadds to these. As it is said to
+take three generations to subdue a freeman completely to a slave, so it
+may not be possible in a single generation to restore the pristine
+manhood. One who expects to find in emancipated slaves perfect men and
+women, or to realize in them some fair dream of an ideal race, will meet
+disappointment; but there is nothing in their nature or condition to
+daunt the Christian patriot; rather, there is everything to cheer and
+fortify his faith. They have shown capacity for knowledge, for free
+industry, for subordination to law and discipline, for soldierly
+fortitude, for social and family relations, for religious culture and
+aspirations; and these qualities, when stirred and sustained by the
+incitements and rewards of a just society, and combining with the
+currents of our continental civilization, will, under the guidance of a
+benevolent Providence which forgets neither them nor us, make them a
+constantly progressive race, and secure them ever after from the
+calamity of another enslavement, and ourselves from the worse calamity
+of being again their oppressors.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+NO AND YES.
+
+
+  I watched her at her spinning;
+  And this was my beginning
+  Of wooing and of winning.
+
+  But when a maid opposes,
+  And throws away your roses,
+  You say the case forecloses.
+
+  Yet sorry wit one uses,
+  Who loves and thinks he loses
+  Because a maid refuses.
+
+  For by her once denying
+  She only means complying
+  Upon a second trying.
+
+  When first I said, in pleading,
+  "Behold, my love lies bleeding!"
+  She heard me half unheeding.
+
+  When afterward I told her,
+  And blamed her growing colder,--
+  She dropped upon my shoulder.
+
+  Had I a doubt? That quelled it:
+  Her very look dispelled it,
+  I caught her hand, and held it.
+
+  Along the lane I led her,
+  And while her cheeks grew redder,
+  I sued outright to wed her.
+
+  Good end from bad beginning!
+  My wooing came to winning,--
+  And still I watch her spinning.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+THE MATHER SAFE.
+
+
+The service I was able to render an official personage connected with
+----College in New England procured me access to the library belonging
+to that institution. In common with many of my fellow-citizens, I had
+previously enjoyed the pleasure of responding to circulars petitioning
+for money to buy books for interment in this choice literary catacomb;
+nay, I was even allowed the satisfaction of an annual stare at them
+through an iron grating, and of reading a placard to the effect that
+nobody was allowed to enter an alcove or take down a volume. As it
+occurred to me that the generous donors could not object to add one more
+to the select half-dozen or so, who, by having the privilege of the
+shelves, could really use the library, I demanded this favor of the
+gentleman who desired to recompense me for what I had done for him. The
+Librarian, who valued books as things capable of being locked up in
+cells like criminals, there to figure numerically to the confusion of
+rival institutions, was manifestly disturbed when I presented my
+credentials. The authority, however, was not to be questioned;--I was to
+be admitted to the library at any hour of the day; and I took care to
+drop a civil expression to imply my estimation of the privilege and my
+purpose of enjoying it.
+
+Wanting the leisure to attempt that ponderous undertaking known as "a
+course of reading," it became my habit to browse about the building upon
+Saturday afternoons, and finally to establish myself, with whatever
+authors I had selected, in a certain retired alcove devoted to the
+metaphysicians. This comfortable nook opens just behind Crawford's bust
+of the late President T----, and is nearly opposite the famous Mather
+Safe. As it is possible that I am addressing some who are not graduates
+of ---- College, nor familiar with its library, it may be well to say a
+word of the history of the spacious and ancient coffer to which
+allusion is made.
+
+The Mather Safe--which, by the way, is not of iron, but of oak heavily
+bound with that metal--is said to have been among the possessions of the
+author of the "Magnalia." Its last private proprietor was a collateral
+descendant of the Mathers, an eccentric character, popularly known as
+Miser Farrel. As Farrel was a bachelor, and had the reputation of being
+enormously rich, the College authorities of his day were accustomed to
+treat him with distinguished consideration, and went so far, I believe,
+as to vote him some minor degree. What effect these academic
+blandishments may have had upon their object cannot at present be
+determined. For when the day came for the long-expected will to be
+opened, it was found that the old gentleman had bequeathed to the
+College only his Mather Safe, with certain papers carefully let into the
+wood-work in one corner of the same,--which papers were not to be
+removed or opened for a hundred years.
+
+It may be conceived that this bulky benefaction was not accepted with
+the best grace, particularly as the testator made no provision for
+considerable expense necessarily incurred in moving and setting it up in
+the library. Yet, not satisfied with this culpable negligence, Mr.
+Farrel had affixed still other conditions to the acceptance of his gift.
+He had caused two massive locks to be put upon the Mather Safe, of which
+he enjoined that the respective keys should be forever held by the
+President and Treasurer of the College, to the end that neither could
+have access to its contents except in the presence of the other.
+Moreover, he required that the Safe should be used only as a receptacle
+for packages which the depositors desired to keep from the world for at
+least fifty years. Of course no right-minded corporation would have
+endured this posthumous fussiness, were it not for the mysterious papers
+left in the Safe,--these being considered instruments whereby immense
+possessions would finally come to the College. But, as their worthy
+friend, however niggardly in other respects, had taken care to save
+nothing in lawyers, there were really no means of disregarding his
+wishes, except by relinquishing all claims under the will. And so, many
+years ago, the Mather Safe came to be opened to the public on the
+conditions already declared. At first, it was matter of surprise that so
+many persons appeared to claim the privilege of Farrel's singular
+legacy. Carefully enveloped packages had been consigned to various
+periods of oblivion by all conditions of men and women. These were
+numbered and registered in a volume kept for the purpose; they were
+severally addressed, perhaps to a specified descendant of some living
+person, perhaps to the future occupant of some professor's chair or
+metropolitan pulpit.
+
+It was near the Mather Safe, as I have already said, that my favorite
+alcove opened. In the short winter afternoon, when the twilight
+thickened without the building, and the type began to blur within, I
+would lay aside my book and muse over wild rumors of secrets borne by
+this messenger between the generations. Journals and letters, it was
+said, were there concealed, which should change the current gossip of
+history, and explode many bubble-reputations that had glittered on the
+world. There were hints of deadly sins, committed by men high in Church
+and State, which their perpetrators lacked the courage to confess before
+their fellows, but which, in the bitterness of remorse, they had
+recorded in the Mather Safe, to blacken their fame to future
+times,--thus taking a ghastly satisfaction from the knowledge that they
+should not always appear as whited sepulchres before men. There was
+vague talk, also, of funds which had been deposited to found some
+professorship in the College, to furnish some instruction which the age
+was not advanced enough to accept. Then, too, there were intimations of
+endowments to establish scholarships for women, who,--so it was
+argued,--after the increasing enlightenment of a few score of years,
+would be admitted to every privilege of culture offered to men. In
+short, there was matter enough to send a curdling tingle through the
+blood, as this tough old ark, buffeting slowly through the years,
+entered its familiar night. If there was deficiency in the testimony
+which consigned any special wonder to its keeping, there was, doubtless,
+sufficient truth in common reports to justify the imagination in
+interpreting misty hieroglyphics of its own device.
+
+During the latter part of a certain August--my family being established
+at the seaside--I determined to devote a long day to the College
+Library. The fact was, that a trifling domestic incident--no other than
+the smoking of a kitchen-chimney--had turned my attention to the
+conditions of atmospheric changes. Certain phenomena I had observed
+seemed inconsistent with the law assumed in popular text-books. Indeed,
+as it appeared to me, modifications of a received theory--which might be
+determined by a diligent comparison of existing authorities--would
+suggest a household economy of great practical importance. Certain
+facts, which must have been noted by all the great voyagers of the
+world, might give me data from which to establish the suspected
+conclusion. I accordingly repaired to the library at a very early hour,
+and labored through the day in collecting and committing to writing what
+had been observed by many eminent navigators upon the point in question.
+Four o'clock in the afternoon found me too tired to apply any process of
+analysis to the observations obtained. I therefore retired to my
+accustomed seat, took down almost the first book which came to hand, and
+resigned myself to the impressions of a favorite author. I had passed
+about an hour in a delicious state of dreamy tranquillity, sometimes
+reading, sometimes pausing to color the faded page with the brilliant
+hues of more modern thought, when my attention was attracted by a
+familiar voice proceeding from the neighborhood of the Mather Safe.
+
+"The President and Treasurer were to have been here at five o'clock."
+
+"I have heard nothing of it," said the Librarian. "I am sure that the
+President is out of town for the day."
+
+"Strange! strange!" exclaimed the Reverend Mr. Clifton, in a very
+excited tone. "I wish to make a deposit of great importance in the
+Mather Safe. I had the assurance that the Safe should be opened at five
+this afternoon. Here, read the solemn promise upon which I have come
+from Foxden!"
+
+The Librarian glanced at an open letter which Clifton held out to him,
+and said, in a quiet manner,--
+
+"The President promises to meet you in the College Library on the
+afternoon of Thursday, the twenty-fourth instant; to-day is Wednesday,
+the twenty-third."
+
+"Is it possible?" muttered the clergyman, with a look of startled
+despair. "Pardon my disturbance. I have been hardly myself for these
+last weeks. Yet I can wait."
+
+I spoke to Mr. Clifton as he was about to leave the library. He blenched
+at hearing my voice, and strove to conceal the package beneath his arm.
+
+"How do my good friends in Foxden?" said I, inviting him into my alcove.
+"Is it true that Dr. Dastick has presented his cabinet of curiosities to
+the town?"
+
+"What are you reading?" said the clergyman, in a tone of curt authority
+very foreign to the mild persuasiveness of his usual professional
+accents.
+
+I exhibited the title of the book: it was the "Meditations of
+Descartes."
+
+"And do you follow those who vainly seek for truth through the inner
+world of man, not conforming themselves to the necessities of the
+outward world and the teachings of Revelation?"
+
+I defended the usefulness of some acquaintance with the original and
+powerful thinker, whose apologies are certainly profuse enough to
+satisfy the most orthodox.
+
+"Yes; I suppose you read Spinoza, Hegel, Fichte, the Atheism of
+D'Holbach, Utilitarianism Systematized by Auguste Comte! Did you ever go
+fishing in a dory when the wind was off shore?"
+
+There was an alarm in the eye and manner of Mr. Clifton, a tremulous
+restlessness in his speech, which warned me to avoid discussion, and
+endeavor to soothe his agitation. It was only to the last interrogatory,
+therefore, that I made some light reply.
+
+"The sea sparkles gayly," pursued the clergyman, in the manner of an
+extemporaneous preacher who strives to catch in a net of decorations
+some illustration which presents itself,--"the boat tosses on from wave
+to wave, for dories will sail before the wind. Soon we are miles from
+shore, and throw the anchor. What auspicious expansion of soul and body!
+How we slide up and down the backs of great billows, and cast our lines
+with ever-varying success! But the night comes, and with it the
+necessity of rowing back against wind and tide. Ah, then how long the
+lonely ocean-leagues! How distant the time when we may hope to stand
+confused and giddy upon solid earth! Some never see the land again, but
+are swept out into the storm and darkness, and are lost,--_lost_!"
+
+"I presume I understand the significance of your similitude," I replied,
+a little annoyed at this inopportune indulgence of the pastoral
+privilege. "You would imply the dangerous tendency of a certain sort of
+philosophical speculation; and so far we doubtless agree. Yet I ought to
+say, that, in cases where personal investigation is possible, I would
+take neither popular clamor nor learned dogmatism as conclusive evidence
+against any writer's honesty and usefulness. With the vulgar, genius has
+always seemed a sort of madness; and should a man rise preeminent above
+the teachers of his generation, his wisdom would appear to them as
+foolishness."
+
+A change came over the face of Clifton as I said these words. It was as
+if a mask had fallen. Perchance he had wished to appear to me in that
+character of instructor which he desired some competent person to assume
+to him. Now, the relaxed muscles and averted eye only asked the sympathy
+of an equal. He spoke with forced, and almost grating, utterance.
+
+"Then you have used experience well enough to know that some minds may
+bear into the world a light, a knowledge too fine for general
+perception, too pure for even exceptional recognition."
+
+"I fully believe it possible," I said. "Yonder old Safe, if rumor says
+true, holds many mystic signals which the past and present could address
+only to the future,--signs meaningless, no doubt, to you or me, but
+which the freemasonry of higher intelligence shall render plain in the
+time hereafter."
+
+"And what if I had come," exclaimed Clifton, eagerly,--"what if I had
+come to add to those deposits which are not for this time, but which may
+be for other times? What blame to me, if I am here to do this? Should we
+common men, who find a life full of active duties presented to our
+acceptance,--should such as we, I say, receive this world as a pageant
+before which we must sit down and evolve a doctrine? The conceit of
+external education is at present too strong to acknowledge a divine
+element radiating from the depths of the soul, and finding in the mind
+only an awkward and imperfect instrument. Any extravagance is now
+tolerated, but an extravagance of spirituality; and we find altogether
+wanting the perception, that, rising from the gross symbols of language,
+can know the subtile and precious emotion which in a more advanced state
+of being those symbols might suggest."
+
+As it was evident that Mr. Clifton was laboring under great nervous
+excitability, I judged it prudent not to question the sequence of what
+he said, or even demand that it be made intelligible by further
+explanation. Indeed, I was sufficiently occupied in striving to identify
+this incomprehensible person with my familiar acquaintance, the pastor
+of the First Church in Foxden. It occurred to me that something had
+once been said of Clifton's connection with that topsy-turvy sodality
+popularly known as "The Transcendentalists." But this was many years
+ago; and the world always supposed that he had outgrown his early
+errors, and found, in the liberal theology of New England, a more
+genuine inspiration. In meeting him in his pastoral relation, I had only
+remarked that he was one of those men who find it very difficult to
+resist the social influences into which they may be thrown. This was
+probably the case even where that influence tended to degrade him from
+the plane he would have occupied, if left to himself. His spiritual life
+seemed to lack that vigor and buoyancy so infinitely important to
+contemplative men. He appeared to be ever yearning for something which
+should add robustness to his convictions. After a pause of some moments,
+Clifton again addressed me.
+
+"Recollections of moments, months of excitement, of intense power, have
+returned! They may not fade again unspoken. You shall know my
+long-cherished secret. Younger in years, you may scarcely advise; but,
+at least, you may give sympathy that shall confirm my decision. I have
+engaged rooms at the neighboring hotel. Come and pass the evening--nay,
+the night--with me; for much must be read and thought and spoken before
+the black veil of personality can be lifted between us."
+
+It has already been observed that my family were at the seaside. This
+circumstance left me sole disposer of my time and localities. How, then,
+resist the inclination to see out the adventure upon which I had
+stumbled? Let me credit myself also with a worthier motive: I saw that
+my companion was in no state to be left to himself,--and, really, there
+was no mutual friend to whom I could consign him. Accordingly I offered
+my arm in a manner to imply acquiescence in his proposal.
+
+We soon reached the hotel, and ascended to a room in the remote corner
+of a spacious wing. Clifton at once turned the key, placed his package
+upon the table, and proceeded to employ a stray bit of carpet in
+stopping a ventilator which communicated with the entry. Having
+satisfied himself that this passage was rendered impervious to sound, he
+drew two chairs up to the table, motioned me into one, and planted
+himself in the other with the air of a man, in popular phrase, about to
+make a night of it.
+
+"Did you ever hear of Herbert Vannelle?" he asked, abruptly.
+
+It can hardly be necessary to say that a substitute is here placed for
+the name really mentioned.
+
+I replied in the negative, and asked where the gentleman lived.
+
+"He lives nowhere on earth; he is dead,--just dead."
+
+"A friend of yours?"
+
+"A master once; now a presence eluding, haunting, torturing. He left me
+this manuscript; it is a 'Philosophy of the Absolute.'" (Here Clifton
+drew from a curiously contrived case of parchment a cluster of pages.)
+"It has now twenty-two hours to appear in the present century. You shall
+devote the night to reading it, and tell me that I have acted well."
+
+A sultry August evening, a smoky boarding-house lamp, much skirmishing
+of mosquitoes, and--a manuscript system of philosophy! The prospect was
+not inviting. The reading of other people's manuscripts is surely the
+crucial test of a devoted benevolence. There are few ways in which I am
+so little ready to oblige my fellow-men. I had, indeed, at times, been
+induced to inspect sundry romances in blotted embryo; but, as yet,
+nobody had called upon me with a system of philosophy. _Printed_
+philosophy is none too easy reading. But to sit there, under the
+guardianship of Clifton, and spell out the dim dogmatism of some
+nebulous fanatic,--of course it was not to be thought of for a moment.
+With a _suave_ periphrasis of speech I questioned the expediency of the
+proposition.
+
+"I shall ring for candles that will burn during the night," said Mr.
+Clifton, heedless of my expostulation. "Also some refreshment. You take
+tea, I suppose? You shall read the first ten pages of Vannelle's
+writing. It is possible you may exercise self-control enough to abandon
+it unfinished. But you will not sleep tonight."
+
+There was a confidence in the minister's tone which gave rather
+unpleasant emphasis to this final prophecy. Still, I believed myself
+capable of the ten pages without establishing a hopelessly wakeful
+condition,--indeed, it was something to be guarantied against the
+opposite infirmity. The tea, accompanied by a few thin shavings of
+toast, presently arrived. The means of procuring light were also
+furnished us. Clifton's hand lay heavily upon the manuscript until the
+attendant had disappeared for the last time, and the door was locked
+behind him. He then opened the papers before me, and signified that the
+time had come. I braced myself as for a serious undertaking.
+
+Thus I accepted the task. How give words to the singular emotions which
+soon possessed me? As if some charm, some spell of magnetism, had been
+given to the paper, my whole consciousness was riveted upon it. I know
+not how to represent this bold, this startling attempt to establish a
+positive basis for metaphysical philosophy, an exact science of all
+things human and divine. Here was a man, perchance of more courage and
+conscience, perchance of more devilish recklessness, than any of his
+contemporaries. But how deal with what came to me from that wondrous
+writing in the ambiguities of common language? All thought--even
+supposing it embodied in a perfect form of speech--is subject to the
+limitations of the recipient mind. My own glimpses of the writer's
+meaning were necessarily most indistinct. I cannot attempt to transfer
+them. I was controlled by a force not my own. The shadow of a mysterious
+power was over me. The mists of sentimental pantheism were left far
+below the clear-cut summits whither the reader was invited to ascend.
+There was an interpretation of Revelation far more removed from the
+apparent letter than that of Swedenborg. Here was reaffirmed (though for
+a widely different purpose) what the Romish Church has ever
+declared,--that the Scriptures, recording spiritual truth, cannot be
+comprehensible to the natural understanding,--that, while the Sacred
+Writings contain a natural letter, it can be translated into spiritual
+verity only by a few exceptional men. If this scheme of philosophy was
+an idealism, it nevertheless manifested itself through the plainest
+realities. The solution of the problem seemed to come not from one
+point, but from all points. Certainly there was a tendency towards the
+supersensible; but this direction was taken through stern grappling with
+the actual. At one time I struggled against the august spirit that was
+borne in upon me; at another, I was utterly subdued by the lofty
+enthusiasm of the writer,--something within me capable of absolute
+cognition seemed responding to his appeals. But the pith and vitality of
+this marvel could be recognized only by long experience. And here the
+student was required to stake his soul upon a perilous cast. For, if not
+pursued and fathomed to full satisfaction, this view of things would be
+disturbing, paralyzing. With any half-acceptance a man might scarcely
+live. It must fashion the mind as an artist fashions the passive metals
+into a musical instrument, and then every event in time might touch it
+to exquisite harmony. But the more ravishing the beauty which seemed
+offered through perfect realization of this knowledge, the more
+blighting would be its effects, if entertained in the spirit of a
+selfish dilettanteism. For in certain passages were breathed faint
+suggestions, that moral codes held sacred by the people could not bind
+the initiated,--nay, that what seemed most evil might be so explained as
+to become wholly legitimate to the elect.
+
+It was far into the night. I had gone over about a third of the
+manuscript. Sharp questions assailed my ears. Was I bound to jeopard
+all the common good of life for the chance of--just failing to know
+existence from a higher plane? Could I ascend so far above the frailties
+of average men as to receive in purity and innocence the license which
+acceptance of this strange scheme would surely give? Dim-sighted as I
+was, it was necessary to rise and dispel this splendid phantasm. I
+shuddered in sudden alarm at the danger which threatened me. By a
+spasmodic movement, in which I failed to recognize any presence of my
+will, the manuscript was closed and handed to Clifton. Welcome existence
+under coarsest and harshest terms, rather than tamper with such fearful
+possibilities!
+
+For hours the minister had gazed into my face, partaking the excitement
+to which he had subjected me. He had lighted and trimmed the candles, as
+was necessary, but had never broken silence. And now there came from him
+the deep sigh of relief from an absorbing interest; he sighed as a
+little child when the fairytale is ended and the tense strain of
+attention may be relaxed.
+
+"What was this man?" I demanded, hurriedly.
+
+"What he was is to be discovered through these writings, if it may be
+found out at all. What he was is not for me nor for you to know. It is
+possible that he may meet with competent judges hereafter, even among
+men. Look at this address."
+
+Clifton handed me a little memorandum relating to the ultimate
+disposition of the manuscript. It was to remain for eighty years in the
+Mather Safe, and was then to be consigned to the occupant of the Chair
+of Moral Philosophy in the College.
+
+"Say rather to the last minority-candidate for the professorship!" I
+exclaimed. "I doubt if the actual winner of that comfortable possession
+will feel disposed to abandon the market-worth of conventional
+acquirements, and set forth as a humble student of unpopular truth."
+
+The minister seemed struck with the suggestion, and made the alteration
+I had indicated.
+
+The darkest hour of the night had come. Every sound of human activity
+had long ago ceased. It was the quiet time when one may most easily
+probe an intense experience. I felt that more was to be
+known,--something which the minister longed to tell,--something to which
+what he had caused me to read was to serve as a prelude. I suspected how
+powerless must have been this sensitive man in the presence of the Idea
+which he had carried. Doubtless, in one of his peculiar tendencies, it
+might prevent all harmonious action,--it might ever goad the intellect,
+and crush the heart. As the confession trembled upon the lips of
+Clifton, I signified my profound sympathy. It is an awful moment, when a
+mature man tries to put off the solitariness of his life.
+
+What was then communicated I can repeat only in the first person. The
+pathetic earnestness of the speaker imprinted on my memory the very
+phrases that he used; there can be few verbal changes as they now flow
+from the pen.
+
+
+II.
+
+NARRATIVE OF THE REVEREND CHARLES CLIFTON.
+
+I am indebted for education to a bachelor uncle, who, after our great
+bereavement, received at his house an infant sister and myself. I was at
+that time about twelve years old. My relative enjoyed a handsome
+annuity, which he spent with the utmost liberality. As I was rather a
+thoughtful, though not very studious boy, it was determined that I
+should go to college. I entered with some difficulty soon after my
+seventeenth birthday,--an age somewhat later than the average at that
+time.
+
+Two years before me in college was the class of 18--. Upon the roll of
+its fifty-two members stood the name of Herbert Vannelle. Rich, an
+orphan, inclined to thought and study beyond the limited academic range
+of those days, endowed with personal fascinations of a very rare and
+peculiar kind,--there seemed only one possible shadow to darken his
+career. In his family there had been said to exist a tendency to
+eccentric independence of action, which vulgarly, perhaps justly, passed
+for insanity. His father, who died soon after Herbert entered college,
+had given much uneasiness to the wealthy and respectable city-circle
+with which he was socially connected. Upon the death of his wife he had
+retired to the Vannelle homestead in the northwestern part of
+Connecticut, and there lived in studious seclusion. There he insisted
+upon bringing up his only son, deprived of such recreations and
+companionships as are suitable to youth. He had, indeed, superintended
+his studies with patience and thoroughness, and had not failed to
+accomplish him in the grace of physical power, at that time little
+recognized as a part of education.
+
+So much was known of Vannelle when he appeared at college among the
+young men of the Junior Class. And little more was known of him when he
+left America on the day his class graduated. His connections with the
+other students had been very slight. He had never cared to acquire that
+fluency in retailing the thoughts of others upon which college-rank
+depends. An access to the library was all that he seemed to value in his
+connection with the institution. And here he busied himself, not with
+the openings to the solid and rational sciences, but with the
+bewildering sophistries of the school-philosophies, and their aimless
+wrangling over verbal conceits.
+
+At that time I happened to be taking a young man's first enchanting
+rounds upon the tread-mill of metaphysics. At the library I often
+encountered Vannelle in search of some volume of which I had just
+possessed myself. This led to an acquaintance. I was soon fascinated by
+a power which streamed from his large, expressive eyes, and persuaded by
+a voice modulated in a pathos and sweetness that I have heard in no
+other person. His influence upon me at this time was not unlike that
+which the mesmerists had just begun to exercise. Yet, while he showed an
+interest in directing my inquiries along the paths to which they
+naturally tended, he never communicated the results of his own studies,
+or offered me the slightest assistance in generalizing my random
+observations. What he thought himself, or by what writers he was
+influenced, it was not easy to fathom. He was deeply acquainted with the
+writings of the New-England Transcendentalists, then at their greatest
+notoriety, yet never for an instant seemed giddy upon the hazy heights
+where those earnest spirits soared.
+
+Vannelle spent two years in Germany, and returned to America about the
+time that my college-course was finished. The little I knew of him
+during his absence was from the scattered notices of
+newspaper-correspondents, who intimated that Herbert possessed the
+privilege of friendly intercourse with men most distinguished for
+knowledge in the Old World. Just before Class-Day, I received a letter
+dated from X----, in Connecticut, inviting me, in terms which seemed
+almost a command, to spend the summer at the Vannelle homestead. Herbert
+had returned, and thus abruptly summoned me. Intending to postpone until
+the autumn the study of a profession, I promised to come to him for a
+few weeks,--a visit which might be extended, were it mutually agreeable.
+
+There was, at that time, a day of weary staging after leaving the cars,
+before arriving in the village of X----; there were also six rough miles
+of carriage-conveyance before the traveller could attain the old house
+by the damp river-marsh whereto I was destined. When I arrived there,
+Vannelle stood at the door to greet me.
+
+"We have six months' concern together," he said, as if delivering
+himself of some studied speech,--"we have six months' concern together;
+then we may stand at the parting of the ways,--we may cleave to one
+another, or separate forever."
+
+A low, dark house. The south-side planted out from the sun by pines and
+cedars. The parlors covered with well-worn Turkey carpets, chafed into
+dusty ridges. The wretched window-glass breaking and distorting the
+pine-trees without. Little oval mirrors distorting the human countenance
+within. In the living-room (so called by those able to live in it)
+loomed a rusty air-tight stove of cathedral proportion,--a ghastly altar
+which the bitterest enemy of the family might feel fully justified in
+protecting. A square, cellarless room, about twenty feet from the house,
+had been the study of the elder Vannelle. Tables covered with a confused
+mass of writing-materials. A jumble of retorts and other chemical
+apparatus about the floor. Cabinets of the ugliest pattern reached to
+the ceiling;--at first I supposed them to be made of painted wood;
+afterwards I discovered they were of iron, and filled with rare books
+and manuscripts.
+
+"My father built this study," said Vannelle, as we passed into it. "He
+wished to get rid of those periodical clearings-up from which there is
+no escape in a New-England household. Mrs. Brett, the wife of our
+farmer, could never resist the feminine itch to put things to rights.
+She was always contriving to arrange papers and books in symmetrical
+piles where nothing could be found. My father could never turn his back
+but she was sure to annihilate important scraps of writing that were
+lying about the floor, and, under pretence of sweeping, invoke a simoom
+of dust that hours were insufficient to allay. But when he built this
+room, and kept the key of it, there was no more trouble."
+
+I shudder as I hurry through these descriptions, for a confession which
+I hardly dare to put into words must accompany them. All these
+surroundings, seen by me for the first time, had a fearful familiarity.
+In some occult state of spiritual existence I seemed to have known them
+all. I have learned that the soul may enter into communion with other
+minds otherwise than through the senses,--nay, more, it may thus take an
+inexplicable cognizance of material things. Of this I have had such
+proof as it would be infatuation to doubt. I was compelled to test this
+startling suspicion for the first time.
+
+"You need not take me up-stairs, Herbert," I said, as we returned to the
+house. "The picture of your father, which hangs in the large chamber
+projecting over the porch, was doubtless a good likeness of the mask he
+wore at city club-houses and family-dinners,--but the man as you knew
+him _here_, how little does it resemble! As for the Chinese cabinet
+which stands between the windows, it has associations, no doubt, but it
+is sadly out of repair. Those pink tiles about the fireplace may be
+interesting to antiquaries; but I rather prefer the blue variety, as
+corresponding to the mental state in which their infinitely pretentious
+subjects and execrable drawing always put me."
+
+The lightness of speech was painfully forced. Vannelle turned to me and
+said, slowly,--
+
+"Have you been here before?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Has any one described to you this house or its contents?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Then thought has been conveyed from mind to mind in unconditioned
+purity. It is as I had supposed. We are brothers forever."
+
+The next day, after an early breakfast, Vannelle summoned me to the
+study. I glanced distrustfully at the confusion of the room, which
+seemed in strange contrast with the exquisitely neat and even
+fashionable attire of its proprietor. A smile of proud pity touched the
+lips of Vannelle, as he seemed to divine my thought. Then, as if I had
+read them in letters of light, these words seemed to answer me:--
+
+"Shall we, the stewards and guardians of the highest interests of
+mankind, fret our souls at trifles,--we, who are to be instruments in
+marshalling the race from slavery and folly to wisdom and freedom?
+Behold, in one bound, the hovels and palaces of earth shall be alike,
+and, floating free in spiritual space, we will win such dominion as the
+highest graduates in saintship dimly perceived, but were never able to
+declare!"
+
+These thoughts, energizing the brain of my companion, seemed thrown into
+my consciousness with far more distinctness than if they had been
+uttered. It was with awe that this mystic correspondence between mind
+and mind was made plain to me. One man out of this myriad-bodied
+humanity had sought me out, and in his presence I was never more to be
+alone. The gigantic shadow of self passed from me; I was as clay in the
+potter's hands!
+
+At length Herbert spoke.
+
+"Our work in this world is determined for us; mine is allotted to
+me,--not by my own choice. I return to this house never to leave it till
+I go to join my father, with his great work more nearly completed than
+when it came to my hands. At that table he died, with some glimpses of
+the promised land whither he tended,--where he prayed that I might
+enter."
+
+There escaped from me a feeble remonstrance,--no utterance of the heart,
+but rather a dry rattling of such conventional proprieties as lingered
+in the memory.
+
+"And you intend to leave this wholesome world,--you, whose career might
+be such as few have it in their power to choose? You know, you must
+know, the wonderful gifts which you possess; you cannot alone be
+ignorant of the fascination you might exercise over man and woman."
+
+"I know all these temptations, and others that you cannot surmise,"
+exclaimed Vannelle, "and I will conquer them,--if not through spiritual
+grace, then by some bodily penance of lasting effect. I discern in you
+certain qualities of mind that may serve to regulate the equipoise of
+mine. I have the means to provide for us both during the high
+speculations in which we shall engage. Let us be comrades in this
+undertaking. I seek to bridge the great gulf that separates the natural
+from the spiritual. My father firmly believed in the possibility of
+obtaining an absolute ground for the philosophy which should include all
+things human and divine. He passed onward before the inestimable gift he
+seemed to have won could be set forth in the symbols of the world. To
+see is not difficult, but only to contrive a popular adaptation through
+which others may discern the thought. I seek the means to express the
+truth which he saw, and of which I can catch some glimpses through such
+colored mythologies as represent the higher religions of the world. Man
+has found out the knowledge by which a universe was evoked from chaos:
+shall he not perfect that knowledge in the Law which includes the divine
+element by which the universe is informed? How can we love with our
+whole heart what we do not know with our whole mind? Clifton, I declare
+to you that knowledge of the Law by which the Creator is and acts is
+possible to man!"
+
+I shall seem to you weak and unstable in no common degree to have been
+moved by utterance like this. Remember that I can reproduce only the
+words, not the wild power of that persuasive voice, not the aspiring
+courage that struck me from his eye. Almost against my will there was
+produced in me a plasticity of mind that seemed to demand the impress of
+some foreign mould. The tree of knowledge was set in the midst of the
+garden, and again were audible the seductive serpent-tones: "Your eyes
+shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil."
+
+I found Vannelle so far my superior in the knowledge of all earthly
+lores, that I at length came to think it possible he might be the
+appointed instrument of communicating the singular intelligence that he
+sought. He proposed to review the different systems built by human
+thought before applying himself to the problem of finding a system of
+philosophy which should include them all. His idea was, that from the
+extreme negation of the so-called transcendental position--when that
+position had been legitimately attained by a thoroughly conscientious
+thinker--some new light must break upon the mind. His was no shrinking
+from the conflict with real things to indulge in vague yearnings after
+the inaccessible, but a definite effort so to place the soul and
+discipline the understanding that wisdom could be realized without
+process or media. Unlike most inquirers of that time, he had no love for
+the abstract and the controversial, but entertained them freely as
+finally discovering some path to the concrete and the unquestioned. He
+declared that only to superficial persons was skepticism the terminus of
+speculative deism. Let me also say this for my friend,--that his
+directing stimulus to action was neither ambition nor curiosity, but
+what, had it been directed to any recognized end, the world would have
+called a religious principle. He was never guilty of the shallow
+wickedness of seeking self-culture as an end; he sought the highest
+self-culture only as a state of more passionate yearning for
+regeneration.
+
+What need to tell how I was fascinated, mesmerized, into a humble
+companionship? how I became inspired with his own mighty belief in the
+feasibility of the object he strove to attain? We read together certain
+manuscripts of the elder Vannelle, in which, wrapt in a gorgeous
+symbolism, seemed dimly to approach a great truth, which, at times,
+could be faintly perceived, but never mastered. There were hints,
+apparently of the deepest significance, which, when the mind endeavored
+to grasp them, vanished like a vision.
+
+Day after day, almost night after night, for five months, I passed with
+Vannelle in the room I have described. And during that vivid period I
+knew an intellectual intoxication which seemed the pure ecstasy of
+spirit wholly delivered from the burden of the flesh. Vannelle talked
+like one inspired upon the higher problems of metaphysical research,
+showing, or appearing to show, in what sense the speculations of the
+philosophers were true, and in what sense absolutely false. We seemed to
+have cut ourselves adrift from the human race, and to look down upon it
+from a position whence its basest moral corruptions and most detestable
+oppressions marked the rhythm in a majestic poem. The infinite vagaries
+of crime, the unspeakable ecstasies of blessedness, were equally
+wholesome as equally full of Law. At times it seemed impossible that any
+words could so mould themselves as to give distinctness to the thought
+which flashed through our minds. At times a representation corresponding
+to what Vannelle so eloquently uttered seemed embodied in every phase of
+opinion man had known. But, alas, there were also periods of doubt and
+despair analogous to those which succeed physical intoxication. The
+grosser systems of antiquity were not only considered, but actually
+personated in our experience. Here it was necessary for us to penetrate
+into some of the darkest recesses of the human soul, and to test how
+nearly allied is that which exalts man to that which degrades him, how
+the noblest virtues plunge headlong into the maddest passions. Yet we
+learned to welcome these convulsions of Chaos and Old Night, as blindly
+bearing us onward towards our destined goal.
+
+--But enough of this. I would only faintly express how terribly real was
+the delusion (the world would so call it, and who am I to gainsay it?)
+which has overhung my earthly life.
+
+Let me tell in briefest words how the spell was broken,--partially
+broken. During those months of passionate exaltation, letters from
+friends once dear to me had been thrown aside half-read, and wholly
+valueless. On the eleventh of November I started,--as a black seal was
+to be broken. My uncle had suddenly died. The last instalment of his
+annuity had been paid, and my little sister, an orphan and penniless,
+was thrown upon me for education and support. Shame to me that I then
+hesitated! Yet it was some hours before I could persuade myself to put
+the letter into Vannelle's hand, and say that I must abandon him
+forever. Let me forget the bitter temptation. Of course my friend begged
+to provide for my sister from his own ample means, and even offered her
+an asylum at his house. I still retained sufficient sanity to perceive
+the wrong of bringing a young child to that dismal place to wither
+removed from all human companionship and sympathy. A spirit not in a
+condition to be sustained and elevated by the society of Herbert would
+be confused, and finally petrified. Had this refined probing and
+questioning deadened all sense of duty? Was this the end of my Absolute
+Philosophy, that the intellect should usurp the place of the conscience
+and the moral law? Shame to me that I could have paused to ask such
+questions! yet any claim but one tittle less urgent I should have
+bantered aside. I seemed to realize the torture described in the dream
+of Dante,--two souls struggling together in one frail body. I had been
+applauding good and condemning evil when it cost me nothing but the
+sentiment; but when the fiery test came, my purpose cracked and
+shrivelled before it. Yes, I conquered; but the scars that purchased the
+victory have ached through my life.
+
+There was but one calling wherein it seemed possible for me to earn my
+bread; for how could I descend to chaffer in the market, to trim and
+huckster through the world,--_I_, who had thought to condition the
+Spirit of the Universe? But there were metaphors faintly shadowing
+divine things, symbols adapted to the limitations of the popular mind,
+and with these I might do an honest work for the souls of men. _Honest?_
+Yes,--unless Augustine was a hypocrite, when he declared that he spoke
+of the Unseen as unity in three persons, less to say something than not
+to remain altogether silent. To a certain order of minds among the
+clergy this is the daily cross,--the necessity of maintaining a fixed
+position, and ever looking down from it to teach, instead of ever
+yearning upward to be taught.
+
+It is enough to say, that, supporting myself and my sister by
+school-teaching, I achieved such courses of reading as are supposed to
+qualify for enrolment among the liberal clergy of New England. Until the
+time when my sister left me by marriage I was settled at N----, on the
+Connecticut. Soon after this event, died old Dr. P---- of Foxden, and I
+received a call to his vacant parish. I knew that the sort of society to
+be found in that place would minister to my most urgent need. I craved
+some intellectual clanship which should never seek to rise to an equal
+spiritual companionship. For there was only one man to whom I might
+speak freely, and from him my path ever diverged. How far apart the
+years had led us! Sometimes there came a whisper that I had been
+snatched from the hand of Satan, killer of souls; sometimes my only
+opportunities of salvation seemed left in that sad, damp homestead. I
+could never return to him; I could never be wholly free from him. Ever
+was I controlled by a shadowy force which reached me from his abundant
+power. No occupation was so absorbing as to protect me from the invading
+presence of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The first Sunday of the present month brought the twentieth anniversary
+of the day that I parted from Vannelle. In the morning I had preached a
+written sermon on those solemn words of the Apostle, "Whatsoever is not
+of faith is sin." For the first time I shrank from the consciousness
+that the words uttered were true to me in a very different sense from
+that in which the congregation received them. I found it difficult to
+poise in tremulous balance between Truth and its available
+representation to common men. It is my custom to preach extemporaneously
+in the afternoon. Upon rising, after the introductory services, I could
+perceive that my pulse and breathing were accelerated. A certain
+numbness of the brain seemed pierced with convulsive, fugitive shocks.
+An inexplicable influence, a command for cerebral sympathy, seemed
+beating at my forehead. I turned the sacred pages before me, but could
+find nothing upon which to base my remarks. But to my lips would come
+incessantly a passage from Sir Thomas Browne. At last I gave it voice:--
+
+"There are, as in philosophy, so in divinity, sturdy doubts and
+boisterous objections wherewith the unhappiness of our knowledge too
+nearly acquainteth us. More of these no man hath known than myself;
+which I confess I conquered, not in martial attitude, but on my knees."
+
+An extraordinary impetus seemed imparted to my mental powers. Men have
+said that I spoke with a fluency and eloquence unknown to them before.
+Indeed, I was conscious of a capacity to receive and convey such
+portions of divine wisdom as corresponded to their needs. To speak in
+figure, my heavenly race was as if the Lord of Evil pursued my soul.
+
+Thoroughly exhausted by the effort, I returned to my study and threw
+myself upon a sofa. More fully than ever before, I entered that state
+where one far distant may make himself perceived and known. The occult
+power of foreknowing events, the delicate perception of forbidden
+things, worked their abnormal invigoration in the brain. I became
+conscious that a carriage miles off was rolling nearer and nearer; I
+knew that it would stop at my door. I waited, waited long into the
+night. One by one went out the scattered village-lights. Another
+consciousness of twenty years seemed compressed into those brilliant,
+bitter hours. My lamp flickered. I rose with effort and supplied oil; it
+would now burn till morning. The carriage came nearer. I knew that
+Vannelle was in it. At last the heavy rumble ceased at the door.
+
+A figure stood before me. The old fascination in the eyes; a soul
+burning with lofty enthusiasm looked through and kindled them. But the
+face,--it was ghastly, livid as the face of a leper: it was
+spectral,--blanched and dried with the white flames of his exalted
+vigils. Ah, black eyes, well may you shine in terrible triumph! The old
+idolatry this man demanded of me would not be repelled. I gazed upon my
+visitor as upon a phantom from another sphere, and knew no reckoning of
+time. His magnetism was upon me; I could only crouch into myself--and
+wait. At length the silence was broken.
+
+"Charles Clifton, teacher of the people, listen that you may be taught!
+For the last time I have come down into your world of passion and sense.
+The impulses with which you vainly strive and wrestle are behind me.
+Alone, alone, I have risen from the abysmal depths of personality. I
+have struggled fiercely. I have also conquered."
+
+The livid face showed no change. It suddenly came to me, that, by some
+voluntary disfigurement of his exquisite beauty of feature, this man had
+cut away the lusts for pleasure, fame, and influence. What woman would
+kiss that ghastly cheek? What sycophant could fawn and smirk in that
+chilly presence? The injunctions concerning the offending eye and hand
+Vannelle had interpreted literally.
+
+"I hold," he continued, "the noble prize of intellectual satisfaction
+seized by effort. Multiply the self-satisfactions of earth by infinity,
+and you may guess a little of the sublime contentment which wraps me
+round! Does the best stage-trick of your liberal clergy help them to
+anything but a plasticity of mind to be moulded into artistic forms of
+skepticism? How can you feel the delight of a definite, positive
+affirmation which accounts for and includes all creeds and lives of men?
+How can you come out from your partial dogmas to enter Truth and find it
+alone dogmatic and compulsive? Clifton, I pity you. I would rescue you
+from this haze of thought and feeling,--I, who have even now discarded
+Intelligence and enthroned Wisdom."
+
+"I hope to be pardoned," I said,--"the current of this life sets so in
+favor of Utility and the Practical; men long to be fed with
+sentiment,--why try to give them ideas?"
+
+"Fulfil, then, forever your little round of decencies and proprieties,"
+exclaimed Vannelle; "I judge you not. Perchance your weakness is the
+pardonable weakness of one who has done his best. You may be guiltless
+in failing to attain the strength, the glory, of a true conviction."
+
+"Is it too late?" I asked, faintly.
+
+"It is the question I must put to you," replied Herbert. "I bring you in
+this manuscript the result of my life,--the result of two lives. Here is
+written, as clearly as can be written in gross symbols of human
+language, that which may suggest the Absolute, the Alpha and Omega, the
+System, not humanly built upon hypothesis, but divinely founded upon
+Law."
+
+I knew that a package had been placed upon the table at my side.
+
+"If you can so far command the fragmentary life you lead as to give this
+manuscript the sober, searching thought which it invites, the truth may
+be brought to you. But if these twenty years have only filled you with
+the pride of inventing arguments and detecting analogies, if they have
+only given you the petty skill of a petty scholar, why then dally on
+with a tinsel variety of superficial attainments, and give others the
+blessed privilege you are not strong enough to accept."
+
+"Take it from me," I said. "It has haunted me too long. What you may
+have found, it is for your honor to promulgate."
+
+"The finding is enough for one life," replied Vannelle. "The spiritual
+manhood is indeed complete, but the shell which enclosed it totters
+towards earth. My responsibility in this matter is at an end: yours will
+now begin."
+
+A tremor ran through my frame as he spoke these words. A mystery rigid
+as Fate seemed to shackle me. Without seeing him go, I knew that
+Vannelle had left the room. Again was I conscious of the carriage-rumble
+growing fainter, fainter, fainter in the distance. A dream of passionate
+excitement, a phantasmagoria of old wishes, old hopes, of the life I
+might have led, flew before me. For a moment the energy of Vannelle
+seemed to have transfused itself through every fibre. An unquenchable
+thirst that I had never summoned struck into my brain. I seized the
+manuscript, and devoured page after page. Then I felt the approaches of
+a supreme despotism that might annihilate all I had been, all I hoped to
+be,--that might compel me to denounce all that I had taught, to hear all
+that was respectable and healthy in the world jeer at me as an impostor,
+an enthusiast, a madman. It was not that I was simply invited to come
+above the ordinary doctrines of the day, and stand supported and
+encouraged by a few advanced minds; but I was called to place myself
+where the most earnest souls--unless a second birth could be granted
+them--would scoff with the ignorance and intolerance of the mass.
+
+At last the gray light of morning shone upon me.
+
+One of my deacons, whistling sturdily, passed along the street. A
+physical emanation from his healthy vitality partially counteracted the
+influence of the night. Gathering up every muscle of my feeble will, I
+closed the manuscript forever. Hereditary imperfections of body and mind
+confine me to a sphere of reputable usefulness. If I have sinned in the
+past, I have also suffered. If, as I sometimes suspect, I have thrust
+from me the grandest opportunity ever offered to man, the loss through
+all eternity will be mine.
+
+In eight days I heard of the death of Herbert Vannelle.
+
+
+III.
+
+As the last words of his strange narration fell from Clifton's lips, he
+bowed his head and was greatly agitated. The vast theologic conception
+over which he had so long brooded, instead of lifting him on high, had
+crushed him to the earth. His moral consciousness had demanded a
+satisfaction which he lacked integrity of purpose to pursue and
+challenge. A fixed conviction of the dreariest pessimism would have been
+better for this man than the lofty uncertainty which had tortured his
+days; for in the belief that one may neither struggle nor aspire there
+is a certain practical drift. But how shall he do any good who bears
+about him a quick conscience, a skeptical understanding, sensitive
+religious affections, and a feeble will? Charles Clifton had neither the
+leisure, nor possibly the application, to follow the creeping advances
+of systematic knowledge. He had listened to a fatal persuasion, and at
+the same time had sought to satisfy contradictory principles of the
+human mind. The kindest thing I could do for him was soon perceived.
+
+"Reverend Sir," I said, "you must permit me to advise you. It is now six
+o'clock. In an hour the early train leaves for Foxden. You must take it
+and return home. Any further vacuum in your daily employment will
+produce a crushing pressure from without that might endanger reason
+itself. I solemnly promise to deposit this manuscript in the Mather
+Safe,--nay, I will not leave town until the President and Treasurer have
+met me this afternoon according to your agreement. I pledge you my honor
+that the parchment shall be consigned to its resting-place with every
+necessary formality."
+
+My companion gazed long upon vacancy before returning any answer. He
+strove to dispel the cloud-pageantry which had sailed above him in
+shapeless beauty. He walked up and down the chamber, paused, threw open
+the window, and looked upon the street below. I felt that every petty
+detail of man's daily craft struck outlines of painful vividness upon
+the morbid sensibility of his condition. Finally he spoke to this
+effect: --
+
+"A grief has been lessened in giving it words. My deepest and most
+solitary moments have been revealed to human sympathy, and the relief is
+great. It may be that I have been created to some wholesome end,--that
+some truth may shine before the world through what seems the failure of
+my life. I will return at once to the sphere of the senses: it is, as
+you say, all that is left me. Let who will inquire into the significance
+and purpose of the Universe; it is for me to work in the bondage of the
+flesh, to be the humble tool of the age in which my lot is cast."
+
+Yet it was not easy to induce the clergyman to commit to my care the
+conclusion of the enterprise which had brought him to town. His peculiar
+nervous temperament foretold a thousand accidents that might befall the
+precious legacy of his friend. It was only by addressing his reason in
+repeated arguments, and by solemnly asseverating my entire fidelity,
+that I induced him to yield.
+
+It was a gracious gift to be once more alone.
+
+I seemed awakened from a dream of pining exultation, of dark foreboding.
+Without acknowledging it to myself, I had been strangely wrought upon by
+what I had read and heard. As Clifton emerged from the magical influence
+of Vannelle, was it not concentrated upon me? The impulse to return to
+the perusal of the manuscript was almost irresistible. Yet it was
+evident, that, failing to receive as my very life what was there
+written, I should become hopelessly entangled in discrepancies and
+contradictions. A glance at the imminent peril sent me shuddering to my
+only safety.
+
+It has been mentioned that I had interested myself in some inquiries
+tending to modify the received understanding of a certain natural law.
+During my morning in the College Library I had collected the records of
+many facts, which, laboriously compared, might confirm the hypothesis I
+had conceived. I now braced myself to the task of tracing an order in
+these random observations. I was soon stimulated by perceiving that my
+statistics seemed to confirm the justice of the reasoning which at
+first roused my suspicion. More and more plainly did man's experience
+respond to the results I had dared to predict. Trivial circumstances,
+noted in remote times and disconnected places, pointed in one direction,
+and there beat the regular pulse of Nature.
+
+It is perhaps a little humiliating to mention, what I afterwards
+discovered, that the doctrine which I endeavored to reach had been
+already conceived and passed upon by a not very eminent scientist in one
+of the Western States. But at that time absorption in the search for
+attainable truth was necessary to my welfare; and, with very brief
+intervals for rest and refreshment, I continued my pursuit until the
+afternoon-hour for visiting the library.
+
+The President and Treasurer entered the building at five o'clock.
+
+For some minutes I had stood before the massive doors of the Mather
+Safe, wondering if any of its mysterious contents could be more singular
+than the consignment about to be made to its keeping.
+
+"Is Mr. Clifton of Foxden in the library?" inquired the President.
+
+"I am here to represent him," I replied. "He made a strange mistake in
+the day of appointment, and was compelled to leave town this morning.
+The package which he wished to deposit in the Mather Safe I hold in my
+hand."
+
+"_Lex Universalis Naturae_; THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE ABSOLUTE," exclaimed
+the Treasurer, reading the inscription upon the outer parchment. "Poh,
+poh! I thought that sort of philosophy had long ago been handed over to
+the limbo of fallacies."
+
+"By those who have neither feeling nor imagination enough to care for
+anything not transmutable into dollars, perhaps it has," I rejoined,
+somewhat tartly.
+
+"Come, come!" said the President, in his good-natured, rolling tones;
+"since the days of the great Jonathan, our New-England metaphysicians
+have generally been broken-down poets, and should be treated with the
+greatest tenderness. Some flighty minds will prefer dangerous trips to
+dream-land to the rigid demonstrations of figures; but the mass of our
+graduates accept the teaching of their Alma Mater, that only the
+mathematician has the right to investigate, and that of all philosophers
+only natural philosophers are competent instructors."
+
+"Yet, Sir," I said, "you will remember that the time was when your
+natural philosophers were persecuted as wizards by Church and State.
+Even the mathematician is defined by an old lexicographer to be '_Magus
+daemonum invocator_'; and I cannot forget that all that is of honor and
+respect to-day is but the actual of a once despised ideal."
+
+I really marvelled at my own audacity in presuming to question the words
+of this distinguished and excellent gentleman. Indeed, it was
+particularly surprising, because (if I knew myself) I precisely agreed
+with him. But there is a certain waywardness in my composition, which
+loves to puncture an inflated conventionality, even when I myself am
+most conventional.
+
+In the mean time the Treasurer, taking the President's key with his own,
+had opened the Safe. I looked in and beheld coffers of lead and oak,
+nooks and pigeon-holes covered and sealed with the College seal, little
+cells of glass which appeared to hold documents of the utmost
+importance, and, in short, whatever might best defy the injuries of
+time. The weighty book which registered the contents of the Safe was
+opened before me. I was told to write the number assigned to the
+manuscript, to describe its present condition, and to indicate its
+destination. This I carefully did, and was about to confide my charge to
+its long oblivion.
+
+"Stay!" said the President. "You have forgotten the mottoes! Here is
+only one; and it is our rule that every deposit in the Mather Safe be
+distinguished by three, in as many languages.
+
+  '_Alteri Saeculo_.'
+
+The selection is good, though it has already been adopted by a
+Massachusetts statesman. It is now for you to supply two others."
+
+Singular as it may appear, this sudden call to perform a trifling office
+which I had not anticipated, filled me with a conflict of emotions. In
+choosing another's words, I seemed to indorse or repudiate the strange
+matter with which they were to be associated. I thought of Vannelle's
+wondrous language, of Clifton's exhilaration, and of the vivid buoyancy
+with which my spirit had striven to rise. I even groped for some phrase
+which might hint what delicate aerial impressions had tended to condense
+the soul on the supreme point of spiritual ecstasy. But memory was a
+blank when I demanded words for this seeming-glorious fact in the
+experience of humanity. Success was made impossible by the very
+intensity of the effort to summon an appropriate message to be dropped
+over the abyss of Time. I was confident that there were many apt things
+which might be said, if I could come at them, as it were, sideways. In
+order that I might take them at this advantage, I snatched a letter from
+my pocket, and began to read. My eye was soon caught by the impression
+of a seal that I had once given my wife. It was a good [woman's] motto,
+I jestingly told her; and now it was returned to me at my sorest need.
+Six little words of the good Pascal,--
+
+  "_Le plus sur est de croire_."
+
+Something compelled me to write them, and a new freedom was with me when
+I had done so.
+
+"Make haste, make haste, for the prayer-bell is ringing!" cried the
+President "See, here is a copy of Plato's 'Phaedrus,'--a work which our
+vapory brethren are fond of quoting, generally at second-hand; perhaps
+you may pick out a sentence that will prophesy with sufficient
+ambiguity."
+
+But it was not Plato or his "Phaedrus" that then claimed my thoughts.
+There loomed a Rock graven with more august instruction than the sage of
+the Academy was privileged to communicate,--a Rock against which the
+heaving surface of human opinion had chafed and broken in vain. Tossed
+to and fro upon the tide of life, who has not sometimes listened to the
+wrangling voices which shouted, "Mystical Interpretation," "Absolute
+Fiction," "Huge Conglomerate of Myths"? Whose eye has never been caught
+by the sparkling tinsel of modern philosophies, with their Seers,
+Heroes, Missions, Developments, Insights, Principles of Nature,
+Clairvoyance, and Magnetic Currents? Happy those who are able to return
+to that one channel through which magnetic currents have indeed
+descended from an unseen sphere, and touched the noblest hearts! For
+there _is_ a certain mediation between the necessities and aspirations
+of man,--an assured deliverance from the gross and sordid surroundings
+of his earthly life. There came before me one simple period from a
+familiar Book. Most direct and confident is the solemn statement. I
+wrote it as the final motto.
+
+
+     "NOW THE SERPENT WAS MORE SUBTILE THAN ANY BEAST OF THE FIELD WHICH
+     THE LORD GOD HAD MADE."
+
+THE TERTIARY AGE, AND ITS CHARACTERISTIC ANIMALS.
+
+
+In entering upon the Tertiaries, we reach that geological age which,
+next to his own, has the deepest interest for man. The more striking
+scenes of animal life, hitherto confined chiefly to the ocean, are now
+on land; the extensive sheets of fresh water are filled with fishes of a
+comparatively modern character,--with Whitefish, Pickerel, Perch, Eels,
+etc.,--while the larger quadrupeds are introduced upon the continents so
+gradually prepared to receive them. The connection of events throughout
+the Tertiaries, considered as leading up to the coming of man, may be
+traced not only in the physical condition of the earth, and in the
+presence of the large terrestrial Mammalia, but also in the appearance
+of those groups of animals and plants which we naturally associate with
+the domestic and social existence of man. Cattle and Horses are first
+found in the middle Tertiaries; the grains, the Rosaceae, with their
+variety of fruits, the tropical fruit-trees, Oranges, Bananas, etc., the
+shade- and cluster-trees, so important to the comfort and shelter of
+man, are added to the vegetable world during these epochs. The fossil
+vegetation of the Tertiaries is, indeed, most interesting from this
+point of view, showing the gradual maturing and completion of those
+conditions most intimately associated with human life. The earth had
+already its seasons, its spring and summer, its autumn and winter, its
+seed-time and harvest, though neither sower nor reaper was there; the
+forests then, as now, dropped their thick carpet of leaves upon the
+ground in the autumn, and in many localities they remain where they
+originally fell, with a layer of soil between the successive layers of
+leaves,--a leafy chronology, as it were, by which we read the passage of
+the years which divided these deposits from each other. Where the leaves
+have fallen singly on a clayey soil favorable for receiving such
+impressions, they have daguerreotyped themselves with the most wonderful
+accuracy, and the Oaks, Poplars, Willows, Maples, Walnuts, Gum- and
+Cinnamon-trees, etc., of the Tertiaries are as well known to us as are
+those of our own time.
+
+It was an eventful day, not only for science, but for the world, when a
+Siberian fisherman chanced to observe a singular mound lying near the
+mouth of the River Lena, where it empties into the Arctic Ocean. During
+the warmer summer-weather, he noticed, that, as the snow gradually
+melted, this mound assumed a more distinct and prominent outline, and at
+length, on one side of it, where the heat of the sun was greatest, a
+dark body became exposed, which, when completely uncovered, proved to be
+that of an immense elephant, in so perfect a state of preservation that
+the dogs and wolves were attracted to it as by the smell of fresh meat,
+and came to feed upon it at night. The man knew little of the value of
+his discovery, but the story went abroad, and an Englishman travelling
+in Russia, being curious to verify it, visited the spot, and actually
+found the remains where they had been reported to lie, on the frozen
+shore of the Arctic Sea,--strange burial-place enough for an animal
+never known to exist out of tropical climates. Little beside the
+skeleton was left, though parts of the skin remained covered with hair,
+showing how perfect must have been the condition of the body when first
+exposed. The tusks had been sold by the fisherman; but Mr. Adams
+succeeded in recovering them; and collecting all the bones except those
+of one foot, which had been carried off by the wolves, he had them
+removed to St. Petersburg, where the skeleton now stands in the Imperial
+Museum. The inhabitants of Siberia seem to be familiar with this animal,
+which they designate by the name of _Mammoth_, while naturalists call
+it _Elephas primigenius_. The circumstance that they abound in the
+frozen drift of the great northern plain of Asia, and are occasionally
+exposed in consequence of the wearing of the large rivers traversing
+Siberia, has led to the superstition among the Tongouses, that the
+Mammoths live under ground, and die whenever, on coming to the surface,
+the sunlight falls upon them.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Had this been the only creature of the kind found so far from the
+countries to which elephants are now exclusively confined, it might have
+been believed that some strange accident had brought it to the spot
+where it was buried. But it was not long before similar remains were
+found in various parts of Europe,--in Russia, in Germany, in Spain, and
+in Italy. The latter were readily accounted for by the theory that they
+must be the remains of the Carthaginian elephants brought over by the
+armies of Hannibal, while it was suggested that the others might have
+been swept from India by some great flood, and stranded where they were
+found. It was Cuvier, entitled by his intimate acquaintance with the
+anatomy of living animals to an authoritative opinion in such matters,
+who first dared to assert that these remains belonged to no elephant of
+our period. He rested this belief upon structural evidence, and insisted
+that an Indian elephant, brought upon the waves of a flood to Siberia,
+would be an Indian elephant still, while all these remains differed in
+structure from any species existing at present. This statement aroused
+research in every direction, and the number of fossil Mammalia found
+within the next few years, and proved by comparison to be different from
+any living species, soon demonstrated the truth of his conclusion.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Shortly after the discovery of fossil elephants had opened this new path
+of investigation, some curious bones were found by some workmen in the
+quarries of Montmartre, near Paris, and brought to Cuvier for
+examination. Although few in number, and affording but very scanty
+_data_ for such a decision, he at once pronounced them to be the remains
+of some extinct animal preceding the present geological age. Here, then,
+at his very door, as it were, was a settlement of that old creation in
+which he could pursue the inquiry, already become so important in its
+bearings. It was not long before other bones of the same kind were
+found, though nothing as yet approaching an entire skeleton. However,
+with such means as he had, Cuvier began a comparison with all the living
+Mammalia,--with the human skeleton first, with Monkeys, with the larger
+Carnivora and Ruminants, then with all the smaller Mammalia, then with
+the Pachyderms; and here, for the first time, he began to find some
+resemblance. He satisfied himself that the animal must have belonged to
+the family of Pachyderms; and he then proceeded to analyze and compare
+all the living species, till he had collected ample evidence to show
+that the bones in question did not correspond with any species, and
+could not even be referred to any genus, now in existence. At length
+there was discovered at Montmartre an upper jaw of the same
+animal,--next a lower jaw, matching the upper one, and presently a whole
+head with a few backbones was brought to light. These were enough, with
+Cuvier's vast knowledge of animal structure, to give him a key to the
+whole skeleton. At about the same time, in the same locality, were found
+other bones and teeth also, differing from those first discovered, and
+yet equally unlike those of any living animal. The first evidently
+belonged to some stout and heavy animal, the others were more slender
+and of lighter build. From these fragments, ample evidence to him of his
+results, he drew the outlines of two animals: one which he called the
+Palaeotherium, (old animal,) a figure of which is given in the above
+wood-cut, and the other Anoplotherium, (animal without fangs). He
+presented these figures with an explanatory memoir at the Academy, and
+announced them as belonging to some creation preceding the present,
+since no such animals had ever existed in our own geological period.
+Such a statement was a revelation to the scientific world: some looked
+upon it with suspicion and distrust; others, who knew more of
+comparative anatomy, hailed it as introducing a new era in science; but
+it was not till complete specimens were actually found of animals
+corresponding perfectly to those figured and described by Cuvier, and
+proving beyond a doubt their actual existence in ancient times, that all
+united in wonder and admiration at the result obtained by him with such
+scanty means.
+
+It would seem that the family of Pachyderms was largely represented
+among the early Mammalia; for, since Cuvier named these species, a
+number of closely allied forms have been found in deposits belonging to
+the same epoch. Of course, the complete specimens are rare; but the
+fragments of such skeletons occur in abundance, showing that these
+old-world Pachyderms, resembling the Tapirs more than any other living
+representatives of the family, were very numerous in the lower
+Tertiaries.
+
+There is, however, one animal now in existence, forming one of those
+singular links before alluded to between the present and the past, of
+which I will say a few words here, though its relation is rather with a
+later group of Tertiary Pachyderms than with those described by Cuvier.
+On the coast of Florida there is an animal of very massive, clumsy
+build, long considered to be a Cetacean, but now recognized, by some
+naturalists at least, as belonging to the order of Pachyderms. In form
+it resembles the Cetaceans, though it has a fan-shaped tail, instead of
+the broad flapper of the Whales. It inhabits fresh waters or shoal
+waters, and is not so exclusively aquatic as the oceanic Cetaceans. Its
+most striking feature is the form of the lower jaw, which is bent
+downward, with the front teeth hanging from it. This animal is called
+the Manatee, or Sea-Cow. There are three species known to
+naturalists,--one in Tampa Bay, one in the Amazon, and one in Africa. In
+the Tertiary deposits of Germany there has been found an animal allied
+in some of its features to those described by Cuvier, but it has the
+crown of its teeth folded like the Tapir, while the lower jaw is turned
+down with a long tusk growing from it. This animal has been called the
+Dinotherium. A part of the head, showing the heavy jaws and the
+formidable tusk, is represented in the subjoined wood-cut.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Its hanging lower jaw, with the protruding tusk, corresponds perfectly
+to the formation of the lower jaw and teeth in the Manatee. Some
+resemblance of the Dinotherium to the Mastodon suggested a comparison
+with that animal as the next step in the investigation, when it was
+found that at the edge of the lower jaw of the latter there was a pit
+with a small projecting tooth, also corresponding exactly in its
+position to the tusk in the Dinotherium. The Elephant was now examined;
+and in him also a rudimentary tooth appeared in the lower jaw, not cut
+through, but placed in the same relation to the jaw and the other teeth
+as that of the Mastodon. It would seem, then, that the Manatee makes one
+in this series of Dinotherium, Mastodon, and Elephant, and represents
+the aquatic Pachyderms, occupying the same relation to the terrestrial
+Pachyderms as the Seals bear to the terrestrial Carnivora, and, like
+them, lowest in structure among their kind.
+
+The announcement of Cuvier's results stimulated research, and from this
+time forward Tertiary Mammalia became the subject of extensive and most
+important investigations among naturalists. The attention of collectors
+once drawn to these remains, they were found in such numbers that the
+wonder was how they had been so long hidden from the observation of men.
+They remind us chiefly of tropical animals; indeed, Tigers, Hyenas,
+Rhinoceroses, Hippopotamuses, Mastodons, and Elephants had their home in
+countries which now belong to the Cold Temperate Zone, showing that the
+climate in these latitudes was much milder then than it is at present.
+Bones of many of these animals were found in caverns in Germany, France,
+Italy, and England. Perhaps the story of Kirkdale Cave, where the first
+important discovery of this kind was made on English soil, may not be so
+well known to American readers as to forbid its repetition here.
+
+It was in the summer of 1821 that some workmen, employed in quarrying
+stone upon the slope of a limestone hill at Kirkdale, in Yorkshire, came
+accidentally upon the mouth of a cavern. Overgrown with grass and
+bushes, the mouth of this cave in the hill-side had been effectually
+closed against all intruders, and it was not strange that its existence
+had never been suspected. The hole was small, but large enough to admit
+a man on his hands and knees; and the workmen, creeping in through the
+opening, found that it led into a cavern, broad in some parts, but low
+throughout. There were only a few spots where a man could stand upright;
+but it was quite extensive, with branches opening out from it, some of
+which have not yet been explored. The whole floor was strewn, from one
+end to the other, with hundreds of bones, like a huge dog-kennel. The
+workmen wondered a little at their discovery, but, remembering that
+there had been a murrain among the cattle in this region some years
+before, they came to the conclusion that these must be the bones of
+cattle that had died in great numbers at that time; and, having so
+settled the matter to their own satisfaction, they took little heed to
+the bones, but threw many of them out on the road with the common
+limestone. Fortunately, a gentleman, living in the neighborhood, whose
+attention had been attracted to them, preserved them from destruction;
+and a few months after the discovery of the cave, Dr. Buckland, the
+great English geologist, visited Kirkdale, to examine its strange
+contents, which proved indeed stranger than any one had imagined; for
+many of these remains belonged to animals never before found in England.
+The bones of Hyenas, Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, and Hippopotamuses
+were mingled with those of Deer, Bears, Wolves, Foxes, and many smaller
+creatures. The bones were gnawed, and many were broken, evidently not by
+natural decay, but seemed to have been snapped violently apart. After
+the most complete investigation of the circumstances, Dr. Buckland
+convinced himself, and proved to the satisfaction of all scientific men,
+that the cave had been a den of Hyenas[A] at a time when they, as well
+as Tigers, Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., existed in England in as great
+numbers as they now do in the wildest parts of tropical Asia or Africa.
+The narrow entrance to the cave still retained the marks of grease and
+hair, such as one may see on the bars of a cage in a menagerie against
+which the imprisoned animals have been in the habit of rubbing
+themselves constantly, and there were marks of the same kind on the
+floor and walls.
+
+[Footnote A: Among the other facts showing that Kirkdale Cave had been
+the den of these animals, and not tenanted as their home by any of the
+other creatures whose remains occurred there, were the excrements of the
+Hyenas found in considerable quantity by Dr. Buckland, and identified as
+such by the keeper of a menagerie. Any one who may wish to read the
+whole history of Dr. Buckland's investigations of this matter, showing
+the patience and sagacity with which he collected and arranged the
+evidence, will find a full account of Kirkdale Cave and other caverns
+containing fossil bones in his "Reliquiae Diluvianae."]
+
+It was evident that the Hyenas were the lords of this ancient cavern,
+and the other animals their unwilling guests; for the remains of the
+latter were those which had been most gnawed, broken, and mangled; and
+the head of an enormous Hyena, with gigantic fangs found complete, bore
+ample evidence to their great size and power. Some of the animals, such
+as the Elephants, Rhinoceroses, etc., could not have been brought into
+the cave without being first killed and torn to pieces, for it is not
+large enough to admit them. But their gnawed and broken bones attest,
+nevertheless, that they were devoured like the rest; and probably the
+Hyenas then had the same propensity which characterizes those of our own
+time, to tear in pieces the body of any dead animal, and carry it to
+their den to feed upon it apart.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+While Kirkdale Cave was evidently the haunt of Hyenas chiefly, other
+caverns in Germany and France were tenanted in a similar manner by a
+gigantic species of Bear. Their remains, mingled with those of the
+animals on which they fed, have been found in great numbers in the
+Cavern of Gailenreuth, in Franconia. The subjoined wood-cut shows the
+head of this formidable beast, which must have exceeded in size any Bear
+now living. Indeed, although there were many smaller kinds, and the
+other types of the Animal Kingdom in the Tertiaries seem to approach
+very nearly both in size and general character their modern
+representatives, yet, on the whole, the earlier Mammalia were giants in
+comparison with those now living. The Mastodon and Mammoth, as compared
+with the modern Elephant, the Megatherium, as compared with the Sloths
+of present times, the Hyenas and Bears of the European caverns, and the
+fossil Elk of Ireland, by the side of which even the Moose of our
+Northern woods is belittled, are remarkable instances in proof of this.
+One cannot but be struck with the fact that this first representation of
+Mammalia, the very impersonation of brute force in power, size, and
+ferocity, immediately preceded the introduction of man, with whose
+creation intelligence and moral strength became the dominant influences
+on earth.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+Among these huge Tertiary Mammalia, one of those most common on the
+North-American continent seems to have been the Mastodon. The
+magnificent specimens preserved in this country are too well known to
+require description. The remains of the Rhinoceros occur also in the
+recent Tertiary deposits of North America, though as yet no perfect
+skeletons have been found. The Edentata, now confined to South America
+and the western coast of Africa, were also numerous in the Southern
+States during that time; their remains have been found as far north as
+the Salt Lick in Kentucky. But we must not judge of the Tertiary
+Edentata by any now known to us. The Sloths, the Armadillos, the
+Ant-Eaters, the Pangolins, are all animals of rather small size; but
+formerly they were represented by the gigantic Megatherium, the
+Megalonyx, and the Mylodon, some of which were larger than the Elephant,
+and others about the same size of the Rhinoceros or Hippopotamus. The
+subjoined wood-cut represents a Mylodon in the act of lifting himself
+against the trunk of a tree.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+They were clumsy brutes, and though their limbs were evidently built
+with reference to powerful movements, perhaps climbing, or at least
+rising on their hind quarters, the act of climbing with them cannot have
+had anything of the nimbleness or activity generally associated with it.
+On the contrary, they probably were barely able to support their huge
+bodies on their hind limbs, which are exceedingly massive, and on the
+stiff, heavy tail, while they dragged down with their front limbs the
+branches of the trees, and fed upon them at leisure. The Zooelogical
+Museum at Cambridge is indebted to the generosity of Mr. Joshua Bates
+for a very fine set of casts taken from the Megatherium in the British
+Museum. They are now mounted, and may be seen in one of the
+exhibition-rooms of the building. Large Reptiles, but very unlike those
+of the Cretaceous and Jurassic epochs, belonging chiefly to the types of
+Turtles, Crocodiles, Pythons, and Salamanders, existed during the
+Tertiary epochs. The wood-cut below represents a gigantic Salamander of
+the Tertiary deposits. It is a curious fact, illustrative of the
+ignorance of all anatomical science in those days, that, when the
+remains of this reptile (Audrias, as it is now called) were first
+discovered toward the close of the seventeenth century, they were
+described by old Professor Scheuchzer as the bones of an infant
+destroyed by the Deluge, and were actually preserved, not for their
+scientific value, but as precious relics of the Flood, and described in
+a separate pamphlet, entitled, "Homo Diluvii Testis." Among the Tertiary
+Reptiles the Turtles seem to have been a very prominent type, by their
+size as well as by their extensive distribution. Their remains have been
+found both in the far West and in the East. The fossil Turtles of
+Nebraska are well known to American naturalists; but the Oriental one
+exceeds them in size, and is, indeed, the most gigantic representative
+of the order known thus far. A man could stand under the arch of the
+shield of the old Himalayan Turtle preserved in the British Museum.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+It would carry me too far, were I to attempt to give anything more than
+the most cursory sketch of the animals of the Tertiary age; and, indeed,
+they are so well known, and have been so fully represented in
+text-books, that I fear some of my readers may think even now that I
+have dwelt too long upon them. Monkeys were unquestionably introduced
+upon earth before the close of the Tertiaries; some bones have been
+found in Southern France, and also on Mount Pentelicus in Greece, in the
+later Tertiary deposits; but these remains have not yet been collected
+in sufficient number to establish much more than the fact of their
+presence in the animal creation at that time. I do not offer any opinion
+respecting the fossil human bones so much discussed recently, because
+the evidence is at present too scanty to admit of any decisive judgment
+concerning them. It becomes, however, daily more probable that facts
+will force us sooner or later to admit that the creation of man lies far
+beyond any period yet assigned to it, and that a succession of human
+races, as of animals, have followed one another upon the earth. It may
+be the inestimable privilege of our young naturalists to solve this
+great problem, but the older men of our generation must be content to
+renounce this hope; we may have some prophetic vision of its fulfilment,
+we may look from afar into the land of promise, but we shall not enter
+in and possess it.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+[Illustration]
+
+The other great types of the Animal Kingdom are very fully represented
+in the Tertiaries, and in their general appearance they approach much
+more closely those of the present creation than of any previous epochs.
+Professor Heer has collected and described the Tertiary Insects in great
+number and variety; and the Butterflies, Bugs, Flies, Grasshoppers,
+Dragon-Flies, Beetles, etc., described in his volumes, would hardly be
+distinguished from our own, except by a practised entomologist. Among
+Crustacea, the Shrimp-like forms of the earlier geological epochs have
+become much less conspicuous, while Crabs and Lobsters are now the
+prominent representatives of the class. Among Mollusks, the Chambered
+Shells, hitherto so numerous, have become, as they now are, very few in
+comparison with the naked Cephalopods. The Nautili, however, resemble
+those now living in the Pacific Ocean; and some fragments of the
+Paper-Nautilus have been found, showing that this delicate shell was
+already in existence. There is one very peculiar type of this class,
+belonging to the Tertiaries, which should not be passed by unnoticed. It
+partakes of the character both of the Cretaceous Belemnites and of the
+living Cuttle-Fish, and is known as the Spirulirostra. Another very
+characteristic group among the Tertiary Shells is that of the
+Nummulites, formerly placed by naturalists in immediate proximity with
+the Ammonites, on account of their internal partitions. This is now
+admitted to have been an error; their position is not yet fully
+determined, but they certainly stand very low in the scale, and have no
+affinity whatever with the Cephalopods. The subjoined wood-cut
+represents one of these Shells, so numerous in the Tertiaries that large
+masses of rock consist of their remains. The Univalve Shells or
+Gasteropods of the Tertiaries embraced all the families now living,
+including land and fresh-water Shells as well as the marine
+representatives of the type. Some of the latter, as, for instance, the
+Cerithium, are accumulated in vast numbers. The limestone quarries out
+of which Paris is chiefly built consist wholly of these Shells. The
+fresh-water basins were filled with Helices, one of which is represented
+in the following wood-cut, with Planorbis, Limnaeus and other Shells
+resembling those now so common in all our lakes and rivers, and
+differing from the living ones only by slight specific characters. The
+Bivalves also have the same resemblance to the present ones, including
+fresh-water Mussels as well as the marine Clams and Oysters. Among
+Radiates, the higher Echini (Sea-Urchins) have become numerous, while
+the other Echinoderms of all families abound. Corals include, for the
+first time, the more highly organized Madrepores.
+
+[Illustration]
+
+In the Tertiaries we see the dawn of the present condition of things,
+not only in the character of the animals and plants, but in the height
+of the mountains and in the distribution of land and sea.
+
+Let us give a glance at the continents whose growth we have been
+following, and see what these more recent geological epochs have done
+for their completion. In Europe they have filled the basin in Central
+France, and converted all that region into dry land: they have filled
+also the channel between France and Spain; they have united Central
+Russia with the rest of Europe by the completion of Poland, and have
+greatly enlarged Austria and Turkey; they have completed the
+promontories of Italy and Greece, and have converted the inland sea at
+the foot of the Jura into the plain of Switzerland. But this fruitful
+period in the progress of the world, when the character of organic life
+was higher and the physical features of the earth more varied than ever
+before, was not without its storms and convulsions. The Pyrenees, the
+Apennines, the Alps, and with them the whole range of the Caucasus and
+Himalayas, were raised either immediately after the Cretaceous epoch, or
+in the course of the Tertiaries. Indeed, with this most significant
+passage in her history, Europe acquired all her essential characters.
+There remained, it is true, much to be done in what is called by
+geologists "modern times." The work of the artist is not yet finished
+when his statue is blocked out and the grand outline of his conception
+stands complete; and there still remained, after the earth was rescued
+from the water, after her framework of mountains was erected, after her
+soil was clothed with field and forest, processes by which her valleys
+were to be made more fruitful, her gulfs to be filled with the rich
+detritus poured into them by the rivers, her whole surface to be
+rendered more habitable for the higher races who were to possess it.
+
+We left America at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. A glance at the
+geological map will show the reader that during the Permian, Triassic,
+and Jurassic epochs little was added to the United States, though here
+and there deposits belonging to each of them crop out. In the Cretaceous
+epoch, however, large tracts of land were accumulated, chiefly in the
+South and West; and during the Tertiaries the continent was very nearly
+completed, leaving only a narrow gulf running up to the neighborhood of
+St. Louis to be filled by modern detritus, and the peninsula of Florida
+to be built by the industrious Coral-Workers of our own period. The age
+of the Alleghany chain is not yet positively determined, but it was
+probably raised at the close of the Carboniferous epoch. Up to that
+time, only the Laurentian Hills, the northern side of that mountainous
+triangle which now makes the skeleton, as it were, of the United States,
+existed. The upheaval of the Alleghanies added its eastern side, raising
+the central part of the continent so as to form a long slope from the
+base of the Alleghanies to the Pacific Ocean; but it was not until the
+Tertiary Age that the upheaval of the great chain at the West completed
+the triangle, and transformed that wide westerly slope into the
+Mississippi Valley, bounded on one side by the Alleghanies, and on the
+other by the Rocky Mountains.
+
+It is my belief, founded upon the tropical character of the Fauna, that
+a much milder climate then prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere
+than is now known to it. Some naturalists have supposed that the
+presence of the tropical Mammalia in the Northern Temperate Zone might
+be otherwise accounted for,--that they might have been endowed with
+warmer covering, with thicker hair or fur. But I think the simpler and
+more natural reason for their existence throughout the North is to be
+found in the difference of climate; and I am the more inclined to this
+opinion because the Tertiary animals generally, the Fishes, Shells,
+etc., in the same regions, are more closely allied in character to those
+now living in the Tropics than to those of the Temperate Zones. The
+Tertiary age may be called the geological summer; we shall see,
+hereafter, how abruptly it was brought to a close.
+
+One word more as to the relation of the Tertiary Mammalia to the
+creation which preceded them. I can only repeat here the argument used
+before: the huge quadrupeds characteristic of these epochs make their
+appearance suddenly, and the deposits containing them follow as
+immediately upon those of the Cretaceous epoch, in which no trace of
+them occurs, as do those of the Cretaceous upon those of the Jurassic
+epoch. I would remind the reader that in the central basin of France, in
+which Cuvier found his first Palaeotherium, and which afterwards proved
+to have been thickly settled by the early Mammalia, the deposits of the
+Jurassic, Cretaceous, and Tertiary epochs follow each other in
+immediate, direct, uninterrupted succession; that the same is true of
+other localities, in Germany, in Southern Europe, in England, where the
+most complete collections have been made from all these deposits; and
+there has never been brought to light a single fact leading us to
+suppose that any intermediate forms have ever existed through which more
+recent types have been developed out of older ones. For thirty years
+Geology has been gradually establishing, by evidence the fulness and
+accuracy of which are truly amazing, the regularity in the sequence of
+the geological formations, and distinguishing, with ever-increasing
+precision, the specific differences of the animals and plants contained
+in these accumulations of past ages. These results bear living testimony
+to the wonderful progress of the kindred sciences of Geology and
+Palaeontology in the last half-century; and the development-theory has
+but an insecure foundation so long as it attempts to strengthen itself
+by belittling the geological record, the assumed imperfection of which,
+in default of positive facts, has now become the favorite argument of
+its upholders.
+
+THE NEW SANGREAL.
+
+
+  "Show me the Sangreal, Lord! Show me Thy blood!
+  Thy body and Thy blood! Give me the Quest!
+  Lord, I am faint and tired; my soul is sick
+  Of all the falseness, all the little aims,
+  The weary vanities, the gasping joys,
+  The slow procession of this satiate world!
+  Dear Lord, I burn for Thee! Give me Thy Quest!
+  Down through the old reverberating time,
+  I see Thy knights in wonderful array
+  Go out to victory, like the solemn stars
+  Fighting in courses, with their conquering swords,
+  Their sad, fixed lips of purity and strength,
+  Their living glory, their majestic death.
+  Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  He lay upon a mountain's rocky crest,
+  So high, that all the glittering, misty world,
+  All summer's splendid tempests, lay below,
+  And sudden lightnings quivered at his feet;
+  So still, not any sound of silentness
+  Expressed the silence, nor the pallid sun
+  Burned on his eyelids; all alone and still,
+  Save for the prayer that struggled from his lips,
+  Broken with eager stress. Then he arose.
+  But always, down the hoary mountain-side,
+  Through whispering forests, by soft-rippled streams,
+  In clattering streets, or the great city's roar,
+  Still from his never sated soul went up,
+  "Give me Thy Quest! Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Through all the land there poured a trumpet's clang,
+  And when its silvery anger smote the air,
+  Men sprang to arms from every true man's home,
+  And followed to the field. He followed, too,--
+  All the mad blood of manhood in his veins,
+  All the fierce instincts of a warring race
+  Kindled like flame in every tingling limb,
+  And raging in his soul on fire with war.
+  He heard a thousand voices call him on:
+  Lips hot with anguish, shrieking their despair
+  From swamps and forests and the still bayous
+  That hide the wanderer, nor bewray his lair:
+  From fields and marshes where the tropic sun
+  Scorches a million laborers scourged to work;
+  From homes that are not homes; from mother-hearts
+  Torn from the infants lingering at their breasts;
+  From parted lovers, and from shuddering wives;
+  From men grown mad with whips and tyranny;
+  From all a country groaning in its chains.
+  Nor sleep, nor dream beguiled him any more;
+  He leaped to manhood in one torrid hour,
+  And armed, and sped to battle. Now no more
+  He cried or prayed,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  So in the front of deadly strife he stood;
+  The glorious thunder of the roaring guns,
+  The restless hurricane of screaming shells,
+  The quick, sharp singing of the rifle-balls,
+  The sudden clash of sabres, and the beat
+  Of rapid horse-hoofs galloping at charge,
+  Made a great chorus to his valorous soul,
+  The dreadful music of a grappling world,
+  That hurried him to fight. He turned the tide,
+  But fell upon its turning. Over him
+  Fluttered the starry flag, and fluttered on,
+  While he lay helpless on the trampled sward,
+  His hot life running scarlet from its source,
+  And all his soul in sudden quiet spent,
+  As still as on the silent mountain-top;
+  So still that from his quick-remembering heart
+  Burst that old cry,--"Show me the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+  Then a bright mist descended over him,
+  And in its central glory stood a shape,
+  Wounded, yet smiling. With His bleeding hands
+  Stretched toward that bleeding side, His eyes divine
+  Like a new dawn, thus softly spake the Lord:--
+  "The blood poured out for brothers is my blood;
+  The flesh for brothers broken is my flesh;
+  No more in golden chalices I dwell,
+  No longer in a vision, angel-borne:
+  Here is the Sangreal, here the Holy Quest.
+  Thy prayer is heard, thy soul is satisfied:
+  Come, my beloved! I am come for thee.
+  As first I broke the bread and poured the wine,
+  So have I broken thee and poured thy life,
+  So do I bless thee and give thanks for thee,
+  So do I bear thee in my wounded hands."
+  Smiling, He stooped, and kissed the tortured brow,
+  And over all its anguish stole a smile;
+  The blood-sealed lips unclosed; the dying breath
+  Sighed, like the rain-sound in a summer wind,
+  Sobbing, but sweet,--"I see the Sangreal, Lord!"
+
+THOMAS DE QUINCEY.
+
+
+In the notice of so memorable a man, even the briefest prelusive
+flourish seems uncalled for; and so indeed it would be, if by such means
+it were meant simply to justify the undertaking. In regard to any of the
+great powers in literature there exists already a prevailing interest,
+which cannot be presumed to slumber for one moment in any thinking
+mind.[A] By way of notification, there is no need of prelude. Yet there
+are occasions, as, for example, the entrances of kings, which absolutely
+demand the inaugural flourish of arms,--which, like the rosy flood of
+dawn, require to be ushered in by a train of twilight glories. And there
+are lives which proceed as by the movements of music,--which, must
+therefore be heralded by overtures: majestic steppings, heard in the
+background, compel us, through mere sympathy with their pomp of
+procession, to sound the note of preparation.
+
+[Footnote A: "_In any thinking mind_." Yet it must be confessed that
+there _does_ exist a woful ignorance or negligence concerning De Quincey
+in quarters from which better things might be expected. Misappreciation
+it cannot be called, where no trouble has been taken to estimate claims
+that needed only to be weighed to be truly valued. Up to this time,
+there has never been published in England a single essay on the life or
+the genius of De Quincey that indicated even a good acquaintance, on the
+part of the writer, with that author's works; and in such a case, of
+course, not much could be looked for in the way of just interpretation.
+Gilfillan did him gross injustice: indeed, from what he condescended to
+say of the man, it would be difficult to conjecture that a greater than
+Gilfillan was there. And, will the reader believe it? in Professor
+Craik's "English Literature"--a work of great excellence--the name of De
+Quincey is not mentioned! "Sam Johnson," says Craik, "was the last king
+that sat upon the throne of English prose literature." Let it be that
+Sam was a proper king; yet it is just as true that De Quincey was
+legitimately his successor. First, in the matter of time: Sam died in
+1784, and De Quincey was born in 1785, just in time to continue the
+regal line. What was it, again, that entitled Johnson to kingly honors?
+Was it learning? De Quincey was as erudite. Was it his style? There is
+no writer in the language who in that matter may look down on De
+Quincey.
+
+If there ever was a writer "damned with faint praise," it was De
+Quincey. Some stupid writer for the London "Athenaeum," for instance,
+dared to compliment the poor "opium-chewer" after the following
+style:--"He possessed taste, but _he lacked creative energy_; and his
+subtle and highly refined intellect was ingenious and acute rather than
+powerful." This reminds me of a criticism once passed upon Shakspeare by
+a mere pedagogue, to the effect that the great poet had considerable
+genius, but very little taste!]
+
+Else I should plunge _in medias res_ upon a sketch of De Quincey's life;
+were it not a rudeness amounting to downright profanity to omit the
+important ceremony of prelibation, and that at a banquet to which,
+implicitly, gods are invited. The reader will assuredly unite with me in
+all such courtesies,--
+
+  "Neu desint epulis rosae";
+
+particularly as the shade we deal with can be evoked only by peculiar
+incantations,--only the heralding of certain precise claims will this
+monarch listen to as the just _inferiae_, the fitting sacrifice or
+hecatomb of our homage.
+
+The key-note of preparation, the claim which preeminently should be set
+forth in advance, is this: that De Quincey was the prince of
+hierophants, or of pontifical hierarchs, as regards all those profound
+mysteries which from the beginning have swayed the human heart,
+sometimes through the light of angelic smiles lifting it upwards to an
+altitude just beneath the heavens, and sometimes shattering it, with the
+shock of quaking anguish, down to earth. As it was the function of the
+hierophant, in the Grecian mysteries, to show the sacred symbols as
+concrete incarnations of faith, so was it De Quincey's to reveal in open
+light the everlasting symbols, universally intelligible when once
+disclosed, which are folded in the involutions of dreams and of those
+meditations which most resemble dreams; and as to the manner of these
+revelations, no Roman _pontifex maximus_, were it even Caesar himself,
+could have rivalled their magisterial pomp.
+
+The peculiarities of his life all point in the direction here indicated.
+It was his remarkable experience which furnished him the key to certain
+secret recesses of human nature hitherto sealed up in darkness. Along
+that border-line by which the glimmerings of consciousness are, as by
+the thinnest, yet the most impervious veil, separated from the regions
+of the unexplored and the undefinable, De Quincey walked familiarly and
+with privileged eye and ear. Many a nebulous mass of hieroglyphically
+inscribed meanings did he--this Champollion, defying all human enigmas,
+this Herschel, or Lord Rosse, forever peering into the obscure chasms
+and yawning abysses of human astronomy--resolve into orderly
+constellations, that, once and for all, through his telescopic
+interpretation and enlargement, were rendered distinct and commensurable
+amongst men. The conditions of his power in this respect are
+psychologically inseparable from the remarkable conditions of his life,
+two of which are especially to be noticed. First, a ruling disposition
+towards meditation, constituting him, in the highest sense of the word,
+a poet. Secondly, the peculiar qualities which this singular mental
+constitution derived from his use of opium,--qualities which, although
+they did not increase, or even give direction to his meditative power,
+at least magnified it, both optically, as to its visual capacity, and
+creatively, as to its constructive faculty. These two conditions, each
+concurrent with the other in its ruling influence, impart to his life a
+degree of psychological interest which belongs to no other on record.
+Nor is this all. The reader knows how often a secondary interest will
+attach to the mightiest of conquerors or to the wisest of sovereigns,
+who is not merely in himself, and through his own deeds, magnificent,
+but whose glory is many times repeated and piled up by numerous
+reverberations of itself from a contemporary race of Titans. Thus,
+doubtless, Charles V., although himself King of Spain, Germany, the
+Netherlands, and a portion of Italy, gloried in the sublime empery of
+the Turkish Solyman, as by some subtile connection of fate sympathetic
+with his own. A secondary interest of this nature belongs to the life of
+De Quincey,--a life which inclosed, as an island, a whole period of
+English literature, one, too, which in activity and originality is
+unsurpassed by any other, including the names of Scott and Dickens, of
+Wordsworth, Coleridge, Lamb, and Southey, of Moore, Byron, Shelley, and
+Keats. His connection with very many of these was not simply that of
+coexistence, but also of familiar intercourse.
+
+Between De Quincey's life and his writings it is impossible that there
+should be any distraction of interest, so intimately are the two
+interwoven: in this case more so than in that of any known author.
+Particularly is this true of his more impassioned writings, which are a
+faithful rescript of his all-impassioned life. Hierophant we have called
+him,--the prince of hierophants,--having reference to the matter of his
+revelations; but in his _manner_, in his style of composition, he is
+something more than this: here he stands the _monarch_ amongst
+rhapsodists. In these writings are displayed the main peculiarities of
+his life and genius.
+
+But, besides these, there is a large section of his works, the aim of
+which is purely intellectual, where feeling is not at all involved; and
+surely there is not, in either ancient or modern literature, a section
+which, in the same amount of space, exhibits the same degree of intense
+activity on the part of the analytic understanding, applied to the
+illustration of truth or to the solution of vexed problems. This latter
+class is the more remarkable from its polar antithesis to the former;
+just as, in his life, it is a most remarkable characteristic of the man,
+that, rising above all other men through the rhapsodies of dreams, he
+should yet be able truly to say of himself that he had devoted a greater
+number of hours to intellectual pursuits than any other man whom he had
+seen, heard of, or read of. A wider range is thus exhibited, not of
+thought merely, but also of the possible modes of expressing thought,
+than is elsewhere to be found, even in writers the most skilled in
+rhetorical subtilty. The distance between these two opposites De Quincey
+does not traverse by violent leaps; he does not by some feat of
+legerdemain evanish from the fields of impassioned eloquence, where he
+is an unrivalled master, to appear forthwith in those of intellectual
+gymnastics, where, at least, he is not surpassed. He is familiar with
+every one of the intervening stages between the rhapsody and the
+demonstration,--between the loftiest reach of aspirant passion, from
+which, with reptile instinct, the understanding slinks downwards to the
+earth, and that fierce antagonism of naked thoughts, where the crested
+serpent "mounts and burns." His alchemy is infinite, combining light
+with warmth in all degrees,--in pathos, in humor,[A] in genial
+illumination. Let the reader, if he can, imagine Rousseau to have
+written "Dinner, Real and Reputed," or the paper on "The Essenes," in
+both of which great erudition is necessary, but in which erudition is as
+nothing when compared to the faculty of recombining into novel forms
+what previously had been so grouped as to be misunderstood, or had
+lacked just the one element necessary for introducing order. To have
+written these would have entitled Rousseau to a separate sceptre. Or,
+moving into a realm of art totally distinct from this, suppose him to
+have been the author of "Murder considered as one of the Fine Arts":
+that would mount a new plume in Rousseau's hat. But I happen just now to
+be reminded of another little paper, numbering about six pages,
+entitled, "On the Knocking at the Gate, in Macbeth": give him _that_,
+too. Why, the little French king is beginning to assume an imperial
+consequence! We beg the reader's pardon for indulging in comparisons of
+this nature, which are always disagreeable; but we have this excuse,
+that the two writers are often mentioned as on the same level, and with
+no appreciation of that unlimited range of power which belongs to De
+Quincey, but not at all to Rousseau. All but one of the trophies which
+we have hypothetically transferred to the Frenchman adorn a single
+volume out of twenty-two, in the Boston edition. Nor is this one
+imperial column adorned by these alone: there are, besides,--alas for
+Rousseau!--two other _spolia opima_ by which the French master is, in
+his own field, proved not the first, nor even the second,--_proximus,
+sed non secundus_,--so wide is the distance between De Quincey and _any_
+other antagonist. These two are the essays respectively entitled, "Joan
+of Arc," and "The English Mail-Coach."
+
+[Footnote A: Of De Quincey's humor, a friend once remarked to me, that
+it always reminded him of an elephant attempting to dance. Now, without
+any doubt, an elephant could dance after an elephantine fashion; but
+surely you would never catch him going through the movements of a jig or
+a Virginia "breakdown." He never lets you forget that he is an elephant.
+So with De Quincey. Levity is an element farthest removed from _his_
+humor; in fact, whenever he allows himself to indulge in humor at all,
+you may be sure that murder is going on somewhere in the vicinity, a
+tragedy of pretty frequent occurrence in De Quincey's works.
+
+There was sufficient humor in De Quincey to have endowed a dozen
+Aristophaneses. There was something, too, in its order, by which it
+resembled the gigantesque features of the old Greek master. I will
+illustrate my meaning by a single instance from each. In Aristophanes's
+"Clouds," Strepsiades is being initiated into the Socratic
+_Phrontisterium_, and in the course of the ceremony Socrates directs his
+pupil's attention to the moon for certain mysterious purposes. But the
+moon only reminds Strepsy of numerous imperturbable duns that storm
+about his ears with lunar exactness, (literally so, since the Greeks
+paid, or refused to pay, regularly on the last day of the month,)--and
+here it is that the opportunity is offered for a monstrous stroke of
+humor; for, at this crisis, Strepsy is made to exclaim, "Some magic is
+it, O Socrates, about the moon? Well! since you are up to that sort of
+thing, what do you say, now, to a spell by which I could snap the old
+monster out of her course for a generation or so?" Now for the parallel
+case from De Quincey. It is from his paper on "California," a
+politico-economical treatise. The author's object is to illustrate the
+fact that scarcity of gold is not due to its non-existence, but to the
+difficulty of obtaining it. "Emeralds and sapphires," says he, "are
+lying at this moment in a place which I could indicate, and no policeman
+is on duty in the whole neighborhood to hinder me or the reader from
+pocketing as many as we please. We are also at perfect liberty to pocket
+the anchors of Her Majesty's ship the Victoria, (one hundred and twenty
+guns,) and to sell them for old iron. Pocket them by all means, and I
+engage that the magistrate sitting at the Thames police-office will have
+too much respect for your powers to think of detaining you. If he does,
+your course is to pocket the police-office, and all which it inherits.
+The man that pockets an anchor may be a dangerous customer, but not a
+customer to be sneezed at." This strikes us as very similar to
+Strepsiades's bagging the moon.]
+
+It is impossible to be exhaustive upon such a subject as that which I
+have undertaken. I shall select, therefore, two prominent centres, about
+which the thoughts which I wish to present naturally revolve: De
+Quincey's childhood, and his opium-experiences.
+
+Thomas de Quincey--hierophant, rhapsodist, philosopher--was born at
+Greenhay, then a suburb of Manchester, in Lancashire County, England, on
+the 15th of August, 1785. According to his own account, the family of
+the De Quinceys was of Norwegian origin; and after its transfer to
+France, in connection with William the Norman, it received its
+territorial appellation from the village of Quincy, in Normandy. Thence,
+at the time of the Norman Invasion, it was transplanted to England,
+where, as afterwards in Scotland, it rose to the highest position, not
+merely in connection with a lordly title and princely estates, but
+chiefly on account of valuable services rendered to the State, and
+conferring preeminence in baronial privilege and consideration.
+
+So sensitive was De Quincey, even at the early age of fifteen, on the
+point of his descent, lest from his name he might be supposed of French
+extraction, that, even into the ears of George III. (that king having,
+in an accidental interview with him at Frogmore, suggested the
+possibility of his family having come to England at the time of the
+Huguenot exodus from France) he ventured to breathe the most earnest
+protest against any supposition of that nature, and boldly insisted upon
+his purely Norman blood,--blood that in the baronial wars had helped to
+establish the earliest basis of English constitutional liberty, and that
+had flowed from knightly veins in the wars of the Crusades. Robert De
+Quincey came into England with William the Conqueror, uniting with whose
+fortunes, he fared after the Conquest as a feudal baron, founding the
+line of Winchester; and that he was a baron of the first water is
+evident from the statement of Gerard Leigh,--that his armorial device
+was inscribed (and how inscribed, if not memorially and as a mark of
+eminent distinction?) on the stained glass in the old church of St.
+Paul's.
+
+And here it is proper that the reader's attention should be momentarily
+diverted to the American branch of this family, at the head of which
+stands the Hon. Josiah Quincy, (the aristocratic _De_ being omitted,)--a
+branch which fled from England in the early part of the seventeenth
+century, to avoid a strife which had then become too intense and fiery
+to admit of reconciliation, and which, indeed, a few years after their
+withdrawal, culminated in civil war. As illustrating the inevitableness
+of any great moral issue, no matter how vast the distance which at a
+critical moment we may put between it and ourselves,--as indicating how
+surely the Nemesis, seemingly avoided, but really only postponed, will
+continue to track our flying footsteps, even across the barren wastes of
+ocean, that ought, if anything could, to interpose an effectual barrier
+between us and all pursuers, and, having caught up with us in our
+fancied retreat, will precipitate upon our devoted heads its
+accumulated violence,--as demonstrating thus the melancholy persistence
+with which that ugly Sphinx who impersonates Justice in our human
+affairs doggedly insists on having her questions answered, and, coming
+by a circuitous route upon those who by good luck have escaped her
+direct path, through an incarnation of unusual terror compels her dread
+alternative,--it is interesting to note how this same family, separated
+by over seven generations from one political revolution, the momentous
+crisis of which was by them successfully evaded, are now, after an
+interval of unsound and hollow peace, compelled to witness the precise
+reiteration of that storm, in the very land to which they fled for
+refuge,--a reiteration that repeats, only on a different stage, and
+under an aggravation of horror as to minute details, not merely two
+antagonistic races corresponding on either side to those which met in
+battle on Marston Moor, but also interests far outweighing any that
+could possibly attach to a conflict between royalty and democracy.
+
+But the Earls of Winchester, in England, whatever may have been their
+prosperity during the nine or ten generations after the Conquest, came
+suddenly to an abrupt termination, abutting at length on some guilty
+traitor in the line, who, like a special Adam for the family, involved
+in his own ruin that prosperity which would else have continued to his
+successors. The dissevered fragments of the old feudal estate, however,
+remained in possession of separate members of the family, as De Quincey
+tells us, until the generation next preceding his own, when the last
+vestige slipped out of the hands of the one sole squire who, together
+with the name, held also some relic of its ancient belongings. But above
+the diluvial wreck of the Winchester estates there has arisen an estate
+far more royal and magnificent, and beneath a far-reaching bow of
+promise, sealed in magical security against a similar disaster. For just
+here, where every hold is lost upon the original heritage, is the family
+freshly grounded upon a second heritage,--one sublime in its order above
+that of all earthly possessions, one that is forever
+imperishable,--namely, the large domain which the gigantic intellect of
+Thomas De Quincey has absolved from aboriginal darkness and brought
+under distinct illumination for all time to come. These are the vast
+acres over which human pride must henceforth soar,--acres that have
+been, through the mighty realizations of human genius, built out into
+the mysterious ocean-depths of chaotic Nature, and that have in some
+measure bridged over infinite chasms in thought, and by just so far have
+extended the fluctuating boundaries of human empire. And for De Quincey
+himself, in view of that monumental structure which rises above the
+shattered wrecks of his poor, frail body, as above the mummied dust of
+Egyptian kings remain eternally the pyramids which they wrought in their
+lifetime, we find it impossible to cherish a single regret, that,
+possibly, by the treasonable slip of a predecessor, he may have been
+robbed of an earldom,--or even that, during a life which by some years
+overlapped the average allotment to humanity, and through which were
+daily accumulating the most splendid results in the very highest
+departments of philosophy and art, these accumulations nevertheless went
+on without any notable recognition from a court the most liberal in all
+Europe; no badge of outward knighthood coming to him through all these
+years, as formerly to Sir Thomas Browne for his subtile meditations, and
+to Sir William Hamilton for his philosophic speculations. The absence of
+such merely _nominal_ titles excites in us no deep regret; there is in
+them little that is monumental, and the pretty tinsel, with which they
+gild monuments already based on substantial worth, is easily, and
+without a sigh, exchanged for that everlasting sunshine reflected from
+the loving remembrances of human hearts.
+
+But at the same time that we so willingly dispense with these nominal
+conditions in the case of De Quincey,--though, assuredly, there was
+never a man upon earth whom these conditions, considered as aerial
+hieroglyphs of the most regal pomp and magnificence, would more
+consistently fit,--we cannot thus easily set aside those other outward
+conditions of affluence and respectability, which, by their presence or
+absence, so materially shape and mould the life, and particularly in its
+earliest tendencies and impulses,--in that season of immature
+preparation when the channels of habit are in the process of formation,
+and while yet a marvellous uncertainty hangs and broods over the
+beginnings of life, as over the infant rivulet yet dandled and tended by
+its mountain-nurses. For, although there are certain elements which
+rigidly and by a foreseen certainty determine its course, as, for
+instance, an extraordinary vantage-height of source, securing for it the
+force and swiftness of a torrent,--yet how shifting are the
+mountain-winds, chilling into frosty silence or quickening with Favonian
+warmth, and how shifting the flying clouds, which, whether marshalled in
+mimic tournament above it, or in the shock of a real conflict, forever
+sway its tender fountains! Thus, even in inexperienced childhood, do the
+scales of the individual destiny begin, favorably or unfavorably, to
+determine their future preponderations, by reason of influences merely
+material, and before, indeed, any sovereignty save a corporeal one (in
+conjunction with heavenly powers) is at all recognized in life. For, in
+this period, with which above all others we associate influences the
+most divine, "with trailing clouds of glory," those influences which are
+purely material are the most efficiently operative. Against the former,
+adult man, in whom reason is developed, _may_ battle, though ignobly,
+and, for himself, ruinously; and against the latter oftentimes he _must_
+struggle, to escape ignominious shipwreck. But the child, helpless alike
+for both these conflicts, is, through the very ignorance which shields
+him from all conscious guilt, bound over in the most impotent (though,
+because impotent and unconscious, the least humiliating) slavery to
+material circumstance,--a slavery which he cannot escape, and which,
+during the period of its absolutism, absorbs his very blood, bone, and
+nerve. To poverty, which the strong man resists, the child succumbs; on
+the other hand, that affluence of comfort, from which philosophy often
+weans the adult, wraps childhood about with a sheltering care; and
+fortunate indeed it is, if the mastery of Nature over us during our
+first years is thus a gentle dealing with us, fertilizing our powers
+with the rich juices of an earthly prosperity. And in this respect De
+Quincey _was_ eminently fortunate. The powers of heaven and of earth
+and--if we side with Milton and _other_ pagan mythologists in
+attributing the gift of wealth to some Plutonian dynasty--the dark
+powers _under_ the earth seem to have conjointly arrayed themselves in
+his behalf. Whatever storms were in the book of Fate written against his
+name they postponed till a far-off future, in the mean time granting him
+the happiest of all childhoods. Really of gentle blood, and thus gaining
+whatever substantial benefits in constitutional temperament and
+susceptibilities _could_ be thence derived, although lacking, as Pope
+also had lacked, the factitious circumstance and airy heralding of this
+distinction, he was, in addition to this, surrounded by elements of
+aristocratic refinement and luxury, and thus hedged in not merely
+against the assault, in any form, of pinching poverty, (as would be any
+one in tolerably comfortable circumstances,) but even against the most
+trivial hint of possible want,--against all necessity of limitation or
+retrenchment in any normal line of expenditure.
+
+He was the son of a merchant, who, at the early age of thirty-nine,
+died, leaving to his family--a wife and six children--an estate yielding
+annually an income of sixteen hundred pounds. And as at his father's
+death De Quincey was seven years old, we may reasonably infer, that,
+during this previous period, while his father was still living, and
+adding to this fixed a fluctuating income from his yearly gains, (which
+to a wholesale merchant of his standing were considerable,) the
+family-fortunes were even more auspicious, amounting to the yearly
+realization of between two and three thousand pounds, and that at a time
+when Napoleon had not as yet meddled with the financial affairs of
+Europe, nor by his intimidations caused even pounds and shillings to
+shrink into less worth and significance than they formerly had,--in view
+of which fact, if we are to charge Alexander the Great (as in a famous
+anecdote he was charged) with the crime of highway-robbery, as the
+"snapper-up of unconsidered trifles" in the way of crowns and a few
+dozen sceptres, what a heinous charge must be brought against this
+Corsican as universal pickpocket! This pecuniary depreciation De Quincey
+himself realized some years later, when, determining to quit school, he
+thought himself compelled[A] to cut off all communication with his
+guardians, and gave himself up to a Bohemian life among the Welsh
+mountains, wandering from one rustic valley to another with the most
+scanty means of support,--for just then the Allies were in full rig
+against France, and the shrinkage of guineas in our young wanderer's
+pocket became palpably evident in view of the increased price of his
+dinner.
+
+[Footnote A: But afterwards he discovered his mistake, and that it was
+only by the lack on his part of that frankness which the kindness of his
+guardians deserved that he had brought so much misery upon himself in
+after-life. His younger brother, Richard,--the Pink of the
+"Autobiographic Sketches,"--made the same mistake, a mistake which in
+his case was never rectified, but led to a life of perilous wanderings
+and adventures.]
+
+The time _did_ come at length when the full epos of a remarkable
+prosperity was closed up and sealed for De Quincey. But that was in the
+unseen future. To the child it was not permitted to look beyond the hazy
+lines that bounded his oasis of flowers into the fruitless waste abroad.
+Poverty, want, at least so great as to compel the daily exercise of his
+mind for mercenary ends, was stealthily advancing from the rear; but the
+sound of its stern steppings was wholly muffled by intervening years of
+luxurious opulence and ease.
+
+I dwell thus at length upon the aristocratic elegance of De Quincey's
+earliest surroundings, (which, coming at a later period, I should notice
+merely as an accident,) because, although not a _potential_ element,
+capable of producing or of adding one single iota to the essential
+character of genius, it is yet a negative condition--a _sine qua
+non_--to the displays of genius in certain directions and under certain
+aspects. By misfortune it is true that power may be intensified. So may
+it by the baptism of malice. But, given a certain degree of power, there
+still remains a question as to its _kind_. So deep is the sky: but of
+what _hue_, of what aspect? Wine is strong, and so is the crude alcohol
+but what the _mellowness_? And the blood in our veins, it is an infinite
+force: but of what temper? Is it warm, or is it cold? Does it minister
+to Moloch, or to Apollo? Will it shape the Madonna face, or the Medusa?
+Why, the simple fact that the rich blue sky over-arches this earth of
+ours, or that it is warm blood which flows in our veins, is sufficient
+to prove that no malignant Ahriman made the world. Just here the
+question is not, what increment or what momentum genius may receive from
+outward circumstances, but what coloring, what mood. Here it is that a
+Mozart differs from a Mendelssohn. The important difference which
+obtains, in this respect, between great powers in literature, otherwise
+cooerdinate, will receive illustration from a comparison between De
+Quincey and Byron. For both these writers were capable, in a degree
+rarely equalled in any literature, of reproducing, or rather, we should
+say, of reconstructing, the pomp of Nature and of human life. In this
+general office they stand together: both wear, in our eyes, the regal
+purple; both have caused to rise between earth and heaven miracles of
+grandeur, such as never Cheops wrought through his myriad slaves, or
+Solomon with his fabled ring. But in the final result, as in the whole
+_modus operandi_, of their architecture, they stand apart _toto coelo_.
+Byron builds a structure that repeats certain elements in Nature or
+humanity; but they are those elements only which are allied to gloom,
+for he builds in suspicion and distrust, and upon the basis of a
+cynicism that has been nurtured in his very flesh and blood from birth;
+he erects a Pisa-like tower which overhangs and threatens all human
+hopes and all that is beautiful in human love. Who else, save this
+archangelic intellect, shut out by a mighty shadow of eclipse from the
+bright hopes and warm affections of all sunny hearts, could have
+originated such a Pandemonian monster as the poem on "Darkness"? The
+most striking specimen of Byron's imaginative power, and nearly the most
+striking that has ever been produced, is the apostrophe to the sea, in
+"Childe Harold." But what is it in the sea which affects Lord Byron's
+susceptibilities to grandeur? Its destructiveness alone. And _how_? Is
+it through any high moral purpose or meaning that seems to sway the
+movements of destruction? No; it is only through the gloomy mystery of
+the ruin itself,--ruin revealed upon a scale so vast and under
+conditions of terror the most appalling,--ruin wrought under the
+semblance of an almighty passion for revenge directed against the human
+race. Thus, as an expression of the attitude which the sea maintains
+toward man, we have the following passage of AEschylian grandeur, but
+also of AEschylian gloom:--
+
+                                "Thou dost arise
+  And shake him from thee; the vile strength he wields
+  For earth's destruction thou dost all despise,
+  Spurning him from thy bosom to the skies,
+  And send'st him, shivering in thy _playful_ spray,
+  And howling, to his gods, where haply lies
+  His petty hope in some near port or bay,
+  And dashest him again to earth: there let him lay!"
+
+Who but this dark spirit, forever wooing the powers of darkness, and of
+darkness the most sullen, praying to Nemesis alone, could, with such
+lamentable lack of faith in the purity and soundness of human
+affections, have given utterance to a sentiment like this:--
+
+  "O love! no habitant of earth thou art,--
+  An _unseen_ seraph we believe in thee"?
+
+or the following:--
+
+  "Who loves, raves,--'tis youth's frenzy," etc.?
+
+and again:--
+
+  "Few--_none_--find what they love or could have loved,
+  Though accident, blind contact, and the strong
+  Necessity of loving having removed
+  Antipathies"?
+
+This, then, is the nearest approach to human love,--the removal of all
+antipathies! But even these
+
+                     "recur erelong,
+  Envenomed with irrevocable wrong:
+  And circumstance--that unspiritual god
+  And miscreator--makes and helps along
+  Our coming evils with a crutch-like rod,
+  Whose touch turns hope to dust,--the dust which all have trod."
+
+De Quincey, on the other hand, in whose heart there was laid no such
+hollow basis for infidelity toward the master-passions of humanity,
+repeated the pomps of joy or of sorrow, as evolved out of universal
+human nature, and as, through sunshine and tempest, typified in the
+outside world,--but never for one instant did he seek alliance, on the
+one side, with the shallow enthusiasm of the raving Bacchante, or, on
+the other, with the overshadowing despotism of gloom; nor can there be
+found on a single page of all his writings the slightest hint indicating
+even a latent sympathy with the power which builds only to crush, or
+with the intellect that denies, and that against the dearest objects of
+human faith fulminates its denials and shocking recantations solely for
+the purposes of scorn.
+
+Whence this marked difference? To account for it, we must needs trace
+back to the first haunts of childhood the steps of these two fugitives,
+each of whom has passed thence, the one into a desert _mirage_, teeming
+with processions of the gloomiest falsities in life, and the other--also
+into the desert, but where he is yet refreshed and solaced by an
+unshaken faith in the genial verities of life, though separated from
+them by irrecoverable miles of trackless wastes, and where, however
+apparently abandoned and desolate, he is yet ministered unto by angels,
+and no mimic fantasies are suffered to exercise upon his heart their
+overmastering seductions to
+
+  "Allure, or terrify, or undermine."
+
+Whether the days of childhood be our happiest days, is a question all by
+itself. But there can be no question as to the inevitable certainty with
+which the conditions of childhood, fortunate or unfortunate, determine
+the main temper and disposition of our lives. For it is underneath the
+multitude of fleeting proposals and conscious efforts, born of reason,
+and which, to one looking upon life from any superficial stand-point,
+seem to have all to do with its conduct, that there runs the
+undercurrent of disposition, which is born of Nature, which is cradled
+and nurtured with us in our infancy, which is itself a general choice,
+branching out into our specific choices of certain directions and aims
+among all opposite directions and aims, and which, although we rarely
+recognize its important functions, is in all cases the arbiter of our
+destiny. And in the very word _disposition_ is indicated the finality of
+its arbitraments as contrasted with all _proposition_.
+
+Now, with respect to this disposition: Nature furnishes its basis; but
+it is the external structure of circumstance, built up or building about
+childhood,--to shelter or imprison,--which, more than all else, gives it
+its determinate character; and though this outward structure may in
+after-life be thoroughly obliterated, or replaced by its
+opposite,--porcelain by clay, or clay by porcelain,--yet will the
+tendencies originally developed remain and hold a sway almost
+uninterrupted over life. And, generally, the happy influences that
+preside over the child may be reduced under three heads: first, a genial
+temperament,--one that naturally, and of its own motion, inclines toward
+a centre of peace and rest rather than toward the opposite centre of
+strife; secondly, profound domestic affections; and, thirdly, affluence,
+which, although of all three it is the most negative, the most material
+condition, is yet practically the most important, because of the degree
+in which it is necessary to the full and unlimited prosperity of the
+other two. For how frequent are the cases in which the happiest of
+temperaments are perverted by the necessities of toil, so burdensome to
+tender years, or in which corroding anxieties, weighing upon parents'
+hearts, check the free play of domestic love!--and in all cases where
+such limitations are present, even in the gentlest form, there must be a
+cramping up of the human organization and individuality somewhere; and
+everywhere, and under all circumstances, there must be sensibly felt the
+absence of that leisure which crowns and glorifies the affections of
+home, making them seem the most like summer sunshine, or rather like a
+sunshine which knows no season, which is an eternal presence in the
+soul.
+
+As regards all these three elements, De Quincey's childhood was
+prosperous; afterwards, vicissitudes came,--mighty changes capable of
+affecting all other transmutations, but thoroughly impotent to annul the
+inwrought grace of a pre-established beauty. On the other hand, Byron's
+childhood was, in all these elements, unfortunate. The sting left in his
+mother's heart by the faithless desertion of her husband, after the
+desolation of her fortunes, was forever inflicted upon him, and
+intensified by her fitful temper; and notwithstanding the change in his
+outward prospects which occurred afterwards, he was never able to lift
+himself out of the Trophonian cave into which his infancy had been
+thrust, any more than Vulcan could have cured that crooked gait of his,
+which dated from some vague infantile remembrances of having been
+rudely kicked out of heaven over its brazen battlements, one summer's
+day,--for that it was a summer's day we are certain from a line of
+"Paradise Lost," commemorating the tragic circumstance:--
+
+  "From morn till noon he fell, from noon till dewy eve--
+  _A summer's day_."
+
+And this allusion to Vulcan reminds us that Byron, in addition to all
+his other early mishaps, had also the identical clubfoot of the Lemnian
+god. Among the guardians over Byron's childhood was a demon, that,
+receiving an ample place in his victim's heart, stood demoniacally his
+ground through life, transmuting love to hate, and what might have been
+benefits to fatal snares. Over De Quincey's childhood, on the contrary,
+a strong angel guarded to withstand and thwart all threatened ruin,
+teaching him the gentle whisperings of faith and love in the darkest
+hours of life: an angel that built happy palaces, the beautiful images
+of which, and their echoed festivals, far outlasted the splendor of
+their material substance.
+
+"We,--the children of the house,--" says De Quincey, in his
+"Autobiographic Sketches," "stood, in fact, upon the very happiest tier
+in the social scaffolding for all good influences. The prayer of
+Agur--'Give me neither poverty nor riches'--was realized for us. That
+blessing we had, being neither too high nor too low. High enough we were
+to see models of good manners, of self-respect, and of simple dignity;
+obscure enough to be left in the sweetest of solitudes. Amply furnished
+with all the nobler benefits of wealth, with _extra_ means of health, of
+intellectual culture, and of elegant enjoyment, on the other hand we
+knew nothing of its social distinctions. Not depressed by the
+consciousness of privations too sordid, nor tempted into restlessness by
+privileges too aspiring, we had no motives for shame, we had none for
+pride. Grateful, also, to this hour I am, that, amidst luxuries in all
+things else, we were trained to a Spartan, simplicity of diet,--that we
+fared, in fact, very much less sumptuously than the servants. And if
+(after the manner of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius) I should return thanks
+to Providence for all the separate blessings of my early situation,
+these four I would single out as worthy of special commemoration: that I
+lived in a rural solitude; that this solitude was in England; that my
+infant feelings were moulded by the gentlest of sisters, and not by
+horrid pugilistic brothers; finally, that I and they were dutiful and
+loving members of a pure, holy, and magnificent church."
+
+Let the reader suppose a different case from that here presented. Let
+him suppose, for instance, that De Quincey, now arrived at the age of
+seven, and having now at least one "pugilistic brother" to torment his
+peace, could annul his own infancy, and in its place substitute that of
+one of the factory-boys of Manchester, of the same age, (and many such
+could be found,) among those with whom daily the military
+predispositions of this brother brought him into a disagreeable
+conflict. Instead of the pure air of outside Lancashire, let there be
+substituted the cotton-dust of the Lancashire mills. The contrast, even
+in thought, is painful. It is true that thus the irrepressible fires of
+human genius could not be quenched. Nay, through just these
+instrumentalities, oftentimes, is genius fostered. We need not the
+instance of Romulus and Remus, or of the Persian Cyrus, to prove that
+men have sometimes been nourished by bears or by she-wolves.
+Nevertheless, this is essentially a Roman nurture. The Greeks, on the
+contrary, laid their infant heroes on beds of violets,--if we may
+believe the Pindaric odes,--set over them a divine watch, and fed them
+with angels' food. And this Grecian nurture De Quincey had.
+
+And not the least important element of this nurture is that of perfect
+_leisure_. Through this it is that we pass from the outward to the
+subjective relations of De Quincey's childhood; for only in connection
+with these has the element just introduced any value, since leisure,
+which is the atmosphere, the breathing-place of genius, is also cap and
+bells for the fool. In relation to power, it is, like solitude, the open
+heaven through which the grandeurs of eternity flow into the penetralian
+recesses of the human heart, after that once the faculties of thought,
+or the sensibilities, have been powerfully awakened. Sensibility _had_
+been thus awakened in De Quincey, through grief occasioned by the loss
+of a sister, his favorite and familiar playmate,--a grief so profound,
+that he, somewhere, in speaking of it, anticipates the certainty of its
+presence in the hour of death; and thought, also, had been prematurely
+awakened, both under the influence of this overmastering pathos of
+sorrow, and because of his strong predisposition to meditation. Both the
+pathos and the meditative tendencies were increased by the halcyon peace
+of his childhood. In a memorial of the poet Schiller, he speaks of that
+childhood as the happiest, "of which the happiness has survived and
+expressed itself, not in distinct records, but in deep affection, in
+abiding love, and the hauntings of meditative power." His, at least, was
+the felicity of this echoless peace.
+
+In no memorial is it so absolutely requisite that a marked prominence
+should be given to its first section as in De Quincey's. This is a
+striking peculiarity in his life. If it were not so, I should have
+seriously transgressed in keeping the reader's attention so long upon a
+point which, aside from such peculiarity, would yield no sufficient, at
+least no proportionate value. But, in the treatment of any life, that
+cannot seem disproportionate which enters into it as an element only and
+just in that ratio of prominence with which it enters into the life
+itself, No stream can rise above the level of its source. No life, which
+lacks a prominent interest as to its beginnings, can ever, in its entire
+course, develop any distinguishing features of interest. This is true of
+any life; but it is true of De Quincey's above all others on record,
+that, through all its successive arches, ascending and descending, it
+repeats the original arch of childhood. Repeats,--but with what
+marvellous transformations! For hardly is its earliest section passed,
+when, for all its future course, it is masked by a mighty trouble. No
+longer does it flow along its natural path, and beneath the open sky,
+but, like the sacred Alpheus, runs
+
+  "Through caverns measureless to man,
+  Down to the sunless sea."
+
+Yet, amid the "briny tides" of that sea, amid turmoil and perplexity and
+the saddest of mysteries, it preserves its earliest gentleness, and its
+inward, noiseless peace, till once more it gushes up toward the sweet
+heaven through the Arethusan font of death. Easily, then, is it to be
+seen why De Quincey himself continually reverted, both in his conscious
+reminiscences and through the subconscious relapses of dreams, from a
+life clouded and disguised in its maturer years, to the unmasked purity
+of its earliest heaven. And what from the vast desert, what from the
+fatal wreck of life, was he to look back upon, for even an imaginary
+solace, if not upon the rich argosies that spread their happier sails
+above a calmer sea? We are forcibly reminded of the dream which
+Milton[A] gives to his Christ in the desert, hungry and tired:--
+
+                      "There he slept,
+  And dreamed, as appetite is wont to dream,
+  Of meats and drinks, Nature's refreshment sweet.
+  Him thought he by the brook of Cherith stood,
+  And saw the ravens with their horny beaks
+  Food to Elijah bringing even and morn,
+  Though ravenous, taught to abstain from what they brought:
+  He saw the prophet also, how he fled
+  Into the desert, and how there he slept
+  Under a juniper, then how, awaked,
+  He found his supper on the coals prepared,
+  And by the angel was bid rise and eat,
+  And eat the second time after repose,
+  The strength whereof sufficed him forty days;
+  Sometimes that with Elijah he partook,
+  Or as a guest with Daniel at his pulse."
+
+[Footnote A: _Paradise Regained_, Book II.]
+
+If the splendors of divinity could be so disguised by the severe
+necessities of the wilderness and of brutal hunger as to be thus
+solicited and baffled even in dreams,--if, by the lowest of mortal
+appetites, they could be so humiliated and eclipsed as to revel in the
+shadowy visions of merely human plenty,--then by how much more must the
+human heart, eclipsed at noon, revert, under the mask of sorrow and of
+dreams, to the virgin beauties of the dawn! with how much more violent
+revulsion must the weary, foot-sore traveller, lost in a waste of sands,
+be carried back through the gate of ivory or of horn to the dewy,
+flower-strewn fields of some far happier place and time!
+
+The transition from De Quincey's childhood to his opium-experiences is
+as natural, therefore, as from strophe to antistrophe in choral
+antiphonies. Henceforth, as the reader already understands, we are not
+permitted to look upon a simple, undisguised life, unless we draw aside
+a veil as impenetrable as that which covers the face of Isis or the
+poppy-sceptred Demeter. Under this _papaverian_ mask it is likely to be
+best known to the reader; for it is under the title of "Opium-Eater"
+that he is most generally recognized. It was through his
+Opium-Confessions, popular both as to matter and style, that he first
+conciliated and charmed the reading public,--and to such a degree that
+great expectations were awakened as to anything which afterwards he
+might write. This expectation heightens appreciation; and in this case
+it helped many a metaphysical dose down the voracious throat of the
+public, without its being aware of the nauseating potion, or
+experiencing any uncomfortable consequences. The flood of popularity
+produced by the Opium-Confessions among that large intellectual class of
+readers who, notwithstanding their mental capacity, yet insist upon the
+graces of composition and upon a subject of immediate and moving
+interest, was sufficient to float into a popular haven many a ship of
+heavier freightage, which might else have fallen short of port.
+
+The general interest which is manifested in De Quincey _personally_ is
+also very much due to the fact that he was an opium-eater, and an
+opium-eater willing to breathe into the public ear the peculiarities of
+his situation and its hidden mysteries, or "_suspiria de profundis_."
+This interest is partly of that vulgar sort which connects itself with
+all mysterious or abnormal phenomena in Nature or in the human mind,
+with a "What is it?" or a spiritual medium, and which is satisfied with
+a palpable exhibition of the novelty; and partly it is of a
+philosophical order, inquiring into the causes and modes of the abnormal
+development. It is rarely the case that human vision is especially or
+deliberately directed to the sun or the moon, except at the marvellous
+season of eclipse, when interest is awakened by the novelty of the
+appearance among the vulgar, and among philosophers by the unusual
+nature of the phenomenon, demanding explanation. Then it is that the
+people inhabiting this globe are excited by something which calls off
+their attention from terrestrial trifles to that which connects them
+with unknown worlds. If we had been born Hindoos, we should, at such
+times, exhibit our skittish tendencies, "shying" at the sun-eating
+monster with nervous apprehension, and should doubtless do our best,
+through horrid yells and tintinnabulations, towards getting up a
+tremendous counter-irritation upon the earth that should tell mightily
+on the nerves of this umbratilous tiger in the heavens. But since we are
+neither Hindoos nor Egyptians, nor skittish heathen of any sort, we take
+defiant attitudes and look through smoked glasses. At any rate, it is
+only at such times that we pay particular attentions, by way of
+courtesy, to foreign worlds. And of all the creatures of God which come
+within the circle of human knowledge or notice, which is it that may be
+said to enjoy the most continuous round of attentions, and to live in
+excitement the most nearly approaching to perpetual? It is the comet,
+which no sooner gets out of reach of _our_ flying compliments than she
+becomes the pet of Jupiter's magnificent citizens, or calls forth
+deprecating murmurs from our shy sister Venus, and Mercury, our milder
+brother, who, from all such mischiefs, creeps as nearly as possible
+under the paternal wings of the Sun. No one of these erratic visitors
+can remember the time when she was not making a stir somewhere in the
+universe, or when a cloudy night, intercepting her from vision, would
+not have been as surely execrated as are the colds which afflict _prima
+donnas_.
+
+Strikingly similar to our interest in these heavenly bodies is that
+which we manifest in mortal men. Here, too, it is the darkened orb or
+the eccentric comet that bespeaks especial notice. Judged by this
+interest, considered in its vulgar aspects, De Quincey would suffer
+gross injustice. Externally, and at one period of his life, I am certain
+that he had all the requisite qualifications for collecting a mob about
+him, and that, had he appeared in the streets of London after one of his
+long sojourns amongst the mountains, no unearthly wight of whatever
+description, no tattered lunatic or Botany-Bay convict, would have been
+able to vie with him in the picturesque _deshabille_ of the whole
+"turnout." Picture to yourself the scene. This "king of shreds and
+patches"--for, to the outward sense, he seems that now--has been "at
+large" for days, perhaps for two or three weeks; he has been
+unkennelled, and, among the lawless mountains, has felt no restraint
+upon his own lawlessness, however Cyclopean. Doubtless he has met with
+panthers and wolves, each one of whom will to its dying day retain
+impressive recollections of the wee monster, from which they fled as a
+trifle too uncanny even for them. As to his subsistence during these
+rambles, it would be very difficult to say how he managed that affair,
+at these, or indeed at any other times; and it may be that the prophetic
+limitation of a fast to forty days is now the urgent occasion of his
+return from vagabondism. One thing we may be sure of,--that he has made
+plentiful use of a certain magical drug hid away in his
+waistcoat-pocket. Like Wordsworth's brook, he has been wandering
+purposely and at his own sweet will, or rather where his feet have taken
+him; and he has laid him down to sleep wherever sleep may have chanced
+to find him.
+
+The result we have here, in this uncouth specimen of humanity, in the
+matted hair, the soiled garments, and the straggling gait; and what
+gives the finishing touch to this grotesque picture is his utter
+unconsciousness of the ludicrous features of his situation, as they
+appear to other eyes. Soon, it is true, he will go through an AEson-like
+rejuvenation; for, in a certain cottage, there are hearts that anxiously
+await his return, and hands ready to fulfil their oft-repeated duties in
+the way of refitting him out for another tramp. But, before this
+transformation is effected, let us suppose the case of his being set
+down in the streets of London, somewhere in the vicinity of Cheapside.
+What an eddying of stragglers about this new-found focus of attraction!
+what amazement, and curiosity to find him out, if, indeed, he be
+find-out-able, and not, as the unmistakable papaverian odor suggests,
+some Stygian bird, hailing from the farther side of Lethe. But, Stygian
+or not, neither Hermes nor Pan (nor Panic, his namesake) could muster
+such a rabble at his heels, supposing _him_ to appear on Cheapside!
+
+In his innermost sensibilities he would have shrunk from this vulgar
+notice as from pollution itself. It would be monstrous to conceive of
+him in such situations, except for the purpose of showing that he had
+very much in his outward habit that would readily attract such a notice.
+In the same light we are to regard some illustrations which J. Hill
+Burton has given in "The Book-Hunter" of similar features in his
+character, and which I take the liberty of introducing here; for,
+although they have appeared in "Blackwood," and more lately in a
+book-form, they are still unpublished to many of my readers.
+
+Thus, we have him pictured to us as he appeared at a dinner, "whereto he
+was seduced by the false pretence that he would there meet with one who
+entertained novel and anarchical views regarding the 'Golden Ass' of
+Apuleius. The festivities of the afternoon are far on, when a commotion
+is heard in the hall, as if some dog or other stray animal had forced
+its way in. The instinct of a friendly guest tells him of the arrival;
+he opens the door, and fetches in the little stranger. What can it be? A
+street-boy of some sort? His costume, in fact, is a boy's duffle
+great-coat, very threadbare, with a hole in it, and buttoned tight to
+the chin, where it meets the fragments of a party-colored belcher
+handkerchief; on his feet are list shoes, covered with snow, for it is a
+stormy winter night; and the trousers,--some one suggests that they are
+inner linen garments blackened with writing-ink, but that Papaverius
+never would have been at the trouble so to disguise them." De Quincey,
+led on by the current of his own thoughts,--though he was always too
+courteous to absorb the entire conversation,--talks on "till it is far
+into the night, and slight hints and suggestions are propagated about
+separation and home-going. The topic starts new ideas on the progress of
+civilization, the effect of habit on men in all ages, and the power of
+the domestic affections. Descending from generals to the specials, he
+could testify to the inconvenience of late hours: for was it not the
+other night, that, coming to what was, or what he believed to be, his
+own door, he knocked and knocked, but the old woman within either
+couldn't or wouldn't hear him, so he scrambled over a wall, and, having
+taken his repose in a furrow, was able to testify to the extreme
+unpleasantness of such a couch?"
+
+"Shall I try another sketch of him, when, travel-stained and foot-sore,
+he glided in on us one night like a shadow, the child by the fire gazing
+on him with round eyes of astonishment, and suggesting that he should
+get a penny and go home,--a proposal which he subjected to some
+philosophical criticism very far wide of its practical tenor. How far he
+had wandered since he had last refreshed himself, or even whether he had
+eaten food that day, were matters on which there was no getting
+articulate utterance from him. How that wearied, worn little body was to
+be refreshed was a difficult problem: soft food disagreed with him; the
+hard he could not eat. Suggestions pointed at length to the solution of
+that vegetable unguent to which he had given a sort of lustre, and it
+might be supposed that there were some fifty cases of acute toothache to
+be treated in the house that night. How many drops? Drops! nonsense! If
+the wineglasses of the establishment were not beyond the ordinary normal
+size, there was no risk,--and so the weary is at rest for a time.
+
+"At early morn, a triumphant cry of '_Eureka!_' calls me to his place of
+rest. With his unfailing instinct he has got at the books, and lugged a
+considerable heap of them around him. That one which specially claims
+his attention--my best-bound quarto--is spread upon a piece of
+bedroom-furniture readily at hand, and of sufficient height to let him
+pore over it as he lies recumbent on the floor, with only one article of
+attire to separate him from the condition in which Archimedes, according
+to the popular story, shouted the same triumphant cry. He had discovered
+a very remarkable anachronism in the commonly received histories of a
+very important period. As he expounded it, turning up his unearthly face
+from the book with an almost painful expression of grave eagerness, it
+occurred to me that I had seen something like the scene in Dutch
+paintings of the Temptation of St. Anthony."
+
+I cannot refrain from quoting from Mr. Burton one more example,
+illustrative of the fact that De Quincey, in money-matters, considered
+merely the immediate and pressing exigencies of the present. "He arrives
+very late at a friend's door, and on gaining admission,--a process in
+which he often endured impediments,--he represents, with his usual
+silver voice and measured rhetoric, the absolute necessity of his being
+then and there invested with a sum of money in the current coin of the
+realm,--the amount limited, from the nature of his necessities, which he
+very freely states, to seven shillings and sixpence. Discovering, or
+fancying he discovers, that his eloquence is likely to prove
+unproductive, he is fortunately reminded, that, should there be any
+difficulty in connection with security for the repayment of the loan, he
+is at that moment in possession of a document which he is prepared to
+deposit with the lender,--a document calculated, he cannot doubt, to
+remove any feeling of anxiety which the moat prudent person could
+experience in the circumstances. After a rummage in his pockets, which
+develops miscellaneous and varied, but as yet by no means valuable,
+possessions, he at last comes to the object of his search, a crumpled
+bit of paper, and spread it out,--a fifty-pound bank-note! All sums of
+money were measured by him through the common standard of immediate use;
+and, with more solemn pomp of diction than he applied to the bank-note,
+might he inform you, that, with the gentleman opposite, to whom he had
+hitherto been entirely a stranger, but who happened to be the nearest to
+him at the time when the exigency occurred to him, he had just succeeded
+in negotiating a loan of two-pence."
+
+These pictures, though true to certain phases of De Quincey's outward
+life, are yet far from personally representing him, even to the eye.
+They satisfy curiosity, and that is about all. As to the real character
+of the man, they are negative and unessential; they represent, indeed,
+his utter carelessness as to all that, like dress, may at pleasure be
+put on or off, but "the human child incarnate" is not thus brought
+before us. For, could we but once look upon his face in rest, then
+should we forget these inferior attributes; just as, looking upon the
+Memnonian statues, one forgets the horrid nicknames of "Shandy" and
+"Andy" which they have received from casual travellers, observing merely
+their grotesque features. Features of this latter sort "dislimn" and
+yield, as the writing on palimpsests, to the regal majesty of the divine
+countenance, which none can look upon and smile. Let me paint De
+Quincey's face as at this moment I seem to see it. It is wrinkled as
+with an Homeric antiquity; arid it is, and sallow, as parchment. Through
+a certain Bedouin-like conformation,--which, however, is idealized by
+the lofty, massive forehead, and by the prevailing subtilty of the
+general expression,--it seems fitted to desert solitudes; and in this
+respect it is truly Memnonian. In another respect, also, is it
+Memnonian,--that, whenever should rest upon its features the morning
+sunlight, we should surely await its responsive requiem or its trembling
+_jubilate_. By a sort of instinctive palmistry (applied, not to the
+hands, but to the face) we interpret symbols of ineffable sorrow and of
+ineffable peace. These, too, are Memnonian,--as is also that infinite
+distance which seems to interpose between its subtile meanings and the
+very possibility of interpretation. This air of remoteness, baffling the
+impertinent crowd not less effectually than the dust which has gathered
+for centuries about the heads of Sphinxes, is due partly to the deeply
+sunken eyes beneath the wrinkled, overarching forehead; partly it arises
+from that childlike simplicity and sweetness which lurk in gentle
+undulations of the features,--undulations as of happy wavelets set in
+motion ages since, and that cannot cease forever; but chiefly it is born
+of a dream-like, brooding eternity of speculation, which we can trace
+neither to the eye alone, nor to the mouth, but rather to the effect
+which both together produce in the countenance.
+
+This is the face which for more than half a century opium veiled to
+mortal eyes, and which refuses to reveal itself save through hints the
+most fugitive and impalpable. Here are draperies and involutions of
+mystery from which mere curiosity stands aloof. This is the head which
+we have loved, and which in our eyes wears a triple wreath of glory: the
+laurel for his Apollo-like art, the lotos-leaf for his impassioned
+dreams, and roses for his most gentle and loving nature.
+
+How much of that which glorified De Quincey was due to opium? Very
+little as to quality, but very much as to the degree and the peculiar
+manner in which original qualities and dispositions are developed, for
+here it is that the only field of influence open to abnormal agencies
+lies. Coleridge, as an opium-eater, is the only individual worthy of
+notice in the same connection. Had _he_ also confessed, it is uncertain
+what new revelations might have been made. It is certain that opium
+exercised a very potent effect upon him; for it was generally after his
+dose that his remarkable intellectual displays occurred. These displays
+were mostly confined to his conversations, which were usually
+long-winded metaphysical epics, evolving a continued series of
+abstractions and analyses, and, for their movement, depending upon a
+sort of poetic construction. A pity it is that we must content ourselves
+with empty descriptions of this nature. Here, doubtless, if anywhere,
+opium was an auxiliary to Coleridge. For a laudanum negus, whatever
+there may be about it that is pernicious, will, to a mind that is
+metaphysically predisposed, open up thoroughfares of thought which are
+raised above the level of the gross material, and which lead into the
+region of the shadowy. Show us the man who habitually carries pills of
+_any_ sort in his waistcoat-pocket, be they opium or whatever else, and
+we can assure you that that man is an _aerobat_,--that somehow, in one
+sense or another, he walks in the air above other men's heads. Whatever
+disturbs the healthful isolation of the nervous system is prosperous to
+metaphysics, because it attracts the mental attention to the organism
+through which thought is carried on. Numerous are the instances of men
+who would never have been heard of as thinkers or as reflective poets,
+if they had had sufficient muscular ballast to pull against their
+teeming brains. The consequence of the disproportion has been that the
+superfluous brain has exhaled, as a mere necessity.[A] If Tacitus had
+fared in any sort like his brother,--if there had been anything like an
+equitable division between them of muscle and brain, it is more than
+probable that we should have lost the illustrious historian.
+
+[Footnote A: It has been adduced as an important proof of the soul's
+immortality, that frequently, as physical power declines, the mind
+exhibits unusual activity. But the argument moves in the opposite
+direction. For of what sort is this unusual activity? That which results
+from unbalanced nerves; and the indications are that not only are the
+physical harmonies disturbed, but that the same disturbing cause has
+impaired the delicate adjustments of thought itself. Sometimes there is
+manifested, towards the near approach of death, an almost insane
+brilliancy; as, for instance, in the case of a noted theologian, who
+occupied the last minutes of his ebbing life with a very subtile
+mathematical discourse concerning the exceeding, the excruciating
+smallness of nothing divided into infinitesimal parts. And strange as it
+may seem, I once heard this identical instance cited as a triumphant
+vindication of the most sublime article of either Pagan or Christian
+faith. Nay, from the lips of a theological professor, the fragmentary
+glimmerings of a maniac's mind have been adduced for precisely the same
+purpose.]
+
+Coleridge was indolent from temperament, a disposition which was
+increased by opium. Hence De Quincey was of the opinion that it injured
+Coleridge's poetic faculties; which probably was the case, since in
+genuine poetry the mind is prominently realistic, its motions are all
+outward, and therefore excessive indolence must of necessity be fatal.
+
+De Quincey's physical system, on the contrary, seemed preconformed to
+opium: it demanded it, and would be satisfied with nothing else. No
+temptation so strong _could_ have been presented to Coleridge. De
+Quincey really craved the drug. His stomach was deranged, and was still
+suffering from the sad results of his youthful wanderings in London. It
+seems almost as if fate had compelled the unfortunate course into which
+he finally drifted. The craving first appeared in the shape of a horrid
+gnawing at the stomach; afterwards this indefinite yearning gave place
+to a specific one, which was unmistakable in its demands. Daily, like
+the daughters of the horse-leech, it cried, "Give, give!" Toward the
+last, this craving became, in De Quincey's solemn belief, an animal
+incarnate, and the opium-eater reasoned after the following fashion:--It
+is not I that eat, it is not I that am responsible either for the fact
+of eating or the amount; am I the keeper of this horrid monster's
+conscience? He even carried the conceit so far as to consider a portion
+of each meal as especially devoted to this insane stomachic reveller,
+just as a voracious Greek or Roman would have attributed no small part
+of his outrageous appetite to the gods, as eating by proxy through the
+mouths of mortals. This is almost as bad as the case reported of
+Stonewall Jackson, who, it is said, religiously believed that whatever
+he ate was, by some mysterious physiological economy, conveyed into his
+left leg.
+
+No less was De Quincey _psychologically_ preconformed to opium. The
+prodigious mental activity so early awakened in him counteracted the
+narcotic despotism of the drug, and made it a sort of ally. The reader
+sees from this how much depends upon predispositions as to the effect of
+opium. De Quincey himself says that the man whose daily talk is of oxen
+will pursue his bovine speculations into dreams. Opium originates
+nothing; but, given activity of a certain type and moving in a certain
+direction, and there will be perhaps through opium a multiplication of
+energies and velocities. What was De Quincey _without_ opium? is,
+therefore, the question preliminary to any proper estimate as to what in
+him was due to opium. This question has already been answered in the
+remarks made concerning his childhood. His meditative tendencies were
+especially noticed as most characteristic. There was besides this a
+natural leaning toward the mysterious,--the mysterious, I mean, as
+depending, not upon the terrible or ghostly, or upon anything which
+excites gloom or fear, but upon operations that are simply inscrutable
+as moving in darkness. Take, for example, the idea of a grand
+combination of human energies mustered together in secret, and operating
+through invisible agencies for the downfall of Christianity,--an idea
+which was conveyed to De Quincey in his childhood through the Abbe
+Baruel's book exposing such a general conspiracy was existing throughout
+Europe: this was the sort of mystery which arrested and engrossed his
+thoughts. Similar elements invested all secret societies with an awful
+grandeur in his conception. So, too, the complicated operations of great
+cities such as London, which he call the "Nation of London," where even
+Nature is mimicked, both in her strict regularity of results, and in the
+seeming unconsciousness of all her outward phases, hiding all meaning
+under the enigmas that defy solution. In order to this effect it was
+absolutely necessary that there should be not simply one mystery
+standing alone by itself, and striking in its portentous significance;
+there must have been more than this,--namely, a network of occult
+influences, a vast organization, wheeling in and out upon itself,
+gyrating in mystic cycles and epicycles, repeating over and again its
+dark omens, and displaying its insignia in a never-ending variety of
+shapes. To him intricacy the most perplexing was also the most inviting.
+It was this which lent an overwhelming interest to certain problems of
+history that presented the most labyrinthian mazes to be disinvolved:
+for the demon that was in him sought after hieroglyphics that by all
+others had been pronounced undecipherable; and not unfrequently it was
+to his eye that for the first time there seemed to be an unknown element
+that must be supplied. Such a problem was presented by the religious
+sect among the Hebrews entitled the _Essenes_. Admitting the character
+and functions of this sect to have been those generally ascribed to it
+no special importance. But the idea once having occurred to De Quincey
+that the general assumption was the farthest removed from the
+truth,--than there was an unknown _x_ in the problem, which could be
+satisfied by no such meagre hypothesis,--that, to meet the urgent
+demands of the case, there must be substituted for this Jewish sect an
+organization of no less importance than the Christian Church
+itself,--that this organization, thus suddenly brought to light, was
+one, moreover, that, from the most imperative necessity, veiled itself
+from all eyes, uttering its sublime articles of faith, and even its very
+name, to itself only in secret recesses of silence:--from the moment
+that all this was revealed to De Quincey, there was thenceforth no limit
+to his profound interest. Two separate essays he wrote on this
+subject,[A] of which he seemed never to tire.
+
+[Footnote A: Yet, marvellous as it may seem, he wrote the second without
+being distinctly conscious of having written a previous one. It was no
+uncommon thing for him to forget his own writings. In one case it is
+known that for a long time he persisted in disowning his production. His
+American editor--a fact which is little known--selected, from among the
+mass of periodical writings in the various magazines for which De
+Quincey wrote, those which, having no other clue to guide him than,
+their peculiar style, he judged to have proceeded from De Quincey's pen.
+In one instance,--as to the "Traditions of the Rabbins,"--after
+considerable examination, he still hesitated, and finally wrote to De
+Quincey, to set himself right. The latter disowned the essay: he had
+forgotten it. Mr. F., however, after another examination, concluded,
+that, notwithstanding De Quincey's denial of the fact, he _must_ have
+written it; accordingly, at his own risk, he published it. Afterwards De
+Quincey owned up, and ever after that referred all disputed cases of
+this nature to his Boston publishers.]
+
+"Klosterheim" is from beginning to end only the development, through
+regular stages, of an intricately involved mystery of this subtile
+nature. Oftentimes De Quincey deals with the horrid tragedy of murder;
+but the mere fact of a murder, however shocking, was not sufficient to
+arrest him. With the celebrated Williams murders, on the contrary, he
+was entirely taken up, since these proceeded in accordance with designs
+not traceable to the cursory glance, but which tasked the skill of a
+decipherer to interpret and reduce to harmony. Here were murders that
+revolved musically, that modulated themselves to master-principles, and
+that at every stage of progress sought alliance with the hidden
+mysteries of universal human nature. I know of no writer but De Quincey
+who invests mysteries of this tragic order with their appropriate
+drapery, so that they shall, to our imaginations, unfold the full
+measure of their capacities for striking awe into our hearts.
+
+This sort of mystery is always connected with dreams. They owe their
+very existence to darkness, which withdraws them from the material
+limitations of every-day life; they are shifted to an ideal
+_proscenium_; their _dramatis personae_, however familiar nominally, and
+however much derived from material suggestions, are yet in all their
+motions obedient to an alien centre as opposite as is possible to the
+ordinary centre about which the mere mechanism of life revolves. We
+should therefore expect beforehand in De Quincey an overruling tendency
+towards this remote architecture of dreams. The careful reader of his
+"Autobiographic Sketches" will remember, that, at the early age of
+seven, and before he knew of even the existence of opium, the least
+material hint which bordered on the shadowy was sufficient to lift him
+up into aerial structures, and to lead his infant footsteps amongst the
+clouds. Such hints, after his little sister's death, were furnished by
+certain expressions of the Litany, by pictures in the stained windows of
+the church, and by the tumult of the organ. Nor were the dreams thus
+introduced mere fantasies, irregular and inconsistent. Throughout, they
+were self-sustained and majestic.
+
+The natural effects of opium were concurrent with preexisting tendencies
+of De Quincey's mind. If, instead of having his restless intellect, he
+had been indolent,--if, instead of loving the mysterious, because it
+invited a Titanic energy to reduce its anarchy to order, he had loved it
+as simply dark or obscure,--if his natural subtilty of reflection had
+been less, or if he had been endowed with inferior powers in the sublime
+architecture of impassioned expression,--then might he as well have
+smoked a meerschaum, taken snuff or grog or any other stimulant, as to
+have gone out of his way for the more refined pleasures of opium.
+
+The reader will indulge us in a single philosophical distinction, at
+this point, by which we mean to classify the effects of opium under two
+heads: first, the _external_, and, secondly, the _internal_. Properly
+speaking, all the _positive_ effects of opium must be internal; for all
+its movements are inward in their direction, being refluent upon the
+focal centres of life. Thus, one of the most noticeable phenomena
+connected with opium-eating is the burden of life resting back upon the
+heart, which deliberately pulsates the moments of existence, as if the
+most momentous issues depended upon each separate throb. But this very
+reflux of sensibility will produce great effects at the surface, which
+are purely negative. This latter class of effects Homer has indicated
+with considerable accuracy, in the ninth Odyssey, (82-105,) where he
+notices specifically an air of carelessness regarding external
+things,--carelessness as to the mutual interchange of conversation by
+question and answer, and as to the ordinary pursuits of life as
+disturbing an inward peace. The same characteristics are more fully
+developed in Tennyson's "Lotos-Eaters":--
+
+  "Branches they bore of that enchanted stem,
+  Laden with flower and fruit, whereof they gave
+  To each; but whoso did receive of them,
+  And taste, to him the gushing of the wave,
+  Far, far away, did seem to mourn and rave
+  On alien shores; and if his fellows spake,
+  His voice was thin, as voices from the grave;
+  And deaf-asleep he seemed, yet all awake,
+  And music in his ears his beating heart did make."
+
+By causing the life to flow inward upon a more ideal centre, opium
+deepens the consciousness, and compels it to give testimony to processes
+and connections that in ordinary moments escape unrecorded. It is as if
+new materials were found for a history of the individual
+life,--materials which, like freshly discovered records, sound the
+deepest meanings of the present and measure the abysses of the past.
+Thus it is that the fugitive imagery of sense is interpreted as a scroll
+which hides infinite truths under the most fleeting of symbols,--symbols
+which are not sufficiently enduring to call them words, or even
+syllables of words, since the most trivial hint or whisper of them has
+hardly reached us ere they have perished. Thus it is that even the still
+more intangible record of memory, where are preserved only images and
+echoes of that which undeniably has perished, is revivified and
+enlarged.
+
+There is, then, in the opium-eater a most marked, a polar antithesis
+between his every-day life and the central manifestations of his genius.
+In the latter, there is beautiful order, as in a symphony of
+Beethoven's; but in the former, looked upon from without, all seems
+confusion. There is the same antithesis in every meditative mind; but
+here opium has heightened each part of the contrast. The more we admire
+the _en_centric harmonies of inwrapt power, the more do we find to draw
+forth laughter in the eccentricities of outward habit. The very same
+agencies which undisguised and unveiled the deep, divine heaven, masked
+the earth with desert sands; and De Quincey's outward life was thus
+masked and rendered abnormal, that the blue heaven in which he revelled
+might be infinitely exalted.
+
+Thus is it possible for the seemingly ludicrous to harmonize with
+transcendent sublimity. We smile at De Quincey's giving in "copy" on the
+generous margins of a splendid "Somnium Scipionis"; but the precious
+words, that might perhaps have found some more fit vehicle to the
+composer's eye, could have found no deeper place in our hearts. We look
+at the hatless sleeper among the mountains: his face seems utterly blank
+and meaningless, and to all intents and purposes he seems as good as
+dead; but let us ascend with him in his dreams, and we shall soon forget
+that under God's heavens there exists mortality or the commonplace uses
+of mortality.
+
+As we ascend from grotesque features to such as are more intellectual,
+that peculiarity of his character which most strikes us is his
+inimitable courtesy. Mr. F.,--to whom I am indebted for the most novel
+and interesting portions of this memorial,--from his own personal
+interviews with the man, among many other things, retains this chiefly
+in remembrance,--that De Quincey was the perfectest gentleman he had
+ever seen.
+
+I take the liberty here of particularizing somewhat in regard to one
+visit which this friend of De Quincey's paid him, particularly as it
+introduces us to the man towards the last of his life (1851). Mr. F.,
+curious as it may seem, found but one person in Edinburgh who could
+inform him definitely as to De Quincey's whereabouts. In return to a
+note, giving De Quincey information of his arrival, etc., the latter
+replies in a letter which is very characteristic, and which may well be
+highly prized, so rarely was it that any friend was able to obtain from
+him such a memento. The style, perhaps, is as familiar as it was ever
+his habit to indulge in; and it shows how impossible it was for him,
+even on the most temporary summons, to dispense with his usual
+regularity of expression or with any logical nicety of method. The
+letter runs thus:--
+
+
+     _Thursday evening, August 26, 1851_.
+
+     "My dear Sir,--The acccompanying billet from my daughter, short at
+     any rate under the pressure of instant engagements, has been cut
+     shorter by a sudden and very distressing headache; I, therefore,
+     who (from a peculiar nervousness connected with the act of writing)
+     so rarely attempt to discharge my own debts in the letter-writing
+     department of life, find myself unaccountably, I might say
+     mysteriously, engaged in the knight-errantry of undertaking for
+     other people's. Wretched bankrupt that I am, with an absolute
+     refusal on the part of the Commissioner to grant me a certificate
+     of the lowest class, suddenly, and by a necessity not to be evaded,
+     I am affecting the large bounties of supererogation. I appear to be
+     vaporing in a spirit of vainglory; and yet it is under the mere
+     coercion of '_salva necessitas_' that I am surprised into this
+     unparalleled instance of activity. Do you walk? That is, do you
+     like walking for four hours '_on end_'--(which is our archaic
+     expression for _continuously_)? If I knew _that_, I would arrange
+     accordingly for meeting you. The case as to distance is this. The
+     Dalkeith railway, from the Waverley station, brings you to Esk
+     Bank. That is its nearest approach,--its _perihelion_, in relation
+     to ourselves; and it is precisely two and three-quarters miles
+     distant from _Mavis Bush_,--the name of our cottage. Close to us,
+     and the most noticeable object for guiding your inquiries, is _Mr.
+     Annandale's Paper-Mills_.
+
+     "Now, then, accordingly as you direct my motions, I will--rain
+     being supposed absent--join you at your hotel in Edinburgh any time
+     after 11 A.M. and walk out the whole distance, (seven miles from
+     the Scott monument,) or else I will meet you at Esk Bank; or, if
+     you prefer coming out in a carriage, I will await your coming here
+     in that state of motionless repose which best befits a philosopher.
+     Excuse my levity; and believe that with sincere pleasure we shall
+     receive your obliging visit.
+
+     "Ever your faithful servant,
+
+     "THOMAS DE QUINCEY."
+
+In order to appreciate the physical powers of him who proposed a walk of
+the distance indicated in the letter, we must remember that he was then
+just sixty-six years _plus_ ten days old. He was now living with his
+daughters, in the utmost simplicity. On his arrival, Mr. F. found De
+Quincey awaiting him at the door of his cottage,--a short man, with
+small head, and eyes that were absolutely indescribable as human
+features, with a certain boyish awkwardness of manner, but with the most
+urban-like courtesy and affability. From noon till dark, the time is
+spent in conversation, continued, various, and eloquent. What a presence
+is there in this humble, unpretending cottage! And as the stream of
+Olympian sweetness moves on, now in laughing ripples, and again in a
+solemn majestic flood, what a past do we bring before ourselves! what a
+present! For this is he that talked with Coleridge, that was the friend
+of Wilson,--and--what furnishes a more sublime suggestion--this is he
+that knows by heart the mountain-fells and the mysterious recesses of
+hidden valleys for miles around; and we think, if he could convey us
+from the haunts of this Lasswade of his old age to those which glorified
+the Grasmere of his youth, what new chords he might touch,--of human
+love, for there it was that the sweetness of his wedded life had been
+buried and embalmed in a thousand outward memorials of happy hours long
+gone by,--and of human sadness, for there it was that he had experienced
+the reversal of every outward fortune, and the alienations of
+friendships which he most highly valued. But the remembrances of
+Grasmere and of youth seem now to have been removed as into some other
+life: the man of a past generation walks alone, and amid other scenes.
+And yonder is the study in which he spends hours that are most
+holy,--hours consecrated to what specific employments is known to none,
+since across its threshold no feet save his have passed for years. Now
+and then some grand intellectual effort proceeds forth from its sacred
+precincts; but that only happens when pecuniary necessities compel the
+exertion. How is it that the time not thus occupied is spent?--in what
+remembrances, in what hidden thoughts, what passing dreams?
+
+As it grows dark, De Quincey's guest, having spent most precious moments
+which he feels ought never to cease, signifies the necessity of his
+taking his departure. To take leave of this strange man, however, is not
+so easy a matter as one might rashly suppose. There is a genius of
+procrastination about him. Was he ever known to make his appearance at
+any dinner in season, or indeed at any entertainment? Yes, he did
+_once_, at the recital of a Greek tragedy on the Edinburgh stage; but
+that happened through a trick played on him by an acquaintance, who, to
+secure some remote chance of his seeing the performance, told him that
+the doors opened at half-past six, whereas, in fact, they opened at
+seven. How preposterous, then, to suppose that he would let an
+opportunity pass for procrastinating other people, and putting all
+manner of snares about their feet! It is dangerous with such a man to
+hint of late hours; for just that lateness is to him the very jewel of
+the thing. In mentioning the circumstance, you only suggest to him the
+infinite pleasure connected with the circumstance. Perhaps he will
+deliberately set to work to prove that candle-light is the one
+absolutely indispensable condition to genial intercourse,--which would
+doubtless suggest a great contrast, in that respect, between the ancient
+and modern economy,--and where, then, _is_ there to be an end? All
+attempts to extricate yourself by unravelling the net which is being
+woven about you are hopelessly vain; you cannot keep pace with _him_.
+The thought of delay enchants him, and he dallies with it, as a child
+with a pet delicacy. Thus, he is at the house of a friend; it storms,
+and a reasonable excuse is furnished for his favorite experiment. The
+consequence is, that, once started in this direction, the delay is
+continued for a year. Late hours were particularly potent to "draw out"
+De Quincey; and, understanding this, Professor Wilson used to protract
+his dinners almost into the morning, a tribute which De Quincey
+doubtless appreciated.
+
+So that it is better to be on the sly about saying "Good bye" to this
+host of yours. When, however, it was absolutely necessary to be gone, De
+Quincey forthwith insisted on accompanying his guest. What, then, was to
+be done? Ominously the sky looked down upon them, momently threatening a
+storm. No resource was there but to give the man his way, and accept his
+offer of companionship for a short distance, painfully conscious though
+you are of the fact that every step taken forwards must, during this
+same August night, be retraced by the weary-looking old man at your
+side, who now lacks barely four years of life's average allotment. Thus
+you move on: and the heavens move on their hurricanes by nearer
+approaches, warnings of which propagate themselves all around you in
+every sound of the wind and every rustle of the forest-leaves.
+Meanwhile, there is no rest to the silvery vocal utterances of your
+companion: every object by the way furnishes a ready topic for
+conversation. Just now you are passing an antiquated old mansion, and
+your guide stops to tell you that in this house may have been committed
+most strange and horrible murders, that, in spite of the tempestuous
+mutterings heard on every side, ought now and here to be specially and
+solemnly memorialized by human relation. A woman passes by, a perfect
+stranger, but De Quincey steps entirely out of the road to one side,
+takes off his hat, and in the most reverent attitude awaits her
+passage,--and you, poor astonished mortal that you are, lest you should
+yourself seem scandalously uncourteous, are compelled to do likewise. In
+this incident we see what infinite majesty invested the very semblance
+of humanity in De Quincey's thoughts: and something of the same
+remarkable courtesy was manifested by Rufus Choate, who uniformly
+addressed the lowest of women in the witness-box as if they were every
+one of them worthy of the most queenly consideration.
+
+Onward you proceed,--one,--two,--three miles, and you can endure no
+longer the thought that your friend shall go on farther, increasing thus
+at every step the burden of his journey back. You have, reached the Esk
+bank and the bridge which spans the stream; the storm so long threatened
+begins now to let loose its rage against all unsheltered mortals. Here
+De Quincey consents to bid you good-bye,--to you his last good-bye; and
+as here you leave him, so is he forever enshrined in your thoughts,
+together with the primal mysteries of night and of storm, of human
+tragedies and of the most pathetic human tenderness.
+
+But this paper, already sufficiently prolonged, should draw to a close.
+It is a source of great mortification to me that I cannot find some very
+disagreeable thing to say of De Quincey, merely as a matter of poetic
+justice; for assuredly he was in the habit of saying all the malicious
+things _he_ could about his friends. If there was anything in a man's
+face or shape particularly uncouth, you might trust De Quincey for
+noticing _that_. Even Wordsworth he could not let off without a Parthian
+shot at his awkward legs and round shoulders; Dr. Parr he rated soundly
+on his mean proportions; and one of the most unfortunate things which
+ever happened to the Russian Emperor Alexander was to have been seen in
+London by De Quincey, who, even amid the festivities of national and
+international congratulation on the fall of Napoleon, could not forget
+that this imperial ally was a very commonplace-looking fellow, after
+all. But, in regard to physical superiority, De Quincey lived in a glass
+house too fragile to admit of his throwing many stones at his neighbors.
+The very fact that he valued personal appearance at so low an estimate
+takes away the sting from his remarks on the deformities of other
+people: he could not have meant any detraction, but simply wished to
+present a perfect picture to the eye, preserving the ugly features with
+the faultless, just as we all insist on doing in regard to those we
+love. De Quincey and myself, therefore, are likely to part good friends.
+Surely, if there was anything which vexed the tender heart of this man,
+it was "the little love and the infinite hate" which went to make up the
+sum of life. If morbid in any direction, it was not in that of spite,
+but of love; and as an instance of almost unnatural intensity of
+affection, witness his insane grief over little Kate Wordsworth's
+grave,--a grief which satisfied itself only by reasonless prostrations,
+for whole nights, over the dark mould which covered her from his sight.
+
+It only remains for us to look in upon De Quincey's last hours. We are
+enabled to take almost the position of those who were permitted really
+to watch at his bedside, through a slight unpublished sketch, from the
+hand of his daughter, in a letter to an American friend. I tremble
+almost to use materials that personally are so sacred; but sympathy, and
+the tender interest which is awakened in our hearts by such a life, are
+also sacred, and in privilege stand nearest to grief.
+
+During the few last, days of his life De Quincey wandered much, mixing
+up "real and imaginary, or apparently imaginary things." He complained,
+one night, that his feet were hot and tired. His daughter arranged the
+blankets around them, saying, "Is that better, papa?" when he answered,
+"Yes, my love, I think it is; you know, my dear girl, these are the feet
+that Christ washed."
+
+Everything seemed to connect itself in his mind with little children. He
+aroused one day, and said suddenly,--"You must know, my dear, the
+Edinburgh cabmen are the most brutal set of fellows under the sun. I
+must tell you that I and the little children were all invited to supper
+with Jesus Christ. So, as you see, it was a great honor. I thought I
+must buy new dresses for the little ones; and--would you believe it
+possible?--when I went out with the children, these wretches laughed at
+their new dresses."
+
+"Of my brothers he often spoke, both those that are dead and those that
+are alive, as if they were his own brothers. One night he said, when I
+entered the room,--
+
+"'Is that you, Horace?'
+
+"'No, papa.'
+
+"'Oh, I see! I thought you were Horace; for he was talking to me just
+now, and I suppose has just left the room.'"
+
+Speaking of his father, one day, suddenly and without introduction, he
+exclaimed,--"There is one thing I deeply regret, that I did not know my
+dear father better; for I am sure a better, kinder, or juster man could
+never have existed."
+
+When death seemed approaching, the physician recommended that a telegram
+should be sent to the eldest daughter,[A] who resided in Ireland, but he
+forbade any mention of this fact to the patient. De Quincey seemed to
+have a prophetic feeling that she was on her way to him, saying, "Has M.
+got to that town yet, that we stopped at when we went to Ireland? How
+many hours will it be before she can be here? Let me see,--there are
+eight hours before I can see her, and three added to that!" His daughter
+came sooner than the family expected; but the time tallied very nearly
+with the computation he had made. On the morning his daughter arrived
+occurred the first intimation his family had seen that the hand of death
+was laid upon him. He had passed a quiet, but rather sleepless night,
+appearing "much the same, yet more than ordinarily loving." After
+greeting his child, he said, "And how does mamma's little girl like her
+leaving her?" "Oh, they were very glad for me to come to grandpapa, and
+they sent you this kiss,--which they did of their own accord." He seemed
+much pleased. It was evident that M. presented herself to him as the
+mother of children, the constant theme of his wanderings. Once when his
+daughter quitted the room, he said, "They are all leaving me but my
+_dear_ little children." "I heard him call, one day, distinctly,
+'Florence! Florence! Florence!'--again, 'My dear, dear mother!'--and to
+the last he called us 'my love,' and it sounded like no other sound
+ever uttered. I never heard such pathos as there was in it, and in every
+tone of his voice. It gave me an idea of a love that passeth all
+understanding."
+
+[Footnote A: De Quincey, at his death, had two sons and three daughters.
+The, eldest of the daughters became the wife of Robert Craig of Ireland.
+It was this one, and the youngest, who were present during his last
+hours. The second daughter, Florence, was with her husband (a colonel of
+the British army) in India. The two sons were both absent: one in India,
+a captain in the army; the other, a physician, in Brazil.]
+
+During the next night he was thought dying, "but he lingered on and on
+till half past nine the next morning. He told me something about
+'to-morrow morning,' and something about sunshine; but the thought that
+he was talking about what he would never see drove the exact idea out of
+my head, though I am sure it was morning in another world he was talking
+of."
+
+"There was an extraordinary appearance of youth about him, both for some
+time before and after death. He looked more like a boy of fourteen, and
+very beautiful. We did not like to let in the morning light, and the
+candle was burning at nine o'clock, when the post brought the following
+letter, which my sister and myself glanced over by the candle-light,
+just as we were listening to his decreasing breath. At the moment it did
+not strike me with the astonishment, at such an extraordinary
+coincidence, that when we came to read it afterwards it did.
+
+
+     "'_Brighton, Dec. 7th, 1859_.
+
+     "'My Dear De Quincey,--Before I quit this world, I most ardently
+     desire to see your handwriting. In early life, that is, more than
+     sixty years ago, we were school-fellows together and mutually
+     attached; nay, I remember a boyish paper ("The Observer") in which
+     we were engaged. Yours has been a brilliant literary career, mine
+     far from brilliant, but I hope not unuseful as a theological
+     student. It seems a pity we should not once more recognize one
+     another before quitting the stage. I have often read your works,
+     and never without remembering the promise of your talents at
+     Winkfield. My life has been almost a domestic tragedy. I have four
+     children in lunatic-asylums. Thank God, it is now drawing to a
+     close; but it would cheer the evening of my days to receive a line
+     from you, for I am, with much sincerity,
+
+     "'Your old and attached friend,
+
+     "'E.H.G.'
+
+"I do not remember the name of G., but the name of Edward constantly
+recurred in his wanderings.
+
+"Half an hour after the reading of that letter we heard those last
+pathetic sighs, so terrible from their very softness, and saw the poor,
+worn-out garment laid aside." Just before he died, he looked around the
+room, and said very tenderly to the nurse, the physician, and his
+daughters, who were present, "Thank you,--thank you all!" Sensible thus
+to the very last of kindness, he breathed out his life in simple thanks,
+swayed even in death by the spirit of profound courtesy that had ruled
+his life.
+
+MRS. LEWIS.
+
+A STORY IN THREE PARTS.
+
+
+PART I.
+
+
+I.
+
+"Here's something Gus Lewis would like to send by you, mother," said my
+hasty boy John, plunging into the room at nine in the evening, and
+stumbling over two trunks, three valises, and bandboxes countless.
+
+The floor was strewn with bundles, and the mantel-piece adorned with
+letters, directed to Springfield, Hartford, New Haven, and New York.
+
+"Oh! ah! yes. Any packages, if not too large," said I, wistfully eying
+the box, (a foot square,) full of fresh maple-sugar, with its card of
+direction to "_Mrs. Lulu L., by the politeness of Mrs. Prince_."
+Boy-like.
+
+"First of all, my John, go you to bed, where Charley has been this
+half-hour, and say good-bye, for we shall be off before you are up."
+
+"See, then, father, if you are!" retorted the wide-awake youth, going
+out of the room in ground and lofty tumbling, and up-stairs in
+somersets.
+
+"I don't see," said I, pettishly, "how I _am_ to get this bundle into my
+trunk, nor where in the world this great box of sugar is to go. See! not
+a direction! but I suppose she is in New York somewhere."
+
+"We shall see her at all events, which is something. I should like to
+know what she is like,--not to look after her boy for two mortal years,"
+said the Dominie.
+
+"I hope not like Gus. He'd make an ugly woman, with his black hair and
+heavy eyebrows, and his big, black eyes always staring. He don't look
+like an American child."
+
+"If we could only say what an American type is. At present, it is a
+little of everything."
+
+"I mean a New-Englander,--an original American."
+
+"Well, he don't.--What do you say to these trunks? Shall we try again to
+compress the gigantic genie into the copper vessel? I thought it was a
+dangerous move, that last one of yours, taking out Tirzah White's
+quilted coat. And what's to be done with these three packages?"
+
+"Well! we can't sit here!" said I, briskly; "half-past nine already, and
+only one trunk packed! Never mind. You can put these three bundles in
+with your clothes."
+
+"Bursting the lock, now."
+
+"How easy 'tis to pack other people's things! But what, then, have you
+in there,--I mean, besides your shirts, etc.?"
+
+"_Imprimis_. Eight volumes of Scott's Commentaries, brought by Deacon
+Boardman. I am to exchange them. They are imperfect. _Item_. A dozen of
+'Sinbad the Sailor,' sent by mistake to the Association, instead of
+Doddridge. These books won't press nor give, more than sound doctrine;
+and I must have room for my gown, without which I am nothing."
+
+The clock struck ten, and we were still struggling with unabated ardor
+to compress Lorana Briggs's shawl, and the flat packages from Burt's,
+into the largest carpet-bag, that there might be room for the seventeen
+letters on top of the minister's luggage, inside the sanctuary of his
+silk gown.
+
+"We can carry a good deal in your coat-pocket, my dear," said I,
+cheerfully; for really we seemed to be coming to daylight, a little.
+
+"Full."
+
+The knocker sounded.
+
+"My galoches at last! Deacon, I can't ask you to come in, we are so
+untidy; but I couldn't pack as I meant to, this afternoon."
+
+How we dreaded his coming in,--half deacon, half shoemaker, and
+two-thirds missionary, with his "Panoplist" sticking out of his
+coat-pocket, and his ears evermore pricked up for the latest news from
+Bombay! and how angry I had been for three weeks because I couldn't get
+those indispensable galoches!
+
+It seemed as if he never would go from the half-open door. He reckoned
+the York folks would stare to see so many patches; he expected ministers
+down to York warn't quite so carfle and troubled about many things, as
+they be to Weston; but he added, with a grim joyfulness,--
+
+"We took up a good collection, though, last Sabbath! eight dollars and
+fifteen cents, clear!"
+
+"Yes, Deacon," responded the minister, with as much heartiness as he
+could muster, between the pushings, puffings, and pressings at the
+carpet-bag; "a cup of cold water shall in no wise lose its reward, we're
+told.--These carpet-bags stretch well!"
+
+"Them poor, dear heathen!" groaned the Deacon.
+
+"Oh, dreadful!" chimed I; "give me that biggest shawl, will you?--no,
+the other,--Ursula Drury's! Shall we ever finish packing?"
+
+"S'pose ye'll see th' A.B.C.F.M.!--Lucina Rand's put in 'the avails of a
+hen,'--and Semela Briggs sold the silver thimble her aunt gin her. 'T
+all helps the good work. I told the Widow Rand she'd ough' to do
+somethin' for the heathen, so she's gone to raisin' mustard. She said
+she hadn't more 'n a grain o' that to spare, she was so poor; but I told
+her 't would be blest, I guessed. Widow Rand's rather worldly-minded,
+I'm afraid."
+
+A minute more and we should have had Hindostan, Harriet Newell, and
+Juggernaut. Happily, somebody came for the Deacon, and we were left to
+our packing again.
+
+
+II.
+
+This was the second week in May, in the year 1830. We were a promising
+country, but had not yet performed. Neither railroads, telegraphs, nor
+cheap postage had been established. Enthusiastic inventors yet sucked
+their fingers in garrets, waiting for the good time coming; and
+philanthropic statesmen aired their vocabularies in vain, in
+Congressional halls, built in defiance of acoustics. Their words rose,
+their fine sentiments curled up and down the pillars of the temple of
+eloquence, and fell flat to the floor. Meanwhile human nature travelled
+by stage-coaches; and postage for over a hundred miles rose to eighteen
+cents. Not a lover's sigh for a cent less; and it took a fortune for
+persons of sensibility to exchange sentiments.
+
+The consequence to country-people of this last-mentioned fact was, that
+everybody who went anywhere took everybody's letters, and, as there were
+no expresses, added, of course, everybody's packages and messages. And
+the consequence of this was, that everybody made everybody's purchases,
+whether gowns, books, bonnets, or what not. It mattered little who did
+errands, so only they were done. Generally, the one store-keeper bought
+our bonnets when he went to Boston for his yearly stock of goods, and
+our one bonnet lasted in those days a year, being retrimmed for winter
+weather. I remember, too, when our one store-keeper, mingling in the
+aesthetic conversation at one of our parties, where Art was on the
+_tapis_, made a comical mistake, but one natural enough, too,--stating
+that he could buy, and had bought, Vandykes for ten dollars. We were not
+thinking of exactly the same kind of Vandyke that he was.
+
+Many a time have I carried in my trunk more letters than the mail-bag
+did to Boston, and conscientiously finished all the parish's business
+before touching my own.
+
+A certain amount of self-complacency and satisfaction is felt, and
+laudably earned, by being intrusted with commissions; and I flatter
+myself few persons ever set off for New York with such an array of them
+as I did on this occasion.
+
+Looking over my list, I must confess to a flush of real enjoyment at
+finding _carte blanche_ for a scarf. "Now, that is something like!" said
+I. "I can see now how pleasantly an artist feels, or would feel, at an
+order for a picture,--'your own subject,--your own terms.' Miss Patty
+Jones knows what is what, and shall be my patroness."
+
+And did I not vindicate triumphantly Miss Patty's confidence? I knew
+better than to buy her a gray and brown thing, merely because she, too,
+was gray and brown. I wreathed her with lilies and hyacinths and French
+green leaves, and she blossomed under it like a rose. If she were not
+the garland, she wore it, and so borrowed bloom and gay freshness. She
+extolled my taste to all Weston.
+
+Then Mrs. Eben Loring had concluded on the whole that I should buy her a
+hat, in Maiden Lane, at the very tip-top milliner's. The thought of my
+return was somewhat embittered by the prospective necessity of carrying
+two very large bandboxes in my lap, in case of rain. Rain might not
+unreasonably be expected in the course of a three days' journey. Think
+of all the bandboxes that in such a case would be put in at the
+coach-window by the driver, to be held in the hapless laps of the nine
+passengers! Almost I was persuaded to leave my own black satin bonnet,
+and perambulate the streets of New York in my travelling-calash, which
+looked exactly like, and was nearly of the size of, a "bellows-top
+shay."
+
+I was thinking of this last sacrifice, when my husband said, in a
+dreamy, bewildered way,--
+
+"Here are five boxes, mother, two bundles, and the rest of these books.
+I give up!"
+
+"Give up? Not I! Now, where a man's energies are exhausted, a woman's
+just begin to show themselves. First and foremost, lock this trunk, and
+let me put the key in my pocket. That's one thing done, and can't be
+undone."
+
+He stepped back from the trunk.
+
+"What's this? all your clothes on the floor!"
+
+"Well, yes, my dear, most of 'em. You see, I couldn't leave Zipporah
+Haven's shawl out, which she sends to her grandmother; and I must put in
+these bundles of the Burts's, and Mary Skinner's box of linen thread. If
+my own things are lost, why, they must be replaced, you know, my dear;
+that is all."
+
+"And we must keep a good lookout, ourselves, that our bandboxes and
+bundles don't fall off behind," replied the Dominie, faintly.
+
+"Yes; and you can put the small trunk under my feet, and the big basket
+under your own, and you will keep an eye on my red shawl,--and pray
+don't lose the umbrella, nor your great-coat, nor your cane. I will, on
+my part, see to these three small bundles, and my parasol. Doubtless we
+shall go on smoothly as need be, only I am afraid you won't be able to
+think up many sermons on the highway. There! I forgot the jar of
+currant-jelly to go to Ruth Hoyt's aunt! However, we must manage
+somehow. You are sure our names are down at the stage-office?"
+
+But, like Charles XII., "after Pultowa's dreadful day," when the
+tale-teller listened for his sympathy,
+
+  "The king had been an hour asleep."
+
+I am ashamed to say that I must have lost myself after that, though I
+thought I was only thinking of the Day of Judgment. But I must have
+dreamed it, or how should I have thought it the last trumpet, when it
+was only the stage-driver's warning knock?
+
+It was delightful to hear the knock, and the simultaneous clang of pots
+and pans which assured us, that, though night had been no night to us,
+the dark morning would usher in our breakfast with coffee by the
+faithful Polly. The driver coming in again before we had finished, we
+seduced him without scruple into taking a cup of boiling comfort, while
+we guiltily collected the waifs and strays of our multifarious luggage.
+Many a time I have waited, myself, in the coach, while similar orgies
+were going on among the unready, so I know just how vexed and impatient
+the passengers were. But what use to go on without the driver? At last
+we squeezed into the full stage.
+
+
+III.
+
+No sooner in than out, however. I was determined not to die before my
+time, as I was sure to do on the back-seat of an overloaded stage, with
+nine passengers, besides numerous, because gratuitously earned,
+children. "For who," as it was sometimes pertinently asked, "would
+charge anything for a poor little innocent child?" The younger, the more
+innocent, of course, and the more numerous.
+
+"If you'll set up here 'long o' me, Miss Prince, there's a plenty o'
+room,--and for you, too, Parson," said the good-natured driver.
+
+Extricating ourselves from the Black Hole, we delightedly clambered to
+the heights above, regardless of risk, and catching at wheel and step
+like Alpine hunters. How comfortable the seat was, with the fresh, early
+morning air blowing freely in our faces! How small the horses looked in
+the dim light of three o'clock! How oddly the wheel-horses looked, all
+backs and no legs!--and how mysteriously many were the reins that were
+tied round and round the iron lantern-rod!
+
+"Just let me put the mail-bag under your feet, Miss Prince. Here we are,
+now, all right, and nothin' to do but go along!"
+
+"Now, then!"
+
+"Come up! come! come!"
+
+But in vain were caresses; in vain were chirrups, duckings, and kisses,
+wafted to the nigh leader. Like the rebellious South of to-day, he had
+taken his attitude, and stood now on four legs, now on two, pawing only
+the dark air, and regardless of the general welfare behind him.
+
+"Now what will you do, driver?" said cowardly I, who, always mortally
+afraid of horse-flesh, felt on this occasion a strange confidence:
+partly in the staid, heavy mass of determination beside me, who looked
+so calm and good-natured; and partly in the queer, elfin look of the
+beast, who seemed so far off as to have no necessary connection with our
+safety or ultimate progress. It seemed quite possible for us to get on
+with the other three pulling, while our demoniacal friend ornamented the
+occasion by plunges, rearings, and kickings.
+
+Still gathering the reins lightly in his large hand, the stable and sure
+intelligence beside me calmly chirruped, and then as calmly switched his
+long whip at the distant rebel brute. How the switching and snapping
+galled his proud neck! How his black back curved, and his small head
+tossed! Still, he would not pull an ounce, but just pawed like a fairy
+horse, or as if he were born to tread on clouds alone, or to herald in
+the morning.
+
+"He'll start by-'m-by,--he's a devil of a spirit in him, when he doos
+start," remarked our Phoebus, composedly, giving, through the darkness,
+the unerring switch every half minute.
+
+What acted on the capricious thing at last,--whether the Inevitability
+behind him, or the folly exhausting itself, nobody knows; but the
+"beautiful disdain" left his black back and tossing mane in a moment,
+and he buckled down to his work with an energy worthy of the cause, and
+with a good-will that was an example to the other three.
+
+"There! you see he can do well enough, 'f he's jest a mind to! nothin'
+wantin' but the will! There's a pair on 'em," said the driver, "but I
+won't never drive 'em together. Staples drove the pair last summer. He
+says they'd run till they dropped down dead. I guess they would. He's a
+putty critter enough, and well made, but dreadful ugly. Now, I like that
+'ere wheeler!"--he pointed his whip towards the horse below my foot.
+"She's kind,--that mare is; and she's fast enough, and handsome. Broad
+back,--short legs,--goes like a duck!"
+
+In such pleasant chat (and why not? for wasn't the driver a cousin of my
+own?--a man of means,--owning his team,--and with more knowledge of his
+district than most members of Congress have? Indeed, I believe he's in
+Congress this minute!) we pulled up hill and tore down dale. Nobody
+knows a hill by experience but New-Hampshire travellers. The Green
+Mountains are full of comparatively gentle slopes, and verdure crowns
+their highest and tallest tops; but the hills of New Hampshire are
+Alpine in their steepness and barrenness, and the roads of old time made
+by the Puritans took the Devil by the horns. There was no circuitous,
+soothing, easy passage. The road ran straight over mountains and pitched
+deep down ravines, the surveyors having evidently kept only in view the
+shortest air-line between places.
+
+Sometimes we chained the wheels, but not often. Oftenest we ran down a
+steep place, and the impetus carried us up the opposite hill. At the
+foot of a long hill, of a two-mile stretch, the driver generally
+stopped, to indicate the propriety of the male passengers, at least,
+ascending the hill on foot. And often the whole stage-load gladly
+availed itself of the permission. It was handy for the owners of
+bandboxes, to pick them up from the rocky road, as they tumbled off now
+and then; and the four beasts, like those in Revelation, said "Amen" to
+the kindly impulse of humanity that lightened their load, and left them
+to scramble comfortably from one side to the other of the still
+ascending path. When they did get to the top of some of those Walpole
+hills, would they could have taken in the living glory and beauty of the
+far-reaching and most magnificent landscape!
+
+
+IV.
+
+We had the mails to change at the post-offices, and a seemingly
+inexhaustible store, intrusted to the care and courtesy of the driver,
+and surrounding him like a rampart,--of newspapers, bundles, cans,
+pillow-cases full of dried apples, and often letters.
+
+At the red house near the mill below Surrey, a sweet-looking girl ran
+out, as we passed, holding her hand forward for a letter, which our
+driver pretended to drop half a dozen times, on purpose to tantalize
+her. It was pretty to see her blushing, sparkling face, as the blood
+danced to her brow with hope, and back with the baffled expectancy to
+her heart.
+
+"Neouw, Sil, be still! give to me, yeouw!"
+
+If it hadn't been Yankee, it was soft and melodious enough for an
+Italian peasant. As picturesque, too, was her short, blue woollen
+petticoat, and white short-gown, that "half hid and half revealed" the
+unconstrained grace of healthy mountain-nature; and more modest the
+happy look with which she received the letter at last, and flew with it
+like a bird back to the red nest.
+
+"A love-letter, I suppose," said I, answering the twinkle of the
+driver's good-natured eye.
+
+"Wal, I expect 's likely. They've been sparking now over a year. And
+it's a pity, too, such a real clever girl as that is! She a'n't so
+dreadful bright, but she's real clever, and ough' to hev a better chance
+'n Jim Ruggles."
+
+"A bad match for her?"
+
+"Wal, Jim's a good feller enough, but he drinks. I don't mean to say
+nothin' agin moderate drinkin'. I drink myself moderately. But Jim's a
+real sponge. He'd drink all day hard and never show it, without it is
+bein' cross, maybe, and paler 'n common. Now I say,--and I a'n't no
+'reformed inebriate,' nor Father Matthew sort,--but I do say, and will
+hold to it, such a man at twenty-one makes a poor beginnin'. If he
+lives, he'll be a poor shote, and no mistake. I'm sorry for the gal."
+
+"Somebody ought to tell her. Why not you?"
+
+"Wal, what's the good on 't? She wouldn't hear a word. When a woman's
+once sot her mind, don't do no good to talk. For that matter, talkin'
+never did do much, I'm thinkin',--exceptin' preachin'. We're bound to
+hear that, Parson," he added, laughing, and with a nod which might seem
+respectful.
+
+In three hours we had driven thirteen miles. Pretty good progress this
+of a warm day, and with a full complement of passengers. We had watched
+the sun rise over Walpole hills, and the specks in the distance where
+the early farmers were ploughing and sowing. The breaking day, the
+bursting spring, and all the outward melodies with which the welcoming
+day rings as we toil on, are so many incentives to appetite, and we are
+all sharp for the ready breakfast, at six o'clock.
+
+Then, as I am talking of the past, and not of the present, there was
+time enough: time enough for the comfortable discussion of breakfast,
+for the changing of raiment among the babies, for chatting in the
+bar-room, for the interchange of news among the men, and even for
+glasses of milk-punch. Tell it not in modern Gath that even the Dominie
+spiced his half-mug of flip with an anecdote, and that every man and
+woman took cider as well as coffee.
+
+How can I describe the events and vicissitudes that befell us during
+this journey of three days and a half to New York? Modern travellers,
+who are, or are not, as it happens, run off the track, smashed up, or
+otherwise suddenly and summarily disposed of, have little notion of our
+successive and amusing accidents, and of how they diversified and
+occupied the mind, so as entirely to preclude the _ennui_ which comes
+from railroad-travelling, with its ninety-nine chances of safety to one
+of accident.
+
+That we were tipped out and over repeatedly,--that one of the leaders
+had fits, (which amiable weakness was understood and allowed for by our
+driver, who was in hopes the critter wouldn't have 'em that day,)--that
+the coach wholly collapsed once, letting all the patient passengers into
+a promiscuous heap of unbroken bones,--this, and such as this, will be
+easily believed by any New-England traveller who remembers thirty years
+back. But how we fell so softly that the brains were never damaged,--why
+falling into ditches at night wasn't an unhealthy process,--and, above
+all, how the driver's stock of leathern straps, strings, and nails
+should always prove exhaustless, and be always so wonderfully adapted to
+every emergency,--that was a wonder, and is a wonder still to me. No
+amount of mechanical skill, though the Yankee has made machines that
+almost think, and altogether do, for him, has superseded or exhausted
+his natural tact, expediency, and invention. With string and nail in his
+pocket, I would defy the horses of Phoebus to get away from a Yankee, or
+his chariot to get out of gear; and if Phaeton had only been a
+Vermonter, the deserts of Ethiopia might to this day have been covered
+with roses instead of sand. Our driver, though he didn't know his own
+powers, knew all about Phoebus, and had read Virgil and Ovid by the
+light of a pine-knot in his father's kitchen. This rude culture is the
+commonest fact among our mountaineers.
+
+We "stopped over" one day in Hartford, to see the deaf-mutes. Their
+bright, concentrated, eager looks haunted me long after. I should like
+to know who would stop anywhere now to see anything! One might as well
+be put into a gun and fired off to New York as go there now by
+steam-cars. Line a gun with red plush, and it is not unlike a "resonant
+steam-eagle." And you would see as much in one as in the other.
+
+But travelling in 1830 enlarged your mind. A journey then was one as
+_was_ a journey. You saw people, you made their acquaintance, you
+entered their hearts and took lodgings,--sometimes for life.
+
+Then the country! You saw that, too,--not the poorest part of it,
+scooting round wherever it is most level, till you pronounce the whole
+way flat, and are glad to shut your eyes and listen to the engine,
+rather than have them ache with seeing everything you would never wish
+to look at!
+
+All these days were full of great, beautiful pictures. From the time we
+leave the Granite State, with it a wild, fierce grandeur, its long,
+dreary reaches of unfertile pastures, and its wealth of stone wall,--so
+abundant that travellers wonder where the stones came from to build it,
+seeing no lack in the road or field,--from the time we enter on trim,
+well-kept Massachusetts, the panorama shifts with ever new interest and
+beauty. We leave the pretentious brick houses, or the glaring white
+ones, which mark the uncultivated taste of the American Switzerland, and
+enter for the first time regions impressed with the necessary element of
+fine landscape, maturity. With and under the old oaks and birches rest
+the sad-colored houses that have held life and experience,--birth,
+death, and old historic adventure.
+
+Looking over the broad meadows that skirt the Connecticut by Hadley and
+Northampton, one seems to see under the distant oaks spectral shapes of
+Indian struggle, or wandering regicides, hiding their noble heads in
+caves, or bursting out like white spirits to lead and avenge. The air is
+peopled with traditions far back from the present, but with which the
+grave, imposing, characteristic landscape seems still to sympathize.
+
+In two days we emerged from the brown chrysalis of a New-Hampshire
+spring into the exultant richness of the winged butterfly,--into white,
+fragrant fields of blossoming fruit, and the odor of tree-lilacs.
+
+In my enchantment at the bounteous panorama that spread out before me in
+ever varying abundance, I forgot to cultivate any interest in my
+fellow-passengers, and, except in listening to some communicative old
+women, might really, as far as society was concerned, as well have been
+travelling in the style of to-day. Beyond the casual acquaintances I
+made when rain compelled me to indoor chat, I saw nobody who interested
+me until we reached Springfield. There, at the top of the first short
+hill outside the town, after looking back on the white houses standing
+in the river-mist like so many ghosts in white muslin, I saw somebody
+whom my prophetic soul announced as a companion, looking wholly unlike a
+ghost, and very unlike a mist. He raised his hand, just as we were about
+passing him, as if signalling an omnibus, and our driver suddenly reined
+in his team.
+
+A full, hearty voice, not a bit nasal, but fresh from the broad chest,
+showed us a traveller by the road-side, waiting to be taken up.
+
+He sprang with two bounds to the top of the coach, and made room for
+himself just above us among the countless boxes.
+
+"Don't let me disturb you, Madam All right. Just room for my bag. Go on,
+driver."
+
+"Fine day," said we.
+
+"A warm morning. I have been walking for the last fifteen miles,--but
+the sun is too hot for me."
+
+He took off his travelling-hat of weather-beaten Panama, and dried his
+broad brow with his handkerchief. Then he looked at us with clear blue
+eyes, and tossed back his curling brown hair. He had a gray
+travelling-dress, such as everybody wears now, but which was then a
+novelty; and something in his curt, clear accents, and his crimson lips,
+and the fresh life in his limbs and action, betrayed that he was not an
+American. So much the better.
+
+
+V.
+
+I said he looked sharply at us two. He seemed to have a habit of
+investigating, at least to a certain extent; and he took us in at once,
+evidently. A country-parson and his wife. If I say his pretty wife, I
+will promise faithfully that it shall be the last time I will refer to
+myself or my prettiness, the whole way, further than may be absolutely
+necessary; and it isn't every woman who will do as much. For with this
+man and his belongings I came to have much to do in the course of the
+next five years. Little thought I, as I heard him chatting soberly with
+my husband, and nodding from time to time gravely at me, as If to take
+me into the conversation,--little thought I of the shadow he would one
+day cast over both of our lives!
+
+He showed us his travelling-apparatus for making a cup of tea in ten
+minutes, toasting bread, and boiling eggs. It was like a doll's
+cooking-stove six inches square, a curious invention, new then, and a
+wonderful convenience.
+
+"With my tea and this," said he, "I can go over the United States. Good
+bread and sweet butter I can always get at your farm-houses, and I often
+walk fifty miles together."
+
+We looked and spoke our New-English astonishment. In our part of the
+world nobody walked anywhere. Everybody, however poor, had a wagon, if
+not a chaise; and he must be miserable indeed who did not own at least
+one horse. Nobody in his sober senses demeaned himself to walking.
+Perhaps it was the climate. Perhaps our fathers instituted the custom,
+to be as unlike the British as possible,--as they did of making their
+houses like lanterns, to show they had no window-tax to pay.
+
+This man's hearty voice and healthy frame, charged, as it seemed, with
+fresh air, jollity, and strength, made us think better of walking. We
+looked at his six feet of height, his broad chest, and his firmly knit
+limbs, and fancied how Antaeus gained supernatural vigor from natural
+contact: he trod the earth with a loving and free step, as a child
+approaches and caresses his mother. So, too, his voice, and the topics
+he chose in talking, gave us the feeling of out-door existence always
+connected with him: of singing-birds, and the breeze of mountain-tops,
+of great walnut- and chesnut-trees, and children gathering nuts beneath;
+never of the solemn hush of pines, or twilight, or anything "sough"-ing
+or whispering: no, all about him sounded like the free, dashing, rushing
+water. So were his bright blue eyes, merry lips, and wind-crimsoned
+cheeks, interpreters of his nature. They linked him firmly to the
+outward. The man's soul was made up of joyfulness, strength, and a sort
+of purposeless activity,--energy for its own sake. While his energies
+harmonized with the right, or were exercised in the pursuit of
+knowledge, one felt that he would have much power for good. But suppose
+his activities to take a wrong direction, all his powers would help him
+to be and enjoy the wrong. In either case, his nature would have the
+same harmonious energy, and the moral part of him would not disturb the
+balance of his character. He had no special liking for evil, I am sure;
+yet, according to all the theories, his intense love of Nature ought to
+have elevated and refined him far more than it had done.
+
+Before we had been an hour together, I had also observed that he was
+good-natured, impulsive, and, in a sort, kindly,--that he loved himself
+and his own enjoyment too well ever knowingly to annoy or distress
+another. There is a little difference between this and kindness. No
+matter how I found him out. He who runs may read, if he looks sharply
+enough; and in travelling, people betray and assert character
+continually. I was also as sure as I was years afterwards, that he would
+walk rough-shod over heart-violets and -daisies, nor once notice them
+bleeding under his heel. It was in the grain of the man's nature. He had
+lived at least thirty-five years, and was too old to be made over into
+anything else by any experience.
+
+His bag was half full of tulip-bulbs which he had bought and begged, he
+said. He had a passion at present for cultivating tulips, and was quite
+sure, that, if he had lived in the seventeenth instead of the nineteenth
+century, he would have ruined himself twenty times over for a favorite
+bulb, even without being a Dutchman.
+
+His dominant idea, to which for the first hour he sacrificed without
+scruple every other, was flowers. I had a mischievous pleasure in
+professing a similar passion, on purpose to confound him with a
+description of a Weston flower-garden. If he talked of jessamine and
+Daphne odora, I talked of phlox and bachelor's-buttons. If he raved of
+azaleas and gladioluses, I told him of our China-asters, sunflowers,
+and hollyhocks.
+
+"Ah, now I see you are laughing at me!" said he, good-humoredly, after I
+had said, that, after all, I could not get up an admiration for
+day-lilies or tulips; "promise me that I may show you my tulips, and I
+will promise you that you shall like botany hereafter."
+
+We agreed at last to bury the hatchet at the foot of a rose-bush, which
+I said I would allow, excused the existence of other flowers. The bulbs
+he gave me on the top of the stage-coach that day made a revolution in
+the taste of Weston; and some climbing plants, from his house
+afterwards, took root in our rude homes, and have displaced the old
+glaring colors with soft beauty and grace. Before I left Weston, which
+happened in time, we had prairie-roses, honeysuckles, and woodbine
+clambering over half the houses in the place, and bouncing-Bets were
+extinguished forever.
+
+I forgot that we had never heard this man's name, though it did not
+matter at all. He was a cultivated gentleman, and we had no occasion for
+introduction. We met freely on that platform, and it was pleasant to us
+to talk on so many subjects outside of personal interest. He had
+travelled, and gave us results, in a sketchy, off-hand way, of much that
+he had observed that was extremely entertaining in foreign manners.
+
+Suddenly his loud, cheery voice rang out,--
+
+"Halloo, old boy, get up here!"
+
+He did get up, a languid, pale man, with sharp features, and a frame so
+attenuated that I involuntarily placed a soft bag for him to lean
+against, and removed a cane and umbrella that seemed likely to hurt his
+bones.
+
+It was about half an hour before I saw that the new man was not at all
+an invalid, but of the natural gaunt frame and pallid complexion of my
+countrymen. My eyes had become so full of the fresh, rosy life of the
+Englishman's face, that the new man's face was bleached and unhealthy to
+me. I happened to glance back from him to the Dominie, and saw, that,
+allowing for green spectacles, they were both of a color. We were so
+arranged on the top of the coach, that with reasonable twisting of necks
+we were able to maintain an animated conversation, and soon found our
+account in the new element.
+
+"Well, Remington!"
+
+"Well, Lewis!"
+
+"Where from now?"
+
+"From Niagara, and home by the White Hills."
+
+"And what of the last, or of both?"
+
+"Miss Rugg has fallen into the one, and Miss Somebody has been to the
+top of the other. Had to be brought down, though. Women shouldn't climb
+mountains."
+
+"There has been some talk of a road, or practicable path at least, to
+the top of Mount Washington."
+
+"Never'll be done. Impossible on the face of the thing."
+
+"Nothing is impossible to Yankees, Remington."
+
+"This is. And now, Lewis, whence come you, and whither go?"
+
+"From Weston, and to New York."
+
+Here was a _denouement!_ We looked at him with new interest, and saw at
+once, such was the force of imagination, the very eyes and eyebrows of
+Gus Lewis. However, it proved afterwards to be only imagination. When we
+told him we came from Weston only two days and a half before, the
+conversation assumed the native style of New England, and for the next
+quarter of an hour we talked of each other and each other's affairs.'
+Mr. Lewis was delighted to see us, had stayed only an hour in Weston,
+and there heard of our trip from Auguste,--profanely called Gus,--took
+the box of maple-sugar in charge at once, laughed at the boy-like
+direction without even a surname, and ended with recommending us to go
+at once to Miss Post's, on Broadway, where himself and his wife were at
+present boarding. All the particulars of life, character, and relative
+interests were discussed between ourselves and Mr. Lewis with the
+relish and zest of compatriots. I had forgotten how close a tie was that
+of Yankee birth, and how like an unknown tongue our talk was to the
+Englishman, till we stopped and turned to him to say something, and
+found him fast asleep. Then I was glad that he hadn't heard my satirical
+description of "donation-parties" at Weston, nor the account I gave of
+our two boys, our salary of five hundred dollars, and the various
+comical shifts we had to make to live comfortably on that sum and
+support aged parents and graceless relations. Little touches told Mr.
+Lewis the whole story. I knew very well that Mr. Remington would be
+entirely abroad about such a social existence as ours in Weston, travel
+he ever so long or widely.
+
+Mr. Lewis had black eyes and hair, and bent like an habitual student. He
+had a scar on his right eyebrow, which he had got by a fall, and by
+which he had saved the life of Mr. Remington, who was a connection of
+his wife's. This he told us, afterwards, and I amused myself with
+drawing parallels between his face and his mind. One side was gentle,
+sweet-humored, sentimental, with a touch of melancholy. The other,
+disfigured with the scar, seemed to have been turned harsh, suspicious,
+proud, reserved, and unrelenting. These were many qualities, all to
+depend on a scar, to be sure; but they generally herd together, and he
+might be one man or another, as life presented its dark or sunny side to
+him. To me, he was very interesting, from the first; and my husband was
+delighted with him. The Dominie starved in Weston for congenial
+intellectual nutriment. Nobody but myself could tell what a drain it was
+on him always to impart, always to simplify, to descend, to walk on the
+ground with wings folded flat to his back, and the angel in him
+habitually kept out of view. The most he could do was to insinuate now
+and then a thought above the farming interest, and in a direction aside
+from Bombay. More than that exposed him to suspicion, and hindered his
+usefulness in Cooes County.
+
+Somehow, we got talking of Mr. Remington, which we might well do, seeing
+him there before us, sleeping like a baby.
+
+"That he could always do, like Napoleon," said Mr. Lewis, "and so can
+accomplish much without fatigue."
+
+"Is he married?" said I.
+
+"Yes. His wife is in delicate health."
+
+I was surprised to hear that he was married.
+
+"He hasn't a married look, has he?"
+
+"You are talking about me," said Remington, waking up. "I felt it
+mesmerically. And, to give you a good opportunity, I will walk a mile or
+two. Give me a good character, Lewis. Hold up, driver!"
+
+Springing down, he went on, laughing, before us, now and then calling
+back to ask if we were nearly through?
+
+"He has not the 'subdued domestic smile upon his features mild', that
+marks the man who has a wife at home," said I.
+
+"No. He is a man, however, born under a lucky star, and his cup filled
+with good-fortune to the brim. His self-lordship has been to him no
+heritage of woe, thus far."
+
+"A certain happiness, but necessarily of a poor quality, comes from
+being able to gratify our wishes. If he has no more, it is poor enough."
+
+"Do you mean that pleasure must be an outgrowth of pain to be properly
+appreciated?" said Mr. Lewis.
+
+"Somewhat,--mostly," said the minister; "since the insensibility that
+protects one from pain prevents also delicate picture. I think, indeed,
+a rational being must suffer in order to enjoy, after infancy."
+
+"His eyes don't look as if they had been in training of any sort," said
+I, without knowing what my words implied, till I saw the harsh
+expression on Mr. Lewis's face.'
+
+"I mean that they have a sort of undisciplined expression, as if he had
+never been tamed by suffering or sorrow of any sort," said I.
+
+"That sadness is the true human look," said the minister, "the look that
+redeems us from the mere animal expression of enjoyment. It is the
+stamp God puts on those He loves. He chastens them; after that, they are
+no more servants, but sons of the house."
+
+I saw by Mr. Lewis's eyes that he understood and felt this. Also, that
+from his nature he bought his enjoyments every step of the way of life.
+How differently his cousin laid hold on the cornucopia of enjoyment, and
+covered himself with bountiful beauty, drinking in at every sense
+pleasure! The former, as could be seen too, held his title to happiness
+by the most uncertain tenure; the nervous quiver betraying, and the
+sensitive blood witnessing, how keenly he felt and how dearly he paid
+for every passing pleasure. I remember, as I saw his purple, thrilling
+face, that I hoped his home-life was happy, feeling that to such a man
+it must be everything. Yet I was sure, from what he did not say, with
+eye or lips, that he had not learned religious trust. Still, he did not
+listen to the mere minister, but to the friend; and there sprang up
+between the two the corresponding interest and respect belonging to
+natures kindred in depth and sensibility, though of widely differing
+experience. In after-years, he who had already attained was able
+frequently to hold out a helping hand to his younger brother; but now,
+only a smile and a look told much. This acquaintance of the soul is very
+fascinating. In the two or three steps we take together, with cognizance
+and measure of each other, what a long path opens before us of alternate
+shade and sunshine, and how imagination borders every step of the way
+with richest heart-blossoms! In friendship, all is glowing and
+enriching. As it has not the depth of love, it neither anticipates nor
+requires sacrifice. We do not think of doing or suffering for a friend;
+but the friend ministers to our weakness, and exalts our strength. He
+sympathizes gently with our self-love, he magnifies every excellence. He
+is perpetually charmed, alike with the novelty and the similarity of our
+experience, and unwearied in comparing thoughts and balancing opinions.
+All, and more, that he gives us, he receives; and so an incipient
+friendship is one of the most intoxicating delights of life. What long
+leaps in acquaintance we took during our first hour, and while Mr.
+Remington still walked up-hill before us!
+
+"You will probably have an opportunity to see and judge for yourselves
+of Mr. Remington, as we are together a great deal, and he is a cousin of
+Mrs. Lewis's. This will be better than for me to attempt a description,
+I think, and, on the whole, more satisfactory. He annoys me, and offends
+me frequently; and then I am not just to him, of course. But he is a
+fine fellow, honorable and agreeable; and with a love of natural science
+that leads him, for the time, like a dog. Just now, he is wild with
+floriculture. Last year, it was geology. You will see."
+
+And then, as if he feared to trust himself with his cousin's character,
+or that it was a distasteful subject for some reason, he turned to the
+minister, and began talking about Cherry Mountain and the scenery in
+Cooes.
+
+Mr. Remington called out, at the top of the hill,--
+
+"Now it is my turn! Let me ride, and I will give your character!"
+
+"Oh! we don't need it, I assure you," said I; "we understand him
+entirely."
+
+"Not a bit of it!" said he, shaking his brown curls; "I am the
+transparent one."
+
+He stepped up on the wheel-hub to get his bag, and to say he should
+strike off for Middleton on foot. He would see us very soon in New York,
+and claim our promise to visit him.
+
+Being relieved from the fascination of personal beauty and presence,
+with only the impression of character remaining, I was a little ashamed
+to find how much I had liked, without being at all able to esteem him.
+It was with a very different feeling that I looked at Mr. Lewis, whose
+ugly, positively ugly face was being perpetually transfigured with
+emotion and variety. Without grace of feature or figure, he impressed
+one as a living soul; and this inward light gave a translucent beauty
+to the frail, chance-shapen vase, which all Mr. Remington's personal
+advantages of form and color failed to impress us with. Only dark eyes
+of un-sounded depth, and a voice whose rich cadences had an answering
+rhythm in the inward man, showed what his attractions might be, or were,
+to a woman. We became curious to see Mrs. Lewis, of whom we gained no
+idea from his casual references to her.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+LYRICS OF THE STREET.
+
+
+  VI.
+
+  PLAY.
+
+  From yon den of double-dealing,
+      With its Devil's host,
+  Come I, maddened out of healing:
+             All is lost!
+
+  So the false wine cannot blind me,
+      Nor the braggart toast;
+  But I know that Hell doth bind me:
+             All is lost!
+
+  Where the lavish gain attracts us,
+      And the easy cost,
+  While the damning dicer backs us,
+             All is lost!
+
+  Blest the rustic in his furrows,
+      Toil- and sweat-embossed;
+  Blest are honest souls in sorrows.
+             All is lost!
+
+  Wifely love, the closer clinging
+      When men need thee most,
+  Shall I come, dishonor bringing?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Babe in silken cradle lying,
+      To low music tossed,
+  Will they wake thee for my dying?
+             All is lost!
+
+  Yonder where the river grimly
+      Whitens, like a ghost,
+  Must I plunge and perish dimly;
+             All is lost!
+
+INTERESTING MANUSCRIPTS OF EDMUND BURKE.
+
+
+Macaulay opens his most remarkable article on Milton by saying, "The
+dexterous Capuchins never choose to preach on the life and miracles of a
+saint, till they have awakened the devotional feelings of their auditors
+by exhibiting some relic of him,--a thread of his garment, a lock of his
+hair, or a drop of his blood." If we were in the mood, we might take
+advantage of interesting manuscripts of Edmund Burke, which are now
+before us, to say something of this remarkable character. But we shall
+confine ourselves for the present to a passing glance at the manuscripts
+which have strayed across the Atlantic.[A]
+
+[Footnote A: These manuscripts are now in the possession of the Hon.
+Charles Sumner, who is also the fortunate owner of the _Album Amicorum_
+containing the autograph of John Milton.--ED.]
+
+The authentic manuscripts of Burke have passed through several hands. On
+his death, they were intrusted to the eminent civilian, Dr. French
+Lawrence, of Doctors' Commons, and to Dr. King, afterwards Bishop of
+Rochester. To these two gentlemen we are indebted for the first eight
+volumes of the London octavo edition of Burke's Works. The career of Dr.
+Lawrence was cut short by death in 1809. His associate had the exclusive
+charge of the papers till 1812, when the venerable widow of Burke died
+at Beaconsfield, and by her last will gave to Earl Fitzwilliam, the
+Bishop of Rochester, and the Right Honorable William Elliott the entire
+direction of the printing and publishing of such parts of the works of
+her late husband as were not published before her decease,--bequeathing
+to them all the printed and manuscript papers for this purpose. Eight
+more volumes were published by the Bishop, who died in 1828, a few
+months after the publication of the fifteenth and sixteenth volumes. Mr.
+Elliott had already died in 1818. The papers now came into the sole
+possession of Earl Fitzwilliam, the distinguished nobleman associated
+with the latter portion of Burke's life, from whom they descended to his
+son, the late Earl Fitzwilliam, who, in conjunction with Sir Richard
+Bourke, published, in 1844, the four volumes of correspondence, with a
+few notes of unpublished speeches.
+
+We have personal reason to know that there are yet other unpublished
+manuscripts of Burke in the hands of Lord Fitzwilliam, some of which it
+was our fortune many years ago to inspect. Mr. Macknight, it appears,
+applied to the present Earl for permission to publish some of those
+which are preserved in the archives of Wentworth House, but, "out of
+obedience to the expressed wish of his father, who published all he
+thought necessary, he declined to sanction any further publication of
+these documents."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight's _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 737.]
+
+There are also letters of Burke which from time to time have seen the
+light, as they were communicated by their possessors. Among these none
+equals in interest that addressed to Pitt with regard to his pension,
+which has been printed recently by Lord Stanhope, in his small, but rich
+and rare collection, entitled "Miscellanies." This important letter came
+to light among the papers of Pitt, and has been described by Macaulay as
+"interesting and very characteristic."
+
+The manuscripts now before us are none of these. They have a history of
+their own.
+
+They constitute a thin volume in folio, neatly bound, having a
+book-mark, and arms with the name of _Fillingham_. Here are four
+familiar autograph-letters from Burke to his amanuensis, Swift, all of
+them written from Margate, on the sea-shore, and bearing Burke's frank
+as a member of Parliament. According to habit with us, the frank of a
+member of Congress is written in the right-hand upper corner of the
+superscription, while the old English frank is in the left-hand lower
+corner. But English law, while the privilege of franking existed,
+required also that the name of the place where the letter was pasted,
+and the day on which it was posted, written at length, should appear in
+the superscription. Take, for instance, the following frank of Burke in
+this collection:--
+
+  "Margate July seventeenth, 1791
+  "Mr Swift,
+  "Mr Burke's Chambers
+  "4 Stone Buildings
+  "Lincoln's Inn
+  "London.
+
+  "Edm. Burke."
+
+These letters have been recently published by Mr. Macknight, who says of
+them that "they show how kind and familiar Burke was to the humblest
+dependants with whom he was thrown into any human relationship"; they
+also "show the statesman, when at the height of literary fame, as busy
+and anxious in sending his sheets through the press, and making
+corrections and alterations, as any young author with his first proofs";
+and he adds, "These letters seem to me quite as important, as
+illustrations of Burke's private character, as those which he wrote to
+the Nagles in former years." It seems that the amanuensis to whom they
+were addressed had at his death other similar letters in his possession;
+but his wife, ignorant of their value, deliberately committed them to
+the names, and the four now before us are all that were saved. Mr.
+Macknight adds, in a note,--"These letters I owe to the kindness of John
+Fillingham, Esq., of Hoxton, who allowed me to inspect and copy the
+originals."[A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Life of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 410.]
+
+Of one of these letters there is an accurate _fac-simile_, which will be
+found in the third volume of Mr. Macknight's elaborate biography of
+Burke.
+
+But the main paper in the collection is none other than the manuscript
+of the "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority," being the
+_identical copy_ from which the surreptitious publication was made which
+disturbed the last hours of Burke. The body of it is in the handwriting
+of the amanuensis to whom the familiar letters were addressed; but it
+shows the revision of Burke, and on several pages most minute and
+elaborate corrections and additions, with changes of sections. Of one of
+these pages there is an accurate _fac-simile_ in the third volume of Mr.
+Macknight, who says that "the manuscript was given by Swift's sister,
+after his death, to the gentleman who kindly permitted him to inspect
+it." [A]
+
+[Footnote A: _Lifo of Burke_, Vol. III. p. 700.]
+
+These manuscripts--both the letters and the Observations--all concern
+the closing period of Burke's life, after the unhappy feud between
+himself and Fox, to which they directly relate. In order to appreciate
+their value, we must glance at the scene by which the memorable
+friendship of these men was closed.
+
+Few political events in English history are read with more interest than
+the separation of Burke and Fox. They had been friends and allies; but
+the French Revolution, which separated so many persons in France,
+reached across the Channel to separate them. They differed so radically
+with regard to this portentous, undeveloped movement, that their
+relations, both political and personal, were rudely severed. Burke, in
+the House of Commons, openly announced this result. He was most
+earnestly inveighing against France, when he said, "It may be indiscreet
+in me at my time of life to provoke enemies, and give occasion to
+friends to desert me." Fox whispered, "There is no loss of friends."
+Burke for a moment paused, and then exclaimed, "Yes, there is a loss of
+friends; I know the price of my conduct. I have done my duty at the
+expense of my friend. Our friendship is at an end." As he finished,
+Burke walked across the floor of the House, and squeezed himself between
+Pitt and Dundas on the Treasury Bench. Fox rose to reply, while tears
+streamed down his face. In the course of his remarks he intimated that
+Burke had heaped upon him the most ignominious terms. Burke at once said
+that he did not recollect having used any; when Fox replied, "My right
+honorable friend does not recollect the epithets. They are out of his
+mind. Then they are completely and forever out of mine. I cannot cherish
+a recollection so painful; and from this moment they are obliterated and
+forgotten."
+
+But the difference was too intense. A few days later it broke forth
+again. "I complain," said Burke, "of being obliged to stand upon my
+defence by the right honorable gentleman, who, when a young man, was
+brought to me and evinced the most promising talents, which I used my
+best endeavors to cultivate; and this man, who has arrived at the
+maturity of being the most brilliant and powerful debater that ever
+existed, has described me as having deserted and abandoned every one of
+my principles!" Fox replied, but alluded to Burke no longer as "friend",
+but as "the right honorable gentleman", and said, in a taunting style,
+that "all he had to do was to repent, and his friends would be ready to
+receive him back and love him as they had previously done". Burke was
+indignant. He said,--"I have gone through my youth without encountering
+any party disgrace, and though in my age I have been so unfortunate as
+to meet it, I do not solicit the right honorable gentleman's friendship,
+nor that of any other man, either on one side of the House or the
+other." [A] This most important and historic friendship was at an end.
+
+[Footnote A:_Parliamentary History_ Vol. XXIX. p. 426.]
+
+The larger part of the Whigs at that time sided with Fox. But Burke
+turned away from Parliament and politicians in one of the most masterly
+productions of his pen, entitled, "An Appeal from the New to the Old
+Whigs." One of the autograph-letters in the collection before us,
+addressed to the amanuensis, Swift, relates to the last corrections of
+this tract, and contains the title, arranged for the printer. It is the
+letter of which a _fac-simile_ is given by Mr. Macknight.
+
+Meanwhile, the difference between the two statesmen became more fixed
+and intense. The Whig Club declared, "that their confidence in Mr. Fox
+was confirmed, strengthened, and increased by the calumnies against
+him." Burke and some forty-five noblemen and gentlemen withdrew from the
+club. It was then that Burke, in justification of himself and his
+friends, took the pen, and drew up what his biographer Prior calls the
+"famous" paper, entitled, "Observations on the Conduct of the Minority,
+particularly in the Last Session of Parliament, addressed to the Duke of
+Portland and Lord Fitzwilliam, 1793," which will be found in the third
+volume of Bonn's edition of his Works.
+
+This paper presents, in fifty-four articles, duly numbered, objections
+to the course and policy of Fox. It was, in brief, an arraignment of
+that distinguished gentleman. But it was not intended for publication,
+at least at that time. It was transmitted to the Duke of Portland, with
+a letter, asking that it might not even be read at once, but that the
+Duke would keep it locked in the drawer of his library-table, and when a
+day of compulsory reflection came, then be pleased to turn to it.
+Communicated thus in confidence, it might have remained indefinitely, if
+not always, unknown to the public, locked in the ducal drawer, if the
+amanuensis whom Burke employed in copying it had not betrayed him. This
+was none other than Swift, to whom the familiar letters were addressed.
+Unknown to his employer, he had appropriated to himself a copy in his
+own handwriting, with corrections and additions by Burke, which seems to
+have come between the original rough draught and the final copy
+transmitted to the Duke of Portland. Some time afterwards, while Burke
+was in his last illness, feeble and failing fast, this faithless
+scrivener communicated this copy to an equally faithless publisher, by
+whom it was advertised as "Fifty-Four Articles of Impeachment against
+the Eight Honorable C.J. Fox." When this was seen by Mrs. Burke, she
+felt it her duty to keep all newspapers and letters from her husband,
+that he might know nothing of the treachery, at least until it was
+relieved so far as it could be. Dr. Lawrence and Dr. King, assisted by
+the affidavit of Mr. Rivington, succeeded in obtaining an injunction
+against the publisher on the very day when the tract appeared. But two
+thousand copies had already stolen abroad.
+
+It was not until Mrs. Burke, on opening a letter from Dr. Lawrence to
+her husband, learned that the injunction had been obtained, that, at two
+o'clock in the afternoon of the 15th of February, 1797, she delivered to
+him his newspapers and correspondence for the past week. He was less
+disturbed than had been expected. "This affair does vex me," he said;
+"but I am not in a state of health at present to be deeply vexed at
+anything. Had I intended it for the public, I should have been more
+exact and full. Many temperaments and explanations there would have
+been, if ever I had had a notion that it should meet the public eye." He
+was justly indignant at the knavish publisher, whose conduct surpassed
+that of the Dublin pirates, or Edmund Curll. But he was at a loss to
+know how the publisher obtained a copy. He did not suppose that the Duke
+of Portland had given up his, and he remembered only "the rough and
+incorrect papers" constituting the first draught, which, it seems, Dr.
+Lawrence, about a year before, had paid the false Swift a guinea to
+deliver back. He had forgotten the intermediate copy made by Swift and
+corrected by himself.
+
+This illicit publication, especially under such a title, was calculated
+to attract attention. Its author was dying, so that it seemed to be his
+last words. Pitt read it with delight, and declared it to be a model in
+that style of composition. But his latest biographer says of it, that
+"it may, perhaps, be regretted that Burke ever wrote the 'Observations
+on the Conduct of the Minority.' It is certainly the least pleasing of
+all his compositions."[A] In style, it is direct, terse, and compact,
+beyond any other composition of Burke's. Perhaps, as it was not intended
+for the public, he was less tempted to rhetorical indulgence. But the
+manuscript now before us exhibits the minute care with which it was
+executed. Here also may be traced varieties of expression, constituting
+the different forms which a thought assumed, not unlike the various
+drawings of Raffaelle for the same wonderful picture.
+
+[Footnote A: Macknight, Vol. III. p. 532.]
+
+But we must stop. It is only as a literary curiosity that we are now
+dealing with this relic.
+
+HARVARD'S HEROES.
+
+
+The stranger who enters the nave of St. Paul's Cathedral in London
+cannot fail to notice the superb pulpit which stands at the angle of the
+choir. It is composed of rare and costly marbles and other precious
+stones. But, beautiful and fitting as it is, its greatest value lies in
+the circumstance which placed it there. It is a memorial, the tribute of
+affection. It was erected by his surviving comrades in arms to a noble
+officer of the Indian army. Yet this, from its position a [Greek: ktema
+es aei], is only one among numberless like monuments which the traveller
+in England meets at every turn. In public squares, in parish churches,
+in stately cathedrals,--wherever the eye of the wayfarer can be
+arrested, whereever the pride of country is most deeply stirred,
+wherever the sentiment of loyalty is consecrated by religion,--the
+Englishman loves to guard from oblivion the names of his honored dead.
+There is in this both a cause and a consequence of that intense local
+pride and affection by which the men of Great Britain are bound to the
+scenes of their early lives.
+
+"It will never do for us to be beaten," said the Duke at Waterloo;
+"think what they will say of us at home!"--and this simple sentence went
+straight to the heart of every man who heard. What they will say at home
+is the prevailing thought in each young soldier's heart as he goes into
+his first fight. And "home" does not mean for him so much broad England
+as it does the little hamlet where he was born, the school where he was
+trained, the county in which his forefathers were honored in times gone
+by. He thinks of his name, henceforward linked with a glorious victory!
+whispered around among the groups who linger in the church-yard after
+the morning service. He trusts, that, if he fall nobly, there will be
+for him the memorial window through whose blazoned panes the sunlight
+will fall softly across the "squire's pew," where as a boy he knelt and
+worshipped, or touch with a crimson and azure gleam the marble effigies
+of his knightly sires recumbent on their tombs. Or he thinks of a place
+among the lettered names high up on the old oaken wall of the
+school-room at Winchester or Harrow or Westminster,--that future boys,
+playing where he played, shall talk of him whom they never knew as "one
+of ours." For he is well aware that he is making fame not for himself
+alone, but to be prized where he himself has been most loved and
+happiest.
+
+We, in this new land of ours, have but a very faint experience of the
+intense working of such influences upon a people in whom the local
+association and sentiment are ingrained. We are but just beginning where
+Englishmen began eight centuries and more ago. Hence our glorifying of
+the past has been a little indiscriminate, and withal has sought to
+commemorate events more than individuals. But the last two years have
+taken us through one of those great periods which, in their concentrated
+energy, compress the work of years into days, and which mark the
+water-sheds of history. The United States of 1865 will be as unlike the
+same land in 1855 as the youth is unlike the child. Life is measured by
+action, not duration. The brilliant epoch of the first Persian invasion
+was more to Greece than its slumbering centuries under Turkish rule, and
+"fifty years of Europe" more "than a cycle of Cathay." We shall look
+back upon a past. We shall have a truly national existence. It will be
+but natural, as it will be most wise, that we take heed of those
+elements which have ever been so potent in strengthening national
+character. One of these has been briefly hinted at above. Yet it may be
+undesirable to perpetuate the memory of events in which the whole
+country cannot participate, which will not for the remainder of this
+century be thought of by one section without shame and confusion of
+face, and which will only tend to keep alive the sad old jealousies and
+hates. We shall be very loath to place our monumental columns upon the
+fields of Antietam and Gettysburg. We should not tolerate them upon the
+slopes of Manassas or the bluffs of Edwards' Ferry. When the war is
+ended, and the best guardian of our internal commerce is the loyalty of
+the returning citizens to their old allegiance, we shall do wisely to
+level the earthworks of Vicksburg and Port Hudson. In the city where
+mob-violence is crushed under the force of armed law, no one cares to
+keep for a day the crumbling walls and the shattered barricade, though
+they may have witnessed heroism as splendid as Arcola or Wagram, for
+they witness also to a wickedness and a terror which all would gladly
+forget. The only memorial that a wise and high-souled nation _can_ erect
+after this war will be the single monument which shall commemorate the
+hour of peace restored.
+
+But while we are debarred from thus recording upon tablets more lasting
+than brass the story of our mournful triumphs over erring brethren, we
+are doubly bound in gratitude to keep green the memory of the men who
+have deserved well of their country in the hour of utmost need. We ought
+to do this also in that temper which shall look most singly to the noble
+end of forming heroic traditions for the youth of our future land. I
+know no place where this can be more fitly carried out than in
+New-England's foremost university. Coeval with the commonwealth itself,
+the starry roll of its heroes links it with all the fortunes of our
+history. Men who sat in the Long Parliament, and who may have seen the
+Battles of Worcester and Dunbar, took their early degrees upon Harvard's
+first Commencement-stage. Her sons fought against King Philip, were
+colonels and captains in the "old French War," went forth in the days of
+Wolfe and Amherst, and exchanged the lexicon for the musket in the eight
+years' struggle which gave to the Thirteen Colonies their independence.
+Alumni still survive who did military duty in the second war with
+England. The men of Harvard were with Taylor at Buena Vista, and helped
+Scott in his victorious march upon the Aztec capital. Of these the only
+record is in the annual necrology and the quaint Latin of the
+"Triennial."
+
+For the young heroes who dropped the oar and took up the sword, who laid
+aside the gown for the sash and shoulder-strap, who, first in the
+bloodless triumphs of the regatta and in "capital training" for the
+great race of life where literary and professional fame are the prizes,
+went forth to venture all for honor and country, the Alma Mater surely
+should have a special commemoration. For her own sake, because of her
+high responsibility in the education of "ingenuous youth," she can do no
+less. I will venture to say that not a Harvard man, among all the loyal
+thousands of her surviving Alumni, but feels his heart beat quicker as
+he reads the story of her children amid their "baptism of fire." There
+is a notable peculiarity about this the most purely New-England of our
+colleges,--the continual recurrence of familiar patronymics. I take up
+the last semi-annual catalogue, and there among the five hundred names I
+can almost make out my own classmates of twenty years ago. Abbots,
+Bigelows, Lawrences, Masons, Russells,--they come with every
+Commencement-season. Some families have had for every generation in a
+hundred and fifty years a representative in her halls. There is a patent
+of nobility in this, such peerage as a republic can rightly confer, the
+coronet which marks the union of birth and worth. We cannot, we, the
+Alumni, suffer these our brothers to sleep unhonored. Those who shall
+come after us, who shall fill our places in dear Old Harvard, shall
+occupy our ancient rooms in Hollis and Massachusetts and Stoughton and
+Holworthy, have a right not only to count the academic wreaths which
+have been won in past days by their namesakes, but also to be taught the
+inspiring lesson of holy love of country, of highest courage and truth
+and soldierly virtue.
+
+And how shall this be done? Let these few remaining lines suggest at
+least one plan. Harvard's chief want is a hall for her Alumni, one
+worthy, in architecture and convenience, of her children's fame, which
+Harvard Hall is not. That long, awkward room, very hot and cramped to
+dine in at midsummer, hotter and more cramped still for the Class-day
+dances, is just fit for one purpose,--the declamation-exercises of the
+Sophomore year. Let us have a hall fit for Commencements, for Alumni and
+Phi-Beta orations, for our annual dinners, worthy of the "Doctor's"
+poems and the "General's" speeches, with a wainscot, not of vulgar
+plaster, but of noble oak, against which Copley's pictures and Story's
+busts may properly be placed.
+
+Then let its windows be filled, as in the glorious halls and chapels of
+England, with memorial glass. Let one of these, if no more, be formed,
+of the costliest and most perfect workmanship our art can compass, to
+the memory of the Heroes of Harvard. It shall be the gift of every class
+which counts among its members one of these. There, amid the gorgeous
+emblazonry, shall be read their names, their academic year, their
+battles.
+
+Or, if this may not be, because our Alma Mater is still too poor or too
+humble to offer to her returning children such banqueting-place,--if
+there is no Wykcham or Waynflete or Wolsey to arch for us the
+high-embowed roof, let us place our memorial in the Library, along its
+shaded alcoves and above its broad portals. There the bright shadows
+shall sleep and pass with the sliding day, where the young scholars
+mused and studied. There the future student, as he walks, shall read as
+noble a lesson as he can glean from any of the groaning shelves and
+dusty tomes. There shall be for Harvard her _Libro d'Oro_ wherein she
+has written the names of her best-beloved.
+
+Some token let us have that they are unforgotten. It was no quarrel of
+vulgar ambition in which they fell. It was the sacred strife for which
+the mother armed them when she sent them forth. For her they fought, for
+culture, generous learning, noble arts, for all that makes a land great
+and glorious, against the barbarism of anarchy and the baseness of a
+system founded upon wrong and oppression. We cannot, indeed, forget them
+while we live to come up to our annual gathering, and see the vacant
+places amid familiar ranks. There will then be question and reply,
+saddening, but proud. "He fell at Port Hudson, cheering on the forlorn
+hope." "He lies beneath the forest-trees of Chancellorsville." "He was
+slain upon the glacis of Fredericksburg." "He died in the foul prisons
+of Richmond." We cannot forget them, and we would fain leave the
+memorial of them to future generations. Their fame belongs to Harvard;
+for what they learned there could not be other than noble, inspiring,
+manly. Let Harvard make the plan, and give the call, and all of us, from
+our distant homes and according to our ability, will offer our gifts
+with gladness. Let the graduates who have leisure and taste and means,
+and who are still dwelling under the pleasant shades of the Cambridge
+elms, come together and take up the matter while love and gratitude and
+pride are fresh.
+
+WHO IS ROEBUCK?
+
+
+An inquiring American mind, seeking the solution of this momentous
+question, would naturally turn to Appleton's "New Cyclopaedia," Vol.
+XIV., page 131. The inquiring mind would be enlightened in a somewhat
+bewildering manner by the description there laid down of a little
+animal, some of whose qualities are thus set forth in the first article
+on the page indicated above:--
+
+"ROEBUCK. A small European deer of the genus _Capreolus_.... The skull
+has a very small, shallow suborbital pit, ... tear-bag indistinct, hoofs
+narrow and triangular.... The color in summer is reddish brown, in
+winter olive, with paler shades; inside of the ears fulvous, and a black
+spot at the angles of the mouth.... It is about four feet long.... The
+horns are used for knife-handles.... They congregate in small families,
+but not in herds.... From their strong scent they are easily hunted;
+though they frequently escape by their speed, doublings, springing to
+cover, and other artifices.... The roebucks are represented in North
+America by the Virginia deer."
+
+Inquiring mind, not wishing for researches in the direction of Natural
+History, albeit the subject of parallelisms is a somewhat curious study
+and in special cases infinitely amusing, passes on to the next article
+in the Cyclopaedia.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+It is sufficiently obvious that it requires neither fame nor greatness
+to excite public curiosity. A notorious criminal or an unusually
+eccentric lunatic frequently gives rise to a larger share of
+newspaper-comment and general discussion than the wisest and most
+virtuous of mankind. It must be well remembered by those who have read
+Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon that a dwarf was attracting thousands to the
+Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly, London, while the historical painter, stung
+to madness by the neglect of the frivolous crowd, committed the hideous
+and ghastly suicide which threw a tragic darkness over the close of his
+strange and troubled existence. The desperate and dangerous frequently
+succeed in placing themselves on a bad eminence, from which they are
+conspicuous enough; and if to be talked of and pointed at be the sole
+object of their ambition, they can, of course, be congratulated on their
+success. Virtue may sit in humble and obscure usefulness at a thousand
+quiet firesides, while the work of the incendiary may be seen to spread
+widely, and the tumult of his mischief be heard from afar. And so any
+public man or politician, whose taste is so morbidly depraved and whose
+aim in life is so debased as to prefer notoriety to honest, useful
+service, may revel in the questionable enjoyment of being the especial
+theme of public debate and private conversation. Hence it happens that
+so many of our fellow-countrymen are at this moment asking the question
+with which we head these pages,--"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+An unhappy culprit, who combined with an innocent taste for green peas a
+thievish method of acquiring their usual savory accompaniment, is
+reported to have been addressed by an English judge in the following
+felicitous terms:--"Prisoner at the bar, Providence has endowed you with
+health and strength, _instead of which_ you go about the country
+stealing ducks." Providence has endowed John Arthur Roebuck, member of
+the Parliament of Great Britain, with fair talents and some power of
+speech, _instead of which_ (to use the accurate judicial ellipsis) he
+goes about using violent and vulgar words of menace against those who
+have never offended him, and scattering firebrands as if there were no
+gun-powder anywhere to ignite and explode. This would be a mean and
+mischievous occupation for the dullest man; but for one who has proved
+by his very failures that he is not devoid of intellect or energy, it
+is a monstrous perversion of mental gifts, even if they are small.
+
+A portion of the fiery heat of his nature may be traced, perhaps, to the
+fact that he was born at Madras; but as on the mother's side he is
+descended from the poet Tickell, the friend of Addison, it would not be
+altogether unreasonable to have expected in him some few of the
+amenities of the _literae humaniores_. He soon, however, exchanged the
+torrid scenes of Oriental life for the snows of Canada, where he
+received his education; and when we remember what the bizarre oddities
+of his subsequent career have been, it might be interesting, if we had
+the materials for the purpose, to inquire what that education was. The
+British Provinces, however, were not deemed a sufficiently ample theatre
+of action for the energy of the capacious soul that dwelt in that not
+over-capacious body; and so, at the age of twenty-three, he repaired to
+England and commenced his studies for the profession of the law.
+
+He was called to the bar in 1832. He had, however, by no means paid an
+exclusive attention to the study of the law, or his success in his
+profession might have been greater, and the world might have had a good
+lawyer instead of a bad politician. The period of his Inner-Temple
+student-life was a very stirring time in England. Old principles were
+dying out, and wrestling in death-struggle with newer and wider theories
+of human liberty and human progress. The young East-Indian Canadian
+rushed with natural impetuosity into the arena, and was one of the most
+reckless and noisy debating-club spouters of the day. In speaking of the
+Reform Bill at a meeting at a tavern in London, he said, that, if the
+bill did not pass, he for one should like to "wade the streets of the
+capital knee-deep in blood." It was consoling to reflect, even at the
+time, that the atrocious aspiration was mitigated by the reflection that
+it would not require a deluge of gore to reach the knees of such a
+Zacchaeus as Roebuck. "Pretty wicious that for a child of six!" said the
+amiable Mr. Squeers on one occasion; and pretty sanguinary that, say we,
+for a rising little demagogue of thirty.
+
+As England was at that time in a seething ferment of excitement, men who
+were unscrupulous in their language were at a premium in the political
+market, and the respectable constituency of the pleasant watering-place
+of Bath, in Somersetshire, elected the fierce little man as their
+representative in the Imperial Parliament. This was a great start in
+life for the new-fledged barrister, and, had he moderated his
+overweening vanity, and studied wisely, and with some self-abnegation
+and honest adherence to party, he might have risen to some useful
+position, and been saved, at least, from the indignity of fetching and
+carrying for the Emperor of Austria, and from the impertinence of
+intruding himself into the august presence of Mr. Kinglake's amiable and
+virtuous friend, the Emperor of France. The English nation might then
+possibly have pointed to his portrait in their historical gallery as
+that of an efficient public servant who had deserved well of his
+country, and he might have escaped a ludicrous immortality as the Dog
+Tear-'em, in the recent admirable sketch in "Punch."
+
+But, in the words of a political song,--
+
+    "There weren't no such luck
+    For John A. Roebuck,
+  And he thought he would teach the whole nation
+    That the Tories were fools,
+    And the Whigs only tools,
+  But Roebuck was England's salvation."
+
+And he, according to this programme, set himself to reform the
+Constitution and protect the Colonies.
+
+  "Nullius addictus jurare in verba magistri,"
+
+he was an eclectic in politics,--acknowledged no leader, had himself no
+followers. A chief without a party, an apostle without disciples, a
+critic without the merest ordinary penetration, a cynic whose bitterness
+was not enlivened by wit or humor, a spouter whose arguments, when he
+had any, were usually furnished from the mint, John Arthur Roebuck was
+for many years that impersonation of terrific honesty, glaring purity,
+and indignant virtue, known in English politics as an INDEPENDENT member
+of Parliament. When party-spirit runs high, and many party-men are
+disposed to be unscrupulous in the measures and artifices by which they
+win or retain place and power, such a position, occupied with judgment
+and fortified by modesty and good sense, is a most powerful and a most
+beneficent one; but it is useless when seized on by one whose obtrusive
+egotism and more than feminine vanity disqualify him for any serious or
+permanent influence on his fellow-men. When a Pocket-Diogenes rolls his
+little tub into the House of Commons, and complains that everybody is
+standing between him and the sun,--why, in an assembly of educated and
+sensible men the sham is soon discovered, the pseudo-cynic seen through,
+and his affected misanthropy deservedly gains for him universal derision
+and scorn. Some years after he entered Parliament, Mr. Disraeli, with
+whom he had many encounters, in which he was invariably worsted, made
+the House roar with laughter by taunting Roebuck with his "Sadler's
+Wells sarcasms and melodramatic malignities," and drew a most amusing
+picture of him as "a solitary sentinel pacing round the deserted citadel
+of his own opinions."
+
+  "He who surpasses or subdues mankind
+  Must look down on the hate of those below";
+
+but as Mr. Roebuck has done neither the one nor the other, his only
+chance of not being utterly forgotten, instead of being feared or hated,
+by his contemporaries, is to continue his work of mischief, and merely
+change the object of his puny attacks as one becomes more prominent than
+another, and as he can manage to maintain his own quasi-importance by
+attaching his name to great questions. He had no special dislike for
+this country; so far from that, he admired and praised us, as by an
+extract from one of his books we will presently prove; but since he has
+become a self-appointed lackey, has donned imperial livery, and as a
+volunteer does the dirty work of despots, he must have lost all sympathy
+with and all regard for an independent, free, and brave people. We hope
+and believe that this country vastly prefers his censure to his praise,
+and, as far as it has leisure at the present crisis for any serious
+consideration of his erratic pranks, would rather have his enmity than
+his friendship. _Non tali auxilio!_
+
+But we must recur to his inconsistent and rather uninteresting career,
+and so satisfy, and perhaps weary, the curiosity of any reader who is
+still disposed to ask the momentous question, "Who is Roebuck?"
+
+In 1835, he was appointed the agent--the _paid_ agent--of the House of
+Assembly of Lower Canada, during the dispute then raging between the
+Executive Government and the House of Assembly. As Englishmen especially
+plume themselves on the fact that the members of their legislative
+bodies are unremunerated, it is somewhat difficult to understand how
+this exception was made in John Arthur's favor. As a precedent it is to
+be hoped that it has not been followed; for it is obvious that such an
+arrangement, however advantageous or pleasant to individual members,
+might throw grave suspicions on the purity of public men, and introduce
+a wholesale venality into public life. If such a system is permitted,
+any foreign monarch or any foreign government may secure the services of
+a British senator as his agent and representative. It is quite appalling
+to think that the chivalrous Earl of Derby or the conscientious Mr.
+Gladstone should be shocked by the offer of a handsome annual salary
+paid quarterly, (not deducting the income-tax,) made by the King of
+Dahomey for an eloquent defence of his humane and enlightened rule, or
+by an equally munificent donative from the famous and merry monarch of
+the Cannibal Islands for the support of himself and his loyal subjects
+in their copious consumption of human flesh. We should be sorry wantonly
+to raise so dreadful a suspicion; but if British M.P.s are permitted,
+according to the Roebuck precedent, to be PAID agents, why has not
+Southern money found its way into senatorial pockets? Greedy Mr. Laird,
+and unscrupulous, money-loving Mr. Lindsay,[A] always resolutely
+grubbing for the main chance, are perhaps sufficiently paid by indirect,
+though heavy gains in shipbuilding. Needy Mr. Roebuck may be salaried by
+the Emperor of Austria, though there is nothing to prove, except his own
+open-mouthed and loud-tongued professions of purity, that he is not
+"_paid_ agent" of the Confederate Government. The indulgence of the evil
+feelings of malice and uncharitableness may, however, sufficiently
+recompense him; and to him, perhaps, his virtue may be its own reward.
+But if paid agencies are not permitted, a very serious suspicion fastens
+on that hard-mouthed, rising lordling, Robert Cecil, son of the Marquis
+of Salisbury, and one of the most active and energetic champions of the
+slave-mongers of the South. The young lord, it is well known, stepped
+down from the lofty pedestal of a bad pedigree to marry the fair, but
+portionless daughter of an English judge; his father is proverbially
+mean and stingy, and the young lord himself proportionately poor; and in
+the intervals of his strenuous advocacy of the claims of the Rebels to
+European recognition he laudably ekes out his very narrow income by
+writing articles for the London newspapers and reviews; and rumor says
+that he communicates gossiping letters, full of piquant and satirical
+sketches of the proceedings of the House of Commons to two or three of
+the provincial papers. He is under these circumstances peculiarly open
+to suspicion. If the proceeding in question is a usual one, why does he
+not openly avow it? If it is unusual or improper, why does he not deny
+the soft impeachment so much credited both in this country and in his
+own? It is really refreshing to contemplate, that Roebuck, after being
+the paid agent of the Canadian House of Assembly, should have become
+such a _purist_ as to drag poor Mr. Isaac Butt before the notice of the
+Commons, and scream for the censure on him on a mere suspicion that he
+had touched the yellow and handsome gold coins of one of the innumerable
+Indian princes and rajahs who come to England with complaints of
+grievances, sometimes real, and sometimes fictitious, against the
+British Government.
+
+[Footnote A: Lindsay's fawning, plastic sycophancy is well known this
+side the water. After shrewdly filling his coffers with profits from
+Northern business-transactions, he now turns about, kicks his old
+friends, who always half suspected his knavish propensities, bows, cap
+in hand, to visionary cotton-bales, and hopes to turn some honest
+pounds, shillings, and pence by advocating the slave-drivers' rebellion.
+A "fool's gudgeon" will surely reward his laborious endeavors for
+Southern gold, that article growing beautifully less every day.]
+
+During the period of the "paid agency" Roebuck was tolerably industrious
+with his pen; but in literature and journalism he proved his utter
+incapacity for joining in any combined action. Such was his dogged
+self-assertion and indomitable egotism that none of the ordinary
+channels would answer his purpose; and so he issued a series of
+political papers, entitled "Pamphlets for the People," to which the
+curious may sometimes refer, but which have now lost all their
+significance and interest. His quarrels with editors and publishers were
+notorious; and an altercation with Mr. Black, the well-known editor of
+the "Morning Chronicle," eventuated in a duel so bloodless as to be
+ridiculous. David's pebble did not reach Goliath, and Goliath was
+equally merciful to David. In these pamphlets he violently assailed the
+whole body of editors, sub-editors, reporters, etc., of most of the
+papers of any note. And the more accustomed he became to the House of
+Commons, the greater liberties did he take with the conventional
+fairness and courtesy of debate. His personality and scurrility were so
+indiscriminating and excessive that he was perhaps at this time the most
+unpopular member of the House.
+
+In 1837 he lost his election for Bath, but was reelected in 1841. In a
+subsequent contest at Bath he was successfully opposed by Lord Ashley,
+the present Earl of Shaftesbury. On this occasion he exhibited even more
+than his usual bad temper and bad taste. He declined to accept Lord
+Ashley's proffered hand; and in the chagrin and vexation occasioned by
+unexpected defeat he uttered a rabid invective against the
+Non-Conformist ministers of the place, to whose influence he rightly
+attributed his rival's success. Lord Ashley was a well-known
+philanthropist, and his consistent support and patronage of many
+religious and charitable societies had naturally given him popularity
+among the Protestant clergy of all denominations,--a popularity
+heightened in the case of the Evangelical and Calvinistic ministers by
+his Lordship's strict Sabbatarianism and his belief in cold dinners on
+Sunday. On the other hand, Mr. Roebuck was openly accused of private
+professions of skepticism in matters of religion; and this report, so
+dangerous to the repute of any public man in England, (where theology
+and politics so frequently cross each other,) considerably damaged his
+chance of success. Lord Ashley, however, was in no way responsible for
+the rumor; and the difference between the conduct of the two during the
+contest was this, that Lord Ashley behaved like a gentleman and Mr.
+Roebuck did not.
+
+During his retirement into private life, after this defeat in 1847, he
+wrote his work entitled "The History of the Whig Ministry of 1830,"--a
+book in the preparation of which he is said to have received
+considerable and valuable assistance from no less a person than Lord
+Brougham. Despite the aid that he received, it is amusing to find in his
+preface a characteristic vaunting of his entire difference with Lord
+Brougham about the character of King William IV. "Lord Brougham," he
+writes, "is accustomed to describe William IV as frank, just, and
+straightforward. We believe him to have been very weak and very false, a
+finished dissembler, and always bitterly hostile to the Whig Ministry
+and their great measure of Reform." This is Roebuck all over. He would
+infinitely rather argue that white was black than quietly coincide in
+any generally received opinion.
+
+While on the subject of his writings, we will mention the book in which
+he vouchsafed to praise those whom he now so elaborately vilifies. In
+1849 he published an octavo volume of two hundred and forty-eight pages
+on "The Colonies of England." Speaking (page 84) of the vast and rapid
+progress made by this country, he says:--
+
+"We are led to inquire by what machinery, by what favoring
+circumstances, such a result has been brought about. The people, be it
+remarked, are the same as ourselves,--the original Thirteen States were
+the work of Englishmen. English heads, English hearts, English hands
+brought those new communities into existence. No longer connected by
+government with us, they nevertheless retained the characteristics of
+the race from which they sprang, and proceeding in the great work to
+which they were destined, they strode across the continent, the fairest
+portion of which they could now call their own. In planting new
+settlements they were aided by our own people,--the very elements _out
+of which we endeavor to frame colonies, and with which we do produce
+sickly, miserable communities that can only be said to exist, and to
+linger on in a sort of half-life_, without the spirit of a young, or the
+amenities and polish of an old community, and, above all, _without any
+spirit of independence_."
+
+Again, speaking of colonization In this country as opposed to Canada and
+other English colonies, he writes (page 88):--"Certain adventurous
+persons, the 'pioneers' of civilization, wishing to make new settlements
+beyond the boundaries of Pennsylvania and Virginia, upon wild lands
+belonging to the United States, made formal application to the
+Government of the United States at Washington, who, being bound to
+afford all possible facility, thereupon take steps to have the land
+surveyed and laid out into counties, townships, parishes. The roads are
+also indicated, and at once the law exists; and security, guarantied by
+the authority of the United States, immediately follows, both for person
+and property; and all the machinery known to the Common Law, and needed
+for the maintenance of this security, and the enforcement of the law's
+decrees, is at once adopted. A municipal authority comes into existence;
+a court-house, a jail, a school-room, arise in the wilderness; and
+although these buildings be humble, and the men who exercise authority
+in them may appear to be in some degree rude, yet is the law there in
+all its useful majesty. To it a reverent obedience is rendered; and the
+plain magistrate, who, in a hunter's frock, may, in the name of the
+United States, pronounce the law's decree, commands an obedience as
+complete and sincere as that which is paid to the Chief-Justice of the
+Supreme Court at Washington, or to the ermined judge who presides in the
+courts of our Lady the Queen in Westminster Hall."
+
+This in 1849; but what a very different tone has he thought fit to adopt
+now! Was any agency then expected which has not been forthcoming? Or,
+having degenerated from being a supporter of liberal opinions in his
+youth to being the fond and fatuous admirer of autocrats in his old age,
+does he think that it is absolutely necessary that the firm friend of
+Austrian despotism should be the malignant assailant of the Government
+and people of the United States? The man is consistent in nothing but
+his spiteful vindictiveness and love of mischief. He is now the general
+object of deserved ridicule and contempt for his flunkyistic attendance
+at the Tuileries. At the time of Louis Napoleon's visit to London,
+Roebuck raved and ranted about his "perjured lips having kissed the
+Queen of England."
+
+He has, on some occasions, put himself prominently forward, and in such
+a way as to make himself an influential member of Parliament. He moved
+the vote of confidence in the Whig Government in 1850, when the great
+debate ensued in which the late Sir Robert Peel made his last speech,
+and they were kept in office by a poetical majority of nine. But the
+speech with which Roebuck introduced the motion was entirely eclipsed by
+the magnificent declamation of Sir Alexander Cockburn, the present
+Lord-Chief-Justice of England. On another great occasion, in January,
+1855, he brought forward in the House of Commons a motion for inquiry
+into the conduct of the Crimean War. Lord Aberdeen's Government was
+defeated by an immense majority, and, of course, resigned. Mr. Roebuck
+was chairman of the Committee of Inquiry; but the cabinet that came in
+discreetly declined to give him any official post in their ranks. They
+knew too well the terrible uncertainty and inconsistency of the man's
+conduct. They could place no reliance either on his temper or his
+discretion. In 1855 he was one of the numerous candidates for the
+chairmanship of the Metropolitan Board of Works, but failed to inspire
+the electors with any confidence in his capacity for the post. In the
+following year he became the chairman of the Administrative Reform
+Association, and although the league had at first been highly
+successful, and aided much in awaking public attention to the
+miscarriages and mismanagement in the Crimea, yet, under this fatal
+presidency, it became speedily and ingloriously defunct. This was his
+last great failure, before abdicating all his early liberal principles.
+He has of late years endeavored to solace himself for the now
+irretrievable blunders of his career by an exaggerated indulgence in his
+idiosyncratic waywardness, paradox, and eccentricity. He is proud of
+being considered the acquaintance of the Emperor of Austria, and rather
+pleased than otherwise at being assailed on this account. He affects the
+society and friendship of conservative members of the House of Commons.
+He has become tolerant of lords. He may be seen sitting next to Lord
+Robert Cecil, indulging in ill-natured jocosities, from which his
+Lordship probably borrows when he indites ill-natured articles for the
+misguided "Saturday Review."[A] He hates the Manchester school of
+politicians, because their liberality and their sympathy with the cause
+of freedom and civilization in this country remind Roebuck of his own
+deflection from the right path.
+
+[Footnote A: This journal is now owned by Mr. Alexander James Beresford
+Beresford-Hope, (we dare not omit any portion of this august name,) who
+has ample means to enlist the talents of reckless, "smart" young men in
+search of employment for any work he may require, no matter how
+unprincipled the job in hand.]
+
+His private undertakings have not been more fortunate than his public
+acts. He was chairman of a bank, which was unsuccessful, to say the
+least of it. He has been connected with other enterprises, which soon
+courted and obtained failure.
+
+What he has recently said and done in reference to this country is too
+fresh in our memories to require that we should recite or recapitulate
+it here. His past career, as we have reviewed it, may account for the
+now intolerable acerbity of temper and the ludicrous vanity which
+disgrace him. Never was a Nemesis more just than that which has for the
+present consigned him to a melancholy obscurity. The political
+extinguisher has certainly dropped upon his head, and this burning and
+shining light has gone out with an unpleasant odor into utter darkness.
+
+In summing up his character, it is evident that excessive vanity is his
+besetting sin. He is not too clever or too honest to act in union with
+other people, but he is too _vain_. He is by no means too good for the
+rest of the world; but he is too conceited and self-opinionated to
+condescend to cooeperate with them. As, at some of the minor theatres, a
+single actor may play an army, so, in the House of Commons, Roebuck is a
+host in himself,--is his own party, and leads it. His occasional
+popularity in his own country is due to the fact, that, in his own
+character, he, to a certain extent, represents and crystallizes a few of
+the good and many of the bad qualities of Englishmen. He has their
+courage and audacity, their independence and pride, their generally
+defiant front to the rest of the world; but he is also vain, obstinate,
+bigoted, prejudiced, narrow in his views, and boastful in his language.
+His vulgar swagger, for instance, about the navy sweeping the seas,
+would have been condemned here, if it had been addressed by the most
+violent of demagogues to the most ignorant of Irish mobs.
+
+We have heard him speak in the House of Commons in his palmier days,
+before he was as decrepit in mind as he is in body. He had great
+fluency, some power of invective, and a vast stock of assurance. We
+listened to him upon one occasion, when, without the slightest
+provocation, he used the most undignified personalities to the late Sir
+Robert Peel,--to which Sir Robert, very wisely, never replied.
+
+We cannot say that we feel any profound interest as to his future. He
+has compared himself to a dog,--but, on behalf of that faithful and
+valued companion of man, we protest against the similitude. He has the
+kind of pugnacity which prompts a cur or a puppy to attack a
+Newfoundland or a mastiff. He has not the fidelity and many other good
+qualities of the canine race. At any rate, he has become a mischievous
+dog,--and a dull dog,--and will soon be a "sad dog."
+
+We would venture to suggest, that he should at once be raised to the
+peerage, under the title of Baron Tear-'em. He might then aid the good
+cause of the slave-mongers of the South, and act in unison with that
+just, generous, moral, and virtuous nobleman, the Marquis of
+Clanricarde.
+
+We ought to apologize to our readers for so lengthy an account of so
+undeserving a person,--but, at any rate, they ought by this time to know
+"Who is Roebuck?"
+
+REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES.
+
+
+_Six Months in the Federal States_. By EDWARD DICEY. In Two Volumes.
+London and Cambridge: Macmillan & Co.
+
+This is a very _gentlemanly_ book. Whatever excellence of commendation
+belongs to the adjective we have Italicized must be awarded to Mr.
+Dicey. And it is ill-adapted to the manufactures of most British
+tourists who have preceded him. For, to make no mention of the vulgar
+buffooneries of Bunn or Grattan, we hold that neither the exalted and
+irrepressible prosiness of Dr. Charles Mackay, nor the cleverish
+magic-lantern pictures of that good-natured book-maker, Mr. Anthony
+Trollope, would be perfectly fitted with this polite addition. It is no
+mean praise to say that the word _gentlemanly_ naturally applies itself
+to a traveller's work. And it is necessary to allow that the majority of
+Americans who have printed their impressions of a scamper over Europe
+have fallen as hopelessly below it as a few have risen far above it.
+Some word of deeper meaning must characterize the sterling sentences of
+"English Traits"; some epithet of more rare and subtile significance is
+suggested by those exquisitely painted scenes of foreign life with which
+Hawthorne is even now adorning the pages of the "Atlantic." But after
+the manner in which such a well-informed, modest, humane man as we would
+emphatically credit as an American _gentleman_ might speak of six months
+in England, so has Mr. Dicey spoken of his six months in the Federal
+States.
+
+And, at this present time, far better than all curious delineations or
+"stereographic" descriptions are the sober testimonies concerning us
+which Mr. Dicey offers to his countrymen. To such loyal Americans as
+these volumes may reach they will give a heart not to be found in Dr.
+Russell's pictorial neutrality, in the dashing effects of popular Mr.
+Trollope, nor even--making all allowance for the sanative influence of
+counter-irritation--in the weekly malignity of that _ex_-Moral Minstrel
+whom the London "Times" has sent to the aid of our insurgent
+slave-masters. For, instead of gloating over objections and picking out
+what petty enigmas may not be readily soluble, Mr. Dicey has a manly,
+English way of accepting the preponderant evidence concerning the crisis
+he came to study. He seldom gets entangled in trivial events, but knows
+how to use them as illustrations of great events. It is really
+refreshing to meet with a British traveller who is so happily delivered
+from the haunting consciousness of a personal identity. The reader is
+not called upon to bemoan the tribulations of temperance-taverns, the
+hardships of indiscriminate railroad-carriages, nor the rapacity of
+New-York hackmen. There is scarcely an offence against good taste or
+good feeling in Mr. Dicey's volumes; and whatever American homes may
+have been opened to him would doubtless reopen far more readily than to
+most publishing tourists from the mother-land.
+
+Mr. Dicey clearly exhibits the bearing of the Rebellion upon the fate of
+the servile population of the South, and confesses that his deep
+sympathy with the Federal cause came from the conviction that the
+supremacy or overthrow of Slavery was intimately connected with the
+success or failure of Secession. In acknowledging the necessity that was
+upon loyal Americans of defending the fundamental law of their society,
+he is not disposed to adopt the lamentation of some of our foreign
+well-wishers who are troubled by the fear of a military despotism in the
+Free States. He has the sagacity to perceive that the genius and
+development of the graduates of Northern school-houses are totally
+opposed to a military rule. Mr. Dicey cordially recognizes the
+democratic idea which sanctifies our convulsion, and displays a careful
+observation in noting "the self-restraint, the moderation, and the
+patience of the American people in the conduct of the people's war." He
+is not over-disturbed because this same people loved law and order more
+than freedom itself, and with few murmurs committed high principles to
+the championship of whatever petty men happened to represent them.
+Indeed, one of the best sayings he reports is that of an old Polish
+exile, who congratulates himself that there will be no saviours of
+society, no fathers of their country, to be provided for when the war
+is over.
+
+Throughout these two volumes British readers may discern something more
+than the barren facts of our struggle: they may catch glimpses of its
+energy and movement; they may see it as reflected from the most generous
+American minds. For it seems to have been Mr. Dicey's good fortune in
+this country to have gained admission to the society of men and women of
+high intelligence, in whom the religious sentiment was living and
+powerful; and he appears to estimate the full weight of testimony such
+persons offered in sending their loved ones to Virginia to fall beneath
+the rifle of some Southern boor. It is this silent public opinion of the
+North which our foreign critics have generally failed to comprehend.
+They have been so long accustomed to parody the rhetorical elation of
+our third-rate political speakers, and to represent this as a universal
+American characteristic, that they signally failed to estimate the
+genuine emotion with which it is never connected. When the cherished
+barbarism of slaveholders arose and threatened our Western civilization,
+those who most felt and have best wrought for their country were
+cautious in their speech. They knew that the principle underlying the
+struggle must submit itself to the checks and counter-checks of
+constitutional law. While the fire of liberty burned at the heart of
+citizens of abiding loyalty, it seemed best, that, like the Psalmist,
+they should hold their peace even from good words. Many thought it an
+act of necessary self-restraint to dwell only upon the Union as a symbol
+of that universal freedom which they felt the Union must finally
+represent. The dread of overleaping the restraints of law, which,
+perchance, has prolonged the conflict, has been most creditable to the
+genuine democracy we have represented. We are proud to remember many
+intelligent soldiers who used no language of passionate denunciation
+towards the guilty institution which called them to the field, yet who
+knew the end when they gave their lives to a cause utterly antagonistic
+to its despotic claims.
+
+By the representations of Secessionists encountered in the Free States,
+as well as from disloyal newspapers which the "Lincoln despotism" never
+sought to suppress, Mr. Dicey was convinced that the sole purpose of the
+Rebellion was to get possession of the vast regions which lie west of
+the Mississippi, wherein to establish Slave States and Territories. "The
+North," he declares, "is fighting against, the South is fighting for,
+the power of extending slavery across the American continent; and if
+this was all that could be said, it is clear on which side must be the
+sympathies of any one who really and honestly believes that slavery is
+an evil and a sin." But it is not here that Mr. Dicey rests the case of
+the North as appealing to the Christian sentiment of the world. He shows
+that the inexorable logic of facts must work the overthrow of slavery
+where it now exists. The suppression of the slave-trade, the recognition
+of Hayti, abolition in the District of Columbia, and finally the
+Proclamation of January have one tendency and can have but one result.
+We state these views as one more confirmation of the fact, that, whether
+agreeable to us or not, the sympathies of liberal men in Europe are to
+be had on the sole ground that ours is an anti-slavery war.
+
+Mr. Dicey's predilections lead him to make a generous, although
+discriminating, estimate of those men who, in time past, have endeavored
+to serve their country by leaving the level commonplaces of respectable
+citizenship. It is no slight praise to say that his chapter upon the
+New-England Abolitionists is clear and just. Their points of
+disagreement with the Republican party are stated with no common
+accuracy. Careful sentences give the precise position of Garrison and
+his adherents: the intrinsic essence of the movement of these reformers
+is divested of the subordinate and trivial facts so often put forward to
+misrepresent it. Although Mr. Dicey endeavors not to commit himself upon
+the vital differences in the agitation of anti-slavery sentiments by the
+Abolitionists and by the Republican party, it is very evident that he
+inclines to the belief that the former, in their advocacy of disunion,
+acted not from a perverse and fanatical philosophy, but from the logical
+compulsions of a critical understanding, stimulated by an intense
+conviction of the national sin.
+
+We have dwelt thus upon Mr. Dicey's views of the war, and of the great
+moral question with which it is connected, because these portions of his
+volumes are most pertinent to us, as well as creditable to him. His
+sketches of public characters are good common-sense grasps at them,
+which generally get their externals, and occasionally something more.
+The description of the President is forcible, though a little too
+graphic for perfect courtesy. Caleb Cushing impresses the traveller as
+one of the ablest of our public men, and Wendell Phillips as by far the
+most eloquent speaker he ever heard. General Butler, however, is not to
+Mr. Dicey's taste. Indeed, he is hardly behind the "Saturday Review" in
+the terrible epithets he bestows upon the man who he acknowledges "was
+associated with the grandest triumph of the Federal arms, and by some
+means or other preserved New Orleans to the Union with but little cost
+of either men or money." It is rather late to renew discussion about the
+notorious order relating to the women of the subjected city. But Mr.
+Dicey chooses to express his belief in an infamous intention of General
+Butler at the time of its issue,--though he declares that "the strictest
+care was taken lest the order should be abused," and that the "Southern
+ladies [?] were grossly insulting in their behavior to the Union
+soldiers, using _language and gestures_ which, in a city occupied by
+troops of any other nation, would have subjected them, _without orders_,
+to the coarsest retaliation." To which we have only to reply, that
+General Butler may be a villain, but that he is certainly not a fool.
+Nobody doubts that he has military or civil aspirations for the future,
+and, for such ends, if for nothing else, wishes the approbation of his
+loyal countrymen. Now Mr. Dicey testifies to "the almost morbid
+sentiment of Americans in the Free States with regard to women": he
+tells us that "it renders them ridiculously susceptible to female
+influences"; also, that this same "sentiment" among us "protects women
+from the natural consequences of their own misconduct." These
+characteristics of his countrymen are just as familiar to General Butler
+as they are patent to Mr. Dicey; and we hold it to be simply incredible
+that one who is at least a very shrewd politician used language which
+_he intended_ should convey a meaning that must necessarily consign his
+future career to privacy and infamy. It is perhaps not wonderful that
+men who have deluged their country in blood, to propagate a system which
+consigns unborn millions to enforced harlotry, should put an evil
+interpretation upon the indignant stigma applied to _acts_ which, in
+civilized States, come from one class of women, and are designed for one
+purpose. Neither is it very astonishing that such persons as have been
+employed to pump the New-York sewers into the _cloaca maxima_ which sets
+towards us from Printing-House Square should share the sensitive
+chastity of the slave-masters whose work they are put to do. But it is
+passing strange that a gentleman so fair and reasonable as Mr. Dicey,
+one so appreciative of the moral tone which Northern society demands of
+its representatives, should join in an accusation whose absurdity is
+only lost in its infinite offence.
+
+There are small inaccuracies, as well as occasional instances of
+carelessness or repetition, in these volumes, which, had circumstances
+allowed time for revision, might have been avoided. It would require the
+"Pathfinder" himself to discover "Fremont Street" in the city where we
+write; the "Courier" is _not_ "the most largely circulated of any Boston
+paper"; and our Ex-Mayor "Whiteman" requires no fanciful orthography to
+free his name from the obloquy of an over-devotion to the interests of
+colored citizens. These are local illustrations of mistakes which are
+excusable in view of the commendable expedition with which the work was
+issued,--for, in the late crisis of our affairs, an Englishman who had
+any good words to give us fulfilled the proverb by giving twice in
+giving quickly. But, whatever trifling details might be subjected to
+criticism, the total impression of what Mr. Dicey has written bears
+honorable testimony to the accuracy of his observation, as well as to
+his powers of comparison and judgment.
+
+As has been already remarked, we cannot be blind to the fact that our
+only supporters in England are those men who recognize at the heart of
+our contest that genuine principle of Liberty which is not to be limited
+to caste or to race. And it is only by hastening to justify their
+confidence that we can win to our cause the great people they address.
+If we cannot gain the national sympathy of England, we must do without
+the true sympathy of any nation. It was, indeed, remarked by De
+Tocqueville, that, "in the eyes of the English, the cause which is most
+useful to England is always the cause of justice." But the rare insight
+of the philosopher assigns the phenomenon, not to a political
+Machiavelism, but to a "laudable desire to connect the actions of one's
+country with something more stable than interest." The English have a
+peculiar gift of fixing their whole attention upon certain traits or
+single circumstances which they desire to see. We doubt not that a
+portion of their sympathy with the energy and endurance of those in arms
+against their country is estimable according to its light. But as the
+dignity of our mission in this struggle becomes more and more apparent,
+the moral intelligence of England will be forced to unite itself with
+the Government of the United States. Let that day come when it will,
+posterity will remember its obligations to those Englishmen who did so
+much to avert the hideous calamity of a war between the two liberal
+powers of the world. And to us of this present generation it is grateful
+to know that our brave and generous young men have not died wholly
+unrecognized in the land of their ancestors. Mill, Ellison,
+Hughes,--what need to name the rest?--have stood up to report them and
+their cause aright to the unsatisfied: in which roll of the honorable
+and honored we are glad to write the name of Edward Dicey.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_Hospital Transports_. A Memoir of the Embarkation of the Sick and
+Wounded from the Peninsula of Virginia in the Summer of 1862. Compiled
+and published at the Request of the Sanitary Commission. Boston: Ticknor
+and Fields.
+
+If pure benevolence was ever organized and utilized into beneficence,
+the name of the institution is the Sanitary Commission. It is a standing
+answer to Samson's riddle, "Out of the strong came forth sweetness." Out
+of the very depths of the agony of this cruel and bloody war springs
+this beautiful system, built of the noblest and divinest attributes of
+the human soul. Amidst all the heroism of daring and enduring which this
+war has developed, amidst all the magnanimity of which it has shown the
+race capable, the daring, the endurance, and the greatness of soul which
+have been discovered among the men and women who have given their lives
+to this work shine as brightly as any on the battle-field,--in some
+respects even more brightly. They have not the bray of trumpets nor the
+clash of swords to rouse enthusiasm, nor will the land ever resound with
+their victories. Theirs is the dark and painful side, the menial and
+hidden side, but made light and lovely by the spirit that shines in and
+through it all. Glimpses of this agency are familiar to our people; but
+not till the history of its inception, progress, and results is calmly
+and adequately written out and spread before the public will any idea be
+formed of the magnitude and importance of the work which it has done.
+Nor even then. Never, till every soldier whose last moments it has
+soothed, till every soldier whose flickering life it has gently steadied
+into continuance, whose waning reason it has softly lulled into quiet,
+whose chilled blood it has warmed into healthful play, whose failing
+frame it has nourished into strength, whose fainting heart it has
+comforted with sympathy,--never, until every full soul has poured out
+its story of gratitude and thanksgiving, will the record be complete;
+but long before that time, ever since the moment that its helping hand
+was first held forth, comes the Blessed Voice, "Inasmuch as ye have done
+it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
+
+An institution asking of Government only permission to live and
+opportunity to work, planting itself firmly and squarely on the
+generosity of the people, subsisting solely by their free-will
+offerings, it is a noble monument of the intelligence, the munificence,
+and the efficiency of a free people, and of the alacrity with which it
+responds when the right chord is rightly touched. It is, however, not
+unnatural that doubts should exist as to the success of a plan so
+far-reaching in its aims and hitherto so untried. Stories have been
+circulated of a mercenary disposition of its stores and trickery among
+its officers. Where these stories have found considerable credence, they
+have been tracked to their source and triumphantly refuted; but it would
+indeed be hardly less than miraculous, if an institution ramifying so
+widely, with agents so numerous, and resources so extensive, should have
+no knaves among its servants, and no waste in its circulation. The
+wonder is, that more leakage has not been proved than has ever been
+suspected. All that is necessary to remove floating doubts, to convince
+all heads of the wisdom which projected this Commission, and to warm all
+hearts up to its continued and sufficient support, is a knowledge of
+what it has done, is doing, and purposes to do. This information the
+Commission has, at different times, and by piecemeal, furnished:
+necessarily by piecemeal, since, as this book justly remarks, the
+immense mass of details which a circumstantial account of its operations
+in field and hospital must involve would prove nearly as laborious in
+the reading as in the performance. In this little volume we have,
+photographed, a single phase of its operations. It consists simply of
+extracts from letters and reports. There is no attempt at completeness
+or dramatic arrangement; yet the most elaborate grouping would probably
+fail to present one-half as accurately a picture of the work and its
+ways as these unpretending fragments. It delights us to see the--we can
+hardly say cheerful, as that savors too much of the "self-sacrifice"
+which benevolence sometimes tarnishes by talking about--but, rather, the
+gay, lively, merry manner in which the most balky matters are taken hold
+of. Men and women seem to have gone into the service with good-will and
+hearty love and buoyant spirits. It refreshes and strengthens us like a
+tonic to read of their taking the wounded, festering, filthy, miserable
+men, washing and dressing them, pouring in lemonade and beef-tea, and
+putting them abed and asleep. There is not a word about "devotion" or
+"ministering angels," (we could wish there were not quite so much about
+"ladies,") but honest, refined, energetic, able women, with quick brains
+and quick hands, now bathing a poor crazy head with ice-water, to be
+rewarded with one grateful smile from the parting soul,--now standing in
+the way of a procession of the slightly wounded, to pour a little brandy
+down their throats, or put an orange into their hands, just to keep them
+up till they reach food and rest,--now running up the river in a
+steam-tug, scrambling eggs in a wash-basin over a spirit-lamp as they
+go,--now groping their way, at all hours of the night, through torrents
+of rain, into dreadful places crammed with sick and dying men, "calling
+back to life those in despair from utter exhaustion, or again and again
+catching for mother or wife the last faint whispers of the dying,"--now
+leaving their compliments to serve a disappointed colonel instead of his
+dinner, which they had nipped in the bud by dragging away the stove with
+its four fascinating and not-to-be-withstood pot-holes;--and let the
+sutler's name be wreathed with laurel who not only permitted this, but
+offered his cart and mule to drag the stove to the boat, and would take
+no pay!
+
+The blessings of thousands who were ready to perish, and of tens of
+thousands who love their country and their kind, rest upon those who
+originated, and those who sustain, this noble work. Let the people's
+heart never faint and its hand never weary; but let it, of its
+abundance, give to this Commission full measure, pressed down, shaken
+together, and running over, that, wherever the red trail of war is seen,
+its divine footsteps may follow,--that, wherever the red hand of war is
+lifted to wound, its white hand may be lifted to heal,--that its work
+may never cease until it is assumed by a great Christian Government, or
+until peace once more reigns throughout the land. And even then,
+gratitude for its service, and joy in its glory, shall never die out of
+the hearts of the American people.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+_The History of the Supernatural, in all Ages and Nations, and in all
+Churches, Christian and Pagan, demonstrating a Universal Faith_. By
+WILLIAM HOWITT. Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co.
+
+There has been a great change of late years in connection with the
+science of Pneumatology and with the manner of treating it. There was a
+revolution of opinion on this subject in the middle of the last century;
+there is a counter-revolution to-day.
+
+The superstitions and credulities of the Middle Ages eventuated, during
+the course of the eighteenth century, in the Encyclopaedism of French
+philosophy. The grounds upon which the Church based her doctrine of the
+supernatural were fiercely attacked. The proofs brought forward to prove
+the insufficiency of such grounds were assumed to prove more than lack
+of logic in the Church; they were taken as proofs, that, in the nature
+of things, there is no evidence for the supernatural, in any sense of
+the term; in other words, that there is no knowledge within the reach of
+mortals, except that which relates to the physical,--to this earth, as
+the only phase of existence,--to the vital body, as the all of the human
+being. Emotional and intellectual phenomena were but results of material
+organization, as heat is the result of combustion: they exhibited
+themselves so long as vitality continued; they disappeared when death
+supervened, as the warmth from a fire dies out with the cessation of
+combustion. No hypothetical soul was needed to account for the thousand
+phenomena of thought or of sensation. Pneumatology was no science, but
+the mere fancy of an excited imagination.
+
+Not to the literature and the social life of France alone was this
+materialistic influence confined. The mind of Germany, of England, and,
+more or less, of the rest of Europe, and of America, was pervaded by it.
+The tendency, all over the civilized world, was towards unbelief, not
+merely in miracles, but in all things spiritual. Science, with her
+strict tests and her severe inductions, lent her aid in the same
+direction.
+
+It does not seem to have occurred to the philosophers of the
+Encyclopaedian school that a doctrine is not necessarily false because an
+insufficient argument is brought forward to prove it. It does not appear
+to have occurred to skeptical physicists that there may be laws of
+Nature regulating ultramundane phenomena, as fixed, as invariable, as
+those which decide the succession of geological phenomena and the
+products of chemical combinations.
+
+Here is a theory which is worth considering. May it not be that God
+adapts the proofs of that which it is important that man should know to
+the intellectual progress of mankind? Is it certain that the same
+evidence which sufficed for the foundation of religious faith five
+hundred years ago will suffice equally well to-day? Truths are eternal;
+laws of Nature vary not. But of the world's thoughts there is a
+childhood, a youth, a manhood; and there may be various classes of
+arguments suited to various stages of progress.
+
+Again, assuming that the materialist takes a contracted view of the
+economy of human life, ignoring every portion of it except its present
+phase, (that phase being but the preparation for another and a higher,)
+may it not be, that, as the world advances, men may gradually be
+permitted, occasionally and to a limited extent, to become aware of
+influences exerted from a more advanced phase of existence over this?
+May it not be that the links connecting the two phases of existence are
+gradually to become more numerous and apparent?
+
+Such are the general views which William Howitt's work is intended to
+illustrate and enforce. He selects, as a title-page motto, an axiom from
+Butler's "Analogy,"--"There are two courses of Nature: the ordinary and
+the extraordinary." By the supernatural he does not mean phenomena out
+of the course of Nature, but such comparatively rare phenomena as are
+governed by laws with which we are unacquainted, and as are, therefore,
+to us something extraordinary, something to be wondered at,--miracles.
+
+The author travels over a vast extent of ground,--more, we think, than
+can be properly explored in the compass of two duodecimo volumes. All
+ages, all countries, all faiths, furnish their quota towards his
+collection. It is curious, interesting, suggestive, rather than
+conclusive. It exhibits more industry than logic. It consists rather of
+abundant materials for others to use, than of materials worked up by the
+collector. It gives evidence of learning, research, and a comprehensive
+study of the subject. It is a _thesaurus_ of pneumatological knowledge,
+collected with German assiduity. It will set many to thinking, though it
+may convince but few, except of the one truth, that the faith in the
+supernatural has been a universal faith, pervading all nations,
+persisting through all ages.
+
+The number of those who take an interest in the subject treated of in
+Mr. Howitt's book, and who believe that great truths underlie popular
+superstitions, increases day by day; and the work will probably have a
+wide circulation.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Atlantic Monthly, Vol. XII. September,
+1863, No. LXXI., by Various
+
+*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK ATLANTIC MONTHLY, VOL. XII. ***
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