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+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+#2 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
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+Title:  The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+Author:  Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+June, 2001  [Etext #2665]
+
+
+The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
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+Etext prepared for Gutenberg by David Widger,  widger@cecomet.net
+
+
+
+
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
+which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
+of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
+the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
+considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
+49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
+might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
+having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
+than a score of years younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
+had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
+which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
+Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
+enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
+arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
+selfsame flight."
+
+There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
+of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
+tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
+the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
+in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
+the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
+track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
+Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
+second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
+aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
+heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
+in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
+called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
+temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
+if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
+the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
+when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
+Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
+engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
+remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
+patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
+ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
+in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
+so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
+effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
+and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
+often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
+catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
+the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
+among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
+All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
+the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
+written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
+passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
+papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
+Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
+dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
+treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
+and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
+written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
+denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
+and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
+years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
+apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
+the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
+natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
+of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
+offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
+opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
+anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
+misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
+expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
+looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
+conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
+radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
+part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
+read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
+task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
+or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
+almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
+readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
+may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
+his sword in his left hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
+Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
+of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
+laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
+that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
+they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
+subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
+their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
+reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
+before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
+elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
+special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
+division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
+As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
+themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
+Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
+transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
+have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
+communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
+licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
+department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
+movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
+tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
+creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
+gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
+evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
+up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
+beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
+the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
+"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
+meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
+the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
+religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
+we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
+thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
+mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
+even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
+following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
+of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
+found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
+still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE PROFESSOR
+
+                           AT THE
+                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+
+          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
+universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
+It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
+on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
+phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
+being. --I will thank you for the sugar,--I said. --Man is a
+dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
+the sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
+of the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said. --Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
+great things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
+with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches. --Life is a great
+bundle of great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on! --said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
+John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
+on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
+about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
+the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
+water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
+surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
+naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
+about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
+do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
+they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
+broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
+round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
+end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
+body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
+fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
+was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
+behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
+hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
+spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
+heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
+come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
+pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
+school in Boston as long as the boys would let me. --The little man
+groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on. --Ran away from
+school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
+logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
+loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
+North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
+underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
+on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
+grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
+old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
+one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
+it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
+rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
+can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
+streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
+thinking in a half-whisper, evidently. --I should think so; and got
+kinked up, turnin' so many corners. --The little man did not hear
+what was said, but went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
+free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
+men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
+steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
+whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
+massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
+nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
+amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
+and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
+him, and is the object of his especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man. --As high as the first step of the
+stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said. --The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
+be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
+whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
+foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
+thought I would not finish it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible! --said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
+eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
+itself as a bit of economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
+the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
+away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
+Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
+me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
+find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
+bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
+butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
+fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
+
+--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, ,etc., etc.  By J.
+J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
+judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
+are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
+has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
+he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
+social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
+be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
+humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
+marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
+once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
+less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
+an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
+hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
+"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
+left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
+which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
+--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
+pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
+fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
+luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
+mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
+for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
+secret he wished to be relieved of.
+
+--I continued. --If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
+the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
+truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
+presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
+our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
+chance to become a convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said. ---When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
+undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
+to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
+strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
+consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
+print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
+from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
+its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
+mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
+Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
+should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
+the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
+this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
+translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
+to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
+new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
+could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
+unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
+philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
+and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
+fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
+dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
+perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
+the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
+and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
+you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
+as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
+look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
+professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
+externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
+enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
+false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
+do. --The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
+civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
+carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
+momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
+it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
+bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
+yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
+religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
+tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
+that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
+source with variable energy. --But there never was a guild of dealers
+or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
+Harvard College yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man. --The bonfire when Robert
+Calef's book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
+the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
+trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
+a set of fools and worse than fools they were-
+
+Remember it?--said the little man. --I don't think I shall forget it,
+as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
+it wears.  There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
+table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
+only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
+and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
+sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
+deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
+ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
+varus, or inverted club-foot.
+
+Stop!  stop! --I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
+I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
+right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
+ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
+funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
+the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
+fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
+B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man. --Hanged for a
+witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
+and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
+Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
+-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
+Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
+talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
+plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
+all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
+that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
+any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
+the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
+instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
+incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
+past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
+-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
+larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
+in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
+ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
+that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
+things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
+Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
+bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
+Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
+another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
+I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
+civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
+judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
+as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
+"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
+selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
+unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
+or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
+and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
+of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
+did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
+old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
+proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
+reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
+and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
+such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
+better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
+how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
+in what form it fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
+and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
+dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
+fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
+fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
+phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
+an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
+is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
+as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
+(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
+teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
+practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
+drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
+well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
+themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
+are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
+laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
+it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
+is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
+which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
+believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
+larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
+be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
+The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
+which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
+times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
+thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
+such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
+ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
+cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
+large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
+science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
+and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
+reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
+of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
+and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
+judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
+watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
+shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
+the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+--Amen! --said the young fellow called John-- Ten minutes by the
+watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+their left foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
+seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
+I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
+youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
+noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
+their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
+little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
+subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
+intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
+driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
+think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
+noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
+eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
+facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
+to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
+a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
+him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
+a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
+generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
+are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
+in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
+through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
+general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
+twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
+people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
+hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
+a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
+the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
+them--like Aaron's calf
+
+[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
+lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
+through the box."   D.W.]
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
+and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
+east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
+cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
+spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
+is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
+in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
+barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
+and excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
+be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
+come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
+and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
+the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
+marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
+Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
+good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
+Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
+we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
+There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
+ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
+well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
+and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
+the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
+he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
+side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
+old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
+it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
+Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
+Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
+it went by cogwheels. --Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
+foreign vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
+the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
+exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
+to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
+bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
+interfered with the reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
+our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
+undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
+magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
+I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
+been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
+justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
+listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
+angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
+contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
+am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
+I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
+fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
+of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
+elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
+Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
+days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
+Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
+the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
+such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
+chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
+real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
+enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
+n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
+risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
+escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
+never saying a foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
+-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
+may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
+when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
+protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
+thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I. --But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
+know anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
+not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
+Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
+others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
+contempt for what should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
+right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail! --I
+understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
+-it is a conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
+speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
+countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
+eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
+as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
+the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
+struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
+Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
+you Chrononhotonthologos? "
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
+or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
+natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
+well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
+the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
+generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
+instinct which we have in common with the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again. --It's a pity that families are kept up,
+where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
+this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
+name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow. --They
+call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied. --But why Little Boston, in a
+place where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
+The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
+little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
+crotchety old town.  Give him a chance. --You will drop the Sculpin,
+won't you?--I said to the young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
+if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow. --I would n't be hard on the poor
+little-
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
+the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
+given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
+words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
+by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
+sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
+noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
+Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
+The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
+that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
+Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
+the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
+whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
+further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
+deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
+empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
+exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
+mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
+likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
+The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
+attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
+wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
+than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
+strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
+way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
+the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
+of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
+that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
+harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
+schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
+which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
+of all concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
+dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
+Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
+a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
+in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
+pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
+seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
+the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
+A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
+FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
+you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
+currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
+FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
+paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
+you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
+your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I. --Only I rather think life can
+coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
+if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
+falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
+no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
+large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
+absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
+or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
+books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
+decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
+are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
+awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
+not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
+agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
+which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
+along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
+finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
+with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
+of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
+finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
+the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
+of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
+me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
+has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
+whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
+As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
+-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
+favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
+receptacle. --I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
+over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
+and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
+year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
+and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
+and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
+through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
+intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
+by its constantly recurring obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
+ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
+he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
+most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
+first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
+screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
+not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
+equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
+suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
+temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
+fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
+who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
+of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
+himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
+deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
+being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
+universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
+look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
+the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
+individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
+is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
+them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
+when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
+Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
+contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
+as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
+impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
+undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
+they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
+and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
+imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
+fulfil-
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
+Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
+there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
+and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
+article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
+Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+
+
+
+                  DE SAUTY
+
+         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+         Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+
+PROFESSOR.
+
+Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
+Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+Holding talk with nations ?
+
+Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+Three times daily patent ?
+
+Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
+Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+Romulus and Remus?
+
+Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+Or a living product of galvanic action,
+Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+
+BLUE-NOSE.
+
+Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+At the polar focus of the wire electric
+Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+Sucking in the current.
+
+When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+>From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+Of disintegration.
+
+Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+There was no De Sauty.
+
+Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+Such as man is made of.
+
+Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
+There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again! --A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
+but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
+boys say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
+in his body as much as his body is in his shell. --I don't think
+there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
+but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
+turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
+and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
+sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
+all America,--
+
+          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
+of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
+pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
+from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
+high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
+a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
+scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
+man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
+two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
+one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
+shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
+Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
+lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
+of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
+once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
+seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
+solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
+arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
+were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
+itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
+One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
+believed what I said. --This was apparently considered something
+unusual, by its being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
+bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
+actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
+is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
+belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
+and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
+who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
+Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
+word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
+occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
+talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
+Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
+and never a calm ; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
+a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
+gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
+faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
+something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
+was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
+you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
+the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
+suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
+you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
+Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
+minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
+we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
+just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
+pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
+as it does that of music into notes. --Well, they govern the world
+for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
+of a larger fact than wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
+the promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
+suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
+intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
+a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
+other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
+the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
+feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
+reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
+it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
+had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead. --The boys of my
+time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
+as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
+place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
+dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
+very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
+talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
+believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
+and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
+and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
+being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
+come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
+space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
+condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
+person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
+and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
+radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
+just where it was when
+
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
+more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
+once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
+I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
+was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
+domestic influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous. --Can
+you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
+once, of which the following is a verse?
+
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered. --What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
+you another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
+the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
+many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
+them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
+grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
+this grinding-down action. --Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
+and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
+wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
+should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
+Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
+all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
+social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
+closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
+dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
+true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
+to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
+appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
+truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
+and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
+owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
+has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
+the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
+omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
+fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
+it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
+principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
+I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
+attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
+printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
+where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
+independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
+has elsewhere called man.
+
+     --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+     --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+     --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
+the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
+consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
+light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
+De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
+trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
+paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
+the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
+out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
+drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
+If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
+of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
+him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
+we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
+to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
+fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
+would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
+folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
+playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
+the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
+special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
+no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
+The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
+come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
+nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
+reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
+determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
+was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
+moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
+will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+--------
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
+and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
+we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
+constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
+masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
+which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
+in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
+understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
+reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
+some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
+Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
+lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
+is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
+but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
+often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
+individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
+me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
+swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
+let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
+to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
+much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
+Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
+cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
+man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
+opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
+follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
+of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
+belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
+others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A. ---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
+talking.
+
+B. --Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C. --Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
+repeating idea.
+
+A. --White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
+blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-
+
+B. --Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
+out of window just here. --Two pages and a half of description, if it
+were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
+(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
+nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
+Why don't they wear a ring in it?
+
+C. --You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
+Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
+which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
+definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
+an unpleasant recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
+consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
+All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
+in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
+of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
+all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
+into regular polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
+no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
+him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
+layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
+thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
+troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
+or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
+way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
+but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
+his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
+another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course. --Twenty
+years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
+you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
+round all that time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
+thought upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
+getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
+in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
+something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
+elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
+unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
+as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
+Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
+master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
+in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
+truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
+begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
+has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
+as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
+streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
+truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
+not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
+like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
+
+Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
+how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
+are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
+spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude. --Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
+--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
+concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball. --You
+small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
+the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
+words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
+first was an emphatic monosyllable. --Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
+myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
+any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
+put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
+wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
+the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
+a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
+take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
+great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
+till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
+thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman. --If importing most dry goods
+made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
+'em. --Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
+any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
+owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
+which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language! --the
+blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
+they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
+Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
+with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
+his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
+of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
+in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
+tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
+before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
+when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
+women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
+yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
+class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
+Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
+lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
+that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
+Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
+made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
+of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
+we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
+two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
+this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
+spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
+world's destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
+call John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
+he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
+Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
+remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
+Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
+down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
+great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
+--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
+he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
+stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
+That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
+'lection dinner.
+
+Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
+Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
+a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
+as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said. --It grows out of life,--out
+of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
+language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
+enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
+angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
+Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
+of themselves. --A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
+a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
+an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
+hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
+hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
+case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
+open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
+crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
+thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
+balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
+caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
+touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
+up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time! --The English
+language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
+everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
+spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
+so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
+meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
+proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
+must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
+the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
+colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
+the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
+dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
+and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
+the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student. --He colored, as he noticed on my
+face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
+mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
+making a little movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late. --A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
+colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
+better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
+earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
+half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
+dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
+libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
+let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
+since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
+one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
+celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
+those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
+them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
+character. --I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
+the matter of voice. --Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
+her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
+overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
+with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
+have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
+child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
+remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
+became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
+years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
+one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
+her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
+her peaceful days. --Three generations linked together by so light a
+breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
+something better than ,the bloom and freshness which had first
+attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
+wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
+hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
+planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
+families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
+with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
+they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
+with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
+his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
+holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
+compliments. --I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
+not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
+the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
+plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
+Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
+the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
+him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy! --he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
+said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
+from, and how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
+hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
+telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
+to ask any questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
+pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
+morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
+be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
+lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
+sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
+throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
+wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished. --Has not been long with
+her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
+upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
+Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
+enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
+that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
+day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
+heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
+very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
+Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
+her life--never see a more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
+consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
+boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
+about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
+disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
+account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
+happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
+observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
+That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
+body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
+mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
+drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
+with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
+a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
+taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
+of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
+should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
+imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
+his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
+sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
+voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
+our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
+whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
+that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
+conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
+their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
+away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
+not yet referred to them as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
+It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+                    THE BOYS.
+
+Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
+"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
+Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+That boy we call Doctor," (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
+It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+That fellow's the Speaker,"(3)--the one on the right;
+Mr. Mayor,"(4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
+There's the "Reverend"(6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)
+
+And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+--Just read on his medal,--My country,--of thee! "
+
+You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
+And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+
+1 Francis Thomas.
+2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+4 G. W. Richardson.
+5 George Thomas Davis.
+6 James Freeman Clarke.
+7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
+Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
+making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
+nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
+to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
+previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
+illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
+gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
+matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
+miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
+an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
+with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
+young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
+there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
+trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
+some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
+clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+the sun to ripen well. --How some of us fellows remember Joe and
+Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
+and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
+whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
+chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
+banquets in those gay ,times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
+the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
+jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
+natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
+crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
+the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
+butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
+steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
+Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
+talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
+thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
+like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
+down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
+that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
+those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
+general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
+from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
+English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
+the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
+parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
+and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
+though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
+us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
+men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
+so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
+heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
+an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
+writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
+talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
+fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
+traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
+skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
+from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
+common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
+who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
+groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
+an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
+expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
+gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
+attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
+would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
+much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
+sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
+as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
+senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
+ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
+not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
+pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
+recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
+little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
+recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
+of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
+flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
+--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
+white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
+flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
+is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
+accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
+ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
+my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
+amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
+dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
+neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
+do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
+artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
+finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
+for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
+blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
+with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
+our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
+the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
+nice as a three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
+of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
+his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
+he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
+happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
+looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
+struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
+openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
+went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
+we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
+ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
+man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
+lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
+Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
+reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
+persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
+table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
+mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
+pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
+features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
+on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
+My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
+have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
+lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
+for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
+curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
+heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
+with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
+striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
+miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
+ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
+timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
+mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
+of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
+pillow,--a widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
+for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
+things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
+surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
+recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
+I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
+Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
+There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
+children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
+come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
+or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
+passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
+wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
+exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
+arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
+boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
+of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
+in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
+the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
+cavity of a geode.
+
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
+of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
+anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
+periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
+highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
+The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
+suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
+eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
+the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
+incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
+maturity is no less clear.
+
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table. --Young
+fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
+fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
+impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
+fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
+time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
+out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
+they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place. --Now the
+odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
+college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
+same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
+Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
+often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
+or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
+as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
+furrow of subsoil in it. --The explanation is, of course, that in a
+great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
+instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
+least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
+our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
+record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
+There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
+than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
+mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
+How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
+rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
+and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
+are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
+warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
+spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
+streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
+counting by the micrometer took him a week. --You have, my full-grown
+friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
+running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
+sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
+Errors excepted. --Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
+the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
+blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
+what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
+and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
+had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
+it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
+all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
+Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
+illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
+our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
+these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
+constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
+presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
+daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
+special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
+and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
+which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
+learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
+unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
+
+
+
+IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
+poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
+love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
+dictionary for him at the word , filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
+greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
+were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
+stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
+though he had read them a hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
+wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
+herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
+She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
+father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
+to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
+to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
+arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
+There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things. --All
+right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
+The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
+--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
+Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly. --Father
+thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
+if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
+explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
+meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia
+
+The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
+the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
+When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
+was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
+shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
+followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
+coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
+he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
+through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
+But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
+look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
+greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
+Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
+memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
+leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
+loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
+learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
+his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
+a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
+These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
+brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
+registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
+marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
+be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
+well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
+only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
+and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
+consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
+keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
+passed through the successive stages of inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
+process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
+in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
+rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
+as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
+of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
+the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
+tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
+watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
+elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
+his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
+rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
+thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
+hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
+recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
+gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
+old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
+which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
+old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
+recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
+from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
+backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
+chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
+white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
+nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
+swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
+at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
+snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
+cherished tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
+into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
+trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
+ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
+of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
+walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
+up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
+trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
+peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
+doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
+that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
+has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
+out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
+A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
+doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
+it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
+see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
+would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
+usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
+showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
+muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
+purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
+might be able--to--attend------to his class again. --But he was
+recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
+occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
+sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
+enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
+the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
+was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
+back on the Latin grammar.
+
+"Iris!  " he said,--",filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
+dear little daughter as well as if it had been English. --"Rainbow!
+"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
+his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!" --The
+child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
+not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
+frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
+opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
+know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
+sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
+seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
+Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
+read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
+lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
+take care of my child!  Domine, audi-- vel audito!" His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
+his last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
+brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
+wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
+books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
+the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
+these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
+doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
+the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
+inherited. --No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
+us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
+winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
+when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
+running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
+used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
+clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
+with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
+has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
+moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
+age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
+in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
+man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
+There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
+figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
+pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
+meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
+feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
+destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
+strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
+of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
+children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
+bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
+and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
+sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
+compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
+race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
+plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
+that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
+the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
+a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
+holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
+its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
+tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
+them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
+such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
+attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
+"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
+thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
+neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
+years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
+doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
+himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
+belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
+was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
+early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
+which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
+instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
+healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
+of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
+downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
+have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
+been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
+the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
+curious students of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
+Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
+future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
+smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
+is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
+daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
+childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
+of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
+It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
+another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
+represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
+either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
+loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
+impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
+like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
+direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
+sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
+Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
+move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
+Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
+connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
+on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
+it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
+pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
+A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
+that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
+loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
+in strawberries and peaches, are-- Well, I suppose I had better stop.
+Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
+On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
+white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her
+age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
+Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
+scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
+notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
+darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
+the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
+before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
+began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
+feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
+verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
+old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
+this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
+sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
+blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
+through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
+into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
+assistance and counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
+somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
+cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
+and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
+broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
+her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
+an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
+unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
+bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
+done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
+to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
+totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
+table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
+of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
+one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
+temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
+Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
+conduct, as there was no chance for their master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
+slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
+running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
+virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
+calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
+depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
+kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
+more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
+goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
+together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
+himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
+anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
+Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
+presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
+are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
+effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
+virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
+organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
+if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
+carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
+
+"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
+as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
+Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
+smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
+riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
+features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
+carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
+steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
+spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
+perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
+breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
+were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
+admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
+attached to her. --Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
+grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
+of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
+is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
+Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
+aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
+her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
+legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
+words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
+the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
+the black-coated personage called her. --I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
+make way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
+souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
+something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
+these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
+smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."
+
+For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
+Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
+
+--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
+--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
+(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
+amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
+out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
+habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
+underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
+genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
+not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
+things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
+thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
+"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
+districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
+the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
+handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
+real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
+latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
+citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
+party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
+basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
+lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
+denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
+of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
+a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
+with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
+praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
+but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
+has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
+him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
+lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
+had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+interesting children.
+Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
+evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
+counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
+other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
+female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
+real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
+acting, but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
+party where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+We will not speak of years to-night;
+For what have years to bring,
+But larger floods of love and light
+And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+We will not drown in wordy praise
+The kindly thoughts that rise;
+If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+He reads it in our eyes.
+
+We need not waste our schoolboy art
+To gild this notch of time;
+Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+Enough for him the silent grasp
+That knits us hand in hand,
+And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+That locks our circling band.
+
+Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+Peace to his starlit dreams!
+Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+The music-haunted streams!
+
+Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+The sunshine on his lips,
+And faith, that sees the ring of light
+Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
+am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
+honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
+believe anybody will be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
+in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
+was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
+dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
+which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
+to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
+individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
+hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
+know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
+swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
+are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
+of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
+eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
+systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
+faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
+call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
+not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
+accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
+stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
+her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
+a charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
+to speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
+then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
+Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
+rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
+against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
+would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
+Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
+his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
+he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
+muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
+eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
+is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
+whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
+game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
+and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
+Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
+the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
+though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
+reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
+asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
+no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
+was indebted to it or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
+which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
+fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
+(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
+as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
+acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
+marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
+change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
+a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
+hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
+willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
+moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
+can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
+was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
+was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
+seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
+struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
+not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
+remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
+again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
+more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
+were talking with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
+grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
+his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
+little figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
+so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
+in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
+in England,---I said. --An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
+and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
+Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
+where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
+steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
+them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
+protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
+welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
+same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
+still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
+whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
+as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
+the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
+different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
+but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
+taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
+from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
+the milk of the breast at which he hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
+as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
+when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
+he winked, however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said. --But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
+the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
+wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
+infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
+man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
+doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
+bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
+the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
+ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
+smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
+but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
+from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
+different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
+of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
+the provisional races are dying out-
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
+student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
+--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
+When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
+make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
+Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
+kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
+and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
+according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
+himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
+and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
+'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
+born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
+been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
+that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
+planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
+little mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
+'m past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
+Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
+lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
+thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
+entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
+colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
+thinking come over it. --No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
+or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
+influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
+progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
+drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
+mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
+pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
+the young Marylander, good-naturedly. --But I suppose you can't
+forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
+numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
+of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
+Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
+other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
+to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
+salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
+you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
+oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
+silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
+-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
+section of social strata, go to The Club. --Good place to live in,
+--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches. --What do we know about
+Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
+each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
+in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
+elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
+aught we know. --The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
+mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
+scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
+accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
+Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
+colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
+-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
+out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
+St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
+Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
+Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
+all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
+something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
+thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
+is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
+attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
+provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
+Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
+either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
+say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
+Marylander spoke up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
+all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
+folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
+scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
+what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
+American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
+overhead, that is home to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
+should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
+ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
+illusion.
+
+Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table. --Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
+copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
+Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
+other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
+let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
+any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
+The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
+not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
+allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
+next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
+very little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
+lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
+womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
+covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
+eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
+life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
+reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
+themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
+that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
+without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
+those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
+mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
+wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
+its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
+in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
+wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all. --And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
+without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
+ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
+sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
+that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
+Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
+well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
+Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
+half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
+inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
+Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
+hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
+any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
+Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
+winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
+all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
+it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
+listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
+subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
+it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
+our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
+exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
+fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
+hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
+leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
+drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
+character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
+to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
+themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
+table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
+not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
+any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
+own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
+always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
+to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
+very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
+province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
+angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
+aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
+another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
+ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
+half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
+him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
+your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
+acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
+most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
+a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
+the pages. --Oh, that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
+came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
+bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
+those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
+not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
+the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
+generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
+shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
+played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
+to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
+after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
+the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
+a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
+by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
+Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
+spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
+place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
+shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
+and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
+no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
+seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
+What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
+the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
+until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
+consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
+dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
+walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
+which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
+were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
+gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
+fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
+only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
+of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
+cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
+mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
+restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
+of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
+men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
+the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
+be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
+made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
+kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
+to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
+have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
+only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
+least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
+afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
+the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
+which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
+dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
+I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
+still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
+he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
+idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
+with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
+nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
+simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
+have not found, however, that people mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
+questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
+for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
+day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
+reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
+not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
+book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
+and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
+drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
+lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
+faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
+the paper the name "Hiram." --Love! love! love!--everywhere!
+everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
+marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine! --No,
+no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
+bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
+poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
+in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+
+Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
+where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
+upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
+out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
+decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
+underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
+stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
+nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
+wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
+the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
+leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
+heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
+tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
+fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
+tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
+could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
+against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
+little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
+the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
+half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
+bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
+touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
+just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
+imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
+go before him, limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
+use rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
+instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
+Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
+was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
+like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
+of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
+thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
+soak through and mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day. --Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
+of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
+another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
+common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
+christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
+heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
+the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
+Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
+never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
+is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on. --
+To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
+name as that! --The poor relation grew very uneasy. --I continued;
+for I never thought of all this till afterwards. --I knew one young
+fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--  What's got
+into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
+upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
+woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
+"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
+women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
+experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
+watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
+Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
+by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
+shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
+She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
+found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
+wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
+consciousness of his presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
+gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
+by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
+"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
+intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
+leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
+young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
+see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
+There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
+the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
+me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
+trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
+often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
+corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
+landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
+nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
+I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
+landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
+arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
+remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
+kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
+daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
+to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
+as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
+a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
+they might be.
+
+Tickets!  presents!--said I. --What tickets, what presents has he had
+the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
+'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
+be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
+is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
+a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
+hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
+delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
+after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
+picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
+rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
+in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
+congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
+great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
+young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
+interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
+than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
+kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
+that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
+is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
+enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
+kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
+to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
+to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
+clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
+she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
+establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
+watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
+if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
+on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
+to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
+reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
+forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
+that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
+or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
+shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
+barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
+and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
+the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
+he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
+may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
+noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
+audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
+the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
+I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
+neighbor while he is speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
+was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
+the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
+at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
+special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
+day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
+but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
+right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
+carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
+other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
+cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
+I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
+one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
+with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
+been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
+course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
+nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
+people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
+dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
+molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
+calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
+relations to each other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
+alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
+hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
+like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
+with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
+never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
+cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
+to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
+love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
+her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
+looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
+woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
+work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
+woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
+what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
+think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
+unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
+her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
+services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
+are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
+--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
+chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
+red stone ring upon it. --Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+That marks the old remembered spot,--
+The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
+The crooked path across the lot.
+
+It left the road by school and church,
+A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+That parted from the silver birch
+And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+No line or compass traced its plan;
+With frequent bends to left or right,
+In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+But always kept the door in sight.
+
+The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
+The broken millstone at the sill,--
+Though many a rood might stretch between,
+The truant child could see them still.
+
+No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
+No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
+And yet it winds, we know not why,
+And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+Perhaps some lover trod the way
+With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
+And so it often runs astray
+With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+>From some unholy banquet reeled,--
+And since, our devious steps maintain
+His track across the trodden field.
+
+Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+Could ever trace a faultless line;
+Our truest steps are human still,--
+To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
+Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+Through all the wanderings of the path,
+We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
+to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
+that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
+write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
+if I should sometimes write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
+me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
+totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
+affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
+virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
+volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
+not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
+of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
+the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
+were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
+heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
+never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
+do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
+of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
+I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
+direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
+fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
+heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no
+intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
+claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
+they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
+daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
+to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
+confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
+sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
+dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
+foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
+her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
+whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
+most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
+into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
+class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
+duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
+rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
+of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
+mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
+and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
+presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
+large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
+without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
+believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
+he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
+sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
+than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
+repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
+of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
+it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
+man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
+him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
+incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
+say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
+yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
+by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
+silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
+enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
+and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
+made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
+juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
+abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
+Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
+improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
+of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
+science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
+somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
+unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
+clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
+the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
+until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
+were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
+its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
+popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
+perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
+Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
+scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
+rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
+religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
+Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
+those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
+consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
+opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
+relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
+while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
+care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
+other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
+ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
+Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
+duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
+trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
+the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
+--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?
+
+
+[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
+barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
+than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
+in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
+manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
+answer for!  D.W.]
+
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
+--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
+two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
+people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
+earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
+axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
+number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
+population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
+times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is
+nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
+comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
+talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
+innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
+are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
+all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
+some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
+minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
+results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
+matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
+prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
+cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
+friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
+if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
+that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
+the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
+ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
+the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
+woman-strangling dogmatists. --However, I fought this matter with one
+of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
+conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
+serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
+after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
+found myself alone with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
+and began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said. --How long is it
+since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
+gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
+adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
+have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
+to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
+account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
+day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
+take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
+naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
+the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
+left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
+the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
+Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
+naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
+shall not see it any more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
+could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
+too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
+could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
+--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
+seen from a good many parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
+and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
+if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
+she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
+superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
+tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
+mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
+proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
+implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
+the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
+for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
+to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
+the society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
+student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
+doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
+little children in the street, and give them books, which their
+parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
+them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
+fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
+thus forced upon people's attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
+called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
+not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
+on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
+opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
+was going beyond his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
+supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
+with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
+rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
+way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
+this matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
+thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
+year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
+approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
+practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
+of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
+he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
+else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
+charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
+a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
+should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
+and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
+an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
+a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
+first:
+
+I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
+caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
+extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
+dentistry adopted by this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
+and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
+many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
+must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
+people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
+The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
+young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
+tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
+other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
+all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
+poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
+everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
+nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
+for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
+Two.
+
+II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
+views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
+it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
+the two following:
+
+III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
+by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
+disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
+simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
+and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
+Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
+to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
+diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
+he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
+calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.
+
+IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
+not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
+and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
+mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
+to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
+inserted according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
+rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
+them, we express doubts (in public, about any of them, they will cut
+us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
+discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
+boiling it down a little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
+understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
+Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
+have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
+instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
+for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
+antagonist of school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
+Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
+prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
+third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
+Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
+eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
+elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
+other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
+surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
+picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
+reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
+imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
+right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
+mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
+commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
+Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
+him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
+should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
+adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
+relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
+it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
+men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
+unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
+supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
+lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
+hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
+see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
+intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
+says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
+against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
+among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
+Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
+his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
+Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
+Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
+of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
+Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
+Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
+Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
+Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
+and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
+thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
+Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
+with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
+He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
+the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the " Abominable
+Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
+friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
+coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
+The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
+seat in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
+-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
+a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
+instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered. --But,
+mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
+express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
+room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
+here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
+trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
+natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
+upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
+with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
+brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
+shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
+to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
+May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
+will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
+go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
+Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
+Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
+Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
+similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
+depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
+possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
+I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
+less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
+Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
+most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
+to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
+remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
+satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
+us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
+of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
+nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
+his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
+golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
+work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
+as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
+it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
+veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
+that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
+nobas."
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
+think what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like! --said the divinity-student;--think what we
+like!  What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
+own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
+of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
+green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
+that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
+us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
+talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
+Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
+The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it! --I said.
+--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
+the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
+but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
+way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
+water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
+when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
+mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
+authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
+know what their right hand doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
+with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
+thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
+hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
+Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
+the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
+Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
+persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
+Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
+contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said. --I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
+flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
+years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
+professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
+of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
+which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
+nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
+sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
+have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
+stir among the ruins. --What would you do, if the folks without names
+kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
+would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
+a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite! --said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
+'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
+ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
+without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
+quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
+pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
+gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
+bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
+for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
+taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
+negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
+particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
+lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
+to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
+understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
+Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias " keeps still
+and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
+If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
+"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
+what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
+keep your temper. --So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
+fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
+somebody a most pernicious punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I. --Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
+after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
+sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
+deal and to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+the men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+1.  The comfortably rich.
+2.  The decently comfortable.
+3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
+while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
+than a heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
+--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
+scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
+instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
+kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
+sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
+beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
+commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
+larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
+his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
+England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
+his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
+his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
+another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
+sometimes hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
+Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
+own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
+different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
+divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
+faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
+still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
+Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
+patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
+and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
+storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
+large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
+offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
+think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
+conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
+frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
+secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
+sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
+worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
+own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
+muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
+whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
+helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
+more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
+or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
+masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
+between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
+believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
+late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
+over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
+agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
+agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
+not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
+I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
+topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
+this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
+please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
+contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
+could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
+morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
+thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
+during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
+one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
+become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
+people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
+much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
+of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
+"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
+source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
+sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
+having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
+power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
+other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
+systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
+the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
+miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
+withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
+creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
+all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
+against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
+excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
+an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
+honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
+pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
+who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
+the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
+of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
+women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
+life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
+their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
+fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
+hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
+to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
+nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
+revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
+one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
+moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
+we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
+freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
+will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
+first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
+secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
+phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
+To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
+authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
+and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
+our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
+found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
+would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
+to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
+managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
+anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
+pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
+only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
+attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
+hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
+the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
+to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
+tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+          A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+In my slight verse such holy things are named--
+Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"
+
+They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+In the meek, studious child they only saw
+The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+Then Joseph spake : "Thy boy hath largely grown;
+Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"
+
+And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+>From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+In devious trails along the winding road,
+(For many a step their homeward path attends,
+And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"
+
+O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+They found him seated with the ancient men,
+The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!
+"Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+It passed around among the listening friends,
+With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
+the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
+to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
+particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
+that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
+took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
+forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
+the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
+long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
+train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
+disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
+their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
+but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
+that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
+longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
+they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
+duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
+happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
+for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
+the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
+beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
+the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
+body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
+are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
+without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
+upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
+so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
+and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
+solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
+neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
+posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
+were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
+formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
+spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
+They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
+sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
+connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
+On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
+have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
+turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
+him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
+not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
+archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
+direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
+little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
+ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
+nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
+sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
+bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
+bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing! --you find it
+is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
+breast where he has been nestling so long. --The Poor Relation said
+that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
+bad way. --The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
+pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John. --Make it into punch,
+cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
+how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
+exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
+where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
+the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
+year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
+take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
+wear on the sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
+--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
+much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
+he looks as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
+and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
+was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
+matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
+sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
+reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
+others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
+and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
+Tutor's daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
+quality.
+
+Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
+ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
+great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
+and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
+republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
+presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
+seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
+believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
+such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
+crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
+equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
+curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
+of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
+all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
+still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
+arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
+superior as a body to all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
+this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
+European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
+who are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
+vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
+what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
+chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
+staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
+tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
+cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
+two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
+doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
+old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
+people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
+artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
+enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
+exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
+agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
+furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
+above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
+gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
+feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
+of it by thinking a little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
+influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
+delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
+and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
+suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
+kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
+perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
+If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
+Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
+diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
+portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
+Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
+person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
+Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
+that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
+highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
+truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
+all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
+that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
+fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
+pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
+dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
+much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
+why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
+speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
+all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
+Model.
+
+[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
+you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
+telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
+which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
+wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
+everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
+at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
+she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
+comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
+otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
+may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
+praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
+habit of getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
+notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
+cigars and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
+all disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
+odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
+consumed your own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
+woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
+in the yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
+it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
+apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
+has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
+water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
+interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
+fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
+that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
+soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
+some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
+was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
+cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
+So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
+had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
+with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
+that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
+important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
+had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
+the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
+have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
+except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
+who could, on the whole, be spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
+at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
+several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
+many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
+manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
+coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
+express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
+what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
+delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
+lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
+few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
+application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
+quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
+excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
+are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
+or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances. --Bad enough, but not so
+bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
+looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing. --A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
+Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
+first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
+apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
+small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
+about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
+and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
+certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
+to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
+them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
+have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
+afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
+harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
+this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
+asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
+highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
+than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
+become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
+their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
+conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
+heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
+devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
+ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
+are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
+back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
+green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
+apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
+room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
+a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
+presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
+on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
+Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
+paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
+that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
+diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
+social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
+foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
+wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
+and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
+political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
+our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
+been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
+at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
+whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
+bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
+of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
+unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
+flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
+public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
+forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
+oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
+society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
+great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
+fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
+No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
+the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
+I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
+would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
+or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
+his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
+her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
+dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
+or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
+think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
+meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
+phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
+and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
+they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
+the same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
+foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
+grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
+or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
+convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
+addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
+I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
+hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
+matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
+lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
+she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
+manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
+of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
+by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
+tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
+from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
+into a kind of human vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
+make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
+particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
+professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
+you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
+possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
+not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
+death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
+Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
+word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
+extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
+which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
+said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
+incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
+six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
+to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
+hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
+as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
+heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
+bearer is ready to let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
+chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
+certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
+people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
+length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
+sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
+on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
+the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
+can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
+that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
+children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
+cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
+select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
+all will be right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
+could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
+made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
+marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
+at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
+take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
+questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
+and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
+English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
+if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
+anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
+these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
+ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
+that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
+what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
+pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
+social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
+holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
+good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
+superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
+could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
+than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
+undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
+before that.
+
+         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
+the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
+is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
+all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
+surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
+we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
+tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
+of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
+the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
+the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
+persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her. --Only we
+don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
+principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
+and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
+immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
+occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
+I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
+excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
+painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
+long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
+it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself. --These rough young
+rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
+knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
+intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
+it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
+Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
+her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
+to show itself too staringly on the outside. ---You don't know,
+perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
+internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
+brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
+from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
+one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
+statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
+no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
+anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
+intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
+society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
+the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
+heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
+chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
+what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
+other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
+itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
+travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
+all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
+is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
+her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
+fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
+That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
+with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
+whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
+respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
+lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
+as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
+and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
+on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
+speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
+in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
+high culture.  It is not
+
+    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"
+
+when the two meet
+
+    "---on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"
+
+that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
+wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
+clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
+ice-quarry. --Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
+were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
+our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
+interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
+But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
+well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
+summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
+and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
+heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
+more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
+babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
+enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
+as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
+cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
+clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
+Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
+talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
+an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
+must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."
+
+Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
+anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
+Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
+digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
+homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
+all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
+and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
+them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
+suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
+by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
+the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
+which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
+is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
+wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
+out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
+injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
+They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
+world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
+richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
+ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
+one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
+things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
+under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
+life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
+the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
+flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
+dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
+will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
+dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
+talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
+whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
+next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
+perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
+yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
+or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
+loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
+slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
+accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
+frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
+about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
+and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
+about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
+about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
+card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
+their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
+was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
+uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
+were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
+tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
+man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
+rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
+to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
+common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
+nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
+learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
+but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
+and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
+utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
+conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
+to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
+breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
+fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
+which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
+the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
+not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
+common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
+should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
+rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
+I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
+referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
+diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
+woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
+to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
+But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
+of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
+into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
+respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
+stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
+a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
+list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
+list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
+these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
+following lesson for the day.
+
+     THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+Behold the rocky wall
+That down its sloping sides
+Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+In rushing river-tides!
+
+Yon stream, whose sources run
+Turned by a pebble's edge,
+Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+The slender rill had strayed,
+But for the slanting stone,
+To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+So from the heights of Will
+Life's parting stream descends,
+And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+Each widening torrent bends,
+
+>From the same cradle's side,
+>From the same mother's knee,--
+One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
+gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
+known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
+very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
+dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
+and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
+draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
+ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
+considering various habits of the American people, also the little
+accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
+has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
+would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
+so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
+little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
+Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
+grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
+as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
+you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
+milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets! --where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
+trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
+through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
+Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
+maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
+nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
+about with her pah! --that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
+bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
+of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
+If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
+up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
+I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
+served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
+cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
+in the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman. --Don't
+tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
+about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
+won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
+has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
+a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
+which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
+buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
+to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
+may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
+insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
+for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
+fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
+after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
+a-----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
+round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
+any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
+wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
+other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
+Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
+person's eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
+person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
+of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
+Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
+evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
+stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
+young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
+the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
+with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
+observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
+who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
+yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
+we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
+naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
+If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
+features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
+twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
+is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
+every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
+If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
+it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
+wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
+common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
+fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
+movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
+its handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
+that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
+with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
+wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
+but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
+calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
+wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
+Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
+Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
+is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
+fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
+and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
+is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
+distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
+could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
+you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
+angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
+shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
+The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
+brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
+which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
+Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
+suppose.  They say that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
+can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
+feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
+hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
+knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
+down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
+take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
+house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
+building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
+crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
+tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
+about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
+acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
+see what is going on. --Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
+of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
+eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
+thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
+at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
+the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
+sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
+life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
+but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
+comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
+was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
+that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
+them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
+two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
+there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
+commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
+understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
+her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
+the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
+tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
+of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
+that he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
+on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
+You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
+they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
+like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
+and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
+parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
+human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
+fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
+flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
+the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
+kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
+burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
+than she to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
+awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
+it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
+All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
+age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
+wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
+touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
+current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
+balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
+so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
+are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
+This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
+mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+               "with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled."
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
+their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
+distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
+itself with new force upon his perceptions. --Read the sonnet, if
+you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
+in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
+physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
+term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
+All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
+the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
+come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
+the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
+there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
+of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
+riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
+read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
+it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
+chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
+guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
+the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
+the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
+over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
+which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
+of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
+-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
+and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
+of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
+may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
+I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
+moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
+heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
+covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
+dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
+called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
+in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
+about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
+all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
+frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
+but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
+it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
+across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
+show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
+years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
+man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
+country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
+have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
+of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
+on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
+black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
+the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
+take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
+word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
+sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
+ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
+frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
+reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
+these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
+sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
+because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
+The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
+was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
+was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
+gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
+and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
+woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
+in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
+he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
+they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
+away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
+frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
+explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
+I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
+a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
+sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
+the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
+"Lamia."
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
+time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
+dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
+you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
+dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
+drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
+door ajar; you know you shut them all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
+softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
+sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
+not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
+you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
+outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
+moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
+or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
+rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
+that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
+your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
+over, very likely---- Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
+damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
+that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
+Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
+of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
+owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
+moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
+eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
+old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
+she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
+but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
+velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
+her lips is full of mystery and fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
+anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
+should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
+has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
+suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
+so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
+easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons
+which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
+pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
+try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
+was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
+sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
+ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
+willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
+might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
+curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
+himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
+bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
+"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
+pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
+of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
+grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
+Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
+the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
+especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
+and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
+Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
+as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
+mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
+has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
+Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
+in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
+about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
+present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
+running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
+comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
+4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
+more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
+Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
+water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
+women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
+woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
+a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
+to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
+experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
+saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
+small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
+the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
+shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
+approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
+"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
+have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
+Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
+this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
+to beat him playing even. --So much are minds alike; and you and I
+think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
+shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
+looking at the picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
+stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
+and they haven't stirred. --He spoke, and handed the chair towards
+me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
+by another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
+bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
+liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
+a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
+and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
+couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
+them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
+canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
+other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
+ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
+several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
+with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
+know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
+the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
+repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
+while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
+infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
+which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
+he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
+of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
+parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
+interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
+looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
+After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
+got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
+tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
+gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
+a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
+it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
+substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
+as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
+not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
+beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
+keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
+anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
+see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
+that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
+help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
+have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
+his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
+folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
+being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
+had excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said. --Pootiest and nicest little chap
+I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
+haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
+eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
+Which style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
+man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
+goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
+Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
+her, that I remember, but---
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
+young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
+that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
+but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
+shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
+woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
+a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
+what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said. --What do you want nicer
+than such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered. --I look at them girls and feel as the
+fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout. --'To'od 'a' cost more
+butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah. --Takes a whole
+piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
+to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
+to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
+ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
+while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
+except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
+Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
+woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
+here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
+if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
+to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
+about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
+odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
+articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
+and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
+nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
+fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
+waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
+lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
+customers, but have n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
+said.
+
+What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
+cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
+and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
+said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
+comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
+I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
+low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
+boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
+want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
+'s been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
+she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
+crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
+pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
+Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
+chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
+somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
+once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
+blossom, to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
+presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
+it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
+of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
+it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
+she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
+up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
+and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
+lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
+somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
+live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
+long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
+book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
+look into the Little Gentleman's room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
+myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
+that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
+outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
+sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
+pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
+tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
+strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
+her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
+that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
+him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
+first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
+hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
+would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
+is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
+about him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
+many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
+bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
+heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
+Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
+the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
+I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
+clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
+not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
+voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
+rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
+sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
+at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
+monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
+door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
+all was still for the night.
+
+By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
+a change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
+it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
+print it to finish off this record with.
+
+
+          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+His wandering flock had gone before,
+But he, the shepherd, might not share
+Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+God calls you hence from over sea;
+Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+"Ye go to bear the saving word
+To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+>From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+"Yet think not unto them was lent
+All light for all the coming days,
+And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+"The living fountain overflows
+For every flock, for every lamb,
+Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."
+
+He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+With tears of love and partings fond,
+They floated down the creeping Maas,
+Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
+And grated soon with lifting keel
+The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+No home for these! --too well they knew
+The mitred king behind the throne;
+The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.
+
+--And these were they who gave us birth,
+The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+Who won for us this virgin earth,
+And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
+In alien earth the exiles lie,--
+Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
+going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
+aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
+quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
+smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
+themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
+catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
+little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
+me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
+middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
+that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
+blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
+loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
+heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
+women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
+born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
+pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
+or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
+possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
+lovely young woman. --I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
+father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
+she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
+that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
+love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
+as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
+that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
+then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
+me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
+get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
+years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
+startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
+waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
+many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
+leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
+course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
+it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
+time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
+and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
+as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
+syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
+written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
+do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
+about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
+an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
+expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
+however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
+Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
+could not tell in our human words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
+infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
+are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
+mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
+contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
+creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
+purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
+they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
+print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
+quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
+ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
+women to be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
+Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
+of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
+of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
+lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
+message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
+this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
+mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
+which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
+have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
+is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
+you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
+rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
+gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
+under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
+the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
+it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
+streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
+until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
+out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
+grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
+now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
+ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
+against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
+and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
+life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
+deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
+some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
+
+I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
+yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
+I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
+hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
+out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
+perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
+whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
+thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
+The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
+Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
+give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
+that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
+tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
+morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
+implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
+in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
+leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
+heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
+women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
+in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
+though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
+Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
+I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
+seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
+known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
+alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
+up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
+their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
+their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
+drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
+young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
+friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
+certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
+feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
+face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
+which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
+or on the very threshold of the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
+incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
+girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
+language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
+being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
+we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
+impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
+comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
+space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
+to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
+could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
+young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
+No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
+description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
+intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
+spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
+living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
+whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
+to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
+understood;--
+
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
+for this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
+attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
+refunded, if you will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
+again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
+him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
+towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
+sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
+there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
+do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
+would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
+direction in which their occupants love to look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
+gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
+sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
+his button-hole. --After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
+Very fine performances,--very fine! --truly elegant productions,
+truly elegant! --Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
+the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
+patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
+truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
+reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
+extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
+that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
+lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+          Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
+of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
+looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
+dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
+to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
+waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
+grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
+shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
+--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
+a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
+manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
+when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
+fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
+but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
+with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
+thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
+--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
+of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
+little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
+that you don't want to see. --The old gentleman put his hand to his
+forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
+photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
+take lessons? --This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
+here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
+large size she had covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
+superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
+from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
+>From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature. --Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
+the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said. --I should like
+to see her style of working on a small scale. --There was nothing in
+it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
+which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
+the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
+dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
+them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
+to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
+more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
+second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
+what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
+has, at any rate. --I saw a book she had, which must have come from
+the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
+enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
+apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
+knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
+many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
+"good men," and that heaven is full of such. --The gentleman with
+the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
+think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
+his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
+would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
+from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
+say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
+which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
+one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
+sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
+locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
+an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
+this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
+just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
+followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
+landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
+which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
+landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
+door, having a pretext ready. --No answer. --Knock again.  A door,
+as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
+heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
+The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
+unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
+pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
+stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
+"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
+and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
+but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
+want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
+up such nonsense and mind my own business. --Hark!  What the deuse
+is that odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
+I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
+distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
+round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
+series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
+of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
+blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
+prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
+creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
+not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
+one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
+named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
+aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
+the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
+sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
+and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
+breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
+considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
+from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
+to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
+things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
+variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
+the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
+the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
+visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
+never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
+evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
+late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
+the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
+which she was thought to know something. --I tell you it was not so
+pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
+an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
+and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
+fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
+where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
+those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
+was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
+season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
+his ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
+by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
+see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
+seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
+fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
+backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
+killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
+portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
+the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
+used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
+mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
+used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
+always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
+covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
+the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
+study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
+armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
+show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
+floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
+wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
+service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
+out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
+Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
+away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
+apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
+liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
+see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
+world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
+such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
+That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
+curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
+with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
+chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
+for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
+thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
+I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
+muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
+in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
+means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
+time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
+that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
+in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
+such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
+curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
+enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
+coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
+the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
+obtain in addition to his purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
+proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
+there is this difference between its view and that of a person
+looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
+formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
+from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
+of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
+occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
+from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
+is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
+from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
+we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
+the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
+conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
+first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
+the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
+record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
+of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
+into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
+looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
+any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
+appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
+could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
+likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
+Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
+rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
+artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
+two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
+photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
+very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
+The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
+repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
+transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
+all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
+exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
+portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
+as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
+in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
+shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
+many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
+likeness in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
+thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
+never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
+blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
+recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
+years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
+better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
+artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
+diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years. --The
+artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
+perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years. --The artist
+breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
+as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
+one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
+or other change of feature. --Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
+fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
+period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
+
+There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
+wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
+and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
+that painted us?
+
+          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
+                                        COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
+with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
+appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
+expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
+of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
+or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
+histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
+know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
+this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
+elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
+infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
+with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
+Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
+the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
+feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
+its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
+very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
+interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
+things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
+nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
+alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
+amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
+docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
+character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
+painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
+are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
+most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
+beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
+because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
+not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
+healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
+much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
+exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
+turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
+skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
+read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
+angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
+his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
+with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
+throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
+behind " anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
+"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
+engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
+whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
+he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
+this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
+fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
+pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
+is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
+condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
+his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
+comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
+beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
+pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
+But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
+honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
+the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
+faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
+animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
+premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
+minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
+piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
+and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
+as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
+know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
+country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
+fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
+sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
+beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
+Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
+natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
+what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
+that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
+children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
+or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
+note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
+their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
+repaired to that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
+arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
+other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
+speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
+the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
+establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
+pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
+if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
+Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
+plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
+9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
+be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
+supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
+"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
+horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
+Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
+on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
+stripped twig of willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
+think you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
+horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
+provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
+something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
+other number equally significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
+Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
+Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
+linguist. --Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
+dictionaries immediately. --I have nothing against the grand total
+of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
+Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
+especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
+Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
+their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
+(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
+A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
+lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
+are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
+but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
+multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
+poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
+philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
+of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
+lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
+a member of the detective police. --I do not say that Phrenology was
+one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
+may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
+starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
+on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
+a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
+common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
+will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
+When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
+out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
+16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
+this. --I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
+agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
+huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
+as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
+the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
+Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
+plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
+the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
+substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
+I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
+cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
+our satellite, before I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
+statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
+proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
+of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
+the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
+much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
+kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
+my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
+etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
+my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
+dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
+only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
+I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
+better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
+An example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
+find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
+Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
+does not lose in the act of copying. --I did not say it gained. --
+What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
+all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
+--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
+That's the reason B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
+used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
+pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
+way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
+instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
+what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
+when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
+thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
+is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
+Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
+covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
+organ, which determines its degree of power."
+
+Oh! oh!  I see. --The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
+convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
+the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
+amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
+Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
+course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
+cranial inspections and manipulations. --What are you laughing at?
+(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
+tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
+Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
+characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
+he could get along without the "organs."
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
+hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
+and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
+would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
+celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
+wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
+I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
+When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
+to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
+SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+      CUSTOMER.
+                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                    men love to be told they do.
+
+Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                       effect of that plus sign.
+
+Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+Conscientiousness 8«   That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
+Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
+Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+
+                And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
+go only by the bumps. --What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
+boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
+"Phrenology" for a living.
+
+                    End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
+commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
+even though their voices may be like
+
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
+from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
+These lines are meant to caution them.
+
+
+     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+          HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+We know how cheaply that is won;
+The idle homage of the crowd
+Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+A surface-smile may pay the toil
+That follows still the conquering Right,
+With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+Sing the sweet song of other days,
+Serenely placid, safely true,
+And o'er the present's parching ways
+Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+But speak in words of living power,--
+They fall like drops of scalding rain
+That plashed before the burning shower
+Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
+Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+And Meekness calls to disobey, --
+
+Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
+in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
+them are, I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
+but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
+through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
+(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me."
+     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
+     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
+should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
+girl was one of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
+blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
+it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
+knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
+merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
+lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
+to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
+folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
+to think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
+Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
+conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
+interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
+sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
+presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
+that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
+interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
+face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
+with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
+of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
+table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
+all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
+the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
+have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
+thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
+and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
+and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
+her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
+disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
+or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
+of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
+Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
+She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
+had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
+the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
+tried to persuade him to hold his tongue. --The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
+settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
+her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
+any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
+that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
+even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
+unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
+when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
+mate by these and other bird-like graces. --My dear Madam,--he
+said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
+which I am totally indifferent. --I don't doubt he meant this; but a
+day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
+uttering itself aloud, thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir! --he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
+religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
+Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
+it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
+politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
+man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
+interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
+lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
+candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
+man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
+Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
+those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
+left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
+pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
+through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
+at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
+fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
+to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
+better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
+advertisement like this! --(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
+he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
+inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
+unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
+the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
+the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
+and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
+things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
+poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
+they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
+somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
+traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
+statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
+quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
+hogshead painted all over with flames!
+
+No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
+box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
+your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
+Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
+we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
+into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
+of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"! --None of my
+words, Sir!  none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
+like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
+over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
+his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
+Christabel,--
+
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
+he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
+Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
+be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
+hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
+aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
+from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
+from their pure affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
+childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
+things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
+of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
+questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
+natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
+enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
+as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
+of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
+she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
+else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
+"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
+with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
+and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
+of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
+assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
+parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image. --
+How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
+is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
+adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
+part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
+you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
+the world's teachers. --Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
+all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
+gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
+the dross with which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
+fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
+themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
+who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
+in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
+article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
+this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
+of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
+fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
+be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
+all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
+to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
+her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
+hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
+a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
+doctrine as could well be divided her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
+Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
+the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
+there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
+there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
+elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
+choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
+very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
+bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
+round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
+"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
+air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
+welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
+door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
+seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
+worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
+women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
+and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
+own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
+mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
+refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
+churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
+which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
+effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
+value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
+cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
+itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
+her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
+rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
+tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
+"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
+as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
+rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
+another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
+she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
+which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
+fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
+had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
+such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
+looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
+thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
+worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
+mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
+handed round. --I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
+besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
+in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
+tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
+much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
+all Heaven asks. --That was the first time I noticed these young
+people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
+behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
+gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
+corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
+removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
+is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
+romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
+it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
+lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
+to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
+not with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
+should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
+enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
+whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
+comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
+that I carried our young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
+outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
+it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
+a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
+tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
+high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
+ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
+shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
+cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
+medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
+might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
+outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
+and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
+was a church reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
+in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of
+the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
+chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
+their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
+succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
+desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
+white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
+of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
+autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
+glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
+that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
+the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
+told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
+desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
+homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
+all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
+gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
+the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
+else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
+costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
+liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
+the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
+change its expressions to its own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
+are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
+before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
+old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
+first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
+The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
+does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
+considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
+together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
+lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
+precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
+people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
+milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
+literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
+restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
+worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
+season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
+very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
+accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
+movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
+reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
+another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
+so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
+grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
+the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
+immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
+youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
+common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
+now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
+advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
+place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
+last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
+of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
+trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
+who take our musical worship out of our hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
+not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
+those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
+or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
+they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
+beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
+who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
+condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
+though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
+affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
+with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
+talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
+bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
+judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
+in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
+streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
+wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
+recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
+strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
+halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
+this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
+free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
+Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
+the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
+world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
+Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
+Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
+broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
+these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
+have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open! --Where do
+they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
+than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered. --When have there been most people
+killed and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it! --said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
+of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
+We're battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
+world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
+it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
+from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
+that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
+makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
+the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
+pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
+game round it is when it is on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
+doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
+of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
+the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
+Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
+call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
+all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
+of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
+end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
+to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
+throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
+the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
+with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
+is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
+sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
+now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
+shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
+cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
+it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
+float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
+lying!"
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
+was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
+Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
+perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
+that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
+of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
+Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
+I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
+for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
+not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
+my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
+patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
+which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
+excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
+especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
+his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
+which he looks forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered. --His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
+if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
+should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
+seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
+reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
+they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
+affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
+with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
+visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
+nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
+conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
+hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
+late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
+such tones from anything but a human voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
+the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
+is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
+saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
+inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
+me one day. --There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
+looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
+wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
+rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
+great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
+for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
+accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
+how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
+business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
+gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
+family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
+great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
+blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
+the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
+for a better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
+young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
+have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
+acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
+directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
+you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
+perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
+mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
+and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
+true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
+defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
+strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
+find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
+do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
+of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
+the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
+height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
+fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
+for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
+"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
+water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
+time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
+two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
+she had some girls of her own to look out for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
+enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
+in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
+tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
+impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
+become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
+eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
+which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
+accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
+genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
+there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
+were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
+a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
+the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
+not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
+sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
+inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
+long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
+different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
+harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
+houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
+watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
+poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
+that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
+mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
+catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
+wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
+little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
+life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
+borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
+herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
+they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
+sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
+wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
+Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
+word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
+any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
+conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
+the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
+porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
+our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
+the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
+are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
+mention it.
+
+On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
+were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
+-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
+the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
+her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
+little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
+will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
+circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
+fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
+him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
+John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
+evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
+looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
+forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
+arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
+second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
+in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
+because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm. --Let me take it,--I
+said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
+it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
+it.  I am not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
+rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
+and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
+suggested by the season.
+
+
+          MIDSUMMER.
+
+Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
+I will not crush my brains to-day!
+Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+And spread some book not overwise
+Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+The pulse that flutters faint and low
+When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
+And give thy child one hour of rest,
+One little hour to lie unseen
+Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+So, curtained by a singing pine,
+Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+          IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
+As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
+to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
+unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
+as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
+through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
+over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
+child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
+which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
+twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
+light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
+She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
+too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
+shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
+loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
+said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
+her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
+the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
+a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
+It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
+child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
+house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
+that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
+natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
+its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
+feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
+face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
+the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
+the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
+little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
+their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
+beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
+model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
+this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
+transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
+I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
+recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
+certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
+this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
+others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
+true.
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
+dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
+house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
+believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
+for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
+house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
+pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
+the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
+shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
+rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
+folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
+social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
+allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
+have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
+door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
+hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
+pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
+were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
+books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
+with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
+made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
+probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
+same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
+posts. --You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
+would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
+Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
+city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
+where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
+of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
+alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
+of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
+claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
+meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
+silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
+I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
+Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
+have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
+Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
+songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
+the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
+for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
+remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
+berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
+nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
+course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
+of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
+through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
+we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
+there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
+closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
+years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
+passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
+cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
+a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
+believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
+incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
+die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
+Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
+temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
+certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
+not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
+read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
+a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
+I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
+fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
+who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
+of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
+ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
+what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
+friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
+strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
+and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
+I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
+may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
+lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
+learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
+her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
+I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
+I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
+prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
+upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
+treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
+remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
+women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
+dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
+around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
+that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
+sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
+hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
+on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
+it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
+bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
+suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
+leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
+letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
+and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
+blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
+traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
+introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
+too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
+artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
+Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
+sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
+oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
+that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
+themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
+themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
+of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
+see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
+kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
+the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
+fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
+with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
+blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
+kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
+dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
+broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
+Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
+plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
+that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
+to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
+wove into her fanciful garlands and borders. --On one of the pages
+were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
+I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
+they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
+the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
+neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
+page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
+to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
+hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
+expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
+black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
+The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
+one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
+Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
+wings spread over some unseen object. --And on the very next page a
+procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
+of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
+every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
+caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
+one other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him. --There is
+a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
+Gladiator,"the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
+broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
+casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
+limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
+miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
+Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
+to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
+could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
+has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
+grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
+up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
+desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
+forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
+the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
+And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
+curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
+their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
+one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
+stare of monumental effigies. --A very odd page indeed!  Not a
+creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
+mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
+fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
+vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
+of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
+beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
+though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
+the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
+paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
+connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
+--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
+believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
+--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
+you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
+loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
+in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had
+been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
+moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
+cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
+went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
+naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
+as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it. --This
+will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
+forehead.  She started and looked round. --I have been in a dream,--
+she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
+your hand! --She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
+and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
+bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
+those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
+who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
+turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
+pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
+poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
+spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
+other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
+On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
+with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
+creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
+those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
+I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
+which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
+as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
+things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
+mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
+Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
+single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
+whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
+the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
+faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
+that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
+or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
+But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
+not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
+new. --Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
+full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
+child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
+common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
+factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
+virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
+understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
+real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
+towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
+them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
+have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
+exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
+often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
+are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
+years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
+and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+     "I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear "
+
+came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
+gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
+well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
+feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
+and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
+confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
+must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
+always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
+not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
+bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
+backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
+and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
+impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
+that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
+therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
+other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
+admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
+have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
+chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
+like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
+regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
+The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
+his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
+instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
+suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
+unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
+but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
+copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
+transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
+but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
+and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
+of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
+It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
+against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
+or intangible private truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
+their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
+and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
+instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
+heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
+many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
+a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
+certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
+if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
+womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
+a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
+with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
+nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
+a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
+utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
+accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
+into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
+surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
+among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
+organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
+northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
+which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
+and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
+thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
+intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
+water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
+did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
+and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
+I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
+embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
+considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
+nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
+aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
+and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
+into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
+young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
+two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
+bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
+stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
+water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
+complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
+supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
+tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
+Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
+come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
+natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
+contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
+uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
+for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
+form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
+of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
+relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
+its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
+purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
+those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
+should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
+frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
+Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
+the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
+not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
+requires?
+
+I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
+Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
+along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
+passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
+In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
+filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
+believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
+season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
+huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
+unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
+colored fringe worn from all its border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
+poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
+but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
+of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
+is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
+imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
+its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
+of humanity?
+
+Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
+sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
+and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
+poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
+life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
+common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
+there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
+I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
+as they come before us in so many other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
+we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
+up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
+Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
+Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
+knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
+hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
+tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
+is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
+way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
+our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
+generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets
+
+    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep."
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
+ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
+still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
+old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
+time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
+be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
+newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
+of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
+humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
+the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
+swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
+hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
+solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
+his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
+old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
+railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
+the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
+youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
+progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
+the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
+growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
+crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
+steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
+a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
+more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
+piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
+apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
+for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
+exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
+it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
+our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
+that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
+southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
+and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
+strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
+front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
+of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
+and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
+glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
+hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
+Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
+monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
+in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
+are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
+the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
+as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
+you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
+with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
+back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
+This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
+faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
+in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
+very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
+soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
+the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
+dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
+honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
+months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
+peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
+just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
+buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
+come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
+than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
+nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
+neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
+poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
+transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
+young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
+am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!--
+said I, when I read that first frank declaration,--you are one of
+the right sort!--She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped
+barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about
+her,--the old woman's "skeleton hand " at the window opposite,
+drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"--the vacuous
+country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,--a
+routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry
+for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for her, and for all
+such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a
+soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and
+sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away
+on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
+heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense
+and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is
+adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of
+torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are
+measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says
+the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind
+used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in
+New England,--but not the hospitals.  I don't like to think of it.
+I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.
+Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or
+duty,--and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is
+sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be
+more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and
+she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for
+it in his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day. --
+Used up, Sir,--breathed over and over again.  You must come to this
+side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not
+worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is
+better than a sup of Old England's ale?  I ought to have died when I
+was a boy, Sir; but I could n't die in this Boston air,--and I think
+I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for
+me to drop this bundle,--or to New Orleans, where they have the
+yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
+said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call
+mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long
+before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed
+look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to
+the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more
+remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like
+it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific
+second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or
+look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to
+me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and
+darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something,
+and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not
+care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature
+of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes
+to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert,
+I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he
+presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of
+his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in
+romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.
+I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him
+off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge
+pang and only time for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke
+through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light
+Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his
+saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
+some who were entitled to be warned.  The landlady's face fell when
+I mentioned my fears.
+
+Poor man! --she said. --And will leave the best room empty!  Has n't
+he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
+should be took away?  Such a sight of cases, full of everything!
+Never thought of his failin' so suddin.  A complication of diseases,
+she expected.  Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
+be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--
+after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement
+of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of
+the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who
+may happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better
+feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed
+invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a
+channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil!
+Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and
+lives have to undergo, this is the most painful.  It is all so plain
+to the practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting
+mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung
+always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!
+--I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious
+state.  She seems nearer to him than anybody.
+
+I did tell her.  Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still
+face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip. --Could I be
+certain that there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not
+be certain; but it looked alarming to me. --He shall have some of my
+life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic
+power she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she
+wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and
+color from that day.  I have sometimes thought he gained the force
+she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale.  Her lips
+moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a
+word.  Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes
+were full of wild light.  She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was
+falling into one of her trances.  Something had frozen her blood
+with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she
+believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the
+Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill.  Bridget, the servant,
+went before me with a light.  The doors were both unfastened, and I
+found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the
+mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others.  I
+give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+          UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+No more her pulses come and go;
+Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+But not beneath a graven stone,
+To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+A slender cross of wood alone
+Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+And gray old trees of hugest limb
+Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+To make the scorching sunlight dim
+That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+And through their leaves the robins call,
+And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+For her the morning choir shall sing
+Its matins from the branches high,
+And every minstrel voice of spring,
+That trills beneath the April sky,
+Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+When, turning round their dial-track,
+Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+Her little mourners, clad in black,
+The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+At last the rootlets of the trees
+Shall find the prison where she lies,
+And bear the buried dust they seize
+In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+If any, born of kindlier blood,
+Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+Say only this: A tender bud,
+That tried to blossom in the snow,
+Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading,
+what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I
+cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.
+If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all
+the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is
+shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--
+if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise
+you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the
+"Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read
+by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who
+would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump
+on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber.  Did I not tell you that I
+was sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with
+thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard
+late at night in my little neighbor's apartment?  It had come to
+that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really
+heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have
+been subject, as before mentioned.  So, when I walked into the room,
+and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with
+its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin,
+such a "goose-flesh " shiver ran over it.  It was not fear, but what
+I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for
+instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
+fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes
+doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely
+flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and
+hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of
+the fifty he is counting.  Extreme curiosity will excite some people
+as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less
+impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
+conjurer's room.  Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor
+invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over
+in the Mayflower.  All this is just what I mean to, find out while
+I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my
+patient.  The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;
+the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace
+objects in disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are
+ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the
+rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.
+I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a
+brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any
+more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less
+favored regions expend on the same performance.  Yet a lump of
+puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over,
+to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.
+Look at that pebble in it.  From what cliff was it broken?  On what
+beach rolled by the waves of what ocean?  How and when imbedded in
+soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into
+bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-
+Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when
+the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent
+with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of
+it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it
+any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.
+Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are
+fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One
+of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an
+opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque
+mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like
+a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great
+worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface
+in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified
+slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries
+are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and
+Dorchester think of "brickbats " and the spawn of creatures that
+live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly
+plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many
+ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung
+out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How
+many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the
+matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a
+chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany
+four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something
+moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room. --The Little
+Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands
+clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one
+of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose
+breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down!  I have come to the hill
+Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up. --His speech was
+laborious and interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I
+proceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which
+you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not
+always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other
+professional folks of my temperament.  Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please. --I was on his right side, but he presented
+his left wrist, crossing it over the other. --I begin to count,
+holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,--What a handsome
+hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle. --One, two,
+three, four, five, six, seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark,
+except one white object. --One, two, three, four,--Hang it!  eighty
+or ninety in the minute, I guess. --Tongue, if you please. --Tongue
+is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any
+particular notice of it;--but what is that white object, with the
+long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius
+and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons?  I
+don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he
+have it in his chamber for?  As I had found his pulse irregular and
+intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over
+the place where the heart beats.  I missed the usual beat of the
+organ. --How is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He
+took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there
+was a displacement of the organ. --I am ill-packed,--he said;--there
+was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men. --God
+help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the
+desire for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his
+condition.  I must look at this patient's chest, and thump it and
+listen to it.  For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--
+displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance
+to overhaul such an interesting malformation.  And so I managed to
+do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time.  The torso was
+slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,--the left full,
+round, and of perfect symmetry.  It had run away with the life of
+the other limbs,--a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you
+before.  If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep
+out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with him.  He has
+the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it is an
+arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
+all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before. --Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral
+valves (professional terms you need not attend to). --What the deuse
+is that long case for?  Got his witch grandmother mummied in it?
+And three big mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came
+over me which I had had once before,--that he might be one of our
+modern alchemists,--you understand, make gold, you know, or what
+looks like it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of
+Liberty to embellish one side of the piece. --Don't I remember
+hearing him shut a door and lock it once?  What do you think was
+kept under that lock?  Let's have another look at his hand, to see
+if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
+just taking a look at his open hand.  Ah!  Four calluses at the end
+of the fingers of the right hand.  None on those of the left.  Ah,
+ha!  What do those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in
+fact.  While I was making these observations of the objects around
+me, I was also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which
+I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath.  Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others.  Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks.  Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently
+the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
+soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.  The "tripod of life" a French
+physiologist called these three organs.  It is all clear enough
+which leg of the tripod is going to break down here.  I could tell
+you exactly what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible
+and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper
+to a ploughman.  It is enough to say, that I found just what I
+expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
+more serious consequences,--which expression means you very well
+know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely
+come out.  If I have made a mystery where there was none, my
+suspicions will be shamed, as they have often been before.  If there
+is anything strange, my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed,
+after giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove,
+which an imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the
+Heart."  Under their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy,
+half-waking slumber, the body fighting hard for every breath, and
+the mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections,
+which escaped from his lips in broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God!  And
+the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
+straight.  Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as
+long as other folks' graves.  And mind you get the sods flat, old
+man,--flat as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under.
+And then, with a good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six
+foot away from it, it'll look just as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man!  Who said he was a man?  No more men of that pattern to bear
+his name! --Used to be a good-looking set enough. --Where 's all the
+manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
+strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah
+there the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light.  I want to see the
+picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.  I was
+not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had
+lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table. --He pointed to a
+portrait hanging against the wall. --Look at her,--he said,--look at
+her!  Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years
+old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New
+England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what
+artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from
+life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure
+and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the
+early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some
+consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging
+sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been
+prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her
+sweetness. --I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm
+hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little
+mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
+addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these
+little excrescences.  "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young
+woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen
+you make fun of them in those days! --Then she had a brooch in her
+bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or
+other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone
+in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;
+--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh
+from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his
+couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens
+and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she
+and I are the last of 'em. --She will stay, and I shall go.  They
+never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me
+with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my
+skeleton when I was dead. --You are my friend, if you are a doctor,
+--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder.  Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
+the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to
+keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the
+sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,--he said,
+in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared
+at, as my body has been.  I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;
+but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show
+of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of
+for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted
+and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there
+is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.  It does
+not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of
+thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with
+red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-
+white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp
+young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--
+Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the
+plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both
+callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
+which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as
+some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there
+passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
+though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval
+glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
+standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
+that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one
+would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of
+pain, even if he were saving pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the
+task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more
+thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel
+experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They
+have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain
+and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without
+claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope
+I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this
+was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain
+instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if
+his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his
+bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to
+speak cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust
+we can help it.  But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
+that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and
+buttercups blow over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
+vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he
+meant for anybody's ears. --I have been talking a little wild, Sir,
+eh? he said. --There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops
+of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than
+I would have it, Sir.  But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's
+the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that
+fifty years from now nobody will know that the place where I lie
+does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of 'em that
+stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may
+get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try;
+but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the
+smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that
+grow out of it.  There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel,
+Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try,
+you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure
+or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not
+far off, at best. --I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
+and come, if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.
+The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often
+do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery
+fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the
+window;--a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind
+stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see
+something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of
+the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the
+panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that
+the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every
+threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon
+stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
+journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still,
+and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as
+from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking
+corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure,
+holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one
+of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their
+hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily
+recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
+see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her
+statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I
+knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,-
+-or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
+movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that
+there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand.  I sometimes
+think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom
+they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them
+at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for
+them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh
+away our last upon their faithful breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the
+starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save
+that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still
+as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of
+waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp
+close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not
+stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor
+Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been "warned in a
+dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds
+which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural
+than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
+her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum" on
+it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
+childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay,
+unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank
+eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along. --Well,
+I must wake her from her slumber or trance. --I called her name, but
+she did not heed my voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young
+girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it,
+and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and
+a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord
+Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from
+her trance?  and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph,
+and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy
+undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked
+upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, "My lips
+have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever"?
+You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering
+with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe
+I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the
+pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of the
+chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our
+school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with
+the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his
+bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he
+was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and
+fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
+internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more
+than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he
+should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he
+would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the
+kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted
+four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored
+poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she
+happened to pass him when he was asleep.  And have we ever forgotten
+that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled under the lips
+of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not think to
+leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time?  The
+sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
+lasts a deal longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
+mind suffers, as compared with the man of action.  While he is
+taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he
+lets his chance slip through his fingers.  Iris woke up, of her own
+accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going to do about
+it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
+all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
+impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it.  She
+did not know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in
+such guise, and me staring at her.  She looked down at her white
+robe and bare feet, and colored,--then at the goblet she held in her
+hand, then at the taper; and at last her thoughts seemed to clear
+up.
+
+I know it all,--she said. --He is going to die, and I must go and
+sit by him.  Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody
+else to care for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest,
+and persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do
+harm.  Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the
+morning.  There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority;
+and the young girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her
+own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in
+my cheeks.  The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded
+gradually from my imagination, and I returned to the still
+perplexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now.  No plaintive sounds, no monotonous
+murmurs, no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if
+something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was
+something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses.  Is there an
+inner apartment that I have not seen?  The way in which the house is
+built might admit of it.  As I thought it over, I at once imagined a
+Bluebeard's chamber.  Suppose, for instance, that the narrow
+bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we
+remember leading to the private study of one of our most
+distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+library to that little silent cell.  If this were lighted from
+above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
+attracting attention from the household, and wander where they
+pleased at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I
+said to myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head.
+There is no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams.
+A she-ghost wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself.  A live
+woman, with a valuable soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to
+sprain her ankles over the old graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this
+page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and
+anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running
+through my head.  I don't care much for your abuse.  The question is
+not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he
+actually does think about, in the dark, and when be is alone, and
+his whole body seems but one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the
+phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in
+the direction of the last strange noise,--what he actually does
+think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories his head is
+full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to account
+for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them to
+scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under
+one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and
+remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and
+tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him
+at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.  Old
+babies that we are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful.  I
+longed for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever.
+So, between my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of
+it, and came down tired to the breakfast-table.  My visit was not to
+be made until after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so
+the servant was ordered to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of
+Iris had been unoccupied. --You might jest as well take away that
+chair,--said our landlady,--he'll never want it again.  He acts like
+a man that 's struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever
+come out of his chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a
+corpse. --These good women do put things so plainly!  There were two
+or three words in her short remark that always sober people, and
+suggest silence or brief moral reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled
+in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
+human history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John,
+so called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple
+like that.  He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
+turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people
+that know how to lift better than I do.  Ask him if he don't want
+any watchers.  I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl.  I was
+up all night twice last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch
+absorbed on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the
+time;--but the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question
+how he would like sitting up without the punch and the company and
+the songs and smoking.  He means what he says, and it would be a
+more considerable achievement for him to sit quietly all night by a
+sick man than for a good many other people.  I tell you this odd
+thing: there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of
+making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their
+cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort
+in general, even in their own persons.  The correlative to loving
+our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our
+neighbors.  Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants,
+and then themselves.  So I think it more for a lively young fellow
+to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn
+martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
+gratify it by fasting and watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit.  I found Iris
+sitting by the Little Gentleman's pillow.  To my disappointment, the
+room was darkened.  He did not like the light, and would have the
+shutters kept nearly closed.  It was good enough for me; what
+business had I to be indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to
+do but to exercise such skill as I possessed for the benefit of my
+patient?  There was not much to be said or done in such a case; but
+I spoke as encouragingly as I could, as I think we are always bound
+to do.  He did not seem to pay any very anxious attention, but the
+poor girl listened as if her own life and more than her own life
+were depending on the words I uttered.  She followed me out of the
+room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain.  Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.
+--One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be
+sudden or slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble.
+But Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she,
+and kept her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted
+that she'd be killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to
+give up, if she didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common.  The high chair was set
+back against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl
+and her nearest neighbor's on the right.  But the next morning, to
+our great surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very
+quietly moved his own chair to the vacant place.  I thought he was
+creeping down that way, but I was not prepared for a leap spanning
+such a tremendous parenthesis of boarders as this change of position
+included.  There was no denying that the youth and maiden were a
+handsome pair, as they sat side by side.  But whatever the young
+girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a
+moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her
+side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to
+talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his
+cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
+as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
+work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
+any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of
+a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this
+matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long
+endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices,
+the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the
+household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of
+ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked
+even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
+footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender
+to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food,
+sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.
+Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
+she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
+Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may
+be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber
+and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the
+care of Nature without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But
+there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with
+the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life
+becomes to them as death and death as life. --How am I getting
+along?--he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand,
+with the death's-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort
+of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly
+of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another
+condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the
+infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was
+well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
+flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb
+was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature
+almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome
+hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice,
+strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that have
+not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
+good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
+forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where,
+free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
+should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
+"deep-damasked wings" beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers,
+as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown
+summer glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium,
+where the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other.
+If one has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in,
+he pleases himself with the thought of all the conveniences it
+offers him, and thinks little of its wants and imperfections.  But
+once having made up his mind to move to a better, every incommodity
+starts out upon him, until the very ground-plan of it seems to have
+changed in his mind, and his thoughts and affections, each one of
+them packing up its little bundle of circumstances, have quitted
+their several chambers and nooks and migrated to the new home, long
+before its apartments are ready to receive their coming tenant.  It
+is so with the body.  Most persons have died before they expire,--
+died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it
+were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.  The
+fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
+persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
+airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first
+cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness
+the last period of life.  Almost always there is a preparation made
+by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there
+is for the removal of a milktooth.  The roots which hold human life
+to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.  Some of
+the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
+inseparable in the universal mind from death.  Some are in pain, and
+want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
+legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.  Some are stupid,
+mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing
+about.  And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw
+near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
+moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word
+along the file that water is in sight.  Though each little party
+that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water
+to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less
+has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed
+which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by
+their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of
+Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and
+not insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by
+illness, on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted
+by science, before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we
+call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of
+sickness.  There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a
+patient's estimate of his own vital force.  His physician knows the
+state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,--that this or that
+organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has
+a sense that he can hold out so much longer,--sometimes that he must
+and will live for a while, though by the logic of disease he ought
+to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that
+his remaining days were few.  I told the household what to expect.
+There was a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders,
+in various modes, according to their characters and style of
+sympathy.  The landlady was urgent that he should try a certain
+nostrum which had saved somebody's life in jest sech a case.  The
+Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's
+Alarm," etc.  I objected to the title, reminding her that it
+offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the book
+were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure Guide to Heaven."
+The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the
+time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as
+children do. --He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very worthy
+gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.  Sadly deformed about
+the spine and the feet.  Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
+had some malformation of this kind.  Had heerd there was something
+the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man
+of talents.  This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.  Could
+not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-
+partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to
+lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--.  In the midst of
+these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-
+noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how
+the old boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was
+going to leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a
+diabolish snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead. --To
+this the Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult
+him.  Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r
+intentions one way or t'other. -The Kohi-noor then suggested the
+young man's stepping out into the yard, that he, the speaker, might
+"slap his chops." --Let 'em alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon
+be over, and they won't hurt each other much. --So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one
+quarrels with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man
+down, and there is the end of it.  Now those who have watched such
+encounters are aware of two things: first, that it is not so easy to
+knock a man down as it is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you
+do happen to knock a man down, there is a very good chance that he
+will be angry, and get up and give you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into
+the yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung
+his arm round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in
+the noble art, expecting the young fellow John to drop when his
+fist, having completed a quarter of a circle, should come in contact
+with the side of that young man's head.  Unfortunately for this
+theory, it happens that a blow struck out straight is as much
+shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the rustic's swinging
+blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a circle.  The
+mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor felt
+something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
+something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow
+had nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit
+he got and the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so
+far as the back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that
+vegetable.  It was a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so
+frequent in young and ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and
+negative pectorals, that they can settle most little quarrels on the
+spot by "knocking the man down."
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
+seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-
+sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies.  A
+person not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover
+from this surprise.  The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and
+still a little confused by the smart hit he had received, but
+furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good deal
+lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
+him and finish the contest at once.  That is the way all angry
+greenhorns and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters.  It
+does n't do, if the other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and
+has a very little science.  It didn't do this time; for, as the
+assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere, like the vans
+of a windmill, be ran a prominent feature of his face against a fist
+which was travelling in the other direction, and immediately after
+struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a severe blow with
+the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one branch of
+science and the bread-basket to another.  This second round closed
+the battle.  The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
+more than as good as a feast.  The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand.  But the other sulked, and
+muttered something about revenge. --Jest as ye like,--said the young
+man John. --Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours
+'n' 't'll take down the swellin'.  (Mouse is a technical term for a
+bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's
+forehead or eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow
+was particularly pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying
+his proficiency in the art of self-defence without the gloves.  The
+Koh-i-noor did not favor us with his company for a day or two, being
+confined to his chamber, it was said, by a slight feverish, attack.
+He was chop-fallen always after this, and got negligent in his
+person.  The impression must have been a deep one; for it was
+observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and whiskers
+had turned visibly white about the roots.  In short, it disgraced
+him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of
+which he had been for some time suspected.  This, and the disgust
+which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
+been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
+to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston.  After a
+man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him.  Poor
+Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of
+talking; and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to
+this pass, you had better begin praying for him, and stop lending
+him money, for he is on his last legs.  Remember poor Edgar!  He is
+dead and gone; but the State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and
+the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into
+the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine display of
+provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number.  I expected to gratify
+your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these
+puzzles, doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call
+them, of mine.  Next month you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber.  As I paused
+at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing.  It was
+not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
+the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word.  I had seen
+the verses in her book; the melody was new to me.  Let me finish my
+page with them.
+
+
+          HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+Though long the weary way we tread,
+And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+O Love Divine, forever dear,
+Content to suffer, while we know,
+Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without
+taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good
+opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our
+private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the
+planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a
+young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his
+arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or
+the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery
+of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.
+Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks,
+straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we
+ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will
+ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But
+the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that
+of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our
+Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans,
+no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which
+have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above
+all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
+knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
+would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
+private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for
+only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of
+brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of
+oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young
+American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in
+prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and
+soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly
+with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles,
+but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees
+them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to
+take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
+pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or
+separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of
+that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not
+lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
+from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
+grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
+with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
+inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
+opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon
+acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of
+stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to
+want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.  In
+fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is
+made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in
+the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain
+respectful consideration at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before.  Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent.
+Thus, if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a
+painter, for instance, he finds the means of education and a demand
+for his services.  Even a man who knows nothing but science will be
+provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his
+birthplace all his days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness.  The
+apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.  Her
+boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Marylander of ours
+spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was wherever
+the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
+made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
+put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had
+left vacant at the side of Iris.  When a young man is found
+habitually at the side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers
+where she stays, and hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow
+her as she moves and rest upon her when she is still,--when he
+begins to grow a little timid, he who was so bold, and a little
+pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds them alone,--
+when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and names her
+very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet
+science in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of
+qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has
+a generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means
+proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned
+inside out when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe
+it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came
+and told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she
+could n't say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!
+--guessed it all without another word! --When your mother, I say,
+came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told
+your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
+the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will
+not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that
+time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we
+should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-
+summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to
+whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or
+she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was
+meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is
+pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.  It is not at all
+essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes
+say of particular couples, "born for each other."  Sometimes a man
+or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for
+having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the
+fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a
+class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men,
+because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
+for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such
+cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called
+upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
+remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
+earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does
+not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never
+found in company.  They don't care for strange scents,--they like
+plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the
+kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the
+personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt
+to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman
+marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual
+mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a
+good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far
+more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the
+philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index
+which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which
+can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a
+plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone!  She knows what she is about.  Genius has an
+infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have
+for genius.  To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its
+work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.  It
+bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems,
+statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.  Character
+evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it
+takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a
+holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.  You
+talk of the fire of genius.  Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung
+and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that
+keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
+theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so
+many men of genius.  It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
+philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out
+the life that warms them.  Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse
+hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out
+of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the
+blood of her youthful heroes.  We are always valuing the soul's
+temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.  Yet the
+great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast
+hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating
+toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two
+degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop
+trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
+law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong,
+to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what
+is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and
+the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the
+same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)
+--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down
+into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller
+proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of
+genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a
+household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say
+the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
+its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of
+the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle
+in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall
+ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible
+towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung
+unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel
+nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as
+if with her own life.  But I knew that on the other side of the
+ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there
+was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and arms of iron,
+that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I knew,
+that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
+ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
+and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither.  And so I
+have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-
+sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
+brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
+close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
+part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
+would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.
+--No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too
+often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk,
+where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some future
+possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
+beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
+complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the
+time when its sun was burned out.  And yet, when a strong brain is
+weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble
+against a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one.  I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
+brilliant pattern already worked in its texture.  But as the very
+essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which
+are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so
+contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes.  Now it is not
+easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a
+perfectly true man.  And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to
+choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in
+so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of
+letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it.  I think there is a kindly feeling
+growing up between Iris and our young Marylander.  Not that I
+suppose there is any distinct understanding between them, but that
+the affinity which has drawn him from the remote corner where he sat
+to the side of the young girl is quietly bringing their two natures
+together.  Just now she is all given up to another; but when he no
+longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares, I warn you not to be
+surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the evening primrose,
+with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the flower of full-
+blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits,
+to make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple
+than to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he
+who has borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly
+pilgrimage.  At this point, under most circumstances, I would close
+the doors and draw the veil of privacy before the chamber where the
+birth which we call death, out of life into the unknown world, is
+working its mystery.  But this friend of ours stood alone in the
+world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly in harmony with
+the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the objection
+commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
+staple of a certain portion of the press.  Let me explain what I
+mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
+they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying
+children, to which almost all of them attach the greatest
+importance.  There is hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not
+anxious to receive the "consolations of religion" in his last hours.
+Even if he be senseless, but still living, I think that the form is
+gone through with, just as baptism is administered to the
+unconscious new-born child.  Now we do not quarrel with these forms.
+We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which give
+peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures.  But the value of the
+new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
+testimony to the truth of a doctrine.  The automatic closing of a
+dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
+the Real Presence, or any other dogma.  And, speaking generally, the
+evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
+great caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt.
+A dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence.
+But it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when
+he is changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks
+when he is truly and wholly himself.  Most murderers die in a very
+pious frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man
+believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats
+in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died
+in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital
+of various kinds out of dying men's speeches.  The lies that have
+been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless.  The prime
+minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies
+with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter.
+Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or
+somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him.  The incoherent
+babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately
+sentiment.  One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say
+the prettiest thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--
+and then bow themselves politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their
+evidence in favor of this or that favorite belief.  The camp-
+followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every
+life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its
+thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.  The Roman Catholic or other
+priest who insists on the reception of his formula means kindly, we
+trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the
+subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us take the
+testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form opinions
+as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.  A
+lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much.  A poor fellow
+who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains,
+whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is
+gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human
+life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in a
+normal, healthy condition.  It is a remark I have heard from the
+wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral
+condition of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle,
+the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with
+disease below it, in the digestive organs.  Many an honest ignorant
+man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
+psychology.  With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the
+story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not
+likely to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender
+conscience and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his
+behalf.  It was undeniable that on several occasions the Little
+Gentleman had expressed himself with a good deal of freedom on a
+class of subjects which, according to the divinity-student, he had
+no right to form an opinion upon.  He therefore considered his
+future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people.
+If I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine,
+there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am
+competent to judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as
+evidence of its truth, while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as
+testimony in its behalf.  But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-
+Muggletonian sentiment, then I become incompetent to form any
+opinion on the matter.  This, you cannot fail to observe, is exactly
+the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture
+on Phrenology.  Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted
+in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
+against it.  Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature
+implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my
+positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that
+of the Muggletonians.  I also remarked a singular timidity on his
+part lest somebody should "unsettle " somebody's faith,--as if faith
+did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were
+not all the better for a shaking up now and then.  I don't mean that
+it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice
+Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but
+all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their
+neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned,
+at all times and by anybody,--just as those who set up bars across a
+thoroughfare must expect to have them taken down by every one who
+wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against
+the questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension
+of our new conditions.  If to question everything be unlawful and
+dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for
+what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even
+the truth of its own fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
+the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the
+young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of
+life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the
+continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that
+govern the planet and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the
+commonwealth, as our young friend the Marylander, for instance,
+understood it.  He could not get rid of that notion of private
+property in truth, with the right to fence it in, and put up a sign-
+board, thus:
+
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit.  I
+love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think
+it has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its
+highest teachings.  I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any
+of you can tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself. --Some
+say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations.  Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
+a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all.  They think that men will eventually come
+together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of
+belief, and form a great unity.  Do they see what this amounts to?
+It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism!
+a thing that never was and never will be until national and
+individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-
+nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going
+to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with
+the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit
+Voltaire."  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
+illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as
+a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is
+narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece
+of business.  You can't make a village or a parish or a family think
+alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs
+or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an
+ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of
+perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
+the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their
+respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to
+himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith's-
+worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
+And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to
+excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take
+in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot
+do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be
+filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and
+always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate
+of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always
+differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in
+which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded
+and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the
+details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce
+themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must
+always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see
+ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of
+intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold
+the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those
+who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative
+aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive
+orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that
+requires the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a
+church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where
+no word of his can be understood.  The apostle of this church may be
+a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting
+fellow-creature.  The cup of cold water does not require to be
+translated for a foreigner to understand it.  I am afraid the only
+Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and
+not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits,
+and not by their words.  If you say this communion of well-doers is
+no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
+limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
+thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
+organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow
+Church, however.  The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats
+of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's
+gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe,
+and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their
+fellow-creatures will go down.  The Broad Church is on board,
+working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship
+will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down
+under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do
+very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about
+outsiders and insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans.  Still they could not keep
+away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint
+Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the
+two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make
+remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was
+noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that
+there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she
+thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what
+his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be
+doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
+femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
+wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;
+--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of
+bein' married this five year.  They was good boarders, both of 'em,
+paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before, -the divinity-
+student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and,
+in the kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in
+the strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he
+and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were
+wrong,--he determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his
+faith before he died, if he could.  So he sent word to the sick man,
+that he should be pleased to visit him and have some conversation
+with him; and received for answer that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman.
+He found him weak, but calm.  Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind
+way, that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt
+concerned for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making
+preparations for the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
+what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
+anything to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir! --said the Little Gentleman. --I was born into
+this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
+to which I do not belong.  Look at this! --he said, and held up his
+withered arm. --See there! --and he pointed to his misshapen
+extremities. --Lay your hand here! --and he laid his own on the
+region of his misplaced heart. --I have known nothing of the life of
+your race.  When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an
+object of pity, or a sight to show.  The first strange child I ever
+remember hid its face and would not come near me.  I was a broken-
+hearted as well as broken-bodied boy.  I grew into the emotions of
+ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from my
+presence.  I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
+manhood but its longings.  My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
+race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of
+men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the
+love of the other.  I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
+If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have
+had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it.  I
+don't believe it, Sir!  I have too much faith for that.  God has not
+left me wholly without comfort, even here.  I love this old place
+where I was born;--the heart of the world beats under the three
+hills of Boston, Sir!  I love this great land, with so many tall men
+in it, and so many good, noble women. --His eyes turned to the
+silent figure by his pillow. --I have learned to accept meekly what
+has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that I think my
+sin has been greater than my suffering.  I bear the ignorance and
+the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person.  I never
+drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for
+another's fault.  I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot
+have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one, and
+I have paced it alone.  I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their
+doings.  I have known what it was to dream of the great passions;
+but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have
+pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
+without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up
+into her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him.
+It was the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of
+bitterness, and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.
+The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever
+saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
+sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his
+head and was still.  All the questions he had meant to ask had faded
+from his memory.  The tests he had.  prepared by which to judge of
+his fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their
+virtue.  He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
+Parent.  The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from
+heaven, that angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a
+moment before to summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.
+Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.  A little before he
+would have said, Shall I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as
+taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment.  So we must not blame
+the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
+sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
+than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
+parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has
+been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray! --said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant
+lying helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his
+long years of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with
+the bruised reed.  Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon
+this their child.  Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own
+transgressions!  Thou hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross
+which thy stronger children are called upon to take up; and now that
+he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him
+that is tempted!  Let his manifold infirmities come between him and
+Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!  If his eyes are not opened
+to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests
+upon him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind
+Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+tenderness.  In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-
+darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making
+a proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever
+listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last
+hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his
+cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which
+overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her
+feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that
+mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him
+in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the
+divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to
+the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon
+him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed. --There is a
+language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that
+ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of
+the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by
+the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is
+soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
+windows and putting out its fires. --Such was the aspect of the face
+upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence
+which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not
+that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these
+cases. --The sick man looked towards him. --Farewell,--he said,--I
+thank you.  Leave me alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took
+from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking
+key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to
+her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those
+that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to
+what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp. --The young girl walked to
+the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined
+with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory
+crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and
+came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the
+figure of the dying Saviour. --Give me your hand, he said; and Iris
+placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until
+presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained
+vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl's
+hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed
+valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible
+dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of
+torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The
+inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if
+her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.  It was one
+of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could
+not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast
+her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands
+and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also
+must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she
+did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying
+man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of
+agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never
+could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;
+but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
+on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I! --What
+is that great bucket of water for?  said the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack. --For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman. --She could not think
+that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so
+keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than
+she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--
+without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes
+over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris,
+released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his
+unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only
+utterance of her long agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
+Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that
+crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
+You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of
+the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser
+of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave
+of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that
+tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says
+how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died
+on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a
+moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his
+autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
+gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless
+the stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
+to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon
+the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure
+of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he
+should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at
+so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which,
+if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at
+once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them
+more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
+names and the old bones of the old Boston people.  At the foot of
+his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of
+its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships,
+and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which
+he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet
+chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes
+follow him all the world over.
+
+
+                         In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do
+a better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to
+the young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him.
+He did not, however.  A considerable bequest to one of our public
+institutions keeps his name in grateful remembrance.  The telescope
+through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the
+movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my
+part, is now the property of a Western College.  You smile as you
+think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its
+tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white
+drapery thrown over it for protection.  So do I smile now; I belong
+to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my
+nightmares very cheap by daylight
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities.  Some
+thought there was no question that he had a second apartment, in
+which he had made an asylum for a deranged female relative.  Others
+were of opinion that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with
+patriarchal tendencies, and I have even been censured for
+introducing so Oriental an element into my record of boarding-house
+experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
+else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as
+one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius.  The vox humana of the
+great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ
+of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a
+human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the
+cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this
+instrument.  A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.  I was
+executing some tours de force upon it one evening, when the
+policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and asked what was
+the matter in the house.  He had heard a woman's screams,--he was
+sure of it.  I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes
+before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a
+woman.  The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman.
+Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from
+his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
+conjecture to offer.  It is not true that a second apartment with a
+secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic.
+She had seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees
+before it.  The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed,
+there was a spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which
+might be thus accounted for.  Why he, whose whole life was a
+crucifixion, should not love to look on that divine image of
+blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it seems to me
+the most natural thing in the world that he should.  But there are
+those who want to make private property of everything, and can't
+make up their minds that people who don't think as they do should
+claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the
+central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he
+should meet him in heaven. --The question is, whether he'll meet
+you,--said the young fellow John, rather smartly.  The divinity-
+student had n't thought of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light.  He will get a parish by-and-by; and,
+as he is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the
+Schoolmistress, whom some of us remember,--and as all sorts of
+expensive accidents happen to young married ministers, he will be
+under bonds to the amount of his salary, which means starvation, if
+they are forfeited, to think all his days as he thought when he was
+settled,--unless the majority of his people change with him or in
+advance of him.  A hard ease, to which nothing could reconcile a
+man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his
+personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough
+in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
+reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman.  Although, as I
+have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various
+pieces of property as tokens of kind remembrance.  It was in this
+way I became the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken
+of, which had been purchased for him out of an Italian convent.  The
+landlady was comforted with a small legacy.  The following extract
+relates to Iris : "in consideration of her manifold acts of
+kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and by no means
+as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a certain
+messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in ______
+Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same
+being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
+families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix,
+the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring.  The funeral or death's-
+head ring was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a
+flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while
+we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away
+among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the
+picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the
+massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube
+through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him
+like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-
+consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and
+women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which
+his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard,
+but it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the
+gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that
+"little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off
+second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the
+landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had
+valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the
+vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the
+landlady's bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his
+limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of
+Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its
+word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were "not a
+dye," were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.
+
+>From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.
+She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off
+various articles of "jewelry."  She began to help her mother in some
+of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the
+ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to
+his meetin' by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a
+man and a woman a "gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility
+which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a
+Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on
+Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this,
+which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with
+a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a
+young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
+steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
+dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain
+solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
+and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
+boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
+prospect of her becoming a minister's wife.  On inquiry, however, I
+found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
+professional one, but not clerical.  He was a young undertaker, who
+had just succeeded to a thriving business.  Things, I believe, are
+going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the
+landlady's daughter and her mother.  Sextons and undertakers are the
+cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-
+clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
+liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of
+each and all of its inmates.  I am happy to say, however, that they
+are all alive and well, up to this time.  That amiable old gentleman
+who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still
+smiles benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of
+father to all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always
+something like a family festival.  The Poor Relation, even, has
+warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on his last birthday
+made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy
+of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle."  I
+saw him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do
+himself great credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a
+professional gentleman of celebrity.  I am pleased to say that he
+has been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in consequence of his
+rise in office, has taken an apartment somewhat lower down than
+number "forty-'leven," as he facetiously called his attic.  Whether
+there is any truth, or not, in the story of his attachment to, and
+favorable reception by, the daughter of the head of an extensive
+wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not venture an opinion; I
+may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in company with a
+very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I understand,
+is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander.  Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own.  They
+often went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course,
+supposes there is any relation between religious sympathy and those
+wretched "sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is
+commonly agreed that nothing better is based than society,
+civilization, friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of
+parent and child, and which many people must think were singularly
+overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said
+before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young man,
+pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
+the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children,
+so that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last
+work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside.  It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the
+same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all
+the Virtues."  Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather
+formal hand, but full of good advice, to her young charge.  And now
+she had come to carry her away, thinking that she had learned all
+she was likely to learn under her present course of teaching.  The
+Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a week, or more,--before they
+should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be.  She was respectful,
+grateful, as a child is with a just, but not tender parent.  Yet
+something was wrong.  She had one of her trances, and became statue-
+like, as before, only the day after the Model's arrival.  She was
+wan and silent, tasted nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced
+effort, and often looked vaguely away from those who were looking at
+her, her eyes just glazed with the shining moisture of a tear that
+must not be allowed to gather and fall.  Was it grief at parting
+from the place where her strange friendship had grown up with the
+Little Gentleman?  Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
+loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had
+been permitted to care for him in his last weary days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room
+alone.  Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to
+the Church of the Galileans.  They said but little going,--
+"collecting their thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope.  My
+kind good friend the pastor preached that day one of his sermons
+that make us all feel like brothers and sisters, and his text was
+that affectionate one from John, "My little children, let us not
+love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."  When
+Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale, and
+walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children,
+Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice.  She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,----
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
+speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand
+to finish his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly
+and suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to
+his lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently
+with them, and said, "It is mine!"
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
+has happened since these events I was describing.  Those two young
+people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted
+that the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young
+lady should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc.
+Long before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young
+Maryland engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his
+native State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to
+decline that famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind
+of nabob in a few years.  Iris does not write verse often, nowadays,
+but she sometimes draws.  The last sketch of hers I have seen in my
+Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the youngest
+holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when I--
+I was so struck with her statue-like beauty.  If in the later,
+summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that
+grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
+you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of
+her childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that
+Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and
+forgotten to rub out the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention.  Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
+was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and
+somewhat youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage
+containing a stout baby.  A buxom young lady watched them from one
+of the stone seats, with an interest which could be nothing less
+than maternal.  I at once recognized my old friend, the young fellow
+whom we called John.  He was delighted to see me, introduced me to
+"Madam," and would have the lusty infant out of the carriage, and
+hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you
+hit from the shoulder.  Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
+straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa. --Chip of the old block.
+Regl'r little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant
+pugilist with great equanimity. --And how is the old boarding-
+house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered. --Painted and papered as good as new.  Gabs in
+all the rooms up to the skyparlors.  Old woman's layin' up money,
+they say.  Means to send Ben Franklin to college.  Just then the
+first bell rang for church, and my friend, who, I understand, has
+become a most exemplary member of society, said he must be off to
+get ready for meetin', and told the young one to "shake dada," which
+he did with his closed fist, in a somewhat menacing manner.  And so
+the young man John, as we used to call him, took the pole of the
+miniature carriage, and pushed the small pugilist before him
+homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by his pleasant-
+looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round
+by the old boarding-house.  The "gahs" was lighted, but the
+curtains, or more properly, the painted shades; were not down.  And
+so I stood there and looked in along the table where the boarders
+sat at the evening meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us
+feel as if we knew so well.  There were new faces at it, but also
+old and familiar ones. --The landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap,
+looking young, comparatively speaking, and as if half the wrinkles
+had been ironed out of her forehead. --Her daughter, in rather
+dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got up, apparently,
+to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume and sandy
+hair,--the last rising straight from his forehead, like the marble
+flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn. --The Poor
+Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of
+white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left
+to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair,
+through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features
+were seen to disadvantage for the moment. --The good old gentleman
+was sitting still and thoughtful.  All at once he turned his face
+toward the window where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me,
+smiled his benignant smile.  It was a recollection of some past
+pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer
+darkness; and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around
+it faded into the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+                    ---------------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less
+than his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more.  Thanks to all
+those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of
+kindly recognition and fellow-feeling!  Peace to all such as may
+have been vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have
+repeated!  They will, doubtless, forget for the moment the
+difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms,
+and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light
+we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all
+brothers.
+
+
+          A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+Lord of all being! throned afar,
+Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+Centre and soul of every sphere,
+Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+Star of our hope, thy softened light
+Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+Lord of all life, below, above,
+Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+Before thy ever-blazing throne
+We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+Till all thy living altars claim
+One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Professor at the Breakfast Table, by Holmes
+#2 in our series by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
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+Title: The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
+Author: Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet)
+(Not the Jurist O. W. Holmes, Jr.)
+
+Release Date: June, 2001 [Etext #2665]
+[Yes, we are more than one year ahead of schedule]
+[Most recently updated: December 6, 2001]
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+Edition: 11
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+Language: English
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+Character set encoding: ASCII
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+Project Gutenberg Etext of Professor at the Breakfast Table, by Holmes
+*********This file should be named prabt11.txt or prabt11.zip*********
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+
+
+THE PROFESSOR AT THE BREAKFAST TABLE
+
+by Oliver Wendell Holmes
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION.
+
+The reader of to-day will not forget, I trust, that it is nearly a
+quarter of a century since these papers were written.  Statements
+which were true then are not necessarily true now.  Thus, the speed
+of the trotting horse has been so much developed that the record of
+the year when the fastest time to that date was given must be very
+considerably altered, as may be seen by referring to a note on page
+49 of the "Autocrat."  No doubt many other statements and opinions
+might be more or less modified if I were writing today instead of
+having written before the war, when the world and I were both more
+than a score of years younger.
+
+These papers followed close upon the track of the "Autocrat."  They
+had to endure the trial to which all second comers are subjected,
+which is a formidable ordeal for the least as well as the greatest.
+Paradise Regained and the Second Part of Faust are examples which are
+enough to warn every one who has made a jingle fair hit with his
+arrow of the danger of missing when he looses "his fellow of the
+selfsame flight."
+
+There is good reason why it should be so.  The first juice that runs
+of itself from the grapes comes from the heart of the fruit, and
+tastes of the pulp only; when the grapes are squeezed in the press
+the flow betrays the flavor of the skin.  If there is any freshness
+in the original idea of the work, if there is any individuality in
+the method or style of a new author, or of an old author on a new
+track, it will have lost much of its first effect when repeated.
+Still, there have not been wanting readers who have preferred this
+second series of papers to the first.  The new papers were more
+aggressive than the earlier ones, and for that reason found a
+heartier welcome in some quarters, and met with a sharper antagonism
+in others.  It amuses me to look back on some of the attacks they
+called forth.  Opinions which do not excite the faintest show of
+temper at this time from those who do not accept them were treated as
+if they were the utterances of a nihilist incendiary.  It required
+the exercise of some forbearance not to recriminate.
+
+How a stray sentence, a popular saying, the maxim of some wise man, a
+line accidentally fallen upon and remembered, will sometimes help one
+when he is all ready to be vexed or indignant!  One day, in the time
+when I was young or youngish, I happened to open a small copy of "Tom
+Jones," and glance at the title-page.  There was one of those little
+engravings opposite, which bore the familiar name of "T. Uwins," as I
+remember it, and under it the words "Mr. Partridge bore all this
+patiently."  How many times, when, after rough usage from
+ill-mannered critics, my own vocabulary of vituperation was simmering
+in such a lively way that it threatened to boil and lift its lid and
+so boil over, those words have calmed the small internal
+effervescence!  There is very little in them and very little of them;
+and so there is not much in a linchpin considered by itself, but it
+often keeps a wheel from coming off and prevents what might be a
+catastrophe.  The chief trouble in offering such papers as these to
+the readers of to-day is that their heresies have become so familiar
+among intelligent people that they have too commonplace an aspect.
+All the lighthouses and land-marks of belief bear so differently from
+the way in which they presented themselves when these papers were
+written that it is hard to recognize that we and our fellow-
+passengers are still in the same old vessel sailing the same
+unfathomable sea and bound to the same as yet unseen harbor.
+
+But after all, there is not enough theology, good or bad, in these
+papers to cause them to be inscribed on the Protestant Index
+Expurgatorius; and if they are medicated with a few questionable
+dogmas or antidogmas, the public has become used to so much rougher
+treatments, that what was once an irritant may now act as an anodyne,
+and the reader may nod over pages which, when they were first
+written, would have waked him into a paroxysm of protest and
+denunciation.
+
+November, 1882.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
+
+This book is one of those which, if it lives for a number of decades,
+and if it requires any Preface at all, wants a new one every ten
+years.  The first Preface to a book is apt to be explanatory, perhaps
+apologetic, in the expectation of attacks from various quarters.  If
+the book is in some points in advance of public opinion, it is
+natural that the writer should try to smooth the way to the reception
+of his more or less aggressive ideas.  He wishes to convince, not to
+offend,--to obtain a hearing for his thought, not to stir up angry
+opposition in those who do not accept it.  There is commonly an
+anxious look about a first Preface.  The author thinks he shall be
+misapprehended about this or that matter, that his well-meant
+expressions will probably be invidiously interpreted by those whom he
+looks upon as prejudiced critics, and if he deals with living
+questions that he will be attacked as a destructive by the
+conservatives and reproached for his timidity by the noisier
+radicals.  The first Preface, therefore, is likely to be the weakest
+part of a work containing the thoughts of an honest writer.
+
+After a time the writer has cooled down from his excitement,--has got
+over his apprehensions, is pleased to find that his book is still
+read, and that he must write a new Preface.  He comes smiling to his
+task.  How many things have explained themselves in the ten or twenty
+or thirty years since he came before his untried public in those
+almost plaintive paragraphs in which he introduced himself to his
+readers,--for the Preface writer, no matter how fierce a combatant he
+may prove, comes on to the stage with his shield on his right arm and
+his sword in his left hand.
+
+The Professor at the Breakfast-Table came out in the "Atlantic
+Monthly" and introduced itself without any formal Preface.  A quarter
+of a century later the Preface of 1882, which the reader has just had
+laid before him, was written.  There is no mark of worry, I think, in
+that.  Old opponents had come up and shaken hands with the author
+they had attacked or denounced.  Newspapers which had warned their
+subscribers against him were glad to get him as a contributor to
+their columns.  A great change had come over the community with
+reference to their beliefs.  Christian believers were united as never
+before in the feeling that, after all, their common object was to
+elevate the moral and religious standard of humanity.  But within the
+special compartments of the great Christian fold the marks of
+division have pronounced themselves in the most unmistakable manner.
+As an example we may take the lines of cleavage which have shown
+themselves in the two great churches, the Congregational and the
+Presbyterian, and the very distinct fissure which is manifest in the
+transplanted Anglican church of this country.  Recent circumstances
+have brought out the fact of the great change in the dogmatic
+communities which has been going on silently but surely.  The
+licensing of a missionary, the transfer of a Professor from one
+department to another, the election of a Bishop,--each of these
+movements furnishes evidence that there is no such thing as an air-
+tight reservoir of doctrinal finalities.
+
+The folding-doors are wide open to every Protestant to enter all the
+privileged precincts and private apartments of the various exclusive
+religious organizations.  We may demand the credentials of every
+creed and catechise all the catechisms.  So we may discuss the
+gravest questions unblamed over our morning coffee-cups or our
+evening tea-cups.  There is no rest for the Protestant until he gives
+up his legendary anthropology and all its dogmatic dependencies.
+
+It is only incidentally, however, that the Professor at the
+Breakfast-Table handles matters which are the subjects of religious
+controversy.  The reader who is sensitive about having his fixed
+beliefs dealt with as if they were open to question had better skip
+the pages which look as if they would disturb his complacency.
+"Faith" is the most precious of possessions, and it dislikes being
+meddled with.  It means, of course, self-trust,--that is, a belief in
+the value of our, own opinion of a doctrine, of a church, of a
+religion, of a Being, a belief quite independent of any evidence that
+we can bring to convince a jury of our fellow beings.  Its roots are
+thus inextricably entangled with those of self-love and bleed as
+mandrakes were said to, when pulled up as weeds.  Some persons may
+even at this late day take offence at a few opinions expressed in the
+following pages, but most of these passages will be read without loss
+of temper by those who disagree with them, and by-and-by they may be
+found too timid and conservative for intelligent readers, if they are
+still read by any.
+
+BEVERLY FARM, MASS., June 18, 1891.
+
+O.  W.  H.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+                        THE PROFESSOR
+
+                           AT THE
+                       BREAKFAST-TABLE.
+
+
+          What he said, what he heard, and what he saw.
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+I intended to have signalized my first appearance by a certain large
+statement, which I flatter myself is the nearest approach to a
+universal formula, of life yet promulgated at this breakfast-table.
+It would have had a grand effect.  For this purpose I fixed my eyes
+on a certain divinity-student, with the intention of exchanging a few
+phrases, and then forcing my court-card, namely, The great end of
+being.--I will thank you for the sugar,--I said.--Man is a
+dependent creature.
+
+It is a small favor to ask,--said the divinity-student,--and passed
+the sugar to me.
+
+--Life is a great bundle of little things,--I said.
+
+The divinity-student smiled, as if that were the concluding epigram
+of the sugar question.
+
+You smile,--I said.--Perhaps life seems to you a little bundle of
+great things?
+
+The divinity-student started a laugh, but suddenly reined it back
+with a pull, as one throws a horse on his haunches.--Life is a great
+bundle of great things,--he said.
+
+(NOW, THEN!)  The great end of being, after all, is....
+
+Hold on!--said my neighbor, a young fellow whose name seems to be
+John, and nothing else,--for that is what they all call him,--hold
+on! the Sculpin is go'n' to say somethin'.
+
+Now the Sculpin (Cottus Virginianus) is a little water-beast which
+pretends to consider itself a fish, and, under that pretext, hangs
+about the piles upon which West-Boston Bridge is built, swallowing
+the bait and hook intended for flounders.  On being drawn from the
+water, it exposes an immense head, a diminutive bony carcass, and a
+surface so full of spines, ridges, ruffles, and frills, that the
+naturalists have not been able to count them without quarrelling
+about the number, and that the colored youth, whose sport they spoil,
+do not like to touch them, and especially to tread on them, unless
+they happen to have shoes on, to cover the thick white soles of their
+broad black feet.
+
+When, therefore, I heard the young fellow's exclamation, I looked
+round the table with curiosity to see what it meant.  At the further
+end of it I saw a head, and a--a small portion of a little deformed
+body, mounted on a high chair, which brought the occupant up to a
+fair level enough for him to get at his food.  His whole appearance
+was so grotesque, I felt for a minute as if there was a showman
+behind him who would pull him down presently and put up Judy, or the
+hangman, or the Devil, or some other wooden personage of the famous
+spectacle.  I contrived to lose the first of his sentence, but what I
+heard began so:
+
+--by the Frog-Pond, when there were frogs in and the folks used to
+come down from the tents on section and Independence days with their
+pails to get water to make egg-pop with.  Born in Boston; went to
+school in Boston as long as the boys would let me.--The little man
+groaned, turned, as if to look around, and went on.--Ran away from
+school one day to see Phillips hung for killing Denegri with a
+logger-head.  That was in flip days, when there were always two three
+loggerheads in the fire.  I'm a Boston boy, I tell you,--born at
+North End, and mean to be buried on Copp's Hill, with the good old
+underground people,--the Worthylakes, and the rest of 'em.  Yes,--up
+on the old hill, where they buried Captain Daniel Malcolm in a stone
+grave, ten feet deep, to keep him safe from the red-coats, in those
+old times when the world was frozen up tight and there was n't but
+one spot open, and that was right over Faneuil all,--and black enough
+it looked, I tell you!  There 's where my bones shall lie, Sir, and
+rattle away when the big guns go off at the Navy Yard opposite!  You
+can't make me ashamed of the old place!  Full crooked little
+streets;--I was born and used to run round in one of 'em--
+
+--I should think so,--said that young man whom I hear them call
+"John,"--softly, not meaning to be heard, nor to be cruel, but
+thinking in a half-whisper, evidently.--I should think so; and got
+kinked up, turnin' so many corners.--The little man did not hear
+what was said, but went on,--
+
+--full of crooked little streets; but I tell you Boston has opened,
+and kept open, more turnpikes that lead straight to free thought and
+free speech and free deeds than any other city of live men or dead
+men,--I don't care how broad their streets are, nor how high their
+steeples!
+
+--How high is Bosting meet'n'-house?--said a person with black
+whiskers and imperial, a velvet waistcoat, a guard-chain rather too
+massive, and a diamond pin so very large that the most trusting
+nature might confess an inward suggestion,--of course, nothing
+amounting to a suspicion.  For this is a gentleman from a great city,
+and sits next to the landlady's daughter, who evidently believes in
+him, and is the object of his especial attention.
+
+How high?--said the little man.--As high as the first step of the
+stairs that lead to the New Jerusalem.  Is n't that high enough?
+
+It is,--I said.--The great end of being is to harmonize man with the
+order of things, and the church has been a good pitch-pipe, and may
+be so still.  But who shall tune the pitch-pipe?  Quis cus-(On the
+whole, as this quotation was not entirely new, and, being in a
+foreign language, might not be familiar to all the boarders, I
+thought I would not finish it.)
+
+--Go to the Bible!--said a sharp voice from a sharp-faced, sharp-
+eyed, sharp-elbowed, strenuous-looking woman in a black dress,
+appearing as if it began as a piece of mourning and perpetuated
+itself as a bit of economy.
+
+You speak well, Madam,--I said;--yet there is room for a gloss or
+commentary on what you say.  "He who would bring back the wealth of
+the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies."  What you bring
+away from the Bible depends to some extent on what you carry to it.-
+Benjamin Franklin!  Be so good as to step up to my chamber and bring
+me down the small uncovered pamphlet of twenty pages which you will
+find lying under the "Cruden's Concordance." [The boy took a large
+bite, which left a very perfect crescent in the slice of bread-and-
+butter he held, and departed on his errand, with the portable
+fraction of his breakfast to sustain him on the way.]
+
+--Here it is.  "Go to the Bible.  A Dissertation, etc., etc.  By J.
+J. Flournoy.  Athens, Georgia, 1858."
+
+Mr. Flournoy, Madam, has obeyed the precept which you have
+judiciously delivered.  You may be interested, Madam, to know what
+are the conclusions at which Mr. J. J. Flournoy of Athens, Georgia,
+has arrived.  You shall hear, Madam.  He has gone to the Bible, and
+he has come back from the Bible, bringing a remedy for existing
+social evils, which, if it is the real specific, as it professes to
+be, is of great interest to humanity, and to the female part of
+humanity in particular.  It is what he calls TRIGAMY, Madam, or the
+marrying of three wives, so that "good old men" may be solaced at
+once by the companionship of the wisdom of maturity, and of those
+less perfected but hardly less engaging qualities which are found at
+an earlier period of life.  He has followed your precept, Madam; I
+hope you accept his conclusions.
+
+The female boarder in black attire looked so puzzled, and, in fact,
+"all abroad," after the delivery of this "counter" of mine, that I
+left her to recover her wits, and went on with the conversation,
+which I was beginning to get pretty well in hand.
+
+But in the mean time I kept my eye on the female boarder to see what
+effect I had produced.  First, she was a little stunned at having her
+argument knocked over.  Secondly, she was a little shocked at the
+tremendous character of the triple matrimonial suggestion.  Thirdly.
+--I don't like to say what I thought.  Something seemed to have
+pleased her fancy.  Whether it was, that, if trigamy should come into
+fashion, there would be three times as many chances to enjoy the
+luxury of saying, "No!" is more than I, can tell you.  I may as well
+mention that B. F. came to me after breakfast to borrow the pamphlet
+for "a lady,"--one of the boarders, he said,--looking as if he had a
+secret he wished to be relieved of.
+
+--I continued.--If a human soul is necessarily to be trained up in
+the faith of those from whom it inherits its body, why, there is the
+end of all reason.  If, sooner or later, every soul is to look for
+truth with its own eyes, the first thing is to recognize that no
+presumption in favor of any particular belief arises from the fact of
+our inheriting it.  Otherwise you would not give the Mahometan a fair
+chance to become a convert to a better religion.
+
+The second thing would be to depolarize every fixed religious idea in
+the mind by changing the word which stands for it.
+
+--I don't know what you mean by "depolarizing" an idea,--said the
+divinity-student.
+
+I will tell you,--I said.---When a given symbol which represents a
+thought has lain for a certain length of time in the mind, it
+undergoes a change like that which rest in a certain position gives
+to iron.  It becomes magnetic in its relations,--it is traversed by
+strange forces which did not belong to it.  The word, and
+consequently the idea it represents, is polarized.
+
+The religious currency of mankind, in thought, in speech, and in
+print, consists entirely of polarized words.  Borrow one of these
+from another language and religion, and you will find it leaves all
+its magnetism behind it.  Take that famous word, O'm, of the Hindoo
+mythology.  Even a priest cannot pronounce it without sin; and a holy
+Pundit would shut his ears and run away from you in horror, if you
+should say it aloud.  What do you care for O'm?  If you wanted to get
+the Pundit to look at his religion fairly, you must first depolarize
+this and all similar words for him.  The argument for and against new
+translations of the Bible really turns on this.  Skepticism is afraid
+to trust its truths in depolarized words, and so cries out against a
+new translation.  I think, myself, if every idea our Book contains
+could be shelled out of its old symbol and put into a new, clean,
+unmagnetic word, we should have some chance of reading it as
+philosophers, or wisdom-lovers, ought to read it,--which we do not
+and cannot now any more than a Hindoo can read the "Gayatri" as a
+fair man and lover of truth should do.  When society has once fairly
+dissolved the New Testament, which it never has done yet, it will
+perhaps crystallize it over again in new forms of language.
+
+I did n't know you was a settled minister over this parish,--said the
+young fellow near me.
+
+A sermon by a lay-preacher may be worth listening--I replied, calmly.
+--It gives the parallax of thought and feeling as they appear to the
+observers from two very different points of view.  If you wish to get
+the distance of a heavenly body, you know that you must take two
+observations from remote points of the earth's orbit,--in midsummer
+and midwinter, for instance.  To get the parallax of heavenly truths,
+you must take an observation from the position of the laity as well
+as of the clergy.  Teachers and students of theology get a certain
+look, certain conventional tones of voice, a clerical gait, a
+professional neckcloth, and habits of mind as professional as their
+externals.  They are scholarly men and read Bacon, and know well
+enough what the "idols of the tribe" are.  Of course they have their
+false gods, as all men that follow one exclusive calling are prone to
+do.--The clergy have played the part of the flywheel in our modern
+civilization.  They have never suffered it to stop.  They have often
+carried on its movement, when other moving powers failed, by the
+momentum stored in their vast body.  Sometimes, too, they have kept
+it back by their vis inertia, when its wheels were like to grind the
+bones of some old canonized error into fertilizers for the soil that
+yields the bread of life.  But the mainspring of the world's onward
+religious movement is not in them, nor in any one body of men, let me
+tell you.  It is the people that makes the clergy, and not the clergy
+that makes the people.  Of course, the profession reacts on its
+source with variable energy.--But there never was a guild of dealers
+or a company of craftsmen that did not need sharp looking after.
+
+Our old friend, Dr. Holyoke, whom we gave the dinner to some time
+since, must have known many people that saw the great bonfire in
+Harvard College yard.
+
+--Bonfire?--shrieked the little man.--The bonfire when Robert
+Calef's book was burned?
+
+The same,--I said,--when Robert Calef the Boston merchant's book was
+burned in the yard of Harvard College, by order of Increase Mather,
+President of the College and Minister of the Gospel.  You remember
+the old witchcraft revival of '92, and how stout Master Robert Calef,
+trader of Boston, had the pluck to tell the ministers and judges what
+a set of fools and worse than fools they were-
+
+Remember it?--said the little man.--I don't think I shall forget it,
+as long as I can stretch this forefinger to point with, and see what
+it wears.  There was a ring on it.
+
+May I look at it?--I said.
+
+Where it is,--said the little man;--it will never come off, till it
+falls off from the bone in the darkness and in the dust.
+
+He pushed the high chair on which he sat slightly back from the
+table, and dropped himself, standing, to the floor,--his head being
+only a little above the level of the table, as he stood.  With pain
+and labor, lifting one foot over the other, as a drummer handles his
+sticks, he took a few steps from his place,--his motions and the
+deadbeat of the misshapen boots announcing to my practised eye and
+ear the malformation which is called in learned language talipes
+varus, or inverted club-foot.
+
+Stop!  stop!--I said,--let me come to you.
+
+The little man hobbled back, and lifted himself by the left arm, with
+an ease approaching to grace which surprised me, into his high chair.
+I walked to his side, and he stretched out the forefinger of his
+right hand, with the ring upon it.  The ring had been put on long
+ago, and could not pass the misshapen joint.  It was one of those
+funeral rings which used to be given to relatives and friends after
+the decease of persons of any note or importance.  Beneath a round
+fit of glass was a death's head.  Engraved on one side of this, "L.
+B.  AEt.  22,"--on the other, "Ob. 1692"
+
+My grandmother's grandmother,--said the little man.--Hanged for a
+witch.  It does n't seem a great while ago.  I knew my grandmother,
+and loved her.  Her mother was daughter to the witch that Chief
+Justice Sewall hanged and Cotton Mather delivered over to the Devil.-
+-That was Salem, though, and not Boston.  No, not Boston.  Robert
+Calef, the Boston merchant, it was that blew them all to-
+
+Never mind where he blew them to,--I said; for the little man was
+getting red in the face, and I did n't know what might come next.
+
+This episode broke me up, as the jockeys say, out of my square
+conversational trot; but I settled down to it again.
+
+--A man that knows men, in the street, at their work, human nature in
+its shirt-sleeves, who makes bargains with deacons, instead of
+talking over texts with them, a man who has found out that there are
+plenty of praying rogues and swearing saints in the world,--above
+all, who has found out, by living into the pith and core of life,
+that all of the Deity which can be folded up between the sheets of
+any human book is to the Deity of the firmament, of the strata, of
+the hot aortic flood of throbbing human life, of this infinite,
+instantaneous consciousness in which the soul's being consists,--an
+incandescent point in the filament connecting the negative pole of a
+past eternity with the positive pole of an eternity that is to come,-
+-that all of the Deity which any human book can hold is to this
+larger Deity of the working battery of the universe only as the films
+in a book of gold-leaf are to the broad seams and curdled lumps of
+ore that lie in unsunned mines and virgin placers,--Oh!--I was saying
+that a man who lives out-of-doors, among live people, gets some
+things into his head he might not find in the index of his "Body of
+Divinity."
+
+I tell you what,--the idea of the professions' digging a moat round
+their close corporations, like that Japanese one at Jeddo, on the
+bottom of which, if travellers do not lie, you could put Park Street
+Church and look over the vane from its side, and try to stretch
+another such spire across it without spanning the chasm,--that idea,
+I say, is pretty nearly worn out.  Now when a civilization or a
+civilized custom falls into senile dementia, there is commonly a
+judgment ripe for it, and it comes as plagues come, from a breath,--
+as fires come, from a spark.
+
+Here, look at medicine.  Big wigs, gold-headed canes, Latin
+prescriptions, shops full of abominations, recipes a yard long,
+"curing" patients by drugging as sailors bring a wind by whistling,
+selling lies at a guinea apiece,--a routine, in short, of giving
+unfortunate sick people a mess of things either too odious to swallow
+or too acrid to hold, or, if that were possible, both at once.
+
+--You don't know what I mean, indignant and not unintelligent
+country-practitioner?  Then you don't know the history of medicine,--
+and that is not my fault.  But don't expose yourself in any outbreak
+of eloquence; for, by the mortar in which Anaxarchus was pounded!  I
+did not bring home Schenckius and Forestus and Hildanus, and all the
+old folios in calf and vellum I will show you, to be bullied by the
+proprietor, of a "Wood and Bache," and a shelf of peppered sheepskin
+reprints by Philadelphia Editors.  Besides, many of the profession
+and I know a little something of each other, and you don't think I am
+such a simpleton as to lose their good opinion by saying what the
+better heads among them would condemn as unfair and untrue?  Now mark
+how the great plague came on the generation of drugging doctors, and
+in what form it fell.
+
+A scheming drug-vender, (inventive genius,) an utterly untrustworthy
+and incompetent observer, (profound searcher of Nature,) a shallow
+dabbler in erudition, (sagacious scholar,) started the monstrous
+fiction (founded the immortal system) of Homoeopathy.  I am very
+fair, you see,---you can help yourself to either of these sets of
+phrases.
+
+All the reason in the world would not have had so rapid and general
+an effect on the public mind to disabuse it of the idea that a drug
+is a good thing in itself, instead of being, as it is, a bad thing,
+as was produced by the trick (system) of this German charlatan
+(theorist).  Not that the wiser part of the profession needed him to
+teach them; but the routinists and their employers, the "general
+practitioners," who lived by selling pills and mixtures, and their
+drug-consuming customers, had to recognize that people could get
+well, unpoisoned.  These dumb cattle would not learn it of
+themselves, and so the murrain of Homoeopathy fell on them.
+
+--You don't know what plague has fallen on the practitioners of
+theology?  I will tell you, then.  It is Spiritualism.  While some
+are crying out against it as a delusion of the Devil, and some are
+laughing at it as an hysteric folly, and some are getting angry with
+it as a mere trick of interested or mischievous persons, Spiritualism
+is quietly undermining the traditional ideas of the future state
+which have been and are still accepted,--not merely in those who
+believe in it, but in the general sentiment of the community, to a
+larger extent than most good people seem to be aware of.  It need n't
+be true, to do this, any more than Homoeopathy need, to do its work.
+The Spiritualists have some pretty strong instincts to pry over,
+which no doubt have been roughly handled by theologians at different
+times.  And the Nemesis of the pulpit comes, in a shape it little
+thought of, beginning with the snap of a toe-joint, and ending with
+such a crack of old beliefs that the roar of it is heard in all the
+ministers' studies of Christendom?  Sir, you cannot have people of
+cultivation, of pure character, sensible enough in common things,
+large-hearted women, grave judges, shrewd business-men, men of
+science, professing to be in communication with the spiritual world
+and keeping up constant intercourse with it, without its gradually
+reacting on the whole conception of that other life.  It is the folly
+of the world, constantly, which confounds its wisdom.  Not only out
+of the mouths of babes and sucklings, but out of the mouths of fools
+and cheats, we may often get our truest lessons.  For the fool's
+judgment is a dog-vane that turns with a breath, and the cheat
+watches the clouds and sets his weathercock by them,--so that one
+shall often see by their pointing which way the winds of heaven are
+blowing, when the slow-wheeling arrows and feathers of what we call
+the Temples of Wisdom are turning to all points of the compass.
+
+--Amen!--said the young fellow called John--Ten minutes by the
+watch.  Those that are unanimous will please to signify by holding up
+their left foot!
+
+I looked this young man steadily in the face for about thirty
+seconds.  His countenance was as calm as that of a reposing infant.
+I think it was simplicity, rather than mischief, with perhaps a
+youthful playfulness, that led him to this outbreak.  I have often
+noticed that even quiet horses, on a sharp November morning, when
+their coats are beginning to get the winter roughness, will give
+little sportive demi-kicks, with slight sudden elevation of the
+subsequent region of the body, and a sharp short whinny,--by no means
+intending to put their heels through the dasher, or to address the
+driver rudely, but feeling, to use a familiar word, frisky.  This, I
+think, is the physiological condition of the young person, John.  I
+noticed, however, what I should call a palpebral spasm, affecting the
+eyelid and muscles of one side, which, if it were intended for the
+facial gesture called a wink, might lead me to suspect a disposition
+to be satirical on his part.
+
+--Resuming the conversation, I remarked,--I am, ex officio, as a
+Professor, a conservative.  For I don't know any fruit that clings to
+its tree so faithfully, not even a "froze-'n'-thaw" winter-apple, as
+a Professor to the bough of which his chair is made.  You can't shake
+him off, and it is as much as you can do to pull him off.  Hence, by
+a chain of induction I need not unwind, he tends to conservatism
+generally.
+
+But then, you know, if you are sailing the Atlantic, and all at once
+find yourself in a current, and the sea covered with weeds, and drop
+your Fahrenheit over the side and find it eight or ten degrees higher
+than in the ocean generally, there is no use in flying in the face of
+facts and swearing there is no such thing as a Gulf-Stream, when you
+are in it.
+
+You can't keep gas in a bladder, and you can't keep knowledge tight
+in a profession.  Hydrogen will leak out, and air will leak in,
+through India-rubber; and special knowledge will leak out, and
+general knowledge will leak in, though a profession were covered with
+twenty thicknesses of sheepskin diplomas.
+
+By Jove, Sir, till common sense is well mixed up with medicine, and
+common manhood with theology, and common honesty with law, We the
+people, Sir, some of us with nut-crackers, and some of us with trip-
+hammers, and some of us with pile-drivers, and some of us coming with
+a whish! like air-stones out of a lunar volcano, will crash down on
+the lumps of nonsense in all of them till we have made powder of
+them--like Aaron's calf
+
+[See Holmes poem: "When doctor's take what they would give and
+lawyers give what they would take and strawberries grow larger down
+through the box."   D.W.]
+
+If to be a conservative is to let all the drains of thought choke up
+and keep all the soul's windows down,--to shut out the sun from the
+east and the wind from the west,--to let the rats run free in the
+cellar, and the moths feed their fill in the chambers, and the
+spiders weave their lace before the mirrors, till the soul's typhus
+is bred out of our neglect, and we begin to snore in its coma or rave
+in its delirium,--I, Sir, am a bonnet-rouge, a red cap of the
+barricades, my friends, rather than a conservative.
+
+--Were you born in Boston, Sir?--said the little man,--looking eager
+and excited.
+
+I was not,--I replied.
+
+It's a pity,--it's a pity,--said the little man;--it 's the place to
+be born in.  But if you can't fix it so as to be born here, you can
+come and live here.  Old Ben Franklin, the father of American science
+and the American Union, was n't ashamed to be born here.  Jim Otis,
+the father of American Independence, bothered about in the Cape Cod
+marshes awhile, but he came to Boston as soon as he got big enough.
+Joe Warren, the first bloody ruffed-shirt of the Revolution, was as
+good as born here.  Parson Charming strolled along this way from
+Newport, and stayed here.  Pity old Sam Hopkins hadn't come, too;--
+we'd have made a man of him,--poor, dear, good old Christian heathen!
+There he lies, as peaceful as a young baby, in the old burying-
+ground!  I've stood on the slab many a time.  Meant well,--meant
+well.  Juggernaut.  Parson Charming put a little oil on one linchpin,
+and slipped it out so softly, the first thing they knew about it was
+the wheel of that side was down.  T' other fellow's at work now, but
+he makes more noise about it.  When the linchpin comes out on his
+side, there'll be a jerk, I tell you! Some think it will spoil the
+old cart, and they pretend to say that there are valuable things in
+it which may get hurt.  Hope not,--hope not.  But this is the great
+Macadamizing place,--always cracking up something.
+
+Cracking up Boston folks,--said the gentleman with the diamond-pin,
+whom, for convenience' sake, I shall hereafter call the Koh-i-noor.
+
+The little man turned round mechanically towards him, as Maelzel's
+Turk used to turn, carrying his head slowly and horizontally, as if
+it went by cogwheels.--Cracking up all sorts of things,--native and
+foreign vermin included,--said the little man.
+
+This remark was thought by some of us to have a hidden personal
+application, and to afford a fair opening for a lively rejoinder, if
+the Koh-i-noor had been so disposed.  The little man uttered it with
+the distinct wooden calmness with which the ingenious Turk used to
+exclaim, E-chec! so that it must have been heard.  The party supposed
+to be interested in the remark was, however, carrying a large knife-
+bladeful of something to his mouth just then, which, no doubt,
+interfered with the reply he would have made.
+
+--My friend who used to board here was accustomed sometimes, in a
+pleasant way, to call himself the Autocrat of the table,--meaning, I
+suppose, that he had it all his own way among the boarders.  I think
+our small boarder here is like to prove a refractory subject, if I
+undertake to use the sceptre my friend meant to bequeath me, too
+magisterially.  I won't deny that sometimes, on rare occasions, when
+I have been in company with gentlemen who preferred listening, I have
+been guilty of the same kind of usurpation which my friend openly
+justified.  But I maintain, that I, the Professor, am a good
+listener.  If a man can tell me a fact which subtends an appreciable
+angle in the horizon of thought, I am as receptive as the
+contribution-box in a congregation of colored brethren.  If, when I
+am exposing my intellectual dry-goods, a man will begin a good story,
+I will have them all in, and my shutters up, before he has got to the
+fifth "says he," and listen like a three-years' child, as the author
+of the "Old Sailor" says.  I had rather hear one of those grand
+elemental laughs from either of our two Georges, (fictitious names,
+Sir or Madam,) glisten to one of those old playbills of our College
+days, in which "Tom and Jerry" ("Thomas and Jeremiah," as the old
+Greek Professor was said to call it) was announced to be brought on
+the stage with whole force of the Faculty, read by our Frederick, (no
+such person, of course,) than say the best things I might by any
+chance find myself capable of saying.  Of course, if I come across a
+real thinker, a suggestive, acute, illuminating, informing talker, I
+enjoy the luxury of sitting still for a while as much as another.
+
+Nobody talks much that does n't say unwise things,--things he did not
+mean to say; as no person plays much without striking a false note
+sometimes.  Talk, to me, is only spading up the ground for crops of
+thought.  I can't answer for what will turn up.  If I could, it would
+n't be talking, but "speaking my piece."  Better, I think, the hearty
+abandonment of one's self to the suggestions of the moment at the
+risk of an occasional slip of the tongue, perceived the instant it
+escapes, but just one syllable too late, than the royal reputation of
+never saying a foolish thing.
+
+--What shall I do with this little man?--There is only one thing to
+do,--and that is to let him talk when he will.  The day of the
+"Autocrat's" monologues is over.
+
+--My friend,--said I to the young fellow whom, as I have said, the
+boarders call "John,"--My friend,--I said, one morning, after
+breakfast,--can you give me any information respecting the deformed
+person who sits at the other end of the table?
+
+What! the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+The diminutive person, with angular curvature of the spine,--I said,-
+-and double talipes varus,--I beg your pardon,--with two club-feet.
+
+Is that long word what you call it when a fellah walks so?--said the
+young man, making his fists revolve round an imaginary axis, as you
+may have seen youth of tender age and limited pugilistic knowledge,
+when they show how they would punish an adversary, themselves
+protected by this rotating guard,--the middle knuckle, meantime,
+thumb-supported, fiercely prominent, death-threatening.
+
+It is,--said I.--But would you have the kindness to tell me if you
+know anything about this deformed person?
+
+About the Sculpin?--said the young fellow.
+
+My good friend,--said I,--I am sure, by your countenance, you would
+not hurt the feelings of one who has been hardly enough treated by
+Nature to be spared by his fellows.  Even in speaking of him to
+others, I could wish that you might not employ a term which implies
+contempt for what should inspire only pity.
+
+A fellah 's no business to be so crooked,--said the young man called
+John.
+
+Yes, yes,--I said, thoughtfully,--the strong hate the weak.  It's all
+right.  The arrangement has reference to the race, and not to the
+individual.  Infirmity must be kicked out, or the stock run down.
+Wholesale moral arrangements are so different from retail!--I
+understand the instinct, my friend,--it is cosmic,--it is planetary,-
+-it is a conservative principle in creation.
+
+The young fellow's face gradually lost its expression as I was
+speaking, until it became as blank of vivid significance as the
+countenance of a gingerbread rabbit with two currants in the place of
+eyes.  He had not taken my meaning.
+
+Presently the intelligence came back with a snap that made him wink,
+as he answered,--Jest so.  All right.  A 1.  Put her through.  That's
+the way to talk.  Did you speak to me, Sir?--Here the young man
+struck up that well-known song which I think they used to sing at
+Masonic festivals, beginning, "Aldiborontiphoscophornio, Where left
+you Chrononhotonthologos?"
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said;--all I meant was, that men, as temporary
+occupants of a permanent abode called human life, which is improved
+or injured by occupancy, according to the style of tenant, have a
+natural dislike to those who, if they live the life of the race as
+well as of the individual, will leave lasting injurious effects upon
+the abode spoken of, which is to be occupied by countless future
+generations.  This is the final cause of the underlying brute
+instinct which we have in common with the herds.
+
+--The gingerbread-rabbit expression was coming on so fast, that I
+thought I must try again.--It's a pity that families are kept up,
+where there are such hereditary infirmities.  Still, let us treat
+this poor man fairly, and not call him names.  Do you know what his
+name is?
+
+I know what the rest of 'em call him,--said the young fellow.--They
+call him Little Boston.  There's no harm in that, is there?
+
+It is an honorable term,--I replied.--But why Little Boston, in a
+place where most are Bostonians?
+
+Because nobody else is quite so Boston all over as he is,--said the
+young fellow.
+
+"L. B.  Ob. 1692."--Little Boston let him be, when we talk about him.
+The ring he wears labels him well enough.  There is stuff in the
+little man, or he would n't stick so manfully by this crooked,
+crotchety old town.  Give him a chance.--You will drop the Sculpin,
+won't you?--I said to the young fellow.
+
+Drop him?--he answered,--I ha'n't took him up yet.
+
+No, no,--the term,--I said,--the term.  Don't call him so any more,
+if you please.  Call him Little Boston, if you like.
+
+All right,--said the young fellow.--I would n't be hard on the poor
+little-
+
+The word he used was objectionable in point of significance and of
+grammar.  It was a frequent termination of certain adjectives among
+the Romans,--as of those designating a person following the sea, or
+given to rural pursuits.  It is classed by custom among the profane
+words; why, it is hard to say,--but it is largely used in the street
+by those who speak of their fellows in pity or in wrath.
+
+I never heard the young fellow apply the name of the odious pretended
+fish to the little man from that day forward.
+
+--Here we are, then, at our boarding--house.  First, myself, the
+Professor, a little way from the head of the table, on the right,
+looking down, where the "Autocrat" used to sit.  At the further end
+sits the Landlady.  At the head of the table, just now, the Koh-i-
+noor, or the gentleman with the diamond.  Opposite me is a Venerable
+Gentleman with a bland countenance, who as yet has spoken little.
+The Divinity Student is my neighbor on the right,--and further down,
+that Young Fellow of whom I have repeatedly spoken.  The Landlady's
+Daughter sits near the Koh-i-noor, as I said.  The Poor Relation near
+the Landlady.  At the right upper corner is a fresh-looking youth of
+whose name and history I have as yet learned nothing.  Next the
+further left-hand corner, near the lower end of the table, sits the
+deformed person.  The chair at his side, occupying that corner, is
+empty.  I need not specially mention the other boarders, with the
+exception of Benjamin Franklin, the landlady's son, who sits near his
+mother.  We are a tolerably assorted set,--difference enough and
+likeness enough; but still it seems to me there is something wanting.
+The Landlady's Daughter is the prima donna in the way of feminine
+attractions.  I am not quite satisfied with this young lady.  She
+wears more "jewelry," as certain young ladies call their trinkets,
+than I care to see on a person in her position.  Her voice is
+strident, her laugh too much like a giggle, and she has that foolish
+way of dancing and bobbing like a quill-float with a "minnum" biting
+the hook below it, which one sees and weeps over sometimes in persons
+of more pretensions.  I can't help hoping we shall put something into
+that empty chair yet which will add the missing string to our social
+harp.  I hear talk of a rare Miss who is expected.  Something in the
+schoolgirl way, I believe.  We shall see.
+
+--My friend who calls himself The Autocrat has given me a caution
+which I am going to repeat, with my comment upon it, for the benefit
+of all concerned.
+
+Professor,--said he, one day,--don't you think your brain will run
+dry before a year's out, if you don't get the pump to help the cow?
+Let me tell you what happened to me once.  I put a little money into
+a bank, and bought a check-book, so that I might draw it as I wanted,
+in sums to suit.  Things went on nicely for a time; scratching with a
+pen was as easy as rubbing Aladdin's Lamp; and my blank check-book
+seemed to be a dictionary of possibilities, in which I could find all
+the synonymes of happiness, and realize any one of them on the spot.
+A check came back to me at last with these two words on it,--NO
+FUNDS.  My check-book was a volume of waste-paper.
+
+Now, Professor,--said he,--I have drawn something out of your bank,
+you know; and just so sure as you keep drawing out your soul's
+currency without making new deposits, the next thing will be, NO
+FUNDS,--and then where will you be, my boy?  These little bits of
+paper mean your gold and your silver and your copper, Professor; and
+you will certainly break up and go to pieces, if you don't hold on to
+your metallic basis.
+
+There is something in that,--said I.--Only I rather think life can
+coin thought somewhat faster than I can count it off in words.  What
+if one shall go round and dry up with soft napkins all the dew that
+falls of a June evening on the leaves of his garden?  Shall there be
+no more dew on those leaves thereafter?  Marry, yea,--many drops,
+large and round and full of moonlight as those thou shalt have
+absterged!
+
+Here am I, the Professor,--a man who has lived long enough to have
+plucked the flowers of life and come to the berries,--which are not
+always sad-colored, but sometimes golden-hued as the crocus of April,
+or rosy-cheeked as the damask of June; a man who staggered against
+books as a baby, and will totter against them, if he lives to
+decrepitude; with a brain full of tingling thoughts, such as they
+are, as a limb which we call "asleep," because it is so particuly
+awake, is of pricking points; presenting a key-board of nerve-pulps,
+not as yet tanned or ossified, to finger-touch of all outward
+agencies; knowing nothing of the filmy threads of this web of life in
+which we insects buzz awhile, waiting for the gray old spider to come
+along; contented enough with daily realities, but twirling on his
+finger the key of a private Bedlam of ideals; in knowledge feeding
+with the fox oftener than with the stork,--loving better the breadth
+of a fertilizing inundation than the depth of narrow artesian well;
+finding nothing too small for his contemplation in the markings of
+the grammatophora subtilissima, and nothing too large in the movement
+of the solar system towards the star Lambda of the constellation
+Hercules;--and the question is, whether there is anything left for
+me, the Professor, to suck out of creation, after my lively friend
+has had his straw in the bung-hole of the Universe!
+
+A man's mental reactions with the atmosphere of life must go on,
+whether he will or no, as between his blood and the air he breathes.
+As to catching the residuum of the process, or what we call thought,-
+-the gaseous ashes of burned-out thinking,--the excretion of mental
+respiration,--that will depend on many things, as, on having a
+favorable intellectual temperature about one, and a fitting
+receptacle.--I sow more thought-seeds in twenty-four hours' travel
+over the desert-sand along which my lonely consciousness paces day
+and night, than I shall throw into soil where it will germinate, in a
+year.  All sorts of bodily and mental perturbations come between us
+and the due projection of our thought.  The pulse-like "fits of easy
+and difficult transmission" seem to reach even the transparent medium
+through which our souls are seen.  We know our humanity by its often
+intercepted rays, as we tell a revolving light from a star or meteor
+by its constantly recurring obscuration.
+
+An illustrious scholar once told me, that, in the first lecture he
+ever delivered, he spoke but half his allotted time, and felt as if
+he had told all he knew.  Braham came forward once to sing one of his
+most famous and familiar songs, and for his life could not recall the
+first line of it;--he told his mishap to the audience, and they
+screamed it at him in a chorus of a thousand voices.  Milton could
+not write to suit himself, except from the autumnal to the vernal
+equinox.  One in the clothing-business, who, there is reason to
+suspect, may have inherited, by descent, the great poet's impressible
+temperament, let a customer slip through his fingers one day without
+fitting him with a new garment.  "Ah!" said he to a friend of mine,
+who was standing by, "if it hadn't been for that confounded headache
+of mine this morning, I'd have had a coat on that man, in spite of
+himself, before he left-the store."  A passing throb, only,--but it
+deranged the nice mechanism required to persuade the accidental human
+being, X, into a given piece of broadcloth, A.
+
+We must take care not to confound this frequent difficulty of
+transmission of our ideas with want of ideas.  I suppose that a man's
+mind does in time form a neutral salt with the elements in the
+universe for which it has special elective affinities.  In fact, I
+look upon a library as a kind of mental chemist's shop filled with
+the crystals of all forms and hues which have come from the union of
+individual thought with local circumstances or universal principles.
+
+When a man has worked out his special affinities in this way, there
+is an end of his genius as a real solvent.  No more effervescence and
+hissing tumult--as he pours his sharp thought on the world's biting
+alkaline unbeliefs!  No more corrosion of the old monumental tablets
+covered with lies!  No more taking up of dull earths, and turning
+them, first into clear solutions, and then into lustrous prisms!
+
+I, the Professor, am very much like other men: I shall not find out
+when I have used up my affinities.  What a blessed thing it is, that
+Nature, when she invented, manufactured, and patented her authors,
+contrived to make critics out of the chips that were left!  Painful
+as the task is, they never fail to warn the author, in the most
+impressive manner, of the probabilities of failure in what he has
+undertaken.  Sad as the necessity is to their delicate sensibilities,
+they never hesitate to advertise him of the decline of his powers,
+and to press upon him the propriety of retiring before he sinks into
+imbecility.  Trusting to their kind offices, I shall endeavor to
+fulfil-
+
+--Bridget enters and begins clearing the table.
+
+--The following poem is my (The Professor's) only contribution to the
+great department of Ocean-Cable literature.  As all the poets of this
+country will be engaged for the next six weeks in writing for the
+premium offered by the Crystal-Palace Company for the Burns
+Centenary, (so called, according to our Benjamin Franklin, because
+there will be nary a cent for any of us,) poetry will be very scarce
+and dear.  Consumers may, consequently, be glad to take the present
+article, which, by the aid of a Latin tutor--and a Professor of
+Chemistry, will be found intelligible to the educated classes.
+
+
+
+
+                  DE SAUTY
+
+         AN ELECTRO-CHEMICAL ECLOGUE.
+
+         Professor.       Blue-Nose.
+
+
+PROFESSOR.
+
+Tell me, O Provincial!  speak, Ceruleo-Nasal!
+Lives there one De Sauty extant now among yon,
+Whispering Boanerges, son of silent thunder,
+Holding talk with nations?
+
+Is there a De Sauty, ambulant on Tellus,
+Bifid-cleft like mortals, dormient in night-cap,
+Having sight, smell, hearing, food-receiving feature
+Three times daily patent?
+
+Breathes there such a being, O Ceruleo-Nasal?
+Or is he a mythus,--ancient word for "humbug,"--
+Such as Livy told about the wolf that wet-nursed
+Romulus and Remus?
+
+Was he born of woman, this alleged De Sauty?
+Or a living product of galvanic action,
+Like the status bred in Crosses flint-solution?
+Speak, thou Cyano-Rhinal!
+
+
+
+BLUE-NOSE.
+
+Many things thou askest, jackknife-bearing stranger,
+Much-conjecturing mortal, pork-and-treacle-waster!
+Pretermit thy whittling, wheel thine ear-flap toward me,
+Thou shalt hear them answered.
+
+When the charge galvanic tingled through the cable,
+At the polar focus of the wire electric
+Suddenly appeared a white-faced man among us
+Called himself "DE SAUTY."
+
+As the small opossum held in pouch maternal
+Grasps the nutrient organ whence the term mammalia,
+So the unknown stranger held the wire electric,
+Sucking in the current.
+
+When the current strengthened, bloomed the pale-faced stranger,
+Took no drink nor victual, yet grew fat and rosy,
+And from time to time, in sharp articulation,
+Said, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+From the lonely station passed the utterance, spreading
+Through the pines and hemlocks to the groves of steeples
+Till the land was filled with loud reverberations
+Of "All right! DE SAUTY."
+
+When the current slackened, drooped the mystic stranger,
+Faded, faded, faded, as the stream grew weaker,
+Wasted to a shadow, with a hartshorn odor
+Of disintegration.
+
+Drops of deliquescence glistened on his forehead,
+Whitened round his feet the dust of efflorescence,
+Till one Monday morning, when the flow suspended,
+There was no De Sauty.
+
+Nothing but a cloud of elements organic,
+C. O. H. N. Ferrum, Chor.  Flu.  Sil.  Potassa,
+Calc.  Sod.  Phosph.  Mag.  Sulphur, Mang.(?) Alumin.(?) Cuprum,(?)
+Such as man is made of.
+
+Born of stream galvanic, with it be had perished!
+There is no De Sauty now there is no current!
+Give us a new cable, then again we'll hear him
+Cry, "All right!  DE SAUTY."
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+Back again!--A turtle--which means a tortoise--is fond of his shell;
+but if you put a live coal on his back, he crawls out of it.  So the
+boys say.
+
+It is a libel on the turtle.  He grows to his shell, and his shell is
+in his body as much as his body is in his shell.--I don't think
+there is one of our boarders quite so testudineous as I am.  Nothing
+but a combination of motives, more peremptory than the coal on the
+turtle's back, could have got me to leave the shelter of my carapace;
+and after memorable interviews, and kindest hospitalities, and grand
+sights, and huge influx of patriotic pride,--for every American owns
+all America,--
+
+          "Creation's heir,--the world, the world is"
+
+his, if anybody's,--I come back with the feeling which a boned turkey
+might experience, if, retaining his consciousness, he were allowed to
+resume his skeleton.
+
+Welcome, O Fighting Gladiator, and Recumbent Cleopatra, and Dying
+Warrior, whose classic outlines (reproduced in the calcined mineral
+of Lutetia) crown my loaded shelves!  Welcome, ye triumphs of
+pictorial art (repeated by the magic graver) that look down upon me
+from the walls of my sacred cell!  Vesalius, as Titian drew him,
+high-fronted, still-eyed, thick-bearded, with signet-ring, as beseems
+a gentleman, with book and carelessly-held eyeglass, marking him a
+scholar; thou, too, Jan Kuyper, commonly called Jan Praktiseer, old
+man of a century and seven years besides, father of twenty sons and
+two daughters, cut in copper by Houbraken, bought from a portfolio on
+one of the Paris quais; and ye Three Trees of Rembrandt, black in
+shadow against the blaze of light; and thou Rosy Cottager of Sir
+Joshua, roses hinted by the peppery burin of Bartolozzi; ye, too, of
+lower grades in nature, yet not unlovely for unrenowned, Young Bull
+of Paulus Potter, and sleeping Cat of Cornelius Visscher; welcome
+once more to my eyes!  The old books look out from the shelves, and I
+seem to read on their backs something asides their titles,--a kind of
+solemn greeting.  The crimson carpet flushes warm under my feet.  The
+arm-chair hugs me; the swivel-chair spins round with me, as if it
+were giddy with pleasure; the vast recumbent fauteuil stretches
+itself out under my weight, as one joyous with food and wine
+stretches in after-dinner laughter.
+
+The boarders were pleased to say that they were glad to get me back.
+One of them ventured a compliment, namely,--that I talked as if I
+believed what I said.--This was apparently considered something
+unusual, by its being mentioned.
+
+One who means to talk with entire sincerity,--I said,--always feels
+himself in danger of two things, namely,--an affectation of
+bluntness, like that of which Cornwall accuses Kent in "Lear," and
+actual rudeness.  What a man wants to do, in talking with a stranger,
+is to get and to give as much of the best and most real life that
+belongs to the two talkers as the time will let him.  Life is short,
+and conversation apt to run to mere words.  Mr. Hue I think it is,
+who tells us some very good stories about the way in which two
+Chinese gentlemen contrive to keep up a long talk without saying a
+word which has any meaning in it.  Something like this is
+occasionally heard on this side of the Great Wall.  The best Chinese
+talkers I know are some pretty women whom I meet from time to time.
+Pleasant, airy, complimentary, the little flakes of flattery
+glimmering in their talk like the bits of gold-leaf in eau-de-vie de
+Dantzic; their accents flowing on in a soft ripple,--never a wave,
+and never a calm; words nicely fitted, but never a colored phrase or
+a highly-flavored epithet; they turn air into syllables so
+gracefully, that we find meaning for the music they make as we find
+faces in the coals and fairy palaces in the clouds.  There is
+something very odd, though, about this mechanical talk.
+
+You have sometimes been in a train on the railroad when the engine
+was detached a long way from the station you were approaching?  Well,
+you have noticed how quietly and rapidly the cars kept on, just as if
+the locomotive were drawing them?  Indeed, you would not have
+suspected that you were travelling on the strength of a dead fact, if
+you had not seen the engine running away from you on a side-track.
+Upon my conscience, I believe some of these pretty women detach their
+minds entirely, sometimes, from their talk,--and, what is more, that
+we never know the difference.  Their lips let off the fluty syllables
+just as their fingers would sprinkle the music-drops from their
+pianos; unconscious habit turns the phrase of thought into words just
+as it does that of music into notes.--Well, they govern the world
+for all that, these sweet-lipped women,--because beauty is the index
+of a larger fact than wisdom.
+
+--The Bombazine wanted an explanation.
+
+Madam,--said I,--wisdom is the abstract of the past, but beauty is
+the promise of the future.
+
+--All this, however, is not what I was going to say.  Here am I,
+suppose, seated--we will say at a dinner-table--alongside of an
+intelligent Englishman.  We look in each other's faces,--we exchange
+a dozen words.  One thing is settled: we mean not to offend each
+other,--to be perfectly courteous,--more than courteous; for we are
+the entertainer and the entertained, and cherish particularly amiable
+feelings, to each other.  The claret is good; and if our blood
+reddens a little with its warm crimson, we are none the less kind for
+it.
+
+I don't think people that talk over their victuals are like to say
+anything very great, especially if they get their heads muddled with
+strong drink before they begin jabberin'.
+
+The Bombazine uttered this with a sugary sourness, as if the words
+had been steeped in a solution of acetate of lead.--The boys of my
+time used to call a hit like this a "side-winder."
+
+--I must finish this woman.--
+
+Madam,--I said,--the Great Teacher seems to have been fond of talking
+as he sat at meat.  Because this was a good while ago, in a far-off
+place, you forget what the true fact of it was,--that those were real
+dinners, where people were hungry and thirsty, and where you met a
+very miscellaneous company.  Probably there was a great deal of loose
+talk among the guests; at any rate, there was always wine, we may
+believe.
+
+Whatever may be the hygienic advantages or disadvantages of wine,--
+and I for one, except for certain particular ends, believe in water,
+and, I blush to say it, in black tea,--there is no doubt about its
+being the grand specific against dull dinners.  A score of people
+come together in all moods of mind and body.  The problem is, in the
+space of one hour, more or less, to bring them all into the same
+condition of slightly exalted life.  Food alone is enough for one
+person, perhaps,--talk, alone, for another; but the grand equalizer
+and fraternizer, which works up the radiators to their maximum
+radiation, and the absorbents to their maximum receptivity, is now
+just where it was when
+
+          The conscious water saw its Lord and blushed,
+
+--when six great vessels containing water, the whole amounting to
+more than a hogshead-full, were changed into the best of wine.  I
+once wrote a song about wine, in which I spoke so warmly of it, that
+I was afraid some would think it was written inter pocula; whereas it
+was composed in the bosom of my family, under the most tranquillizing
+domestic influences.
+
+--The divinity-student turned towards me, looking mischievous.--Can
+you tell me,--he said,--who wrote a song for a temperance celebration
+once, of which the following is a verse?
+
+     Alas for the loved one, too gentle and fair
+     The joys of the banquet to chasten and share!
+     Her eye lost its light that his goblet might shine,
+     And the rose of her cheek was dissolved in his wine!
+
+I did,--I answered.--What are you going to do about it?--I will tell
+you another line I wrote long ago:--
+
+     Don't be "consistent,"--but be simply true.
+
+The longer I live, the more I am satisfied of two things: first, that
+the truest lives are those that are cut rose-diamond-fashion, with
+many facets answering to the many-planed aspects of the world about
+them; secondly, that society is always trying in some way or other to
+grind us down to a single flat surface.  It is hard work to resist
+this grinding-down action.--Now give me a chance.  Better eternal
+and universal abstinence than the brutalities of those days that made
+wives and mothers and daughters and sisters blush for those whom they
+should have honored, as they came reeling home from their debauches!
+Yet better even excess than lying and hypocrisy; and if wine is upon
+all our tables, let us praise it for its color and fragrance and
+social tendency, so far as it deserves, and not hug a bottle in the
+closet and pretend not to know the use of a wine-glass at a public
+dinner!  I think you will find that people who honestly mean to be
+true really contradict themselves much more rarely than those who try
+to be "consistent."  But a great many things we say can be made to
+appear contradictory, simply because they are partial views of a
+truth, and may often look unlike at first, as a front view of a face
+and its profile often do.
+
+Here is a distinguished divine, for whom I have great respect, for I
+owe him a charming hour at one of our literary anniversaries, and he
+has often spoken noble words; but he holds up a remark of my friend
+the "Autocrat,"--which I grieve to say he twice misquotes, by
+omitting the very word which gives it its significance,--the word
+fluid, intended to typify the mobility of the restricted will,--holds
+it up, I say, as if it attacked the reality of the self-determining
+principle, instead of illustrating its limitations by an image.  Now
+I will not explain any farther, still less defend, and least of all
+attack, but simply quote a few lines from one of my friend's poems,
+printed more than ten years ago, and ask the distinguished gentleman
+where he has ever asserted more strongly or absolutely the
+independent will of the "subcreative centre," as my heretical friend
+has elsewhere called man.
+
+    --Thought, conscience, will, to make them all thy own
+     He rent a pillar from the eternal throne!
+    --Made in His image, thou must nobly dare
+     The thorny crown of sovereignty to share.
+    --Think not too meanly of thy low estate;
+     Thou hast a choice; to choose is to create!
+
+If he will look a little closely, he will see that the profile and
+the full-face views of the will are both true and perfectly
+consistent!
+
+Now let us come back, after this long digression, to the conversation
+with the intelligent Englishman.  We begin skirmishing with a few
+light ideas,--testing for thoughts,--as our electro-chemical friend,
+De Sauty, if there were such a person, would test for his current;
+trying a little litmus-paper for acids, and then a slip of turmeric-
+paper for alkalies, as chemists do with unknown compounds; flinging
+the lead, and looking at the shells and sands it brings up to find
+out whether we are like to keep in shallow water, or shall have to
+drop the deep-sea line;--in short, seeing what we have to deal with.
+If the Englishman gets his H's pretty well placed, he comes from one
+of the higher grades of the British social order, and we shall find
+him a good companion.
+
+But, after all, here is a great fact between us.  We belong to two
+different civilizations, and, until we recognize what separates us,
+we are talking like Pyramus and Thisbe, without any hole in the wall
+to talk through.  Therefore, on the whole, if he were a superior
+fellow, incapable of mistaking it for personal conceit, I think I
+would let out the fact of the real American feeling about Old-World
+folks.  They are children to us in certain points of view.  They are
+playing with toys we have done with for whole-generations.
+
+--------
+FOOTNOTE:
+
+The more I have observed and reflected, the more limited seems to me
+the field of action of the human will. Every act of choice involves a
+special relation between the ego and the conditions before it.  But
+no man knows what forces are at work in the determination of his ego.
+The bias which decides his choice between two or more motives may
+come from some unsuspected ancestral source, of which he knows
+nothing at all.  He is automatic in virtue of that hidden spring of
+reflex action, all the time having the feeling that he is self-
+determining.  The Story of Elsie Yenner, written-soon after this book
+was published, illustrates the direction in which my thought was
+moving.  'The imaginary subject of the story obeyed her will, but her
+will Obeyed the mysterious antenatal poisoning influence.
+--------
+
+That silly little drum they are always beating on, and the trumpet
+and the feather they make so much noise and cut such a figure with,
+we have not quite outgrown, but play with much less seriously and
+constantly than they do.  Then there is a whole museum of wigs, and
+masks, and lace-coats, and gold-sticks, and grimaces, and phrases,
+which we laugh at honestly, without affectation, that are still used
+in the Old-World puppet-shows.  I don't think we on our part ever
+understand the Englishman's concentrated loyalty and specialized
+reverence.  But then we do think more of a man, as such, (barring
+some little difficulties about race and complexion which the
+Englishman will touch us on presently,) than any people that ever
+lived did think of him.  Our reverence is a great deal wider, if it
+is less intense.  We have caste among us, to some extent; it is true;
+but there is never a collar on the American wolf-dog such as you
+often see on the English mastiff, notwithstanding his robust, hearty
+individuality.
+
+This confronting of two civilizations is always a grand sensation to
+me; it is like cutting through the isthmus and letting the two oceans
+swim into each other's laps.  The trouble is, it is so difficult to
+let out the whole American nature without its self-assertion seeming
+to take a personal character.  But I never enjoy the Englishman so
+much as when he talks of church and king like Manco Capac among the
+Peruvians.  Then you get the real British flavor, which the
+cosmopolite Englishman loses.
+
+How much better this thorough interpenetration of ideas than a barren
+interchange of courtesies, or a bush-fighting argument, in which each
+man tries to cover as much of himself and expose as much of his
+opponent as the tangled thicket of the disputed ground will let him!
+
+---My thoughts flow in layers or strata, at least three deep.  I
+follow a slow person's talk, and keep a perfectly clear under-current
+of my own beneath it.  Under both runs obscurely a consciousness
+belonging to a third train of reflections, independent of the two
+others.  I will try to write out a Mental movement in three parts.
+
+A.---First voice, or Mental Soprano,--thought follows a woman
+talking.
+
+B.--Second voice, or Mental Barytone,--my running accompaniment.
+
+C.--Third voice, or Mental Basso,--low grumble of importunate self-
+repeating idea.
+
+A.--White lace, three skirts, looped with flowers, wreath of apple-
+blossoms, gold bracelets, diamond pin and ear-rings, the most
+delicious berthe you ever saw, white satin slippers-
+
+B.--Deuse take her!  What a fool she is!  Hear her chatter!  (Look
+out of window just here.--Two pages and a half of description, if it
+were all written out, in one tenth of a second.)--Go ahead, old lady!
+(Eye catches picture over fireplace.) There's that infernal family
+nose!  Came over in the "Mayflower" on the first old fool's face.
+Why don't they wear a ring in it?
+
+C.--You 'll be late at lecture,--late at lecture,--late,--late-
+
+I observe that a deep layer of thought sometimes makes itself felt
+through the superincumbent strata, thus:--The usual single or double
+currents shall flow on, but there shall be an influence blending with
+them, disturbing them in an obscure way, until all at once I say,--
+Oh, there!  I knew there was something troubling me,--and the thought
+which had been working through comes up to the surface clear,
+definite, and articulates itself,--a disagreeable duty, perhaps, or
+an unpleasant recollection.
+
+The inner world of thought and the outer world of events are alike in
+this, that they are both brimful.  There is no space between
+consecutive thoughts, or between the never-ending series of actions.
+All pack tight, and mould their surfaces against each other, so that
+in the long run there is a wonderful average uniformity in the forms
+of both thoughts and actions, just as you find that cylinders crowded
+all become hexagonal prisms, and spheres pressed together are formed
+into regular polyhedra.
+
+Every event that a man would master must be mounted on the run, and
+no man ever caught the reins of a thought except as it galloped by
+him.  So, to carry out, with another comparison, my remark about the
+layers of thought, we may consider the mind as it moves among
+thoughts or events, like a circus-rider whirling round with a great
+troop of horses.  He can mount a fact or an idea, and guide it more
+or less completely, but he cannot stop it.  So, as I said in another
+way at the beginning, he can stride two or three thoughts at once,
+but not break their steady walk, trot, or gallop.  He can only take
+his foot from the saddle of one thought and put it on that of
+another.
+
+--What is the saddle of a thought?  Why, a word, of course.--Twenty
+years after you have dismissed a thought, it suddenly wedges up to
+you through the press, as if it had been steadily galloping round and
+round all that time without a rider.
+
+The will does not act in the interspaces of thought, for there are no
+such interspaces, but simply steps from the back of one moving
+thought upon that of another.
+
+--I should like to ask,--said the divinity-student,--since we are
+getting into metaphysics, how you can admit space, if all things are
+in contact, and how you can admit time, if it is always now to
+something?
+
+--I thought it best not to hear this question.
+
+--I wonder if you know this class of philosophers in books or
+elsewhere.  One of them makes his bow to the public, and exhibits an
+unfortunate truth bandaged up so that it cannot stir hand or foot,--
+as helpless, apparently, and unable to take care of itself, as an
+Egyptian mummy.  He then proceeds, with the air and method of a
+master, to take off the bandages.  Nothing can be neater than the way
+in which he does it.  But as he takes off layer after layer, the
+truth seems to grow smaller and smaller, and some of its outlines
+begin to look like something we have seen before.  At last, when he
+has got them all off, and the truth struts out naked, we recognize it
+as a diminutive and familiar acquaintance whom we have known in the
+streets all our lives.  The fact is, the philosopher has coaxed the
+truth into his study and put all those bandages on; or course it is
+not very hard for him to take them off.  Still, a great many people
+like to watch the process,--he does it so neatly!
+
+Dear!  dear!  I am ashamed to write and talk, sometimes, when I see
+how those functions of the large-brained, thumb-opposing plantigrade
+are abused by my fellow-vertebrates,--perhaps by myself.  How they
+spar for wind, instead of hitting from the shoulder!
+
+--The young fellow called John arose and placed himself in a neat
+fighting attitude.--Fetch on the fellah that makes them long words!
+--he said,--and planted a straight hit with the right fist in the
+concave palm of the left hand with a click like a cup and ball.--You
+small boy there, hurry up that "Webster's Unabridged!"
+
+The little gentleman with the malformation, before described, shocked
+the propriety of the breakfast-table by a loud utterance of three
+words, of which the two last were "Webster's Unabridged," and the
+first was an emphatic monosyllable.--Beg pardon,--he added,--forgot
+myself.  But let us have an English dictionary, if we are to have
+any.  I don't believe in clipping the coin of the realm, Sir!  If I
+put a weathercock on my house, Sir, I want it to tell which way the
+wind blows up aloft,--off from the prairies to the ocean, or off from
+the ocean to the prairies, or any way it wants to blow!  I don't want
+a weathercock with a winch in an old gentleman's study that he can
+take hold of and turn, so that the vane shall point west when the
+great wind overhead is blowing east with all its might, Sir!  Wait
+till we give you a dictionary; Sir!  It takes Boston to do that
+thing, Sir!
+
+--Some folks think water can't run down-hill anywhere out of Boston,
+--remarked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+I don't know what some folks think so well as I know what some fools
+say,--rejoined the Little Gentleman.--If importing most dry goods
+made the best scholars, I dare say you would know where to look for
+'em.--Mr. Webster could n't spell, Sir, or would n't spell, Sir,--at
+any rate, he did n't spell; and the end of it was a fight between the
+owners of some copyrights and the dignity of this noble language
+which we have inherited from our English fathers.  Language!--the
+blood of the soul, Sir! into which our thoughts run and out of which
+they grow!  We know what a word is worth here in Boston.  Young Sam
+Adams got up on the stage at Commencement, out at Cambridge there,
+with his gown on, the Governor and Council looking on in the name of
+his Majesty, King George the Second, and the girls looking down out
+of the galleries, and taught people how to spell a word that was n't
+in the Colonial dictionaries !  R-e, re, s-i-s, sis, t-a-n-c-e,
+tance, Resistance!  That was in '43, and it was a good many years
+before the Boston boys began spelling it with their muskets;--but
+when they did begin, they spelt it so loud that the old bedridden
+women in the English almshouses heard every syllable!  Yes, yes,
+yes,--it was a good while before those other two Boston boys got the
+class so far along that it could spell those two hard words,
+Independence and Union!  I tell you what, Sir, there are a thousand
+lives, aye, sometimes a million, go to get a new word into a language
+that is worth speaking.  We know what language means too well here in
+Boston to play tricks with it.  We never make a new word til we have
+made a new thing or a new thought, Sir! then we shaped the new mould
+of this continent, we had to make a few.  When, by God's permission,
+we abrogated the primal curse of maternity, we had to make a word or
+two.  The cutwater of this great Leviathan clipper, the OCCIDENTAL,--
+this thirty-wasted wind-and-steam wave-crusher,--must throw a little
+spray over the human vocabulary as it splits the waters of a new
+world's destiny!
+
+He rose as he spoke, until his stature seemed to swell into the fair
+human proportions.  His feet must have been on the upper round of his
+high chair; that was the only way I could account for it.
+
+Puts her through fast-rate,--said the young fellow whom the boarders
+call John.
+
+The venerable and kind-looking old gentleman who sits opposite said
+he remembered Sam Adams as Governor.  An old man in a brown coat.
+Saw him take the Chair on Boston Common.  Was a boy then, and
+remembers sitting on the fence in front of the old Hancock house.
+Recollects he had a glazed 'lectionbun, and sat eating it and looking
+down on to the Common.  Lalocks flowered late that year, and he got a
+great bunch off from the bushes in the Hancock front-yard.
+
+Them 'lection-buns are no go,--said the young man John, so called.
+--I know the trick.  Give a fellah a fo'penny bun in the mornin', an'
+he downs the whole of it.  In about an hour it swells up in his
+stomach as big as a football, and his feedin' 's spilt for that day.
+That's the way to stop off a young one from eatin' up all the
+'lection dinner.
+
+Salem!  Salem! not Boston,--shouted the little man.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor laughed a great rasping laugh, and the boy
+Benjamin Franklin looked sharp at his mother, as if he remembered the
+bun-experiment as a part of his past personal history.
+
+The Little Gentleman was holding a fork in his left hand.  He stabbed
+a boulder of home-made bread with it, mechanically, and looked at it
+as if it ought to shriek.  It did not,--but he sat as if watching it.
+
+--Language is a solemn thing,--I said.--It grows out of life,--out
+of its agonies and ecstasies, its wants and its weariness.  Every
+language is a temple, in which the soul of those who speak it is
+enshrined.  Because time softens its outlines and rounds the sharp
+angles of its cornices, shall a fellow take a pickaxe to help time?
+Let me tell you what comes of meddling with things that can take care
+of themselves.--A friend of mine had a watch given him, when he was
+a boy,--a "bull's eye," with a loose silver case that came off like
+an oyster-shell from its contents; you know them,--the cases that you
+hang on your thumb, while the core, or the real watch, lies in your
+hand as naked as a peeled apple.  Well, he began with taking off the
+case, and so on from one liberty to another, until he got it fairly
+open, and there were the works, as good as if they were alive,--
+crown-wheel, balance-wheel, and all the rest.  All right except one
+thing,--there was a confounded little hair had got tangled round the
+balance-wheel.  So my young Solomon got a pair of tweezers, and
+caught hold of the hair very nicely, and pulled it right out, without
+touching any of the wheels,--when,--buzzzZZZ!  and the watch had done
+up twenty-four hours in double magnetic-telegraph time!--The English
+language was wound up to run some thousands of years, I trust; but if
+everybody is to be pulling at everything he thinks is a hair, our
+grandchildren will have to make the discovery that it is a hair-
+spring, and the old Anglo-Norman soul's-timekeeper will run down, as
+so many other dialects have done before it.  I can't stand this
+meddling any better than you, Sir.  But we have a great deal to be
+proud of in the lifelong labors of that old lexicographer, and we
+must n't be ungrateful.  Besides, don't let us deceive ourselves,--
+the war of the dictionaries is only a disguised rivalry of cities,
+colleges, and especially of publishers.  After all, it is likely that
+the language will shape itself by larger forces than phonography and
+dictionary-making.  You may spade up the ocean as much as you like,
+and harrow it afterwards, if you can,--but the moon will still lead
+the tides, and the winds will form their surface.
+
+--Do you know Richardson's Dictionary?--I said to my neighbor the
+divinity-student.
+
+Haow?--said the divinity-student.--He colored, as he noticed on my
+face a twitch in one of the muscles which tuck up the corner of the
+mouth, (zygomaticus major,) and which I could not hold back from
+making a little movement on its own account.
+
+It was too late.--A country-boy, lassoed when he was a half-grown
+colt.  Just as good as a city-boy, and in some ways, perhaps,
+better,--but caught a little too old not to carry some marks of his
+earlier ways of life.  Foreigners, who have talked a strange tongue
+half their lives, return to the language of their childhood in their
+dying hours.  Gentlemen in fine linen, and scholars in large
+libraries, taken by surprise, or in a careless moment, will sometimes
+let slip a word they knew as boys in homespun and have not spoken
+since that time,--but it lay there under all their culture.  That is
+one way you may know the country-boys after they have grown rich or
+celebrated; another is by the odd old family names, particularly
+those of the Hebrew prophets, which the good old people have saddled
+them with.
+
+--Boston has enough of England about it to make a good English
+dictionary,--said that fresh-looking youth whom I have mentioned as
+sitting at the right upper corner of the table.
+
+I turned and looked him full in the face,--for the pure, manly
+intonations arrested me.  The voice was youthful, but full of
+character.--I suppose some persons have a peculiar susceptibility in
+the matter of voice.--Hear this.
+
+Not long after the American Revolution, a young lady was sitting in
+her father's chaise in a street of this town of Boston.  She
+overheard a little girl talking or singing, and was mightily taken
+with the tones of her voice.  Nothing would satisfy her but she must
+have that little girl come and live in her father's house.  So the
+child came, being then nine years old.  Until her marriage she
+remained under the same roof with the young lady.  Her children
+became successively inmates of the lady's dwelling; and now, seventy
+years, or thereabouts, since the young lady heard the child singing,
+one of that child's children and one of her grandchildren are with
+her in that home, where she, no longer young, except in heart, passes
+her peaceful days.--Three generations linked together by so light a
+breath of accident!
+
+I liked--the sound of this youth's voice, I said, and his look when I
+came to observe him a little more closely.  His complexion had
+something better than the bloom and freshness which had first
+attracted me;--it had that diffused tone which is a sure index of
+wholesome, lusty life.  A fine liberal style of nature seemed to be:
+hair crisped, moustache springing thick and dark, head firmly
+planted, lips finished, as is commonly sees them in gentlemen's
+families, a pupil well contracted, and a mouth that opened frankly
+with a white flash of teeth that looked as if they could serve him as
+they say Ethan Allen's used to serve their owner,--to draw nails
+with.  This is the kind of fellow to walk a frigate's deck and bowl
+his broadsides into the "Gadlant Thudnder-bomb," or any forty-port-
+holed adventurer who would like to exchange a few tons of iron
+compliments.--I don't know what put this into my head, for it was
+not till some time afterward I learned the young fellow had been in
+the naval school at Annapolis.  Something had happened to change his
+plan of life, and he was now studying engineering and architecture in
+Boston.
+
+When the youth made the short remark which drew my attention to him,
+the little deformed gentleman turned round and took a long look at
+him.
+
+Good for the Boston boy!--he said.
+
+I am not a Boston boy,--said the youth, smiling,--I am a Marylander.
+
+I don't care where you come from,--we'll make a Boston man of you,--
+said the little gentleman.  Pray, what part of Maryland did you come
+from, and how shall I call you?
+
+The poor youth had to speak pretty loud, as he was at the right upper
+corner of the table, and the little gentleman next the lower left-
+hand corner.  His face flushed a little, but he answered pleasantly,
+telling who he was, as if the little man's infirmity gave him a right
+to ask any questions he wanted to.
+
+Here is the place for you to sit,--said the little gentleman,
+pointing to the vacant chair next his own, at the corner.
+
+You're go'n' to have a young lady next you, if you wait till to-
+morrow,--said the landlady to him.
+
+He did not reply, but I had a fancy that he changed color.  It can't
+be that he has susceptibilities with reference to a contingent young
+lady!  It can't be that he has had experiences which make him
+sensitive!  Nature could not be quite so cruel as to set a heart
+throbbing in that poor little cage of ribs!  There is no use in
+wasting notes of admiration.  I must ask the landlady about him.
+
+These are some of the facts she furnished.--Has not been long with
+her.  Brought a sight of furniture,--could n't hardly get some of it
+upstairs.  Has n't seemed particularly attentive to the ladies.  The
+Bombazine (whom she calls Cousin something or other) has tried to
+enter into conversation with him, but retired with the impression
+that he was indifferent to ladies' society.  Paid his bill the other
+day without saying a word about it.  Paid it in gold,--had a great
+heap of twenty-dollar pieces.  Hires her best room.  Thinks he is a
+very nice little man, but lives dreadful lonely up in his chamber.
+Wants the care of some capable nuss.  Never pitied anybody more in
+her life--never see a more interestin' person.
+
+--My intention was, when I began making these notes, to let them
+consist principally of conversations between myself and the other
+boarders.  So they will, very probably; but my curiosity is excited
+about this little boarder of ours, and my reader must not be
+disappointed, if I sometimes interrupt a discussion to give an
+account of whatever fact or traits I may discover about him.  It so
+happens that his room is next to mine, and I have the opportunity of
+observing many of his ways without any active movements of curiosity.
+That his room contains heavy furniture, that he is a restless little
+body and is apt to be up late, that he talks to himself, and keeps
+mainly to himself, is nearly all I have yet found out.
+
+One curious circumstance happened lately which I mention without
+drawing an absolute inference.  Being at the studio of a sculptor
+with whom I am acquainted, the other day, I saw a remarkable cast of
+a left arm.  On my asking where the model came from, he said it was
+taken direct from the arm of a deformed person, who had employed one
+of the Italian moulders to make the cast.  It was a curious case, it
+should seem, of one beautiful limb upon a frame otherwise singularly
+imperfect--I have repeatedly noticed this little gentleman's use of
+his left arm.  Can he have furnished the model I saw at the
+sculptor's?
+
+--So we are to have a new boarder to-morrow.  I hope there will be
+something pretty and pleasing about her.  A woman with a creamy
+voice, and finished in alto rilievo, would be a variety in the
+boarding-house,--a little more marrow and a little less sinew than
+our landlady and her daughter and the bombazine-clad female, all of
+whom are of the turkey-drumstick style of organization.  I don't mean
+that these are our only female companions; but the rest being
+conversational non-combatants, mostly still, sad feeders, who take in
+their food as locomotives take in wood and water, and then wither
+away from the table like blossoms that never came to fruit, I have
+not yet referred to them as individuals.
+
+I wonder what kind of young person we shall see in that empty chair
+to-morrow!
+
+--I read this song to the boarders after breakfast the other morning.
+It was written for our fellows;--you know who they are, of course.
+
+
+
+                    THE BOYS.
+
+Has there any old fellow got mixed with the boys?
+If there has, take him out, without making a noise!
+Hang the Almanac's cheat and the Catalogue's spite!
+Old Time is a liar!  We're twenty to-night!
+
+We're twenty!  We're twenty!  Who says we are more?
+He's tipsy,--young jackanapes!--show him the door!--
+"Gray temples at twenty?"--Yes!  white, if we please;
+Where the snow-flakes fall thickest there's nothing can freeze!
+
+Was it snowing I spoke of?  Excuse the mistake!
+Look close,--you will see not a sign of a flake;
+We want some new garlands for those we have shed,
+And these are white roses in place of the red!
+
+We've a trick, we young fellows, you may have been told.
+Of talking (in public) as if we were old;
+That boy we call Doctor, (1) and this we call Judge (2)--
+It's a neat little fiction,--of course it's all fudge.
+
+That fellow's the Speaker, (3)--the one on the right;
+Mr. Mayor, (4) my young one, how are you to-night?
+That's our "Member of Congress,"(5) we say when we chaff;
+There's the "Reverend" (6) What's his name?--don't make me laugh!
+
+That boy with the grave mathematical look(7)
+Made believe he had written a wonderful book,
+And the ROYAL SOCIETY thought it was true!
+So they chose him right in; a good joke it was, too.
+
+There's a boy,--we pretend,--with a three-decker-brain
+That could harness a team with a logical chain:
+When he spoke for our manhood in syllabled fire,
+We called him "The Justice,"--but now he's "The Squire."(1)
+
+And there's a nice youngster of excellent pith,(2)
+Fate tried to conceal him by naming him Smith,
+But he shouted a song for the brave and the free,
+--Just read on his medal,--"My country,--of thee!"
+
+You hear that boy laughing?--you think he's all fun,
+But the angels laugh, too, at the good he has done;
+The children laugh loud as they troop to his call,
+And the poor man that knows him laughs loudest of all!(3)
+
+Yes, we're boys,--always playing with tongue or with pen,--
+And I sometimes have asked,--Shall we ever be men?
+Shall we always be youthful and laughing and gay,
+Till the last dear companion drops smiling away?
+
+Then here's to our boyhood, its gold and its gray!
+The stars of its Winter, the dews of its May!
+And when we have done with our life-lasting toys,
+Dear Father, take care of thy children, the Boys!
+
+
+1 Francis Thomas.
+2 George Tyler Bigelow.
+3 Francis Boardman Crowninshield.
+4 G. W. Richardson.
+5 George Thomas Davis.
+6 James Freeman Clarke.
+7 Benjamin Peirce.
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+[The Professor talks with the Reader.  He tells a
+Young Girl's Story.]
+
+When the elements that went to the making of the first man, father of
+mankind, had been withdrawn from the world of unconscious matter, the
+balance of creation was disturbed.  The materials that go to the
+making of one woman were set free by the abstraction from inanimate
+nature of one man's-worth of masculine constituents.  These combined
+to make our first mother, by a logical necessity involved in the
+previous creation of our common father.  All this, mythically,
+illustratively, and by no means doctrinally or polemically.
+
+The man implies the woman, you will understand.  The excellent
+gentleman whom I had the pleasure of setting right in a trifling
+matter a few weeks ago believes in the frequent occurrence of
+miracles at the present day.  So do I.  I believe, if you could find
+an uninhabited coral-reef island, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean,
+with plenty of cocoa-palms and bread-fruit on it, and put a handsome
+young fellow, like our Marylander, ashore upon it, if you touched
+there a year afterwards, you would find him walking under the palm-
+trees arm in arm with a pretty woman.
+
+Where would she come from?
+
+Oh, that 's the miracle!
+
+--I was just as certain, when I saw that fine, high-colored youth at
+the upper right-hand corner of our table, that there would appear
+some fitting feminine counterpart to him, as if I had been a
+clairvoyant, seeing it all beforehand.
+
+--I have a fancy that those Marylanders are just about near enough to
+the sun to ripen well.--How some of us fellows remember Joe and
+Harry, Baltimoreans, both!  Joe, with his cheeks like lady-apples,
+and his eyes like black-heart cherries, and his teeth like the
+whiteness of the flesh of cocoanuts, and his laugh that set the
+chandelier-drops rattling overhead, as we sat at our sparkling
+banquets in those gay times!  Harry, champion, by acclamation, of
+the college heavy-weights, broad-shouldered, bull-necked, square-
+jawed, six feet and trimmings, a little science, lots of pluck, good-
+natured as a steer in peace, formidable as a red-eyed bison in the
+crack of hand-to-hand battle!  Who forgets the great muster-day, and
+the collision of the classic with the democratic forces?  The huge
+butcher, fifteen stone,--two hundred and ten pounds,--good weight,--
+steps out like Telamonian Ajax, defiant.  No words from Harry, the
+Baltimorean,--one of the quiet sort, who strike first; and do the
+talking, if there is any, afterwards.  No words, but, in the place
+thereof, a clean, straight, hard hit, which took effect with a spank
+like the explosion of a percussion-cap, knocking the slayer of beeves
+down a sand-bank,--followed, alas! by the too impetuous youth, so
+that both rolled down together, and the conflict terminated in one of
+those inglorious and inevitable Yankee clinches, followed by a
+general melee, which make our native fistic encounters so different
+from such admirably-ordered contests as that which I once saw at an
+English fair, where everything was done decently and in order; and
+the fight began and ended with such grave propriety, that a sporting
+parson need hardly have hesitated to open it with a devout petition,
+and, after it was over, dismiss the ring with a benediction.
+
+I can't help telling one more story about this great field-day,
+though it is the most wanton and irrelevant digression.  But all of
+us have a little speck of fight underneath our peace and good-will to
+men, just a speck, for revolutions and great emergencies, you know,--
+so that we should not submit to be trodden quite flat by the first
+heavy-heeled aggressor that came along.  You can tell a portrait from
+an ideal head, I suppose, and a true story from one spun out of the
+writer's invention.  See whether this sounds true or not.
+
+Admiral Sir Isaac Coffin sent out two fine blood-horses, Barefoot and
+Serab by name, to Massachusetts, something before the time I am
+talking of.  With them came a Yorkshire groom, a stocky little
+fellow, in velvet breeches, who made that mysterious hissing noise,
+traditionary in English stables, when he rubbed down the silken-
+skinned racers, in great perfection.  After the soldiers had come
+from the muster-field, and some of the companies were on the village-
+common, there was still some skirmishing between a few individuals
+who had not had the fight taken out of them.  The little Yorkshire
+groom thought he must serve out somebody.  So he threw himself into
+an approved scientific attitude, and, in brief, emphatic language,
+expressed his urgent anxiety to accommodate any classical young
+gentleman who chose to consider himself a candidate for his
+attentions.  I don't suppose there were many of the college boys that
+would have been a match for him in the art which Englishmen know so
+much more of than Americans, for the most part.  However, one of the
+Sophomores, a very quiet, peaceable fellow, just stepped out of the
+crowd, and, running straight at the groom, as he stood there,
+sparring away, struck him with the sole of his foot, a straight blow,
+as if it had been with his fist, and knocked him heels over head and
+senseless, so that he had to be carried off from the field.  This
+ugly way of hitting is the great trick of the French gavate, which is
+not commonly thought able to stand its ground against English
+pugilistic science.  These are old recollections, with not much to
+recommend them, except, perhaps, a dash of life, which may be worth a
+little something.
+
+The young Marylander brought them all up, you may remember.  He
+recalled to my mind those two splendid pieces of vitality I told you
+of.  Both have been long dead. How often we see these great red-
+flaring flambeaux of life blown out, as it were, by a puff of wind,
+--and the little, single-wicked night-lamp of being, which some
+white-faced and attenuated invalid shades with trembling fingers,
+flickering on while they go out one after another, until its glimmer
+is all that is left to us of the generation to which it belonged!
+
+I told you that I was perfectly sure, beforehand, we should find some
+pleasing girlish or womanly shape to fill the blank at our table and
+match the dark-haired youth at the upper corner.
+
+There she sits, at the very opposite corner, just as far off as
+accident could put her from this handsome fellow, by whose side she
+ought, of course, to be sitting.  One of the "positive" blondes, as
+my friend, you may remember, used to call them.  Tawny-haired,
+amber-eyed, full-throated, skin as white as a blanched almond.  Looks
+dreamy to me, not self-conscious, though a black ribbon round her
+neck sets it off as a Marie-Antoinette's diamond-necklace could not
+do.  So in her dress, there is a harmony of tints that looks as if an
+artist had run his eye over her and given a hint or two like the
+finishing touch to a picture.  I can't help being struck with her,
+for she is at once rounded and fine in feature, looks calm, as
+blondes are apt to, and as if she might run wild, if she were trifled
+with.  It is just as I knew it would be,--and anybody can see that
+our young Marylander will be dead in love with her in a week.
+
+Then if that little man would only turn out immensely rich and have
+the good-nature to die and leave them all his money, it would be as
+nice as a three-volume novel.
+
+The Little Gentleman is in a flurry, I suspect, with the excitement
+of having such a charming neighbor next him.  I judge so mainly by
+his silence and by a certain rapt and serious look on his face, as if
+he were thinking of something that had happened, or that might
+happen, or that ought to happen,--or how beautiful her young life
+looked, or how hardly Nature had dealt with him, or something which
+struck him silent, at any rate.  I made several conversational
+openings for him, but he did not fire up as he often does.  I even
+went so far as to indulge in, a fling at the State House, which, as
+we all know, is in truth a very imposing structure, covering less
+ground than St. Peter's, but of similar general effect.  The little
+man looked up, but did not reply to my taunt.  He said to the young
+lady, however, that the State House was the Parthenon of our
+Acropolis, which seemed to please her, for she smiled, and he
+reddened a little,--so I thought.  I don't think it right to watch
+persons who are the subjects of special infirmity,--but we all do it.
+
+I see that they have crowded the chairs a little at that end of the
+table, to make room for another newcomer of the lady sort.  A well-
+mounted, middle-aged preparation, wearing her hair without a cap,--
+pretty wide in the parting, though,--contours vaguely hinted,--
+features very quiet,--says little as yet, but seems to keep her eye
+on the young lady, as if having some responsibility for her
+My record is a blank for some days after this.  In the mean time I
+have contrived to make out the person and the story of our young
+lady, who, according to appearances, ought to furnish us a heroine
+for a boarding-house romance before a year is out.  It is very
+curious that she should prove connected with a person many of us have
+heard of.  Yet, curious as it is, I have been a hundred times struck
+with the circumstance that the most remote facts are constantly
+striking each other; just as vessels starting from ports thousands of
+miles apart pass close to each other in the naked breadth of the
+ocean, nay, sometimes even touch, in the dark, with a crack of
+timbers, a gurgling of water, a cry of startled sleepers,--a cry
+mysteriously echoed in warning dreams, as the wife of some Gloucester
+fisherman, some coasting skipper, wakes with a shriek, calls the name
+of her husband, and sinks back to uneasy slumbers upon her lonely
+pillow,--a widow.
+
+Oh, these mysterious meetings!  Leaving all the vague, waste, endless
+spaces of the washing desert, the ocean-steamer and the fishing-smack
+sail straight towards each other as if they ran in grooves ploughed
+for them in the waters from the beginning of creation!  Not only
+things and events, but our own thoughts, are so full of these
+surprises, that, if there were a reader in my parish who did not
+recognize the familiar occurrence of what I am now going to mention,
+I should think it a case for the missionaries of the Society for the
+Propagation of Intelligence among the Comfortable Classes.
+There are about as many twins in the births of thought as of
+children.  For the first time in your lives you learn some fact or
+come across some idea.  Within an hour, a day, a week, that same fact
+or idea strikes you from another quarter.  It seems as if it had
+passed into space and bounded back upon you as an echo from the blank
+wall that shuts in the world of thought.  Yet no possible connection
+exists between the two channels by which the thought or the fact
+arrived.  Let me give an infinitesimal illustration.
+
+One of the Boys mentioned, the other evening, in the course of a very
+pleasant poem he read us, a little trick of the Commons-table
+boarders, which I, nourished at the parental board, had never heard
+of.  Young fellows being always hungry--Allow me to stop dead-short,
+in order to utter an aphorism which has been forming itself in one of
+the blank interior spaces of my intelligence, like a crystal in the
+cavity of a geode.
+
+               Aphorism by the Professor.
+
+In order to know whether a human being is young or old, offer it food
+of different kinds at short intervals.  If young, it will eat
+anything at any hour of the day or night.  If old, it observes stated
+periods, and you might as well attempt to regulate the time of
+highwater to suit a fishing-party as to change these periods.
+The crucial experiment is this.  Offer a bulky and boggy bun to the
+suspected individual just ten minutes before dinner.  If this is
+eagerly accepted and devoured, the fact of youth is established.  If
+the subject of the question starts back and expresses surprise and
+incredulity, as if you could not possibly be in earnest, the fact of
+maturity is no less clear.
+
+
+--Excuse me,--I return to my story of the Commons-table.--Young
+fellows being always hungry, and tea and dry toast being the meagre
+fare of the evening meal, it was a trick of some of the Boys to
+impale a slice of meat upon a fork, at dinner-time, and stick the
+fork holding it beneath the table, so that they could get it at tea-
+time.  The dragons that guarded this table of the Hesperides found
+out the trick at last, and kept a sharp look-out for missing forks;--
+they knew where to find one, if it was not in its place.--Now the
+odd thing was, that, after waiting so many years to hear of this
+college trick, I should hear it mentioned a second time within the
+same twenty-four hours by a college youth of the present generation.
+Strange, but true.  And so it has happened to me and to every person,
+often and often, to be hit in rapid succession by these twinned facts
+or thoughts, as if they were linked like chain-shot.
+
+I was going to leave the simple reader to wonder over this, taking it
+as an unexplained marvel.  I think, however, I will turn over a
+furrow of subsoil in it.--The explanation is, of course, that in a
+great many thoughts there must be a few coincidences, and these
+instantly arrest our attention.  Now we shall probably never have the
+least idea of the enormous number of impressions which pass through
+our consciousness, until in some future life we see the photographic
+record of our thoughts and the stereoscopic picture of our actions.
+There go more pieces to make up a conscious life or a living body
+than you think for.  Why, some of you were surprised when a friend of
+mine told you there were fifty-eight separate pieces in a fiddle.
+How many "swimming glands"--solid, organized, regularly formed,
+rounded disks taking an active part in all your vital processes, part
+and parcel, each one of them, of your corporeal being--do you suppose
+are whirled along, like pebbles in a stream, with the blood which
+warms your frame and colors your cheeks?--A noted German physiologist
+spread out a minute drop of blood, under the microscope, in narrow
+streaks, and counted the globules, and then made a calculation.  The
+counting by the micrometer took him a week.--You have, my full-grown
+friend, of these little couriers in crimson or scarlet livery,
+running on your vital errands day and night as long as you live,
+sixty-five billions, five hundred and seventy thousand millions.
+Errors excepted.--Did I hear some gentleman say, "Doubted? "--I am
+the Professor.  I sit in my chair with a petard under it that will
+blow me through the skylight of my lecture-room, if I do not know
+what I am talking about and whom I am quoting.
+
+Now, my dear friends, who are putting your hands to your foreheads,
+and saying to yourselves that you feel a little confused, as if you
+had been waltzing until things began to whirl slightly round you, is
+it possible that you do not clearly apprehend the exact connection of
+all that I have been saying, and its bearing on what is now to come?
+Listen, then.  The number of these living elements in our bodies
+illustrates the incalculable multitude of our thoughts; the number of
+our thoughts accounts for those frequent coincidences spoken of;
+these coincidences in the world of thought illustrate those which we
+constantly observe in the world of outward events, of which the
+presence of the young girl now at our table, and proving to be the
+daughter of an old acquaintance some of us may remember, is the
+special example which led me through this labyrinth of reflections,
+and finally lands me at the commencement of this young girl's story,
+which, as I said, I have found the time and felt the interest to
+learn something of, and which I think I can tell without wronging the
+unconscious subject of my brief delineation.
+
+
+
+IRIS.
+
+You remember, perhaps, in some papers published awhile ago, an odd
+poem written by an old Latin tutor?  He brought up at the verb amo, I
+love, as all of us do, and by and by Nature opened her great living
+dictionary for him at the word filia, a daughter.  The poor man was
+greatly perplexed in choosing a name for her.  Lucretia and Virginia
+were the first that he thought of; but then came up those pictured
+stories of Titus Livius, which he could never read without crying,
+though he had read them a hundred times.
+
+--Lucretia sending for her husband and her father, each to bring one
+friend with him, and awaiting them in her chamber.  To them her
+wrongs briefly.  Let them see to the wretch,--she will take care of
+herself.  Then the hidden knife flashes out and sinks into her heart.
+She slides from her seat, and falls dying.  "Her husband and her
+father cry aloud."--No, not Lucretia.
+
+-Virginius,--a brown old soldier, father of a nice girl.  She engaged
+to a very promising young man.  Decemvir Appius takes a violent fancy
+to her,--must have her at any rate.  Hires a lawyer to present the
+arguments in favor of the view that she was another man's daughter.
+There used to be lawyers in Rome that would do such things.--All
+right.   There are two sides to everything.  Audi alteram partem.
+The legal gentleman has no opinion,--he only states the evidence.
+--A doubtful case.  Let the young lady be under the protection of the
+Honorable Decemvir until it can be looked up thoroughly.--Father
+thinks it best, on the whole, to give in.  Will explain the matter,
+if the young lady and her maid will step this way.  That is the
+explanation,--a stab with a butcher's knife, snatched from a stall,
+meant for other lambs than this poor bleeding Virginia
+
+The old man thought over the story.  Then he must have one look at
+the original.  So he took down the first volume and read it over.
+When he came to that part where it tells how the young gentleman she
+was engaged to and a friend of his took up the poor girl's bloodless
+shape and carried it through the street, and how all the women
+followed, wailing, and asking if that was what their daughters were
+coming to,--if that was what they were to get for being good girls,--
+he melted down into his accustomed tears of pity and grief, and,
+through them all, of delight at the charming Latin of the narrative.
+But it was impossible to call his child Virginia.  He could never
+look at her without thinking she had a knife sticking in her bosom.
+
+Dido would be a good name, and a fresh one.  She was a queen, and the
+founder of a great city.  Her story had been immortalized by the
+greatest of poets,--for the old Latin tutor clove to "Virgilius
+Maro," as he called him, as closely as ever Dante did in his
+memorable journey.  So he took down his Virgil, it was the smooth-
+leafed, open-lettered quarto of Baskerville,--and began reading the
+loves and mishaps of Dido.  It would n't do.  A lady who had not
+learned discretion by experience, and came to an evil end.  He shook
+his head, as he sadly repeated,
+
+    "---misera ante diem, subitoque accensa furore;"
+
+but when he came to the lines,
+
+    "Ergo Iris croceis per coelum roscida pennis
+     Mille trahens varios adverso Sole colores,"
+
+he jumped up with a great exclamation, which the particular recording
+angel who heard it pretended not to understand, or it might have gone
+hard with the Latin tutor some time or other.
+
+"Iris shall be her name!"--he said.  So her name was Iris.
+
+--The natural end of a tutor is to perish by starvation.  It is only
+a question of time, just as with the burning of college libraries.
+These all burn up sooner or later, provided they are not housed in
+brick or stone and iron.  I don't mean that you will see in the
+registry of deaths that this or that particular tutor died of well-
+marked, uncomplicated starvation.  They may, even, in extreme cases,
+be carried off by a thin, watery kind of apoplexy, which sounds very
+well in the returns, but means little to those who know that it is
+only debility settling on the head.  Generally, however, they fade
+and waste away under various pretexts,--calling it dyspepsia,
+consumption, and so on, to put a decent appearance upon the case and
+keep up the credit of the family and the institution where they have
+passed through the successive stages of inanition.
+
+In some cases it takes a great many years to kill a tutor by the
+process in question.  You see they do get food and clothes and fuel,
+in appreciable quantities, such as they are.  You will even notice
+rows of books in their rooms, and a picture or two,--things that look
+as if they had surplus money; but these superfluities are the water
+of crystallization to scholars, and you can never get them away till
+the poor fellows effloresce into dust.  Do not be deceived.  The
+tutor breakfasts on coffee made of beans, edulcorated with milk
+watered to the verge of transparency; his mutton is tough and
+elastic, up to the moment when it becomes tired out and tasteless;
+his coal is a sullen, sulphurous anthracite, which rusts into ashes,
+rather than burns, in the shallow grate; his flimsy broadcloth is too
+thin for winter and too thick for summer.  The greedy lungs of fifty
+hot-blooded boys suck the oxygen from the air he breathes in his
+recitation-room.  In short, he undergoes a process of gentle and
+gradual starvation.
+
+--The mother of little Iris was not called Electra, like hers of the
+old story, neither was her grandfather Oceanus.  Her blood-name,
+which she gave away with her heart to the Latin tutor, was a plain
+old English one, and her water-name was Hannah, beautiful as
+recalling the mother of Samuel, and admirable as reading equally well
+from the initial letter forwards and from the terminal letter
+backwards.  The poor lady, seated with her companion at the
+chessboard of matrimony, had but just pushed forward her one little
+white pawn upon an empty square, when the Black Knight, that cares
+nothing for castles or kings or queens, swooped down upon her and
+swept her from the larger board of life.
+
+The old Latin tutor put a modest blue stone at the head of his late
+companion, with her name and age and Eheu!  upon it,--a smaller one
+at her feet, with initials; and left her by herself, to be rained and
+snowed on,--which is a hard thing to do for those whom we have
+cherished tenderly.
+
+About the time that the lichens, falling on the stone, like drops of
+water, had spread into fair, round rosettes, the tutor had starved
+into a slight cough.  Then he began to draw the buckle of his black
+trousers a little tighter, and took in another reef in his never-
+ample waistcoat.  His temples got a little hollow, and the contrasts
+of color in his cheeks more vivid than of old.  After a while his
+walks fatigued him, and he was tired, and breathed hard after going
+up a flight or two of stairs.  Then came on other marks of inward
+trouble and general waste, which he spoke of to his physician as
+peculiar, and doubtless owing to accidental causes; to all which the
+doctor listened with deference, as if it had not been the old story
+that one in five or six of mankind in temperate climates tells, or
+has told for him, as if it were something new.  As the doctor went
+out, he said to himself,--"On the rail at last.  Accommodation train.
+A good many stops, but will get to the station by and by."  So the
+doctor wrote a recipe with the astrological sign of Jupiter before
+it, (just as your own physician does, inestimable reader, as you will
+see, if you look at his next prescription,) and departed, saying he
+would look in occasionally.  After this, the Latin tutor began the
+usual course of "getting better," until he got so much better that
+his face was very sharp, and when he smiled, three crescent lines
+showed at each side of his lips, and when he spoke; it was in a
+muffled whisper, and the white of his eye glistened as pearly as the
+purest porcelain,--so much better, that he hoped--by spring--he----
+might be able--to--attend------to his class again.--But he was
+recommended not to expose himself, and so kept his chamber, and
+occasionally, not having anything to do, his bed.  The unmarried
+sister with whom he lived took care of him; and the child, now old
+enough to be manageable and even useful in trifling offices, sat in
+the chamber, or played, about.
+
+Things could not go on so forever, of course.  One morning his face
+was sunken and his hands were very, very cold.  He was "better," he
+whispered, but sadly and faintly.  After a while he grew restless and
+seemed a little wandering.  His mind ran on his classics, and fell
+back on the Latin grammar.
+
+"Iris!" he said,--"filiola mea!"--The child knew this meant my
+dear little daughter as well as if it had been English.--"Rainbow!
+"for he would translate her name at times,--"come to me,--veni"--and
+his lips went on automatically, and murmured," vel venito!"--The
+child came and sat by his bedside and took his hand, which she could
+not warm, but which shot its rays of cold all through her slender
+frame.  But there she sat, looking steadily at him.  Presently he
+opened his lips feebly, and whispered, "Moribundus."  She did not
+know what that meant, but she saw that there was something new and
+sad.  So she began to cry; but presently remembering an old book that
+seemed to comfort him at times, got up and brought a Bible in the
+Latin version, called the Vulgate.  "Open it," he said,--"I will
+read, segnius irritant,--don't put the light out,--ah!  hoeret
+lateri,--I am going,--vale, vale, vale, goodbye, good-bye,--the Lord
+take care of my child!  Domine, audi--vel audito!" His face whitened
+suddenly, and he lay still, with open eyes and mouth.  He had taken
+his last degree.
+
+--Little Miss Iris could not be said to begin life with a very
+brilliant rainbow over her, in a worldly point of view.  A limited
+wardrobe of man's attire, such as poor tutors wear,--a few good
+books, principally classics,--a print or two, and a plaster model of
+the Pantheon, with some pieces of furniture which had seen service,--
+these, and a child's heart full of tearful recollections and strange
+doubts and questions, alternating with the cheap pleasures which are
+the anodynes of childish grief; such were the treasures she
+inherited.--No,--I forgot.  With that kindly sentiment which all of
+us feel for old men's first children,--frost-flowers of the early
+winter season, the old tutor's students had remembered him at a time
+when he was laughing and crying with his new parental emotions, and
+running to the side of the plain crib in which his alter egg, as he
+used to say, was swinging, to hang over the little heap of stirring
+clothes, from which looked the minute, red, downy, still, round face,
+with unfixed eyes and working lips,--in that unearthly gravity which
+has never yet been broken by a smile, and which gives to the earliest
+moon-year or two of an infant's life the character of a first old
+age, to counterpoise that second childhood which there is one chance
+in a dozen it may reach by and by.  The boys had remembered the old
+man and young father at that tender period of his hard, dry life.
+There came to him a fair, silver goblet, embossed with classical
+figures, and bearing on a shield the graver words, Ex dono
+pupillorum.  The handle on its side showed what use the boys had
+meant it for; and a kind letter in it, written with the best of
+feeling, in the worst of Latin, pointed delicately to its
+destination.  Out of this silver vessel, after a long, desperate,
+strangling cry, which marked her first great lesson in the realities
+of life, the child took the blue milk, such as poor tutors and their
+children get, tempered with water, and sweetened a little, so as to
+bring it nearer the standard established by the touching indulgence
+and partiality of Nature,--who had mingled an extra allowance of
+sugar in the blameless food of the child at its mother's breast, as
+compared with that of its infant brothers and sisters of the bovine
+race.
+
+But a willow will grow in baked sand wet with rainwater.  An air-
+plant will grow by feeding on the winds.  Nay, those huge forests
+that overspread great continents have built themselves up mainly from
+the air-currents with which they are always battling.  The oak is but
+a foliated atmospheric crystal deposited from the aerial ocean that
+holds the future vegetable world in solution.  The storm that tears
+its leaves has paid tribute to its strength, and it breasts the
+tornado clad in the spoils of a hundred hurricanes.
+
+Poor little Iris!  What had she in common with the great oak in the
+shadow of which we are losing sight of her?--She lived and grew like
+that,--this was all.  The blue milk ran into her veins and filled
+them with thin, pure blood.  Her skin was fair, with a faint tinge,
+such as the white rosebud shows before it opens.  The doctor who had
+attended her father was afraid her aunt would hardly be able to
+"raise " her,--"delicate child,"--hoped she was not consumptive,--
+thought there was a fair chance she would take after her father.
+
+A very forlorn-looking person, dressed in black, with a white
+neckcloth, sent her a memoir of a child who died at the age of two
+years and eleven months, after having fully indorsed all the
+doctrines of the particular persuasion to which he not only belonged
+himself, but thought it very shameful that everybody else did not
+belong.  What with foreboding looks and dreary death-bed stories, it
+was a wonder the child made out to live through it.  It saddened her
+early years, of course,--it distressed her tender soul with thoughts
+which, as they cannot be fully taken in, should be sparingly used as
+instruments of torture to break down the natural cheerfulness of a
+healthy child, or, what is infinitely worse, to cheat a dying one out
+of the kind illusions with which the Father of All has strewed its
+downward path.
+
+The child would have died, no doubt, and, if properly managed, might
+have added another to the long catalogue of wasting children who have
+been as cruelly played upon by spiritual physiologists, often with
+the best intentions, as ever the subject of a rare disease by the
+curious students of science.
+
+Fortunately for her, however, a wise instinct had guided the late
+Latin tutor in the selection of the partner of his life, and the
+future mother of his child.  The deceased tutoress was a tranquil,
+smooth woman, easily nourished, as such people are,--a quality which
+is inestimable in a tutor's wife,--and so it happened that the
+daughter inherited enough vitality from the mother to live through
+childhood and infancy and fight her way towards womanhood, in spite
+of the tendencies she derived from her other parent.
+
+--Two and two do not always make four, in this matter of hereditary
+descent of qualities.  Sometimes they make three, and sometimes five.
+It seems as if the parental traits at one time showed separate, at
+another blended,--that occasionally, the force of two natures is
+represented in the derivative one by a diagonal of greater value than
+either original line of living movement,--that sometimes there is a
+loss of vitality hardly to be accounted for, and again a forward
+impulse of variable intensity in some new and unforeseen direction.
+
+So it was with this child.  She had glanced off from her parental
+probabilities at an unexpected angle.  Instead of taking to classical
+learning like her father, or sliding quietly into household duties
+like her mother, she broke out early in efforts that pointed in the
+direction of Art.  As soon as she could hold a pencil she began to
+sketch outlines of objects round her with a certain air and spirit.
+Very extraordinary horses, but their legs looked as if they could
+move.  Birds unknown to Audubon, yet flying, as it were, with a rush.
+Men with impossible legs, which did yet seem to have a vital
+connection with their most improbable bodies.  By-and-by the doctor,
+on his beast,--an old man with a face looking as if Time had kneaded
+it like dough with his knuckles, with a rhubarb tint and flavor
+pervading himself and his sorrel horse and all their appurtenances.
+A dreadful old man!  Be sure she did not forget those saddle-bags
+that held the detestable bottles out of which he used to shake those
+loathsome powders which, to virgin childish palates that find heaven
+in strawberries and peaches, are--Well, I suppose I had better stop.
+Only she wished she was dead sometimes when she heard him coming.
+On the next leaf would figure the gentleman with the black coat and
+white cravat, as he looked when he came and entertained her with
+stories concerning the death of various little children about her
+age, to encourage her, as that wicked Mr. Arouet said about shooting
+Admiral Byng.   Then she would take her pencil, and with a few
+scratches there would be the outline of a child, in which you might
+notice how one sudden sweep gave the chubby cheek, and two dots
+darted at the paper looked like real eyes.
+
+By-and-by she went to school, and caricatured the schoolmaster on the
+leaves of her grammars and geographies, and drew the faces of her
+companions, and, from time to time, heads and figures from her fancy,
+with large eyes, far apart, like those of Raffaelle's mothers and
+children, sometimes with wild floating hair, and then with wings and
+heads thrown back in ecstasy.  This was at about twelve years old, as
+the dates of these drawings show, and, therefore, three or four years
+before she came among us.  Soon after this time, the ideal figures
+began to take the place of portraits and caricatures, and a new
+feature appeared in her drawing-books in the form of fragments of
+verse and short poems.
+
+It was dull work, of course, for such a young girl to live with an
+old spinster and go to a village school.  Her books bore testimony to
+this; for there was a look of sadness in the faces she drew, and a
+sense of weariness and longing for some imaginary conditions of
+blessedness or other, which began to be painful.  She might have gone
+through this flowering of the soul, and, casting her petals, subsided
+into a sober, human berry, but for the intervention of friendly
+assistance and counsel.
+
+In the town where she lived was a lady of honorable condition,
+somewhat past middle age, who was possessed of pretty ample means, of
+cultivated tastes, of excellent principles, of exemplary character,
+and of more than common accomplishments.  The gentleman in black
+broadcloth and white neckerchief only echoed the common voice about
+her, when he called her, after enjoying, beneath her hospitable roof,
+an excellent cup of tea, with certain elegancies and luxuries he was.
+unaccustomed to, "The Model of all the Virtues."
+
+She deserved this title as well as almost any woman.  She did really
+bristle with moral excellences.  Mention any good thing she had not
+done; I should like to see you try!  There was no handle of weakness
+to take hold of her by; she was as unseizable, except in her
+totality, as a billiard-ball; and on the broad, green, terrestrial
+table, where she had been knocked about, like all of us, by the cue
+of Fortune, she glanced from every human contact, and "caromed" from
+one relation to another, and rebounded from the stuffed cushion of
+temptation, with such exact and perfect angular movements, that the
+Enemy's corps of Reporters had long given up taking notes of her
+conduct, as there was no chance for their master.
+
+What an admirable person for the patroness and directress of a
+slightly self-willed child, with the lightning zigzag line of genius
+running like a glittering vein through the marble whiteness of her
+virgin nature!  One of the lady-patroness's peculiar virtues was
+calmness.  She was resolute and strenuous, but still.  You could
+depend on her for every duty; she was as true as steel.  She was
+kind-hearted and serviceable in all the relations of life.  She had
+more sense, more knowledge, more conversation, as well as more
+goodness, than all the partners you have waltzed with this winter put
+together.
+
+Yet no man was known to have loved her, or even to have offered
+himself to her in marriage.  It was a great wonder.  I am very
+anxious to vindicate my character as a philosopher and an observer of
+Nature by accounting for this apparently extraordinary fact.
+
+You may remember certain persons who have the misfortune of
+presenting to the friends whom they meet a cold, damp hand.  There
+are states of mind in which a contact of this kind has a depressing
+effect on the vital powers that makes us insensible to all the
+virtues and graces of the proprietor of one of these life-absorbing
+organs.  When they touch us, virtue passes out of us, and we feel as
+if our electricity had been drained by a powerful negative battery,
+carried about by an overgrown human torpedo.
+
+"The Model of all the Virtues" had a pair of searching eyes as clear
+as Wenham ice; but they were slower to melt than that fickle jewelry.
+Her features disordered themselves slightly at times in a surface-
+smile, but never broke loose from their corners and indulged in the
+riotous tumult of a laugh,--which, I take it, is the mob-law of the
+features;--and propriety the magistrate who reads the riot-act.  She
+carried the brimming cup of her inestimable virtues with a cautious,
+steady hand, and an eye always on them, to see that they did not
+spill.  Then she was an admirable judge of character.  Her mind was a
+perfect laboratory of tests and reagents; every syllable you put into
+breath went into her intellectual eudiometer, and all your thoughts
+were recorded on litmus-paper.  I think there has rarely been a more
+admirable woman.  Of course, Miss Iris was immensely and passionately
+attached to her.--Well,--these are two highly oxygenated adverbs,--
+grateful,--suppose we say,--yes,--grateful, dutiful, obedient to her
+wishes for the most part,--perhaps not quite up to the concert pitch
+of such a perfect orchestra of the virtues.
+
+We must have a weak spot or two in a character before we can love it
+much.  People that do not laugh or cry, or take more of anything than
+is good for them, or use anything but dictionary-words, are admirable
+subjects for biographies.  But we don't always care most for those
+flat-pattern flowers that press best in the herbarium.
+
+This immaculate woman,--why could n't she have a fault or two?
+Is n't there any old whisper which will tarnish that wearisome
+aureole of saintly perfection?  Does n't she carry a lump of opium in
+her pocket?  Is n't her cologne-bottle replenished oftener than its
+legitimate use would require?  It would be such a comfort!
+
+Not for the world would a young creature like Iris have let such
+words escape her, or such thoughts pass through her mind.  Whether at
+the bottom of her soul lies any uneasy consciousness of an oppressive
+presence, it is hard to say, until we know more about her.  Iris sits
+between the Little Gentleman and the "Model of all the Virtues," as
+the black-coated personage called her.--I will watch them all.
+
+--Here I stop for the present.  What the Professor said has had to
+make way this time for what he saw and heard.
+
+-And now you may read these lines, which were written for gentle
+souls who love music, and read in even tones, and, perhaps, with
+something like a smile upon the reader's lips, at a meeting where
+these musical friends had gathered.  Whether they were written with
+smiles or not, you can guess better after you have read them.
+
+
+               THE OPENING OF THE PIANO.
+
+In the little southern parlor of the house you may have seen
+With the gambrel-roof, and the gable looking westward to the green,
+At the side toward the sunset, with the window on its right,
+Stood the London-made piano I am dreaming of to-night.
+
+Ah me! how I remember the evening when it came!
+What a cry of eager voices, what a group of cheeks in flame,
+When the wondrous boa was opened that had come from over seas,
+With its smell of mastic-varnish and its flash of ivory keys!
+
+Then the children all grew fretful in the restlessness of joy,
+For the boy would push his sister, and the sister crowd the boy,
+Till the father asked for quiet in his grave paternal way,
+But the mother hushed the tumult with the words, "Now, Mary, play."
+
+For the dear soul knew that music was a very sovereign balm;
+She had sprinkled it over Sorrow and seen its brow grow calm,
+In the days of slender harpsichords with tapping tinkling quills,
+Or caroling to her spinet with its thin metallic thrills.
+
+So Mary, the household minstrel, who always loved to please,
+Sat down to the new "Clementi," and struck the glittering keys.
+Hushed were the children's voices, and every eye grew dim,
+As, floating from lip and finger, arose the "Vesper Hymn."
+
+--Catharine, child of a neighbor, curly and rosy-red,
+(Wedded since, and a widow,--something like ten years dead,)
+Hearing a gush of music such as none before,
+Steals from her mother's chamber and peeps at the open door.
+
+Just as the "Jubilate " in threaded whisper dies,
+--"Open it! open it, lady!" the little maiden cries,
+(For she thought't was a singing creature caged in a box she heard,)
+"Open it! open it, lady! and let me see the bird!"
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+I don't know whether our literary or professional people are more
+amiable than they are in other places, but certainly quarrelling is
+out of fashion among them.  This could never be, if they were in the
+habit of secret anonymous puffing of each other.  That is the kind of
+underground machinery which manufactures false reputations and
+genuine hatreds.  On the other hand, I should like to know if we are
+not at liberty to have a good time together, and say the pleasantest
+things we can think of to each other, when any of us reaches his
+thirtieth or fortieth or fiftieth or eightieth birthday.
+
+We don't have "scenes," I warrant you, on these occasions.  No
+"surprise" parties!  You understand these, of course.  In the rural
+districts, where scenic tragedy and melodrama cannot be had, as in
+the city, at the expense of a quarter and a white pocket-
+handkerchief, emotional excitement has to be sought in the dramas of
+real life.  Christenings, weddings, and funerals, especially the
+latter, are the main dependence; but babies, brides, and deceased
+citizens cannot be had at a day's notice.  Now, then, for a surprise-
+party!
+
+A bag of flour, a barrel of potatoes, some strings of onions, a
+basket of apples, a big cake and many little cakes, a jug of
+lemonade, a purse stuffed with bills of the more modest
+denominations, may, perhaps, do well enough for the properties in one
+of these private theatrical exhibitions.  The minister of the parish,
+a tender-hearted, quiet, hard-working man, living on a small salary,
+with many children, sometimes pinched to feed and clothe them,
+praying fervently every day to be blest in his "basket and store,"
+but sometimes fearing he asks amiss, to judge by the small returns,
+has the first role,--not, however, by his own choice, but forced upon
+him.  The minister's wife, a sharp-eyed, unsentimental body, is first
+lady; the remaining parts by the rest of the family.  If they only
+had a playbill, it would run thus:
+
+
+                     ON TUESDAY NEXT
+                    WILL BE PRESENTED
+                   THE AFFECTING SCENE
+                         CALLED
+
+                   THE SURPRISE-PARTY
+
+                           OR
+
+                  THE OVERCOME FAMILY;
+
+
+WITH THE FOLLOWING STRONG CAST OF CHARACTERS.
+
+The Rev.  Mr. Overcome, by the Clergyman of this Parish.
+Mrs.  Overcome, by his estimable lady.
+Masters Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John Overcome,
+Misses Dorcas, Tabitha, Rachel, and Hannah, Overcome, by their
+interesting children.
+Peggy, by the female help.
+
+The poor man is really grateful;--it is a most welcome and unexpected
+relief.  He tries to express his thanks,--his voice falters,--he
+chokes,--and bursts into tears.  That is the great effect of the
+evening.  The sharp-sighted lady cries a little with one eye, and
+counts the strings of onions, and the rest of the things, with the
+other.  The children stand ready for a spring at the apples.  The
+female help weeps after the noisy fashion of untutored handmaids.
+
+Now this is all very well as charity, but do let the kind visitors
+remember they get their money's worth.  If you pay a quarter for dry
+crying, done by a second-rate actor, how much ought you to pay for
+real hot, wet tears, out of the honest eyes of a gentleman who is not
+acting, but sobbing in earnest?
+
+All I meant to say, when I began, was, that this was not a surprise-
+party where I read these few lines that follow:
+
+We will not speak of years to-night;
+For what have years to bring,
+But larger floods of love and light
+And sweeter songs to sing?
+
+We will not drown in wordy praise
+The kindly thoughts that rise;
+If friendship owns one tender phrase,
+He reads it in our eyes.
+
+We need not waste our schoolboy art
+To gild this notch of time;
+Forgive me, if my wayward heart
+Has throbbed in artless rhyme.
+
+Enough for him the silent grasp
+That knits us hand in hand,
+And he the bracelet's radiant clasp
+That locks our circling band.
+
+Strength to his hours of manly toil!
+Peace to his starlit dreams!
+Who loves alike the furrowed soil,
+The music-haunted streams!
+
+Sweet smiles to keep forever bright
+The sunshine on his lips,
+And faith, that sees the ring of light
+Round Nature's last eclipse!
+
+
+--One of our boarders has been talking in such strong language that I
+am almost afraid to report it.  However, as he seems to be really
+honest and is so very sincere in his local prejudices, I don't
+believe anybody will be very angry with him.
+
+It is here, Sir!  right here!--said the little deformed gentleman,--
+in this old new city of Boston,--this remote provincial corner of a
+provincial nation, that the Battle of the Standard is fighting, and
+was fighting before we were born, and will be fighting when we are
+dead and gone,--please God!  The battle goes on everywhere throughout
+civilization; but here, here, here is the broad white flag flying
+which proclaims, first of all, peace and good-will to men, and, next
+to that, the absolute, unconditional spiritual liberty of each
+individual immortal soul!  The three-hilled city against the seven-
+hilled city!  That is it, Sir,--nothing less than that; and if you
+know what that means, I don't think you'll ask for anything more.  I
+swear to you, Sir, I believe that these two centres of civilization
+are just exactly the two points that close the circuit in the battery
+of our planetary intelligence!  And I believe there are spiritual
+eyes looking out from Uranus and unseen Neptune,--ay, Sir, from the
+systems of Sirius and Arcturus and Aldebaran, and as far as that
+faint stain of sprinkled worlds confluent in the distance that we
+call the nebula of Orion,--looking on, Sir, with what organs I know
+not, to see which are going to melt in that fiery fusion, the
+accidents and hindrances of humanity or man himself, Sir,--the
+stupendous abortion, the illustrious failure that he is, if the
+three-hilled city does not ride down and trample out the seven-hilled
+city!
+
+--Steam 's up!--said the young man John, so called, in a low tone.
+--Three hundred and sixty-five tons to the square inch.  Let him blow
+her off, or he'll bu'st his b'iler.
+
+The divinity-student took it calmly, only whispering that he thought
+there was a little confusion of images between a galvanic battery and
+a charge of cavalry.
+
+But the Koh-i-noor--the gentleman, you remember, with a very large
+diamond in his shirt-front laughed his scornful laugh, and made as if
+to speak.
+
+Sail in, Metropolis!--said that same young man John, by name.  And
+then, in a lower lane, not meaning to be heard,--Now, then, Ma'am
+Allen!
+
+But he was heard,--and the Koh-i-noor's face turned so white with
+rage, that his blue-black moustache and beard looked fearful, seen
+against it.  He grinned with wrath, and caught at a tumbler, as if he
+would have thrown it or its contents at the speaker.  The young
+Marylander fixed his clear, steady eye upon him, and laid his hand on
+his arm, carelessly almost, but the Jewel found it was held so that
+he could not move it.  It was of no use.  The youth was his master in
+muscle, and in that deadly Indian hug in which men wrestle with their
+eyes;--over in five seconds, but breaks one of their two backs, and
+is good for threescore years and ten;--one trial enough,--settles the
+whole matter,--just as when two feathered songsters of the barnyard,
+game and dunghill, come together,-after a jump or two at each other,
+and a few sharp kicks, there is the end of it; and it is, Apres vous,
+Monsieur, with the beaten party in all the social relations for all
+the rest of his days.
+
+I cannot philosophically account for the Koh-i-noor's wrath.  For
+though a cosmetic is sold, bearing the name of the lady to whom
+reference was made by the young person John, yet, as it is publicly
+asserted in respectable prints that this cosmetic is not a dye, I see
+no reason why he should have felt offended by any suggestion that he
+was indebted to it or its authoress.
+
+I have no doubt that there are certain exceptional complexions to
+which the purple tinge, above alluded to, is natural.  Nature is
+fertile in variety.  I saw an albiness in London once, for sixpence,
+(including the inspection of a stuffed boa-constrictor,) who looked
+as if she had been boiled in milk.  A young Hottentot of my
+acquaintance had his hair all in little pellets of the size of
+marrow-fat peas.  One of my own classmates has undergone a singular
+change of late years,--his hair losing its original tint, and getting
+a remarkable discolored look; and another has ceased to cultivate any
+hair at all over the vertex or crown of the head.  So I am perfectly
+willing to believe that the purple-black of the Koh-i-noor's
+moustache and whiskers is constitutional and not pigmentary.  But I
+can't think why he got so angry.
+
+The intelligent reader will understand that all this pantomime of the
+threatened onslaught and its suppression passed so quickly that it
+was all over by the time the other end of the table found out there
+was a disturbance; just as a man chopping wood half a mile off may be
+seen resting on his axe at the instant you hear the last blow he
+struck.  So you will please to observe that the Little Gentleman was
+not, interrupted during the time implied by these ex-post-facto
+remarks of mine, but for some ten or fifteen seconds only.
+
+He did not seem to mind the interruption at all, for he started
+again.  The "Sir" of his harangue was no doubt addressed to myself
+more than anybody else, but he often uses it in discourse as if he
+were talking with some imaginary opponent.
+
+--America, Sir,--he exclaimed,--is the only place where man is full-
+grown!
+
+He straightened himself up, as he spoke, standing on the top round of
+his high chair, I suppose, and so presented the larger part of his
+little figure to the view of the boarders.
+
+It was next to impossible to keep from laughing.  The commentary was
+so strange an illustration of the text!  I thought it was time to put
+in a word; for I have lived in foreign parts, and am more or less
+cosmopolitan.
+
+I doubt if we have more practical freedom in America than they have
+in England,---I said.--An Englishman thinks as he likes in religion
+and politics.  Mr. Martineau speculates as freely as ever Dr.
+Channing did, and Mr. Bright is as independent as Mr. Seward.
+
+Sir,--said he,--it is n't what a man thinks or says; but when and
+where and to whom he thinks and says it.  A man with a flint and
+steel striking sparks over a wet blanket is one thing, and striking
+them over a tinder-box is another.  The free Englishman is born under
+protest; he lives and dies under protest,--a tolerated, but not a
+welcome fact.  Is not freethinker a term of reproach in England?  The
+same idea in the soul of an Englishman who struggled up to it and
+still holds it antagonistically, and in the soul of an American to
+whom it is congenital and spontaneous, and often unrecognized, except
+as an element blended with all his thoughts, a natural movement, like
+the drawing of his breath or the beating of his heart, is a very
+different thing.  You may teach a quadruped to walk on his hind legs,
+but he is always wanting to be on all fours.  Nothing that can be
+taught a growing youth is like the atmospheric knowledge he breathes
+from his infancy upwards.  The American baby sucks in freedom with
+the milk of the breast at which he hangs.
+
+--That's a good joke,--said the young fellow John,--considerin' it
+commonly belongs to a female Paddy.
+
+I thought--I will not be certain--that the Little Gentleman winked,
+as if he had been hit somewhere--as I have no doubt Dr. Darwin did
+when the wooden-spoon suggestion upset his theory about why, etc.  If
+he winked, however, he did not dodge.
+
+A lively comment!--he said.--But Rome, in her great founder, sucked
+the blood of empire out of the dugs of a brute, Sir!  The Milesian
+wet-nurse is only a convenient vessel through which the American
+infant gets the life-blood of this virgin soil, Sir, that is making
+man over again, on the sunset pattern!  You don't think what we are
+doing and going to do here.  Why, Sir, while commentators are
+bothering themselves with interpretation of prophecies, we have got
+the new heavens and the new earth over us and under us!  Was there
+ever anything in Italy, I should like to know, like a Boston sunset?
+
+--This time there was a laugh, and the little man himself almost
+smiled.
+
+Yes,--Boston sunsets;--perhaps they're as good in some other places,
+but I know 'em best here.  Anyhow, the American skies are different
+from anything they see in the Old World.  Yes, and the rocks are
+different, and the soil is different, and everything that comes out
+of the soil, from grass up to Indians, is different.  And now that
+the provisional races are dying out-
+
+--What do you mean by the provisional races, Sir?--said the divinity-
+student, interrupting him.
+
+Why, the aboriginal bipeds, to be sure,--he answered,--the red-crayon
+sketch of humanity laid on the canvas before the colors for the real
+manhood were ready.
+
+I hope they will come to something yet,--said the divinity-student.
+
+Irreclaimable, Sir,--irreclaimable!--said the Little Gentleman.
+--Cheaper to breed white men than domesticate a nation of red ones.
+When you can get the bitter out of the partridge's thigh, you can
+make an enlightened commonwealth of Indians.  A provisional race,
+Sir,--nothing more.  Exhaled carbonic acid for the use of vegetation,
+kept down the bears and catamounts, enjoyed themselves in scalping
+and being scalped, and then passed away or are passing away,
+according to the programme.
+
+Well, Sir, these races dying out, the white man has to acclimate
+himself.  It takes him a good while; but he will come all right by-
+and-by, Sir,--as sound as a woodchuck,--as sound as a musquash!
+
+A new nursery, Sir, with Lake Superior and Huron and all the rest of
+'em for wash-basins!  A new race, and a whole new world for the new-
+born human soul to work in!  And Boston is the brain of it, and has
+been any time these hundred years!  That's all I claim for Boston,--
+that it is the thinking centre of the continent, and therefore of the
+planet.
+
+--And the grand emporium of modesty,--said the divinity-student, a
+little mischievously.
+
+Oh, don't talk to me of modesty!--answered the Little Gentleman,--I
+'m past that!  There is n't a thing that was ever said or done in
+Boston, from pitching the tea overboard to the last ecclesiastical
+lie it tore into tatters and flung into the dock, that was n't
+thought very indelicate by some fool or tyrant or bigot, and all the
+entrails of commercial and spiritual conservatism are twisted into
+colics as often as this revolutionary brain of ours has a fit of
+thinking come over it.--No, Sir,--show me any other place that is,
+or was since the megalosaurus has died out, where wealth and social
+influence are so fairly divided between the stationary and the
+progressive classes!  Show me any other place where every other
+drawing-room is not a chamber of the Inquisition, with papas and
+mammas for inquisitors,--and the cold shoulder, instead of the "dry
+pan and the gradual fire," the punishment of "heresy"!
+
+--We think Baltimore is a pretty civilized kind of a village,--said
+the young Marylander, good-naturedly.--But I suppose you can't
+forgive it for always keeping a little ahead of Boston in point of
+numbers,--tell the truth now.  Are we not the centre of something?
+
+Ah, indeed, to be sure you are.  You are the gastronomic metropolis
+of the Union.  Why don't you put a canvas-back-duck on the top of the
+Washington column?  Why don't you get that lady off from Battle
+Monument and plant a terrapin in her place?  Why will you ask for
+other glories when you have soft crabs?  No, Sir,--you live too well
+to think as hard as we do in Boston.  Logic comes to us with the
+salt-fish of Cape Ann; rhetoric is born of the beans of Beverly; but
+you--if you open your mouths to speak, Nature stops them with a fat
+oyster, or offers a slice of the breast of your divine bird, and
+silences all your aspirations.
+
+And what of Philadelphia?--said the Marylander.
+
+Oh, Philadelphia?--Waterworks,--killed by the Croton and Cochituate;-
+-Ben Franklin,--borrowed from Boston;--David Rittenhouse,--made an
+orrery;--Benjamin Rush,--made a medical system;--both interesting to
+antiquarians;--great Red-river raft of medical students,--spontaneous
+generation of professors to match;--more widely known through the
+Moyamensing hose-company, and the Wistar parties;-for geological
+section of social strata, go to The Club.--Good place to live in,
+--first-rate market,--tip-top peaches.--What do we know about
+Philadelphia, except that the engine-companies are always shooting
+each other?
+
+And what do you say to New York?--asked the Koh-i-noor.
+
+A great city, Sir,--replied the Little Gentleman,--a very opulent,
+splendid city.  A point of transit of much that is remarkable, and of
+permanence for much that is respectable.  A great money-centre.  San
+Francisco with the mines above-ground,--and some of 'em under the
+sidewalks.  I have seen next to nothing grandiose, out of New York,
+in all our cities.  It makes 'em all look paltry and petty.  Has many
+elements of civilization.  May stop where Venice did, though, for
+aught we know.--The order of its development is just this:--Wealth;
+architecture; upholstery; painting; sculpture.  Printing, as a
+mechanical art,--just as Nicholas Jepson and the Aldi, who were
+scholars too, made Venice renowned for it.  Journalism, which is the
+accident of business and crowded populations, in great perfection.
+Venice got as far as Titian and Paul Veronese and Tintoretto,--great
+colorists, mark you, magnificent on the flesh-and-blood side of Art,-
+-but look over to Florence and see who lie in Santa Crocea, and ask
+out of whose loins Dante sprung!
+
+Oh, yes, to be sure, Venice built her Ducal Palace, and her Church of
+St. Mark, and her Casa d' Or, and the rest of her golden houses; and
+Venice had great pictures and good music; and Venice had a Golden
+Book, in which all the large tax-payers had their names written;--but
+all that did not make Venice the brain of Italy.
+
+I tell you what, Sir,--with all these magnificent appliances of
+civilization, it is time we began to hear something from the djinnis
+donee whose names are on the Golden Book of our sumptuous, splendid,
+marble-placed Venice,--something in the higher walks of literature,--
+something in the councils of the nation.  Plenty of Art, I grant you,
+Sir; now, then, for vast libraries, and for mighty scholars and
+thinkers and statesmen,--five for every Boston one, as the population
+is to ours,--ten to one more properly, in virtue of centralizing
+attraction as the alleged metropolis, and not call our people
+provincials, and have to come begging to us to write the lives of
+Hendrik Hudson and Gouverneur Morris!
+
+--The Little Gentleman was on his hobby, exalting his own city at the
+expense of every other place.  I have my doubts if he had been in
+either of the cities he had been talking about.  I was just going to
+say something to sober him down, if I could, when the young
+Marylander spoke up.
+
+Come, now,--he said,--what's the use of these comparisons?  Did n't I
+hear this gentleman saying, the other day, that every American owns
+all America?  If you have really got more brains in Boston than other
+folks, as you seem to think, who hates you for it, except a pack of
+scribbling fools?  If I like Broadway better than Washington Street,
+what then?  I own them both, as much as anybody owns either. I am an
+American,--and wherever I look up and see the stars and stripes
+overhead, that is home to me!
+
+He spoke, and looked up as if he heard the emblazoned folds crackling
+over him in the breeze.  We all looked up involuntarily, as if we
+should see the national flag by so doing.  The sight of the dingy
+ceiling and the gas-fixture depending therefrom dispelled the
+illusion.
+
+Bravo!  bravo!--said the venerable gentleman on the other side of the
+table.--Those are the sentiments of Washington's Farewell Address.
+Nothing better than that since the last chapter in Revelations.
+Five-and-forty years ago there used to be Washington societies, and
+little boys used to walk in processions, each little boy having a
+copy of the Address, bound in red, hung round his neck by a ribbon.
+Why don't they now?  Why don't they now?  I saw enough of hating each
+other in the old Federal times; now let's love each other, I say,--
+let's love each other, and not try to make it out that there is n't
+any place fit to live in except the one we happen to be born in.
+
+It dwarfs the mind, I think,--said I,--to feed it on any localism.
+The full stature of manhood is shrivelled--
+
+The color burst up into my cheeks.  What was I saying,--I, who would
+not for the world have pained our unfortunate little boarder by an
+allusion?
+
+I will go,--he said,--and made a movement with his left arm to let
+himself down from his high chair.
+
+No,--no,--he does n't mean it,--you must not go,--said a kind voice
+next him; and a soft, white hand was laid upon his arm.
+
+Iris, my dear!--exclaimed another voice, as of a female, in accents
+that might be considered a strong atmospheric solution of duty with
+very little flavor of grace.
+
+She did not move for this address, and there was a tableau that
+lasted some seconds.  For the young girl, in the glory of half-blown
+womanhood, and the dwarf, the cripple, the misshapen little creature
+covered with Nature's insults, looked straight into each other's
+eyes.
+
+Perhaps no handsome young woman had ever looked at him so in his
+life.  Certainly the young girl never had looked into eyes that
+reached into her soul as these did.  It was not that they were in
+themselves supernaturally bright,--but there was the sad fire in them
+that flames up from the soul of one who looks on the beauty of woman
+without hope, but, alas! not without emotion.  To him it seemed as if
+those amber gates had been translucent as the brown water of a
+mountain brook, and through them he had seen dimly into a virgin
+wilderness, only waiting for the sunrise of a great passion for all
+its buds to blow and all its bowers to ring with melody.
+
+That is my image, of course,--not his.  It was not a simile that was
+in his mind, or is in anybody's at such a moment,--it was a pang of
+wordless passion, and then a silent, inward moan.
+
+A lady's wish,--he said, with a certain gallantry of manner,--makes
+slaves of us all.--And Nature, who is kind to all her children, and
+never leaves the smallest and saddest of all her human failures
+without one little comfit of self-love at the bottom of his poor
+ragged pocket,--Nature suggested to him that he had turned his
+sentence well; and he fell into a reverie, in which the old thoughts
+that were always hovering dust outside the doors guarded by Common
+Sense, and watching for a chance to squeeze in, knowing perfectly
+well they would be ignominiously kicked out again as soon as Common
+Sense saw them, flocked in pell-mell,--misty, fragmentary, vague,
+half-ashamed of themselves, but still shouldering up against his
+inner consciousness till it warmed with their contact:--John
+Wilkes's--the ugliest man's in England--saying, that with half-an-
+hour's start he would cut out the handsomest man in all the land in
+any woman's good graces; Cadenus--old and savage--leading captive
+Stella and Vanessa; and then the stray line of a ballad, "And a
+winning tongue had he,"--as much as to say, it is n't looks, after
+all, but cunning words, that win our Eves over,--just as of old when
+it was the worst-looking brute of the lot that got our grandmother to
+listen to his stuff and so did the mischief.
+
+Ah, dear me!  We rehearse the part of Hercules with his club,
+subjugating man and woman in our fancy, the first by the weight of
+it, and the second by our handling of it,--we rehearse it, I say, by
+our own hearth-stones, with the cold poker as our club, and the
+exercise is easy.  But when we come to real life, the poker is in the
+fore, and, ten to one, if we would grasp it, we find it too hot to
+hold;--lucky for us, if it is not white-hot, and we do not have to
+leave the skin of our hands sticking to it when we fling it down or
+drop it with a loud or silent cry!
+
+--I am frightened when I find into what a labyrinth of human
+character and feeling I am winding.  I meant to tell my thoughts, and
+to throw in a few studies of manner and costume as they pictured
+themselves for me from day to day.  Chance has thrown together at the
+table with me a number of persons who are worth studying, and I mean
+not only to look on them, but, if I can, through them.  You can get
+any man's or woman's secret, whose sphere is circumscribed by your
+own, if you will only look patiently on them long enough.  Nature is
+always applying her reagents to character, if you will take the pains
+to watch her.  Our studies of character, to change the image, are
+very much like the surveyor's triangulation of a geographical
+province.  We get a base-line in organization, always; then we get an
+angle by sighting some distant object to which the passions or
+aspirations of the subject of our observation are tending; then
+another;--and so we construct our first triangle.  Once fix a man's
+ideals, and for the most part the rest is easy.  A wants to die worth
+half a million.  Good.  B (female) wants to catch him,--and outlive
+him.  All right.  Minor details at our leisure.
+
+What is it, of all your experiences, of all your thoughts, of all
+your misdoings, that lies at the very bottom of the great heap of
+acts of consciousness which make up your past life?  What should you
+most dislike to tell your nearest friend?--Be so good as to pause for
+a brief space, and shut the volume you hold with your finger between
+the pages.--Oh, that is it!
+
+What a confessional I have been sitting at, with the inward ear of my
+soul open, as the multitudinous whisper of my involuntary confidants
+came back to me like the reduplicated echo of a cry among the craggy
+bills!
+
+At the house of a friend where I once passed the night was one of
+those stately upright cabinet desks and cases of drawers which were
+not rare in prosperous families during the last century.  It had held
+the clothes and the books and the papers of generation after
+generation.  The hands that opened its drawers had grown withered,
+shrivelled, and at last been folded in death.  The children that
+played with the lower handles had got tall enough to open the desk,
+to reach the upper shelves behind the folding-doors,--grown bent
+after a while,--and then followed those who had gone before, and left
+the old cabinet to be ransacked by a new generation.
+
+A boy of ten or twelve was looking at it a few years ago, and, being
+a quick-witted fellow, saw that all the space was not accounted for
+by the smaller drawers in the part beneath the lid of the desk.
+Prying about with busy eyes and fingers, he at length came upon a
+spring, on pressing which, a secret drawer flew from its hiding-
+place.  It had never been opened but by the maker.  The mahogany
+shavings and dust were lying in it as when the artisan closed it,--
+and when I saw it, it was as fresh as if that day finished.
+
+Is there not one little drawer in your soul, my sweet reader, which
+no hand but yours has ever opened, and which none that have known you
+seem to have suspected?  What does it hold?--A sin?--I hope not.
+What a strange thing an old dead sin laid away in a secret drawer of
+the soul is!  Must it some time or other be moistened with tears,
+until it comes to life again and begins to stir in our
+consciousness,--as the dry wheel-animalcule, looking like a grain of
+dust, becomes alive, if it is wet with a drop of water?
+
+Or is it a passion?  There are plenty of withered men and women
+walking about the streets who have the secret drawer in their hearts,
+which, if it were opened, would show as fresh as it was when they
+were in the flush of youth and its first trembling emotions.
+
+What it held will, perhaps, never be known, until they are dead and
+gone, and same curious eye lights on an old yellow letter with the
+fossil footprints of the extinct passion trodden thick all over it.
+
+There is not a boarder at our table, I firmly believe, excepting the
+young girl, who has not a story of the heart to tell, if one could
+only get the secret drawer open.  Even this arid female, whose armor
+of black bombazine looks stronger against the shafts of love than any
+cuirass of triple brass, has had her sentimental history, if I am not
+mistaken.  I will tell you my reason for suspecting it.
+
+Like many other old women, she shows a great nervousness and
+restlessness whenever I venture to express any opinion upon a class
+of subjects which can hardly be said to belong to any man or set of
+men as their strictly private property,--not even to the clergy, or
+the newspapers commonly called "religious."  Now, although it would
+be a great luxury to me to obtain my opinions by contract, ready-
+made, from a professional man, and although I have a constitutional
+kindly feeling to all sorts of good people which would make me happy
+to agree with all their beliefs, if that were possible, still I must
+have an idea, now and then, as to the meaning of life; and though the
+only condition of peace in this world is to have no ideas, or, at
+least, not to express them, with reference to such subjects, I can't
+afford to pay quite so much as that even for peace.
+
+I find that there is a very prevalent opinion among the dwellers on
+the shores of Sir Isaac Newton's Ocean of Truth, that salt, fish,
+which have been taken from it a good while ago, split open, cured and
+dried, are the only proper and allowable food for reasonable people.
+I maintain, on the other hand, that there are a number of live fish
+still swimming in it, and that every one of us has a right to see if
+he cannot catch some of them.  Sometimes I please myself with the
+idea that I have landed an actual living fish, small, perhaps, but
+with rosy gills and silvery scales.  Then I find the consumers of
+nothing but the salted and dried article insist that it is poisonous,
+simply because it is alive, and cry out to people not to touch it.  I
+have not found, however, that people mind them much.
+
+The poor boarder in bombazine is my dynamometer.  I try every
+questionable proposition on her.  If she winces, I must be prepared
+for an outcry from the other old women.  I frightened her, the other
+day, by saying that faith, as an intellectual state, was self-
+reliance, which, if you have a metaphysical turn, you will find is
+not so much of a paradox as it sounds at first.  So she sent me a
+book to read which was to cure me of that error.  It was an old book,
+and looked as if it had not been opened for a long time.  What should
+drop out of it, one day, but a small heart-shaped paper, containing a
+lock of that straight, coarse, brown hair which sets off the sharp
+faces of so many thin-flanked, large-handed bumpkins!  I read upon
+the paper the name "Hiram."--Love! love! love!--everywhere!
+everywhere!--under diamonds and housemaids' "jewelry,"--lifting the
+marrowy camel's-hair, and rustling even the black bombazine!--No,
+no,--I think she never was pretty, but she was young once, and wore
+bright ginghams, and, perhaps, gay merinos.  We shall find that the
+poor little crooked man has been in love, or is in love, or will be
+in love before we have done with him, for aught that I know!
+
+Romance!  Was there ever a boarding-house in the world where the
+seemingly prosaic table had not a living fresco for its background,
+where you could see, if you had eyes, the smoke and fire of some
+upheaving sentiment, or the dreary craters of smouldering or burnt-
+out passions?  You look on the black bombazine and high-necked
+decorum of your neighbor, and no more think of the real life that
+underlies this despoiled and dismantled womanhood than you think of a
+stone trilobite as having once been full of the juices and the
+nervous thrills of throbbing and self-conscious being.  There is a
+wild creature under that long yellow pin which serves as brooch for
+the bombazine cuirass,--a wild creature, which I venture to say would
+leap in his cage, if I should stir him, quiet as you think him.  A
+heart which has been domesticated by matrimony and maternity is as
+tranquil as a tame bullfinch; but a wild heart which has never been
+fairly broken in flutters fiercely long after you think time has
+tamed it down,--like that purple finch I had the other day, which
+could not be approached without such palpitations and frantic flings
+against the bars of his cage, that I had to send him back and get a
+little orthodox canary which had learned to be quiet and never mind
+the wires or his keeper's handling.  I will tell you my wicked, but
+half involuntary experiment on the wild heart under the faded
+bombazine.
+
+Was there ever a person in the room with you, marked by any special
+weakness or peculiarity, with whom you could be two hours and not
+touch the infirm spot?  I confess the most frightful tendency to do
+just this thing.  If a man has a brogue, I am sure to catch myself
+imitating it.  If another is lame, I follow him, or, worse than that,
+go before him, limping.
+
+I could never meet an Irish gentleman--if it had been the Duke of
+Wellington himself--without stumbling upon the word "Paddy,"--which I
+use rarely in my common talk.
+
+I have been worried to know whether this was owing to some innate
+depravity of disposition on my part, some malignant torturing
+instinct, which, under different circumstances, might have made a
+Fijian anthropophagus of me, or to some law of thought for which I
+was not answerable.  It is, I am convinced, a kind of physical fact
+like endosmosis, with which some of you are acquainted.  A thin film
+of politeness separates the unspoken and unspeakable current of
+thought from the stream of conversation.  After a time one begins to
+soak through and mingle with the other.
+
+We were talking about names, one day.--Was there ever anything,--I
+said,--like the Yankee for inventing the most uncouth, pretentious,
+detestable appellations,--inventing or finding them,--since the time
+of Praise-God Barebones?  I heard a country-boy once talking of
+another whom he called Elpit, as I understood him.  Elbridge is
+common enough, but this sounded oddly.  It seems the boy was
+christened Lord Pitt,--and called for convenience, as above.  I have
+heard a charming little girl, belonging to an intelligent family in
+the country, called Anges invariably; doubtless intended for Agnes.
+Names are cheap.  How can a man name an innocent new-born child, that
+never did him any harm, Hiram?--The poor relation, or whatever she
+is, in bombazine, turned toward me, but I was stupid, and went on.--
+To think of a man going through life saddled with such an abominable
+name as that!--The poor relation grew very uneasy.--I continued;
+for I never thought of all this till afterwards.--I knew one young
+fellow, a good many years ago, by the name of Hiram--What's got
+into you, Cousin,--said our landlady,--to look so?--There! you 've
+upset your teacup!
+
+It suddenly occurred to me what I had been doing, and I saw the poor
+woman had her hand at her throat; she was half-choking with the
+"hysteric ball,"--a very odd symptom, as you know, which nervous
+women often complain of.  What business had I to be trying
+experiments on this forlorn old soul?  I had a great deal better be
+watching that young girl.
+
+Ah, the young girl!  I am sure that she can hide nothing from me.
+Her skin is so transparent that one can almost count her heart-beats
+by the flushes they send into her cheeks.  She does not seem to be
+shy, either.  I think she does not know enough of danger to be timid.
+She seems to me like one of those birds that travellers tell of,
+found in remote, uninhabited islands, who, having never received any
+wrong at the hand of man, show no alarm at and hardly any particular
+consciousness of his presence.
+
+The first thing will be to see how she and our little deformed
+gentleman get along together; for, as I have told you, they sit side
+by side.  The next thing will be to keep an eye on the duenna,--the
+"Model" and so forth, as the white-neck-cloth called her.  The
+intention of that estimable lady is, I understand, to launch her and
+leave her.  I suppose there is no help for it, and I don't doubt this
+young lady knows how to take care of herself, but I do not like to
+see young girls turned loose in boarding-houses.  Look here now!
+There is that jewel of his race, whom I have called for convenience
+the Koh-i-noor, (you understand it is quite out of the question for
+me to use the family names of our boarders, unless I want to get into
+trouble,)--I say, the gentleman with the diamond is looking very
+often and very intently, it seems to me, down toward the farther
+corner of the table, where sits our amber-eyed blonde.  The
+landlady's daughter does not look pleased, it seems to me, at this,
+nor at those other attentions which the gentleman referred to has, as
+I have learned, pressed upon the newly-arrived young person.  The
+landlady made a communication to me, within a few days after the
+arrival of Miss Iris, which I will repeat to the best of my
+remembrance.
+
+He, (the person I have been speaking of,)--she said,--seemed to be
+kinder hankerin' round after that young woman.  It had hurt her
+daughter's feelin's a good deal, that the gentleman she was a-keepin'
+company with should be offerin' tickets and tryin' to send presents
+to them that he'd never know'd till jest a little spell ago,--and he
+as good as merried, so fur as solemn promises went, to as respectable
+a young lady, if she did say so, as any there was round, whosomever
+they might be.
+
+Tickets!  presents!--said I.--What tickets, what presents has he had
+the impertinence to be offering to that young lady?
+
+Tickets to the Museum,--said the landlady.  There is them that's glad
+enough to go to the Museum, when tickets is given 'em; but some of
+'em ha'n't had a ticket sence Cenderilla was played,--and now he must
+be offerin' 'em to this ridiculous young paintress, or whatever she
+is, that's come to make more mischief than her board's worth.  But it
+a'n't her fault,--said the landlady, relenting;--and that aunt of
+hers, or whatever she is, served him right enough.
+
+Why, what did she do?
+
+Do?  Why, she took it up in the tongs and dropped it out o' winder.
+
+Dropped?  dropped what?--I said.
+
+Why, the soap,--said the landlady.
+
+It appeared that the Koh-i-noor, to ingratiate himself, had sent an
+elegant package of perfumed soap, directed to Miss Iris, as a
+delicate expression of a lively sentiment of admiration, and that,
+after having met with the unfortunate treatment referred to, it was
+picked up by Master Benjamin Franklin, who appropriated it,
+rejoicing, and indulged in most unheard-of and inordinate ablutions
+in consequence, so that his hands were a frequent subject of maternal
+congratulation, and he smelt like a civet-cat for weeks after his
+great acquisition.
+
+After watching daily for a time, I think I can see clearly into the
+relation which is growing up between the little gentleman and the
+young lady.  She shows a tenderness to him that I can't help being
+interested in.  If he was her crippled child, instead of being more
+than old enough to be her father, she could not treat him more
+kindly.  The landlady's daughter said, the other day, she believed
+that girl was settin' her cap for the Little Gentleman.
+
+Some of them young folks is very artful,--said her mother,--and there
+is them that would merry Lazarus, if he'd only picked up crumbs
+enough.  I don't think, though, this is one of that sort; she's
+kinder childlike,--said the landlady,--and maybe never had any dolls
+to play with; for they say her folks was poor before Ma'am undertook
+to see to her teachin' and board her and clothe her.
+
+I could not help overhearing this conversation.  "Board her and
+clothe her!"--speaking of such a young creature!  Oh, dear!--Yes,--
+she must be fed,--just like Bridget, maid-of-all-work at this
+establishment.  Somebody must pay for it.  Somebody has a right to
+watch her and see how much it takes to "keep" her, and growl at her,
+if she has too good an appetite.  Somebody has a right to keep an eye
+on her and take care that she does not dress too prettily.  No mother
+to see her own youth over again in these fresh features and rising
+reliefs of half-sculptured womanhood, and, seeing its loveliness,
+forget her lessons of neutral-tinted propriety, and open the cases
+that hold her own ornaments to find for her a necklace or a bracelet
+or a pair of ear-rings,--those golden lamps that light up the deep,
+shadowy dimples on the cheeks of young beauties,--swinging in a semi-
+barbaric splendor that carries the wild fancy to Abyssinian queens
+and musky Odalisques!  I don't believe any woman has utterly given up
+the great firm of Mundus & Co., so long as she wears ear-rings.
+
+I think Iris loves to hear the Little Gentleman talk.  She smiles
+sometimes at his vehement statements, but never laughs at him.  When
+he speaks to her, she keeps her eye always steadily upon him.  This
+may be only natural good-breeding, so to speak, but it is worth
+noticing.  I have often observed that vulgar persons, and public
+audiences of inferior collective intelligence, have this in common:
+the least thing draws off their minds, when you are speaking to them.
+I love this young creature's rapt attention to her diminutive
+neighbor while he is speaking.
+
+He is evidently pleased with it.  For a day or two after she came, he
+was silent and seemed nervous and excited.  Now he is fond of getting
+the talk into his own hands, and is obviously conscious that he has
+at least one interested listener.  Once or twice I have seen marks of
+special attention to personal adornment, a ruffled shirt-bosom, one
+day, and a diamond pin in it,--not so very large as the Koh-i-noor's,
+but more lustrous.  I mentioned the death's-head ring he wears on his
+right hand.  I was attracted by a very handsome red stone, a ruby or
+carbuncle or something of the sort, to notice his left hand, the
+other day.  It is a handsome hand, and confirms my suspicion that the
+cast mentioned was taken from his arm.  After all, this is just what
+I should expect.  It is not very uncommon to see the upper limbs, or
+one of them, running away with the whole strength, and, therefore,
+with the whole beauty, which we should never have noticed, if it had
+been divided equally between all four extremities.  If it is so, of
+course he is proud of his one strong and beautiful arm; that is human
+nature.  I am afraid he can hardly help betraying his favoritism, as
+people who have any one showy point are apt to do,--especially
+dentists with handsome teeth, who always smile back to their last
+molars.
+
+Sitting, as he does, next to the young girl, and next but one to the
+calm lady who has her in charge, he cannot help seeing their
+relations to each other.
+
+That is an admirable woman, Sir,--he said to me one day, as we sat
+alone at the table after breakfast,--an admirable woman, Sir,--and I
+hate her.
+
+Of course, I begged an explanation.
+
+An admirable woman, Sir, because she does good things, and even kind
+things,--takes care of this--this--young lady--we have here, talks
+like a sensible person, and always looks as if she was doing her duty
+with all her might.  I hate her because her voice sounds as if it
+never trembled and her eyes look as if she never knew what it was to
+cry.  Besides, she looks at me, Sir, stares at me, as if she wanted
+to get an image of me for some gallery in her brain,--and we don't
+love to be looked at in this way, we that have--I hate her,--I hate
+her,--her eyes kill me,--it is like being stabbed with icicles to be
+looked at so,--the sooner she goes home, the better.  I don't want a
+woman to weigh me in a balance; there are men enough for that sort of
+work.  The judicial character is n't captivating in females, Sir.  A
+woman fascinates a man quite as often by what she overlooks as by
+what she sees.  Love prefers twilight to daylight; and a man doesn't
+think much of, nor care much for, a woman outside of his household,
+unless he can couple the idea of love, past, present, or future, with
+her.  I don't believe the Devil would give half as much for the
+services of a sinner as he would for those of one of these folks that
+are always doing virtuous acts in a way to make them unpleasing.
+--That young girl wants a tender nature to cherish her and give her a
+chance to put out her leaves,--sunshine, and not east winds.
+
+He was silent,--and sat looking at his handsome left hand with the
+red stone ring upon it.--Is he going to fall in love with Iris?
+
+Here are some lines I read to the boarders the other day:--
+
+      THE CROOKED FOOTPATH
+
+Ah, here it is! the sliding rail
+That marks the old remembered spot,--
+The gap that struck our schoolboy trail,--
+The crooked path across the lot.
+
+It left the road by school and church,
+A pencilled shadow, nothing more,
+That parted from the silver birch
+And ended at the farmhouse door.
+
+No line or compass traced its plan;
+With frequent bends to left or right,
+In aimless, wayward curves it ran,
+But always kept the door in sight.
+
+The gabled porch, with woodbine green,--
+The broken millstone at the sill,--
+Though many a rood might stretch between,
+The truant child could see them still.
+
+No rocks, across the pathway lie,--
+No fallen trunk is o'er it thrown,--
+And yet it winds, we know not why,
+And turns as if for tree or stone.
+
+Perhaps some lover trod the way
+With shaking knees and leaping heart,--
+And so it often runs astray
+With sinuous sweep or sudden start.
+
+Or one, perchance, with clouded brain
+From some unholy banquet reeled,--
+And since, our devious steps maintain
+His track across the trodden field.
+
+Nay, deem not thus,--no earthborn will
+Could ever trace a faultless line;
+Our truest steps are human still,--
+To walk unswerving were divine!
+
+Truants from love, we dream of wrath;--
+Oh, rather let us trust the more!
+Through all the wanderings of the path,
+We still can see our Father's door!
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+The Professor finds a Fly in his Teacup.
+
+I have a long theological talk to relate, which must be dull reading
+to some of my young and vivacious friends.  I don't know, however,
+that any of them have entered into a contract to read all that I
+write, or that I have promised always to write to please them.  What
+if I should sometimes write to please myself?
+
+Now you must know that there are a great many things which interest
+me, to some of which this or that particular class of readers may be
+totally indifferent.  I love Nature, and human nature, its thoughts,
+affections, dreams, aspirations, delusions,--Art in all its forms,--
+virtu in all its eccentricities,--old stories from black-letter
+volumes and yellow manuscripts, and new projects out of hot brains
+not yet imbedded in the snows of age.  I love the generous impulses
+of the reformer; but not less does my imagination feed itself upon
+the old litanies, so often warmed by the human breath upon which they
+were wafted to Heaven that they glow through our frames like our own
+heart's blood.  I hope I love good men and women; I know that they
+never speak a word to me, even if it be of question or blame, that I
+do not take pleasantly, if it is expressed with a reasonable amount
+of human kindness.
+
+I have before me at this time a beautiful and affecting letter, which
+I have hesitated to answer, though the postmark upon it gave its
+direction, and the name is one which is known to all, in some of its
+representatives.  It contains no reproach, only a delicately-hinted
+fear.  Speak gently, as this dear lady has spoken, and there is no
+heart so insensible that it does not answer to the appeal, no
+intellect so virile that it does not own a certain deference to the
+claims of age, of childhood, of sensitive and timid natures, when
+they plead with it not to look at those sacred things by the broad
+daylight which they see in mystic shadow.  How grateful would it be
+to make perpetual peace with these pleading saints and their
+confessors, by the simple act that silences all complainings!  Sleep,
+sleep, sleep!  says the Arch-Enchantress of them all,--and pours her
+dark and potent anodyne, distilled over the fires that consumed her
+foes,--its large, round drops changing, as we look, into the beads of
+her convert's rosary!  Silence! the pride of reason! cries another,
+whose whole life is spent in reasoning down reason.
+
+I hope I love good people, not for their sake, but for my own.  And
+most assuredly, if any deed of wrong or word of bitterness led me
+into an act of disrespect towards that enlightened and excellent
+class of men who make it their calling to teach goodness and their
+duty to practise it, I should feel that I had done myself an injury
+rather than them.  Go and talk with any professional man holding any
+of the medieval creeds, choosing one who wears upon his features the
+mark of inward and outward health, who looks cheerful, intelligent,
+and kindly, and see how all your prejudices melt away in his
+presence!  It is impossible to come into intimate relations with a
+large, sweet nature, such as you may often find in this class,
+without longing to be at one with it in all its modes of being and
+believing.  But does it not occur to you that one may love truth as
+he sees it, and his race as he views it, better than even the
+sympathy and approbation of many good men whom he honors,--better
+than sleeping to the sound of the Miserere or listening to the
+repetition of an effete Confession of Faith?
+
+The three learned professions have but recently emerged from a state
+of quasi-barbarism.  None of them like too well to be told of it, but
+it must be sounded in their ears whenever they put on airs.  When a
+man has taken an overdose of laudanum, the doctors tell us to place
+him between two persons who shall make him walk up and down
+incessantly; and if he still cannot be kept from going to sleep, they
+say that a lash or two over his back is of great assistance.
+
+So we must keep the doctors awake by telling them that they have not
+yet shaken off astrology and the doctrine of signatures, as is shown
+by the form of their prescriptions, and their use of nitrate of
+silver, which turns epileptics into Ethiopians.  If that is not
+enough, they must be given over to the scourgers, who like their task
+and get good fees for it.  A few score years ago, sick people were
+made to swallow burnt toads and powdered earthworms and the expressed
+juice of wood-lice.  The physician of Charles I. and II. prescribed
+abominations not to be named.  Barbarism, as bad as that of Congo or
+Ashantee.  Traces of this barbarism linger even in the greatly
+improved medical science of our century.  So while the solemn farce
+of over-drugging is going on, the world over, the harlequin pseudo-
+science jumps on to the stage, whip in hand, with half-a-dozen
+somersets, and begins laying about him.
+
+In 1817, perhaps you remember, the law of wager by battle was
+unrepealed, and the rascally murderous, and worse than murderous,
+clown, Abraham Thornton, put on his gauntlet in open court and defied
+the appellant to lift the other which he threw down.  It was not
+until the reign of George II. that the statutes against witchcraft
+were repealed.  As for the English Court of Chancery, we know that
+its antiquated abuses form one of the staples of common proverbs and
+popular literature.  So the laws and the lawyers have to be watched
+perpetually by public opinion as much as the doctors do.
+
+I don't think the other profession is an exception.  When the
+Reverend Mr. Cauvin and his associates burned my distinguished
+scientific brother,--he was burned with green fagots, which made it
+rather slow and painful,--it appears to me they were in a state of
+religious barbarism.  The dogmas of such people about the Father of
+Mankind and his creatures are of no more account in my opinion than
+those of a council of Aztecs.  If a man picks your pocket, do you not
+consider him thereby disqualified to pronounce any authoritative
+opinion on matters of ethics?  If a man hangs my ancient female
+relatives for sorcery, as they did in this neighborhood a little
+while ago, or burns my instructor for not believing as he does, I
+care no more for his religious edicts than I should for those of any
+other barbarian.
+
+Of course, a barbarian may hold many true opinions; but when the
+ideas of the healing art, of the administration of justice, of
+Christian love, could not exclude systematic poisoning, judicial
+duelling, and murder for opinion's sake, I do not see how we can
+trust the verdict of that time relating to any subject which involves
+the primal instincts violated in these abominations and absurdities.
+--What if we are even now in a state of semi-barbarism?
+
+
+[This physician believes we "are even now in a state of semi-
+barbarism": invasive procedures for the prolongation of death rather
+than prolongation of life; "faith",as slimly based as medieval faith
+in minute differences between control and treated groups; statistical
+manipulation to prove a prejudice.  Medicine has a good deal to
+answer for!  D.W.]
+
+
+Perhaps some think we ought not to talk at table about such things.
+--I am not so sure of that.  Religion and government appear to me the
+two subjects which of all others should belong to the common talk of
+people who enjoy the blessings of freedom.  Think, one moment.  The
+earth is a great factory-wheel, which, at every revolution on its
+axis, receives fifty thousand raw souls and turns off nearly the same
+number worked up more or less completely.  There must be somewhere a
+population of two hundred thousand million, perhaps ten or a hundred
+times as many, earth-born intelligences.  Life, as we call it, is
+nothing but the edge of the boundless ocean of existence where it
+comes on soundings.  In this view, I do not see anything so fit to
+talk about, or half so interesting, as that which relates to the
+innumerable majority of our fellow-creatures, the dead-living, who
+are hundreds of thousands to one of the live-living, and with whom we
+all potentially belong, though we have got tangled for the present in
+some parcels of fibrine, albumen, and phosphates, that keep us on the
+minority side of the house.  In point of fact, it is one of the many
+results of Spiritualism to make the permanent destiny of the race a
+matter of common reflection and discourse, and a vehicle for the
+prevailing disbelief of the Middle-Age doctrines on the subject.  I
+cannot help thinking, when I remember how many conversations my
+friend and myself have sported, that it would be very extraordinary,
+if there were no mention of that class of subjects which involves all
+that we have and all that we hope, not merely for ourselves, but for
+the dear people whom we love best,--noble men, pure and lovely women,
+ingenuous children, about the destiny of nine tenths of whom you know
+the opinions that would have been taught by those old man-roasting,
+woman-strangling dogmatists.--However, I fought this matter with one
+of our boarders the other day, and I am going to report the
+conversation.
+
+The divinity-student came down, one morning, looking rather more
+serious than usual.  He said little at breakfast-time, but lingered
+after the others, so that I, who am apt to be long at the table,
+found myself alone with him.
+
+When the rest were all gone, he turned his chair round towards mine,
+and began.
+
+I am afraid,--he said,--you express yourself a little too freely on a
+most important class of subjects.  Is there not danger in introducing
+discussions or allusions relating to matters of religion into common
+discourse?
+
+Danger to what?--I asked.
+
+Danger to truth,--he replied, after a slight pause.
+
+I didn't know Truth was such an invalid,' I said.--How long is it
+since she could only take the air in a close carriage, with a
+gentleman in a black coat on the box?  Let me tell you a story,
+adapted to young persons, but which won't hurt older ones.
+
+--There was a very little boy who had one of those balloons you may
+have seen, which are filled with light gas, and are held by a string
+to keep them from running off in aeronautic voyages on their own
+account.  This little boy had a naughty brother, who said to him, one
+day,--Brother, pull down your balloon, so that I can look at it and
+take hold of it.  Then the little boy pulled it down.  Now the
+naughty brother had a sharp pin in his hand, and he thrust it into
+the balloon, and all the gas oozed out, so that there was nothing
+left but a shrivelled skin.
+
+One evening, the little boy's father called him to the window to see
+the moon, which pleased him very much; but presently he said,--
+Father, do not pull the string and bring down the moon, for my
+naughty brother will prick it, and then it will all shrivel up and we
+shall not see it any more.
+
+Then his father laughed, and told him how the moon had been shining a
+good while, and would shine a good while longer, and that all we
+could do was to keep our windows clean, never letting the dust get
+too thick on them, and especially to keep our eyes open, but that we
+could not pull the moon down with a string, nor prick it with a pin.
+--Mind you this, too, the moon is no man's private property, but is
+seen from a good many parlor-windows.
+
+--Truth is tough.  It will not break, like a bubble, at a touch; nay,
+you may kick it about all day, like a football, and it will be round
+and full at evening.  Does not Mr. Bryant say, that Truth gets well
+if she is run over by a locomotive, while Error dies of lockjaw if
+she scratches her finger?  [Would that this was so:--error,
+superstition, mysticism, authoritarianism, pseudo-science all have a
+tenacity that survives inexplicably.  D.W.]  I never heard that a
+mathematician was alarmed for the safety of a demonstrated
+proposition.  I think, generally, that fear of open discussion
+implies feebleness of inward conviction, and great sensitiveness to
+the expression of individual opinion is a mark of weakness.
+
+--I am not so much afraid for truth,--said the divinity-student,--as
+for the conceptions of truth in the minds of persons not accustomed
+to judge wisely the opinions uttered before them.
+
+Would you, then, banish all allusions to matters of this nature from
+the society of people who come together habitually?
+
+I would be very careful in introducing them,--said the divinity-
+student.
+
+Yes, but friends of yours leave pamphlets in people's entries, to be
+picked up by nervous misses and hysteric housemaids, full of
+doctrines these people do not approve.  Some of your friends stop
+little children in the street, and give them books, which their
+parents, who have had them baptized into the Christian fold and give
+them what they consider proper religious instruction, do not think
+fit for them.  One would say it was fair enough to talk about matters
+thus forced upon people's attention.
+
+The divinity-student could not deny that this was what might be
+called opening the subject to the discussion of intelligent people.
+
+But,--he said,--the greatest objection is this, that persons who have
+not made a professional study of theology are not competent to speak
+on such subjects.  Suppose a minister were to undertake to express
+opinions on medical subjects, for instance, would you not think he
+was going beyond his province?
+
+I laughed,--for I remembered John Wesley's "sulphur and
+supplication," and so many other cases where ministers had meddled
+with medicine,--sometimes well and sometimes ill, but, as a general
+rule, with a tremendous lurch to quackery, owing to their very loose
+way of admitting evidence,--that I could not help being amused.
+
+I beg your pardon,--I said,--I do not wish to be impolite, but I was
+thinking of their certificates to patent medicines.  Let us look at
+this matter.
+
+If a minister had attended lectures on the theory and practice of
+medicine, delivered by those who had studied it most deeply, for
+thirty or forty years, at the rate of from fifty to one hundred a
+year,--if he had been constantly reading and hearing read the most
+approved text-books on the subject,--if he had seen medicine actually
+practised according to different methods, daily, for the same length
+of time,--I should think, that if a person of average understanding,
+he was entitled to express an opinion on the subject of medicine, or
+else that his instructors were a set of ignorant and incompetent
+charlatans.
+
+If, before a medical practitioner would allow me to enjoy the full
+privileges of the healing art, he expected me to affirm my belief in
+a considerable number of medical doctrines, drugs, and formulae, I
+should think that he thereby implied my right to discuss the same,
+and my ability to do so, if I knew how to express myself in English.
+
+Suppose, for instance, the Medical Society should refuse to give us
+an opiate, or to set a broken limb, until we had signed our belief in
+a certain number of propositions,--of which we will say this is the
+first:
+
+I.  All men's teeth are naturally in a state of total decay or
+caries, and, therefore, no man can bite until every one of them is
+extracted and a new set is inserted according to the principles of
+dentistry adopted by this Society.
+
+I, for one, should want to discuss that before signing my name to it,
+and I should say this:--Why, no, that is n't true.  There are a good
+many bad teeth, we all know, but a great many more good ones.  You
+must n't trust the dentists; they are all the time looking at the
+people who have bad teeth, and such as are suffering from toothache.
+The idea that you must pull out every one of every nice young man and
+young woman's natural teeth!  Poh, poh!  Nobody believes that.  This
+tooth must be straightened, that must be filled with gold, and this
+other perhaps extracted, but it must be a very rare case, if they are
+all so bad as to require extraction; and if they are, don't blame the
+poor soul for it!  Don't tell us, as some old dentists used to, that
+everybody not only always has every tooth in his head good for
+nothing, but that he ought to have his head cut off as a punishment
+for that misfortune!  No, I can't sign Number One.  Give us Number
+Two.
+
+II.  We hold that no man can be well who does not agree with our
+views of the efficacy of calomel, and who does not take the doses of
+it prescribed in our tables, as there directed.
+
+To which I demur, questioning why it should be so, and get for answer
+the two following:
+
+III.  Every man who does not take our prepared calomel, as prescribed
+by us in our Constitution and By-Laws, is and must be a mass of
+disease from head to foot; it being self-evident that he is
+simultaneously affected with Apoplexy, Arthritis, Ascites, Asphyxia,
+and Atrophy; with Borborygmus, Bronchitis, and Bulimia; with
+Cachexia, Carcinoma, and Cretinismus; and so on through the alphabet,
+to Xerophthahnia and Zona, with all possible and incompatible
+diseases which are necessary to make up a totally morbid state; and
+he will certainly die, if he does not take freely of our prepared
+calomel, to be obtained only of one of our authorized agents.
+
+IV.  No man shall be allowed to take our prepared calomel who does
+not give in his solemn adhesion to each and all of the above-named
+and the following propositions (from ten to a hundred) and show his
+mouth to certain of our apothecaries, who have not studied dentistry,
+to examine whether all his teeth have been extracted and a new set
+inserted according to our regulations.
+
+Of course, the doctors have a right to say we sha'n't have any
+rhubarb, if we don't sign their articles, and that, if, after signing
+them, we express doubts (in public), about any of them, they will cut
+us off from our jalap and squills,--but then to ask a fellow not to
+discuss the propositions before he signs them is what I should call
+boiling it down a little too strong!
+
+If we understand them, why can't we discuss them?  If we can't
+understand them, because we have n't taken a medical degree, what the
+Father of Lies do they ask us to sign them for?
+
+Just so with the graver profession.  Every now and then some of its
+members seem to lose common sense and common humanity.  The laymen
+have to keep setting the divines right constantly.  Science, for
+instance,--in other words, knowledge,--is not the enemy of religion;
+for, if so, then religion would mean ignorance: But it is often the
+antagonist of school-divinity.
+
+Everybody knows the story of early astronomy and the school-divines.
+Come down a little later, Archbishop Usher, a very learned Protestant
+prelate, tells us that the world was created on Sunday, the twenty-
+third of October, four thousand and four years before the birth of
+Christ.  Deluge, December 7th, two thousand three hundred and forty-
+eight years B. C.  Yes, and the earth stands on an elephant, and the
+elephant on a tortoise.  One statement is as near the truth as the
+other.
+
+Again, there is nothing so brutalizing to some natures as moral
+surgery.  I have often wondered that Hogarth did not add one more
+picture to his four stages of Cruelty.  Those wretched fools,
+reverend divines and others, who were strangling men and women for
+imaginary crimes a little more than a century ago among us, were set
+right by a layman, and very angry it made them to have him meddle.
+
+The good people of Northampton had a very remarkable man for their
+clergyman,--a man with a brain as nicely adjusted for certain
+mechanical processes as Babbage's calculating machine.  The
+commentary of the laymen on the preaching and practising of Jonathan
+Edwards was, that, after twenty-three years of endurance, they turned
+him out by a vote of twenty to one, and passed a resolve that he
+should never preach for them again.  A man's logical and analytical
+adjustments are of little consequence, compared to his primary
+relations with Nature and truth: and people have sense enough to find
+it out in the long ran; they know what "logic" is worth.
+
+In that miserable delusion referred to above, the reverend Aztecs and
+Fijians argued rightly enough from their premises, no doubt, for many
+men can do this.  But common sense and common humanity were
+unfortunately left out from their premises, and a layman had to
+supply them.  A hundred more years and many of the barbarisms still
+lingering among us will, of course, have disappeared like witch-
+hanging.  But people are sensitive now, as they were then.  You will
+see by this extract that the Rev. Cotton Mather did not like
+intermeddling with his business very well.
+
+"Let the Levites of the Lord keep close to their Instructions," he
+says, "and God will smite thro' the loins of those that rise up
+against them.  I will report unto you a Thing which many Hundreds
+among us know to be true.  The Godly Minister of a certain Town in
+Connecticut, when he had occasion to be absent on a Lord's Day from
+his Flock, employ'd an honest Neighbour of some small Talents for a
+Mechanick, to read a Sermon out of some good Book unto 'em.  This
+Honest, whom they ever counted also a Pious Man, had so much conceit
+of his Talents, that instead of Reading a Sermon appointed, he to the
+Surprize of the People, fell to preaching one of his own.  For his
+Text he took these Words, 'Despise not Prophecyings'; and in his
+Preachment he betook himself to bewail the Envy of the Clergy in the
+Land, in that they did not wish all the Lord's People to be Prophets,
+and call forth Private Brethren publickly to prophesie.  While he was
+thus in the midst of his Exercise, God smote him with horrible
+Madness; he was taken ravingly distracted; the People were forc'd
+with violent Hands to carry him home.  I will not mention his Name:
+He was reputed a Pious Man."--This is one of Cotton Mather's
+"Remarkable Judgments of God, on Several Sorts of Offenders,"--and
+the next cases referred to are the Judgments on the "Abominable
+Sacrilege" of not paying the Ministers' Salaries.
+
+This sort of thing does n't do here and now, you see, my young
+friend!  We talk about our free institutions;--they are nothing but a
+coarse outside machinery to secure the freedom of individual thought.
+The President of the United States is only the engine driver of our
+broad-gauge mail-train; and every honest, independent thinker has a
+seat in the first-class cars behind him.
+
+--There is something in what you say,--replied the divinity-student;-
+-and yet it seems to me there are places and times where disputed
+doctrines of religion should not be introduced.  You would not attack
+a church dogma--say Total Depravity--in a lyceum-lecture, for
+instance?
+
+Certainly not; I should choose another place,--I answered.--But,
+mind you, at this table I think it is very different.  I shall
+express my ideas on any subject I like.  The laws of the lecture-
+room, to which my friends and myself are always amenable, do not hold
+here.  I shall not often give arguments, but frequently opinions,--I
+trust with courtesy and propriety, but, at any rate, with such
+natural forms of expression as it has pleased the Almighty to bestow
+upon me.
+
+A man's opinions, look you, are generally of much more value than his
+arguments.  These last are made by his brain, and perhaps he does not
+believe the proposition they tend to prove,--as is often the case
+with paid lawyers; but opinions are formed by our whole nature,--
+brain, heart, instinct, brute life, everything all our experience has
+shaped for us by contact with the whole circle of our being.
+
+--There is one thing more,--said the divinity-student,--that I wished
+to speak of; I mean that idea of yours, expressed some time since, of
+depolarizing the text of sacred books in order to judge them fairly.
+May I ask why you do not try the experiment yourself?
+
+Certainly,--I replied,--if it gives you any pleasure to ask foolish
+questions.  I think the ocean telegraph-wire ought to be laid and
+will be laid, but I don't know that you have any right to ask me to
+go and lay it.  But, for that matter, I have heard a good deal of
+Scripture depolarized in and out of the pulpit.  I heard the Rev.
+Mr. F. once depolarize the story of the Prodigal Son in Park-Street
+Church.  Many years afterwards, I heard him repeat the same or a
+similar depolarized version in Rome, New York.  I heard an admirable
+depolarization of the story of the young man who "had great
+possessions" from the Rev.  Mr. H.  in another pulpit, and felt that
+I had never half understood it before.  All paraphrases are more or
+less perfect depolarizations.  But I tell you this: the faith of our
+Christian community is not robust enough to bear the turning of our
+most sacred language into its depolarized equivalents.  You have only
+to look back to Dr. Channing's famous Baltimore discourse and
+remember the shrieks of blasphemy with which it was greeted, to
+satisfy yourself on this point.  Time, time only, can gradually wean
+us from our Epeolatry, or word-worship, by spiritualizing our ideas
+of the thing signified.  Man is an idolater or symbol-worshipper by
+nature, which, of course, is no fault of his; but sooner or later all
+his local and temporary symbols must be ground to powder, like the
+golden calf,--word-images as well as metal and wooden ones.  Rough
+work, iconoclasm,--but the only way to get at truth.  It is, indeed,
+as that quaint and rare old discourse, "A Summons for Sleepers," hath
+it, "no doubt a thankless office, and a verie unthriftie occupation;
+veritas odium parit, truth never goeth without a scratcht face; he
+that will be busie with voe vobis, let him looke shortly for coram
+nobas."
+
+The very aim and end of our institutions is just this: that we may
+think what we like and say what we think.
+
+--Think what we like!--said the divinity-student;--think what we
+like!  What! against all human and divine authority?
+
+Against all human versions of its own or any other authority.  At our
+own peril always, if we do not like the right,--but not at the risk
+of being hanged and quartered for political heresy, or broiled on
+green fagots for ecclesiastical treason!  Nay, we have got so far,
+that the very word heresy has fallen into comparative disuse among
+us.
+
+And now, my young friend, let-us shake hands and stop our discussion,
+which we will not make a quarrel.  I trust you know, or will learn, a
+great many things in your profession which we common scholars do not
+know; but mark this: when the common people of New England stop
+talking politics and theology, it will be because they have got an
+Emperor to teach them the one, and a Pope to teach them the other!
+
+That was the end of my long conference with the divinity-student.
+The next morning we got talking a little on the same subject, very
+good-naturedly, as people return to a matter they have talked out.
+
+You must look to yourself,--said the divinity-student,--if your
+democratic notions get into print.  You will be fired into from all
+quarters.
+
+If it were only a bullet, with the marksman's name on it!--I said.
+--I can't stop to pick out the peep-shot of the anonymous scribblers.
+
+Right, Sir!  right!--said the Little Gentleman.  The scamps!  I know
+the fellows.  They can't give fifty cents to one of the Antipodes,
+but they must have it jingled along through everybody's palms all the
+way, till it reaches him,--and forty cents of it gets spilt, like the
+water out of the fire-buckets passed along a "lane" at a fire;--but
+when it comes to anonymous defamation, putting lies into people's
+mouths, and then advertising those people through the country as the
+authors of them,--oh, then it is that they let not their left hand
+know what their right hand doeth!
+
+I don't like Ehud's style of doing business, Sir.  He comes along
+with a very sanctimonious look, Sir, with his "secret errand unto
+thee," and his "message from God unto thee," and then pulls out his
+hidden knife with that unsuspected hand of his,---(the Little
+Gentleman lifted his clenched left hand with the blood-red jewel on
+the ring-finger,)--and runs it, blade and haft, into a man's stomach!
+Don't meddle with these fellows, Sir.  They are read mostly by
+persons whom you would not reach, if you were to write ever so much.
+Let 'em alone.  A man whose opinions are not attacked is beneath
+contempt.
+
+I hope so,--I said.--I got three pamphlets and innumerable squibs
+flung at my head for attacking one of the pseudo-sciences, in former
+years.  When, by the permission of Providence, I held up to the
+professional public the damnable facts connected with the conveyance
+of poison from one young mother's chamber to another's,--for doing
+which humble office I desire to be thankful that I have lived, though
+nothing else good should ever come of my life,--I had to bear the
+sneers of those whose position I had assailed, and, as I believe,
+have at last demolished, so that nothing but the ghosts of dead women
+stir among the ruins.--What would you do, if the folks without names
+kept at you, trying to get a San Benito on to your shoulders that
+would fit you?--Would you stand still in fly-time, or would you give
+a kick now and then?
+
+Let 'em bite!--said the Little Gentleman,--let 'em bite!  It makes
+'em hungry to shake 'em off, and they settle down again as thick as
+ever and twice as savage.  Do you know what meddling with the folks
+without names, as you call 'em, is like?--It is like riding at the
+quintaan.  You run full tilt at the board, but the board is on a
+pivot, with a bag of sand on an arm that balances it.  The board
+gives way as soon as you touch it; and before you have got by, the
+bag of sand comes round whack on the back of your neck.  "Ananias,"
+for instance, pitches into your lecture, we will say, in some paper
+taken by the people in your kitchen.  Your servants get saucy and
+negligent.  If their newspaper calls you names, they need not be so
+particular about shutting doors softly or boiling potatoes.  So you
+lose your temper, and come out in an article which you think is going
+to finish "Ananias," proving him a booby who doesn't know enough to
+understand even a lyceum-lecture, or else a person that tells lies.
+Now you think you 've got him!  Not so fast.  "Ananias" keeps still
+and winks to "Shimei," and "Shimei" comes out in the paper which they
+take in your neighbor's kitchen, ten times worse than t'other fellow.
+If you meddle with "Shimei," he steps out, and next week appears
+"Rab-shakeh," an unsavory wretch; and now, at any rate, you find out
+what good sense there was in Hezekiah's "Answer him not."--No, no,--
+keep your temper.--So saying, the Little Gentleman doubled his left
+fist and looked at it as if he should like to hit something or
+somebody a most pernicious punch with it.
+
+Good!--said I.--Now let me give you some axioms I have arrived at,
+after seeing something of a great many kinds of good folks.
+
+--Of a hundred people of each of the different leading religious
+sects, about the same proportion will be safe and pleasant persons to
+deal and to live with.
+
+--There are, at least, three real saints among the women to one among
+the men, in every denomination.
+
+--The spiritual standard of different classes I would reckon thus:
+
+1.  The comfortably rich.
+2.  The decently comfortable.
+3.  The very rich, who are apt to be irreligious.
+4.  The very poor, who are apt to be immoral.
+
+--The cut nails of machine-divinity may be driven in, but they won't
+clinch.
+
+--The arguments which the greatest of our schoolmen could not refute
+were two: the blood in men's veins, and the milk in women's breasts.
+
+--Humility is the first of the virtues--for other people.
+
+--Faith always implies the disbelief of a lesser fact in favor of a
+greater.  A little mind often sees the unbelief, without seeing the
+belief of a large one.
+
+The Poor Relation had been fidgeting about and working her mouth
+while all this was going on.  She broke out in speech at this point.
+
+I hate to hear folks talk so.  I don't see that you are any better
+than a heathen.
+
+I wish I were half as good as many heathens have been,--I said.
+--Dying for a principle seems to me a higher degree of virtue than
+scolding for it; and the history of heathen races is full of
+instances where men have laid down their lives for the love of their
+kind, of their country, of truth, nay, even for simple manhood's
+sake, or to show their obedience or fidelity.  What would not such
+beings have done for the souls of men, for the Christian
+commonwealth, for the King of Kings, if they had lived in days of
+larger light?  Which seems to you nearest heaven, Socrates drinking
+his hemlock, Regulus going back to the enemy's camp, or that old New
+England divine sitting comfortably in his study and chuckling over
+his conceit of certain poor women, who had been burned to death in
+his own town, going "roaring out of one fire into another"?
+
+I don't believe he said any such thing,--replied the Poor Relation.
+
+It is hard to believe,--said I,--but it is true for all that.  In
+another hundred years it will be as incredible that men talked as we
+sometimes hear them now.
+
+Pectus est quod facit theologum.  The heart makes the theologian.
+Every race, every civilization, either has a new revelation of its
+own or a new interpretation of an old one.  Democratic America, has a
+different humanity from feudal Europe, and so must have a new
+divinity.  See, for one moment, how intelligence reacts on our
+faiths.  The Bible was a divining-book to our ancestors, and is so
+still in the hands of some of the vulgar.  The Puritans went to the
+Old Testament for their laws; the Mormons go to it for their
+patriarchal institution.  Every generation dissolves something new
+and precipitates something once held in solution from that great
+storehouse of temporary and permanent truths.
+
+You may observe this: that the conversation of intelligent men of the
+stricter sects is strangely in advance of the formula that belong to
+their organizations.  So true is this, that I have doubts whether a
+large proportion of them would not have been rather pleased than
+offended, if they could have overheard our, talk.  For, look you, I
+think there is hardly a professional teacher who will not in private
+conversation allow a large part of what we have said, though it may
+frighten him in print; and I know well what an under-current of
+secret sympathy gives vitality to those poor words of mine which
+sometimes get a hearing.
+
+I don't mind the exclamation of any old stager who drinks Madeira
+worth from two to six Bibles a bottle, and burns, according to his
+own premises, a dozen souls a year in the cigars with which he
+muddles his brains.  But as for the good and true and intelligent men
+whom we see all around us, laborious, self-denying, hopeful,
+helpful,--men who know that the active mind of the century is tending
+more and more to the two poles, Rome and Reason, the sovereign church
+or the free soul, authority or personality, God in us or God in our
+masters, and that, though a man may by accident stand half-way
+between these two points, he must look one way or the other,--I don't
+believe they would take offence at anything I have reported of our
+late conversation.
+
+But supposing any one do take offence at first sight, let him look
+over these notes again, and see whether he is quite sure he does not
+agree with most of these things that were said amongst us.  If he
+agrees with most of them, let him be patient with an opinion he does
+not accept, or an expression or illustration a little too vivacious.
+I don't know that I shall report any more conversations on these
+topics; but I do insist on the right to express a civil opinion on
+this class of subjects without giving offence, just when and where I
+please,---unless, as in the lecture-room, there is an implied
+contract to keep clear of doubtful matters.  You did n't think a man
+could sit at a breakfast-table doing nothing but making puns every
+morning for a year or two, and never give a thought to the two
+thousand of his fellow-creatures who are passing into another state
+during every hour that he sits talking and laughing.  Of course, the
+one matter that a real human being cares for is what is going to
+become of them and of him.  And the plain truth is, that a good many
+people are saying one thing about it and believing another.
+
+--How do I know that?  Why, I have known and loved to talk with good
+people, all the way from Rome to Geneva in doctrine, as long as I can
+remember.  Besides, the real religion of the world comes from women
+much more than from men,--from mothers most of all, who carry the key
+of our souls in their bosoms.  It is in their hearts that the
+"sentimental" religion some people are so fond of sneering at has its
+source.  The sentiment of love, the sentiment of maternity, the
+sentiment of the paramount obligation of the parent to the child as
+having called it into existence, enhanced just in proportion to the
+power and knowledge of the one and the weakness and ignorance of the
+other,--these are the "sentiments" that have kept our soulless
+systems from driving men off to die in holes like those that riddle
+the sides of the hill opposite the Monastery of St. Saba, where the
+miserable victims of a falsely-interpreted religion starved and
+withered in their delusion.
+
+I have looked on the face of a saintly woman this very day, whose
+creed many dread and hate, but whose life is lovely and noble beyond
+all praise.  When I remember the bitter words I have heard spoken
+against her faith, by men who have an Inquisition which
+excommunicates those who ask to leave their communion in peace, and
+an Index Expurgatorius on which this article may possibly have the
+honor of figuring,--and, far worse than these, the reluctant,
+pharisaical confession, that it might perhaps be possible that one
+who so believed should be accepted of the Creator,--and then recall
+the sweet peace and love that show through all her looks, the price
+of untold sacrifices and labors, and again recollect how thousands of
+women, filled with the same spirit, die, without a murmur, to earthly
+life, die to their own names even, that they may know nothing but
+their holy duties,--while men are torturing and denouncing their
+fellows, and while we can hear day and night the clinking of the
+hammers that are trying, like the brute forces in the "Prometheus,"
+to rivet their adamantine wedges right through the breast of human
+nature,--I have been ready to believe that we have even now a new
+revelation, and the name of its Messiah is WOMAN!
+
+--I should be sorry,--I remarked, a day or two afterwards, to the
+divinity-student,--if anything I said tended in any way to foster any
+jealousy between the professions, or to throw disrespect upon that
+one on whose counsel and sympathies almost all of us lean in our
+moments of trial.  But we are false to our new conditions of life, if
+we do not resolutely maintain our religious as well as our political
+freedom, in the face of any and all supposed monopolies.  Certain men
+will, of course, say two things, if we do not take their views:
+first, that we don't know anything about these matters; and,
+secondly, that we are not so good as they are.  They have a polarized
+phraseology for saying these things, but it comes to precisely that.
+To which it may be answered, in the first place, that we have good
+authority for saying that even babes and sucklings know something;
+and, in the second, that, if there is a mote or so to be removed from
+our premises, the courts and councils of the last few years have
+found beams enough in some other quarters to build a church that
+would hold all the good people in Boston and have sticks enough left
+to make a bonfire for all the heretics.
+
+As to that terrible depolarizing process of mine, of which we were
+talking the other day, I will give you a specimen of one way of
+managing it, if you like.  I don't believe it will hurt you or
+anybody.  Besides, I had a great deal rather finish our talk with
+pleasant images and gentle words than with sharp sayings, which will
+only afford a text, if anybody repeats them, for endless relays of
+attacks from Messrs.  Ananias, Shimei, and Rabshakeh.
+
+[I must leave such gentry, if any of them show themselves, in the
+hands of my clerical friends, many of whom are ready to stand up for
+the rights of the laity,--and to those blessed souls, the good women,
+to whom this version of the story of a mother's hidden hopes and
+tender anxieties is dedicated by their peaceful and loving servant.]
+
+
+
+          A MOTHER'S SECRET.
+
+How sweet the sacred legend--if unblamed
+In my slight verse such holy things are named--
+Of Mary's secret hours of hidden joy,
+Silent, but pondering on her wondrous boy!
+Ave, Maria!  Pardon, if I wrong
+Those heavenly words that shame my earthly song!
+
+The choral host had closed the angel's strain
+Sung to the midnight watch on Bethlehem's plain;
+And now the shepherds, hastening on their way,
+Sought the still hamlet where the Infant lay.
+They passed the fields that gleaning Ruth toiled O'er,
+They saw afar the ruined threshing-floor
+Where Moab's daughter, homeless and forlorn,
+Found Boaz slumbering by his heaps of corn;
+And some remembered how the holy scribe,
+Skilled in the lore of every jealous tribe,
+Traced the warm blood of Jesse's royal son
+To that fair alien, bravely wooed and won.
+So fared they on to seek the promised sign
+That marked the anointed heir of David's line.
+
+At last, by forms of earthly semblance led,
+They found the crowded inn, the oxen's shed.
+No pomp was there, no glory shone around
+On the coarse straw that strewed the reeking ground;
+One dim retreat a flickering torch betrayed,
+In that poor cell the Lord of Life was laid!
+
+The wondering shepherds told their breathless tale
+Of the bright choir that woke the sleeping vale;
+Told how the skies with sudden glory flamed;
+Told how the shining multitude proclaimed
+"Joy, joy to earth!  Behold the hallowed morn!
+In David's city Christ the Lord is born!
+'Glory to God!' let angels shout on high,
+'Good-will to men!' the listening Earth reply!"
+
+They spoke with hurried words and accents wild;
+Calm in his cradle slept the heavenly child.
+No trembling word the mother's joy revealed,
+One sigh of rapture, and her lips were sealed;
+Unmoved she saw the rustic train depart,
+But kept their words to ponder in her heart.
+
+Twelve years had passed; the boy was fair and tall,
+Growing in wisdom, finding grace with all.
+The maids of Nazareth, as they trooped to fill
+Their balanced urns beside the mountain-rill,
+The gathered matrons, as they sat and spun,
+Spoke in soft words of Joseph's quiet son.
+No voice had reached the Galilean vale
+Of star-led kings or awe-struck shepherds' tale;
+In the meek, studious child they only saw
+The future Rabbi, learned in Israel's law.
+
+So grew the boy; and now the feast was near,
+When at the holy place the tribes appear.
+Scarce had the home-bred child of Nazareth seen
+Beyond the hills that girt the village-green,
+Save when at midnight, o'er the star-lit sands,
+Snatched from the steel of Herod's murdering bands,
+A babe, close-folded to his mother's breast,
+Through Edom's wilds he sought the sheltering West.
+
+Then Joseph spake: "Thy boy hath largely grown;
+Weave him fine raiment, fitting to be shown;
+Fair robes beseem the pilgrim, as the priest
+Goes he not with us to the holy feast?"
+
+And Mary culled the flaxen fibres white;
+Till eve she spun; she spun till morning light.
+The thread was twined; its parting meshes through
+From hand to hand her restless shuttle flew,
+Till the full web was wound upon the beam,
+Love's curious toil,--a vest without a seam!
+
+They reach the holy place, fulfil the days
+To solemn feasting given, and grateful praise.
+At last they turn, and far Moriah's height
+Melts in the southern sky and fades from sight.
+All day the dusky caravan has flowed
+In devious trails along the winding road,
+(For many a step their homeward path attends,
+And all the sons of Abraham are as friends.)
+Evening has come,--the hour of rest and joy;
+Hush! hush!--that whisper,-"Where is Mary's boy?"
+
+O weary hour!  O aching days that passed
+Filled with strange fears, each wilder than the last:
+The soldier's lance,--the fierce centurion's sword,
+The crushing wheels that whirl some Roman lord,
+The midnight crypt that suck's the captive's breath,
+The blistering sun on Hinnom's vale of death!
+
+Thrice on his cheek had rained the morning light,
+Thrice on his lips the mildewed kiss of night,
+Crouched by some porphyry column's shining plinth,
+Or stretched beneath the odorous terebinth.
+
+At last, in desperate mood, they sought once more
+The Temple's porches, searched in vain before;
+They found him seated with the ancient men,
+The grim old rufflers of the tongue and pen,
+Their bald heads glistening as they clustered near;
+Their gray beards slanting as they turned to hear,
+Lost in half-envious wonder and surprise
+That lips so fresh should utter words so wise.
+
+And Mary said,--as one who, tried too long,
+Tells all her grief and half her sense of wrong,
+"What is this thoughtless thing which thou hast done?
+Lo, we have sought thee sorrowing, O my son!"
+Few words he spake, and scarce of filial tone,
+Strange words, their sense a mystery yet unknown;
+Then turned with them and left the holy hill,
+To all their mild commands obedient still.
+
+The tale was told to Nazareth's sober men,
+And Nazareth's matrons told it oft again;
+The maids retold it at the fountain's side;
+The youthful shepherds doubted or denied;
+It passed around among the listening friends,
+With all that fancy adds and fiction fends,
+Till newer marvels dimmed the young renown
+Of Joseph's son, who talked the Rabbis down.
+
+But Mary, faithful to its lightest word,
+Kept in her heart the sayings she had heard,
+Till the dread morning rent the Temple's veil,
+And shuddering Earth confirmed the wondrous tale.
+
+Youth fades; love droops; the leaves of friendship fall;
+A mother's secret hope outlives them all.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+You don't look so dreadful poor in the face as you did a while back.
+Bloated some, I expect.
+
+This was the cheerful and encouraging and elegant remark with which
+the Poor Relation greeted the divinity-student one morning.
+
+Of course every good man considers it a great sacrifice on his part
+to continue living in this transitory, unsatisfactory, and
+particularly unpleasant world.  This is so much a matter of course,
+that I was surprised to see the divinity-student change color.  He
+took a look at a small and uncertain-minded glass which hung slanting
+forward over the chapped sideboard.  The image it returned to him had
+the color of a very young pea somewhat overboiled.  The scenery of a
+long tragic drama flashed through his mind as the lightning-express-
+train whishes by a station: the gradual dismantling process of
+disease; friends looking on, sympathetic, but secretly chuckling over
+their own stomachs of iron and lungs of caoutchouc; nurses attentive,
+but calculating their crop, and thinking how soon it will be ripe, so
+that they can go to your neighbor, who is good for a year or so
+longer; doctors assiduous, but giving themselves a mental shake, as
+they go out of your door, which throws off your particular grief as a
+duck sheds a raindrop from his oily feathers; undertakers solemn, but
+happy; then the great subsoil cultivator, who plants, but never looks
+for fruit in his garden; then the stone-cutter, who puts your name on
+the slab which has been waiting for you ever since the birds or
+beasts made their tracks on the new red sandstone; then the grass and
+the dandelions and the buttercups,----Earth saying to the mortal
+body, with her sweet symbolism, "You have scarred my bosom, but you
+are forgiven"; then a glimpse of the soul as a floating consciousness
+without very definite form or place, but dimly conceived of as an
+upright column of vapor or mist several times larger than life-size,
+so far as it could be said to have any size at all, wandering about
+and living a thin and half-awake life for want of good old-fashioned
+solid matter to come down upon with foot and fist,--in fact, having
+neither foot nor fist, nor conveniences for taking the sitting
+posture.
+
+And yet the divinity-student was a good Christian, and those heathen
+images which remind one of the childlike fancies of the dying Adrian
+were only the efforts of his imagination to give shape to the
+formless and position to the placeless.  Neither did his thoughts
+spread themselves out and link themselves as I have displayed them.
+They came confusedly into his mind like a heap of broken mosaics,--
+sometimes a part of the picture complete in itself, sometimes
+connected fragments, and sometimes only single severed stones.
+
+They did not diffuse a light of celestial joy over his countenance.
+On the contrary, the Poor Relation's remark turned him pale, as I
+have said; and when the terrible wrinkled and jaundiced looking-glass
+turned him green in addition, and he saw himself in it, it seemed to
+him as if it were all settled, and his book of life were to be shut
+not yet half-read, and go back to the dust of the under-ground
+archives.  He coughed a mild short cough, as if to point the
+direction in which his downward path was tending.  It was an honest
+little cough enough, so far as appearances went.  But coughs are
+ungrateful things.  You find one out in the cold, take it up and
+nurse it and make everything of it, dress it up warm, give it all
+sorts of balsams and other food it likes, and carry it round in your
+bosom as if it were a miniature lapdog.  And by-and-by its little
+bark grows sharp and savage, and--confound the thing!--you find it
+is a wolf's whelp that you have got there, and he is gnawing in the
+breast where he has been nestling so long.--The Poor Relation said
+that somebody's surrup was good for folks that were gettin' into a
+bad way.--The landlady had heard of desperate cases cured by cherry-
+pictorial.
+
+Whiskey's the fellah,--said the young man John.--Make it into punch,
+cold at dinner-time 'n' hot at bed-time.  I'll come up 'n' show you
+how to mix it.  Have n't any of you seen the wonderful fat man
+exhibitin' down in Hanover Street?
+
+Master Benjamin Franklin rushed into the dialogue with a breezy
+exclamation, that he had seen a great picter outside of the place
+where the fat man was exhibitin'.  Tried to get in at half-price, but
+the man at the door looked at his teeth and said he was more'n ten
+year old.
+
+It is n't two years,--said the young man John, since that fat fellah
+was exhibitin' here as the Livin' Skeleton.  Whiskey--that's what did
+it,--real Burbon's the stuff.  Hot water, sugar, 'n' jest a little
+shavin' of lemon-skin in it,--skin, mind you, none o' your juice;
+take it off thin,--shape of one of them flat curls the factory-girls
+wear on the sides of their foreheads.
+
+But I am a teetotaller,--said the divinity-student in a subdued
+tone;--not noticing the enormous length of the bow-string the young
+fellow had just drawn.
+
+He took up his hat and went out.
+
+I think you have worried that young man more than you meant,--I said.
+--I don't believe he will jump off one of the bridges, for he has too
+much principle; but I mean to follow him and see where he goes, for
+he looks as if his mind were made up to something.
+
+I followed him at a reasonable distance.  He walked doggedly along,
+looking neither to the right nor the left, turned into State Street,
+and made for a well-known Life-Insurance Office.  Luckily, the doctor
+was there and overhauled him on the spot.  There was nothing the
+matter with him, he said, and he could have his life insured as a
+sound one.  He came out in good spirits, and told me this soon after.
+
+This led me to make some remarks the next morning on the manners of
+well-bred and ill-bred people.
+
+I began,--The whole essence of true gentle-breeding (one does not
+like to say gentility) lies in the wish and the art to be agreeable.
+Good-breeding is surface-Christianity.  Every look, movement, tone,
+expression, subject of discourse, that may give pain to another is
+habitually excluded from conversational intercourse.  This is the
+reason why rich people are apt to be so much more agreeable than
+others.
+
+--I thought you were a great champion of equality,--said the discreet
+and severe lady who had accompanied our young friend, the Latin
+Tutor's daughter.
+
+I go politically for equality,--I said,--and socially for the
+quality.
+
+Who are the "quality,"--said the Model, etc., in a community like
+ours?
+
+I confess I find this question a little difficult to answer,--I said.
+--Nothing is better known than the distinction of social ranks which
+exists in every community, and nothing is harder to define.  The
+great gentlemen and ladies of a place are its real lords and masters
+and mistresses; they are the quality, whether in a monarchy or a
+republic; mayors and governors and generals and senators and ex-
+presidents are nothing to them.  How well we know this, and how
+seldom it finds a distinct expression!  Now I tell you truly, I
+believe in man as man, and I disbelieve in all distinctions except
+such as follow the natural lines of cleavage in a society which has
+crystallized according to its own true laws.  But the essence of
+equality is to be able to say the truth; and there is nothing more
+curious than these truths relating to the stratification of society.
+
+Of all the facts in this world that do not take hold of immortality,
+there is not one so intensely real, permanent, and engrossing as this
+of social position,--as you see by the circumstances that the core of
+all the great social orders the world has seen has been, and is
+still, for the most part, a privileged class of gentlemen and ladies
+arranged in a regular scale of precedence among themselves, but
+superior as a body to all else.
+
+Nothing but an ideal Christian equality, which we have been getting
+farther away from since the days of the Primitive Church, can prevent
+this subdivision of society into classes from taking place
+everywhere,--in the great centres of our republic as much as in old
+European monarchies.  Only there position is more absolutely
+hereditary,--here it is more completely elective.
+
+--Where is the election held? and what are the qualifications? and
+who are the electors?--said the Model.
+
+Nobody ever sees when the vote is taken; there never is a formal
+vote.  The women settle it mostly; and they know wonderfully well
+what is presentable, and what can't stand the blaze of the
+chandeliers and the critical eye and ear of people trained to know a
+staring shade in a ribbon, a false light in a jewel, an ill-bred
+tone, an angular movement, everything that betrays a coarse fibre and
+cheap training.  As a general thing, you do not get elegance short of
+two or three removes from the soil, out of which our best blood
+doubtless comes,--quite as good, no doubt, as if it came from those
+old prize-fighters with iron pots on their heads, to whom some great
+people are so fond of tracing their descent through a line of small
+artisans and petty shopkeepers whose veins have held "base" fluid
+enough to fill the Cloaca Maxima!
+
+Does not money go everywhere?--said the Model.
+
+Almost.  And with good reason.  For though there are numerous
+exceptions, rich people are, as I said, commonly altogether the most
+agreeable companions.  The influence of a fine house, graceful
+furniture, good libraries, well-ordered tables, trim servants, and,
+above all, a position so secure that one becomes unconscious of it,
+gives a harmony and refinement to the character and manners which we
+feel, if we cannot explain their charm.  Yet we can get at the reason
+of it by thinking a little.
+
+All these appliances are to shield the sensibility from disagreeable
+contacts, and to soothe it by varied natural and artificial
+influences.  In this way the mind, the taste, the feelings, grow
+delicate, just as the hands grow white and soft when saved from toil
+and incased in soft gloves.  The whole nature becomes subdued into
+suavity.  I confess I like the quality ladies better than the common
+kind even of literary ones.  They have n't read the last book,
+perhaps, but they attend better to you when you are talking to them.
+If they are never learned, they make up for it in tact and elegance.
+Besides, I think, on the whole, there is less self-assertion in
+diamonds than in dogmas.  I don't know where you will find a sweeter
+portrait of humility than in Esther, the poor play-girl of King
+Ahasuerus; yet Esther put on her royal apparel when she went before
+her lord.  I have no doubt she was a more gracious and agreeable
+person than Deborah, who judged the people and wrote the story of
+Sisera.  The wisest woman you talk with is ignorant of something
+that you know, but an elegant woman never forgets her elegance.
+
+Dowdyism is clearly an expression of imperfect vitality.  The
+highest fashion is intensely alive,--not alive necessarily to the
+truest and best things, but with its blood tingling, as it were, in
+all its extremities and to the farthest point of its surface, so
+that the feather in its bonnet is as fresh as the crest of a
+fighting-cock, and the rosette on its slipper as clean-cut and
+pimpant (pronounce it English fashion,--it is a good word) as a
+dahlia.  As a general rule, that society where flattery is acted is
+much more agreeable than that where it is spoken.  Don't you see
+why?  Attention and deference don't require you to make fine
+speeches expressing your sense of unworthiness (lies) and returning
+all the compliments paid you.  This is one reason.
+
+--A woman of sense ought to be above flattering any man,--said the
+Model.
+
+[My reflection.  Oh! oh! no wonder you did n't get married.  Served
+you right.]  My remark.  Surely, Madam,--if you mean by flattery
+telling people boldly to their faces that they are this or that,
+which they are not.  But a woman who does not carry about with her
+wherever she goes a halo of good feeling and desire to make
+everybody contented,--an atmosphere of grace, mercy, and peace, of
+at least six feet radius, which wraps every human being upon whom
+she voluntarily bestows her presence, and so flatters him with the
+comfortable thought that she is rather glad he is alive than
+otherwise, isn't worth the trouble of talking to, as a woman; she
+may do well enough to hold discussions with.
+
+--I don't think the Model exactly liked this.  She said,--a little
+spitefully, I thought,--that a sensible man might stand a little
+praise, but would of course soon get sick of it, if he were in the
+habit of getting much.
+
+Oh, yes,--I replied,--just as men get sick of tobacco.  It is
+notorious how apt they are to get tired of that vegetable.
+
+--That 's so!--said the young fellow John,--I've got tired of my
+cigars and burnt 'em all up.
+
+I am heartily glad to hear it,--said the Model,--I wish they were
+all disposed of in the same way.
+
+So do I,--said the young fellow John.
+
+Can't you get your friends to unite with you in committing those
+odious instruments of debauchery to the flames in which you have
+consumed your own?
+
+I wish I could,--said the young fellow John.
+
+It would be a noble sacrifice,--said the Model, and every American
+woman would be grateful to you.  Let us burn them all in a heap out
+in the yard.
+
+That a'n't my way,--said the young fellow John;--I burn 'em one 't'
+time,--little end in my mouth and big end outside.
+
+--I watched for the effect of this sudden change of programme, when
+it should reach the calm stillness of the Model's interior
+apprehension, as a boy watches for the splash of a stone which he
+has dropped into a well.  But before it had fairly reached the
+water, poor Iris, who had followed the conversation with a certain
+interest until it turned this sharp corner, (for she seems rather to
+fancy the young fellow John,) laughed out such a clear, loud laugh,
+that it started us all off, as the locust-cry of some full-throated
+soprano drags a multitudinous chorus after it.  It was plain that
+some dam or other had broken in the soul of this young girl, and she
+was squaring up old scores of laughter, out of which she had been
+cheated, with a grand flood of merriment that swept all before it.
+So we had a great laugh all round, in which the Model--who, if she
+had as many virtues as there are spokes to a wheel, all compacted
+with a personality as round and complete as its tire, yet wanted
+that one little addition of grace, which seems so small, and is as
+important as the linchpin in trundling over the rough ways of life--
+had not the tact to join.  She seemed to be "stuffy" about it, as
+the young fellow John said.  In fact, I was afraid the joke would
+have cost us both our new lady-boarders.  It had no effect, however,
+except, perhaps, to hasten the departure of the elder of the two,
+who could, on the whole, be spared.
+
+--I had meant to make this note of our conversation a text for a few
+axioms on the matter of breeding.  But it so happened, that, exactly
+at this point of my record, a very distinguished philosopher, whom
+several of our boarders and myself go to hear, and whom no doubt
+many of my readers follow habitually, treated this matter of
+manners.  Up to this point, if I have been so fortunate as to
+coincide with him in opinion, and so unfortunate as to try to
+express what he has more felicitously said, nobody is to blame; for
+what has been given thus far was all written before the lecture was
+delivered.  But what shall I do now?  He told us it was childish to
+lay down rules for deportment,--but he could not help laying down a
+few.
+
+Thus,--Nothing so vulgar as to be in a hurry.  True, but hard of
+application.  People with short legs step quickly, because legs are
+pendulums, and swing more times in a minute the shorter they are.
+Generally a natural rhythm runs through the whole organization:
+quick pulse, fast breathing, hasty speech, rapid trains of thought,
+excitable temper.  Stillness of person and steadiness of features
+are signal marks of good-breeding.  Vulgar persons can't sit still,
+or, at least, they must work their limbs or features.
+
+Talking of one's own ails and grievances.--Bad enough, but not so
+bad as insulting the person you talk with by remarking on his ill-
+looks, or appealing to notice any of his personal peculiarities.
+
+Apologizing.--A very desperate habit,--one that is rarely cured.
+Apology is only egotism wrong side out.  Nine times out of ten, the
+first thing a man's companion knows of his shortcoming is from his
+apology.  It is mighty presumptuous on your part to suppose your
+small failures of so much consequence that you must make a talk
+about them.
+
+Good dressing, quiet ways, low tones of voice, lips that can wait,
+and eyes that do not wander,--shyness of personalities, except in
+certain intimate communions,--to be light in hand in conversation,
+to have ideas, but to be able to make talk, if necessary, without
+them,--to belong to the company you are in, and not to yourself,--to
+have nothing in your dress or furniture so fine that you cannot
+afford to spoil it and get another like it, yet to preserve the
+harmonies, throughout your person and--dwelling: I should say that
+this was a fair capital of manners to begin with.
+
+Under bad manners, as under graver faults, lies very commonly an
+overestimate of our special individuality, as distinguished from our
+generic humanity.  It is just here that the very highest society
+asserts its superior breeding.  Among truly elegant people of the
+highest ton, you will find more real equality in social intercourse
+than in a country village.  As nuns drop their birth-names and
+become Sister Margaret and Sister Mary, so high-bred people drop
+their personal distinctions and become brothers and sisters of
+conversational charity.  Nor are fashionable people without their
+heroism.  I believe there are men who have shown as much self-
+devotion in carrying a lone wall-flower down to the supper-table as
+ever saint or martyr in the act that has canonized his name.  There
+are Florence Nightingales of the ballroom, whom nothing can hold
+back from their errands of mercy.  They find out the red-handed,
+gloveless undergraduate of bucolic antecedents, as he squirms in his
+corner, and distill their soft words upon him like dew upon the
+green herb.  They reach even the poor relation, whose dreary
+apparition saddens the perfumed atmosphere of the sumptuous drawing-
+room.  I have known one of these angels ask, of her own accord, that
+a desolate middle-aged man, whom nobody seemed to know, should be
+presented to her by the hostess.  He wore no shirt-collar,--he had
+on black gloves,--and was flourishing a red bandanna handkerchief!
+Match me this, ye proud children of poverty, who boast of your
+paltry sacrifices for each other!  Virtue in humble life!  What is
+that to the glorious self-renunciation of a martyr in pearls and
+diamonds?  As I saw this noble woman bending gracefully before the
+social mendicant,--the white billows of her beauty heaving under the
+foam of the traitorous laces that half revealed them,--I should have
+wept with sympathetic emotion, but that tears, except as a private
+demonstration, are an ill-disguised expression of self-consciousness
+and vanity, which is inadmissible in good society.
+
+I have sometimes thought, with a pang, of the position in which
+political chance or contrivance might hereafter place some one of
+our fellow-citizens.  It has happened hitherto, so far as my limited
+knowledge goes, that the President of the United States has always
+been what might be called in general terms a gentleman.  But what if
+at some future time the choice of the people should fall upon one on
+whom that lofty title could not, by any stretch of charity, be
+bestowed?  This may happen,--how soon the future only knows.  Think
+of this miserable man of coming political possibilities,--an
+unpresentable boor sucked into office by one of those eddies in the
+flow of popular sentiment which carry straws and chips into the
+public harbor, while the prostrate trunks of the monarchs of the
+forest hurry down on the senseless stream to the gulf of political
+oblivion!  Think of him, I say, and of the concentrated gaze of good
+society through its thousand eyes, all confluent, as it were, in one
+great burning-glass of ice that shrivels its wretched object in
+fiery torture, itself cold as the glacier of an unsunned cavern!
+No,--there will be angels of good-breeding then as now, to shield
+the victim of free institutions from himself and from his torturers.
+I can fancy a lovely woman playfully withdrawing the knife which he
+would abuse by making it an instrument for the conveyance of food,--
+or, failing in this kind artifice, sacrificing herself by imitating
+his use of that implement; how much harder than to plunge it into
+her bosom, like Lucretia!  I can see her studying in his provincial
+dialect until she becomes the Champollion of New England or Western
+or Southern barbarisms.  She has learned that haow means what; that
+think-in' is the same thing as thinking, or she has found out the
+meaning of that extraordinary mono syllable, which no single-tongued
+phonographer can make legible, prevailing on the banks of the Hudson
+and at its embouchure, and elsewhere,--what they say when they think
+they say first, (fe-eest,--fe as in the French le),--or that cheer
+means chair,--or that urritation means irritation,--and so of other
+enormities.  Nothing surprises her.  The highest breeding, you know,
+comes round to the Indian standard,--to take everything coolly,--nil
+admirari,--if you happen to be learned and like the Roman phrase for
+the same thing.
+
+If you like the company of people that stare at you from head to
+foot to see if there is a hole in your coat, or if you have not
+grown a little older, or if your eyes are not yellow with jaundice,
+or if your complexion is not a little faded, and so on, and then
+convey the fact to you, in the style in which the Poor Relation
+addressed the divinity-student,--go with them as much as you like.
+I hate the sight of the wretches.  Don't for mercy's sake think I
+hate them; the distinction is one my friend or I drew long ago.  No
+matter where you find such people; they are clowns.
+
+The rich woman who looks and talks in this way is not half so much a
+lady as her Irish servant, whose pretty "saving your presence," when
+she has to say something which offends her natural sense of good
+manners, has a hint in it of the breeding of courts, and the blood
+of old Milesian kings, which very likely runs in her veins,--thinned
+by two hundred years of potato, which, being an underground fruit,
+tends to drag down the generations that are made of it to the earth
+from which it came, and, filling their veins with starch, turn them
+into a kind of human vegetable.
+
+I say, if you like such people, go with them.  But I am going to
+make a practical application of the example at the beginning of this
+particular record, which some young people who are going to choose
+professional advisers by-and-by may remember and thank me for.  If
+you are making choice of a physician, be sure you get one, if
+possible, with a cheerful and serene countenance.  A physician is
+not--at least, ought not to be--an executioner; and a sentence of
+death on his face is as bad as a warrant for execution signed by the
+Governor.  As a general rule, no man has a right to tell another by
+word or look that he is going to die.  It may be necessary in some
+extreme cases; but as a rule, it is the last extreme of impertinence
+which one human being can offer to another.  "You have killed me,"
+said a patient once to a physician who had rashly told him he was
+incurable.  He ought to have lived six months, but he was dead in
+six' weeks.  If we will only let Nature and the God of Nature alone,
+persons will commonly learn their condition as early as they ought
+to know it, and not be cheated out of their natural birthright of
+hope of recovery, which is intended to accompany sick people as long
+as life is comfortable, and is graciously replaced by the hope of
+heaven, or at least of rest, when life has become a burden which the
+bearer is ready to let fall.
+
+Underbred people tease their sick and dying friends to death.  The
+chance of a gentleman or lady with a given mortal ailment to live a
+certain time is as good again as that of the common sort of coarse
+people.  As you go down the social scale, you reach a point at
+length where the common talk in sick rooms is of churchyards and
+sepulchres, and a kind of perpetual vivisection is forever carried
+on, upon the person of the miserable sufferer.
+
+And so, in choosing your clergyman, other things being equal, prefer
+the one of a wholesome and cheerful habit of mind and body.  If you
+can get along with people who carry a certificate in their faces
+that their goodness is so great as to make them very miserable, your
+children cannot.  And whatever offends one of these little ones
+cannot be right in the eyes of Him who loved them so well.
+
+After all, as you are a gentleman or a lady, you will probably
+select gentlemen for your bodily and spiritual advisers, and then
+all will be right.
+
+This repetition of the above words,--gentleman and lady,--which
+could not be conveniently avoided, reminds me what strange uses are
+made of them by those who ought to know what they mean.  Thus, at a
+marriage ceremony, once, of two very excellent persons who had been
+at service, instead of, Do you take this man, etc.?  and, Do you
+take this woman?  how do you think the officiating clergyman put the
+questions?  It was, Do you, Miss So and So, take this GENTLEMAN?
+and, Do you, Mr. This or That, take this LADY?!  What would any
+English duchess, ay, or the Queen of England herself, have thought,
+if the Archbishop of Canterbury had called her and her bridegroom
+anything but plain woman and man at such a time?
+
+I don't doubt the Poor Relation thought it was all very fine, if she
+happened to be in the church; but if the worthy man who uttered
+these monstrous words--monstrous in such a connection--had known the
+ludicrous surprise, the convulsion of inward disgust and contempt,
+that seized upon many of the persons who were present,--had guessed
+what a sudden flash of light it threw on the Dutch gilding, the
+pinchbeck, the shabby, perking pretension belonging to certain
+social layers,--so inherent in their whole mode of being, that the
+holiest offices of religion cannot exclude its impertinences,--the
+good man would have given his marriage-fee twice over to recall that
+superb and full-blown vulgarism.  Any persons whom it could please
+could have no better notion of what the words referred to signify
+than of the meaning of apsides and asymptotes.
+
+MAN!  Sir!  WOMAN!  Sir!  Gentility is a fine thing, not to be
+undervalued, as I have been trying to explain; but humanity comes
+before that.
+
+         "When Adam delved and Eve span,
+          Who was then the gentleman?"
+
+The beauty of that plainness of speech and manners which comes from
+the finest training is not to be understood by those whose habitat
+is below a certain level.  Just as the exquisite sea-anemones and
+all the graceful ocean-flowers die out at some fathoms below the
+surface, the elegances and suavities of life die out one by one as
+we sink through the social scale.  Fortunately, the virtues are more
+tenacious of life, and last pretty well until we get down to the mud
+of absolute pauperism, where they do not flourish greatly.
+
+--I had almost forgotten about our boarders.  As the Model of all
+the Virtues is about to leave us, I find myself wondering what is
+the reason we are not all very sorry.  Surely we all like good
+persons.  She is a good person.  Therefore we like her.--Only we
+don't.
+
+This brief syllogism, and its briefer negative, involving the
+principle which some English conveyancer borrowed from a French wit
+and embodied in the lines by which Dr. Fell is made unamiably
+immortal, this syllogism, I say, is one that most persons have had
+occasion to construct and demolish, respecting somebody or other, as
+I have done for the Model.  "Pious and painefull."  Why has that
+excellent old phrase gone out of use?  Simply because these good
+painefull or painstaking persons proved to be such nuisances in the
+long run, that the word "painefull" came, before people thought of
+it, to mean pain-giving instead of painstaking.
+
+--So, the old fellah's off to-morrah,--said the young man John.
+
+Old fellow?--said I,--whom do you mean?
+
+Why, the one that came with our little beauty, the old fellah in
+petticoats.
+
+--Now that means something,--said I to myself.--These rough young
+rascals very often hit the nail on the head, if they do strike with
+their eyes shut.  A real woman does a great many things without
+knowing why she does them; but these pattern machines mix up their
+intellects with everything they do, just like men.  They can't help
+it, no doubt; but we can't help getting sick of them, either.
+Intellect is to a woman's nature what her watch-spring skirt is to
+her dress; it ought to underlie her silks and embroideries, but not
+to show itself too staringly on the outside.---You don't know,
+perhaps, but I will tell you; the brain is the palest of all the
+internal organs, and the heart the reddest.  Whatever comes from the
+brain carries the hue of the place it came from, and whatever comes
+from the heart carries the heat and color of its birthplace.
+
+The young man John did not hear my soliloquy, of course, but sent up
+one more bubble from our sinking conversation, in the form of a
+statement, that she was at liberty to go to a personage who receives
+no visits, as is commonly supposed, from virtuous people.
+
+Why, I ask again, (of my reader,) should a person who never did
+anybody any wrong, but, on the contrary, is an estimable and
+intelligent, nay, a particularly enlightened and exemplary member of
+society, fail to inspire interest, love, and devotion?  Because of
+the reversed current in the flow of thought and emotion.  The red
+heart sends all its instincts up to the white brain to be analyzed,
+chilled, blanched, and so become pure reason, which is just exactly
+what we do not want of woman as woman.  The current should run the
+other-way.  The nice, calm, cold thought, which in women shapes
+itself so rapidly that they hardly know it as thought, should always
+travel to the lips via the heart.  It does so in those women whom
+all love and admire.  It travels the wrong way in the Model.  That
+is the reason why the Little Gentleman said "I hate her, I hate
+her."  That is the reason why the young man John called her the "old
+fellah," and banished her to the company of the great Unpresentable.
+That is the reason why I, the Professor, am picking her to pieces
+with scalpel and forceps.  That is the reason why the young girl
+whom she has befriended repays her kindness with gratitude and
+respect, rather than with the devotion and passionate fondness which
+lie sleeping beneath the calmness of her amber eyes.  I can see her,
+as she sits between this estimable and most correct of personages
+and the misshapen, crotchety, often violent and explosive little man
+on the other side of her, leaning and swaying towards him as she
+speaks, and looking into his sad eyes as if she found some fountain
+in them at which her soul could quiet its thirst.
+
+Women like the Model are a natural product of a chilly climate and
+high culture.  It is not
+
+    "The frolic wind that breathes the spring,
+     Zephyr with Aurora playing,"
+
+when the two meet
+
+    "---on beds of violets blue,
+     And fresh-blown roses washed in dew,"
+
+that claim such women as their offspring.  It is rather the east
+wind, as it blows out of the fogs of Newfoundland, and clasps a
+clear-eyed wintry noon on the chill bridal couch of a New England
+ice-quarry.--Don't throw up your cap now, and hurrah as if this
+were giving up everything, and turning against the best growth of
+our latitudes,--the daughters of the soil.  The brain-women never
+interest us like the heart women; white roses please less than red.
+But our Northern seasons have a narrow green streak of spring, as
+well as a broad white zone of winter,--they have a glowing band of
+summer and a golden stripe of autumn in their many-colored wardrobe;
+and women are born to us that wear all these hues of earth and
+heaven in their souls.  Our ice-eyed brain-women are really
+admirable, if we only ask of them just what they can give, and no
+more.  Only compare them, talking or writing, with one of those
+babbling, chattering dolls, of warmer latitudes, who do not know
+enough even to keep out of print, and who are interesting to us only
+as specimens of arrest of development for our psychological
+cabinets.
+
+Good-bye, Model of all the Virtues!  We can spare you now.  A little
+clear perfection, undiluted with human weakness, goes a great way.
+Go! be useful, be honorable and honored, be just, be charitable,
+talk pure reason, and help to disenchant the world by the light of
+an achromatic understanding.  Goodbye!  Where is my Beranger?  I
+must read a verse or two of "Fretillon."
+
+Fair play for all.  But don't claim incompatible qualities for
+anybody.  Justice is a very rare virtue in our community.
+Everything that public sentiment cares about is put into a Papin's
+digester, and boiled under high pressure till all is turned into one
+homogeneous pulp, and the very bones give up their jelly.  What are
+all the strongest epithets of our dictionary to us now?  The critics
+and politicians, and especially the philanthropists, have chewed
+them, till they are mere wads of syllable-fibre, without a
+suggestion of their old pungency and power.
+
+Justice!  A good man respects the rights even of brute matter and
+arbitrary symbols.  If he writes the same word twice in succession,
+by accident, he always erases the one that stands second; has not
+the first-comer the prior right?  This act of abstract justice,
+which I trust many of my readers, like myself, have often performed,
+is a curious anti-illustration, by the way, of the absolute
+wickedness of human dispositions.  Why doesn't a man always strike
+out the first of the two words, to gratify his diabolical love of
+injustice?
+
+So, I say, we owe a genuine, substantial tribute of respect to these
+filtered intellects which have left their womanhood on the strainer.
+They are so clear that it is a pleasure at times to look at the
+world of thought through them.  But the rose and purple tints of
+richer natures they cannot give us, and it is not just to them to
+ask it.
+
+Fashionable society gets at these rich natures very often in a way
+one would hardly at first think of.  It loves vitality above all
+things, sometimes disguised by affected languor, always well kept
+under by the laws of good-breeding,--but still it loves abundant
+life, opulent and showy organizations,--the spherical rather than
+the plane trigonometry of female architecture,--plenty of red blood,
+flashing eyes, tropical voices, and forms that bear the splendors of
+dress without growing pale beneath their lustre.  Among these you
+will find the most delicious women you will ever meet,--women whom
+dress and flattery and the round of city gayeties cannot spoil,--
+talking with whom, you forget their diamonds and laces,--and around
+whom all the nice details of elegance, which the cold-blooded beauty
+next them is scanning so nicely, blend in one harmonious whole, too
+perfect to be disturbed by the petulant sparkle of a jewel, or the
+yellow glare of a bangle, or the gay toss of a feather.
+
+There are many things that I, personally, love better than fashion
+or wealth.  Not to speak of those highest objects of our love and
+loyalty, I think I love ease and independence better than the golden
+slavery of perpetual matinees and soirees, or the pleasures of
+accumulation.
+
+But fashion and wealth are two very solemn realities, which the
+frivolous class of moralists have talked a great deal of silly stuff
+about.  Fashion is only the attempt to realize Art in living forms
+and social intercourse.  What business has a man who knows nothing
+about the beautiful, and cannot pronounce the word view, to talk
+about fashion to a set of people who, if one of the quality left a
+card at their doors, would contrive to keep it on the very top of
+their heap of the names of their two-story acquaintances, till it
+was as yellow as the Codex Vaticanus?
+
+Wealth, too,--what an endless repetition of the same foolish
+trivialities about it!  Take the single fact of its alleged
+uncertain tenure and transitory character.  In old times, when men
+were all the time fighting and robbing each other,--in those
+tropical countries where the Sabeans and the Chaldeans stole all a
+man's cattle and camels, and there were frightful tornadoes and
+rains of fire from heaven, it was true enough that riches took wings
+to themselves not unfrequently in a very unexpected way.  But, with
+common prudence in investments, it is not so now.  In fact, there is
+nothing earthly that lasts so well, on the whole, as money.  A man's
+learning dies with him; even his virtues fade out of remembrance,
+but the dividends on the stocks he bequeaths to his children live
+and keep his memory green.
+
+I do not think there is much courage or originality in giving
+utterance to truths that everybody knows, but which get overlaid by
+conventional trumpery.  The only distinction which it is necessary
+to point out to feeble-minded folk is this: that, in asserting the
+breadth and depth of that significance which gives to fashion and
+fortune their tremendous power, we do not indorse the extravagances
+which often disgrace the one, nor the meanness which often degrades
+the other.
+
+A remark which seems to contradict a universally current opinion is
+not generally to be taken "neat," but watered with the ideas of
+common-sense and commonplace people.  So, if any of my young friends
+should be tempted to waste their substance on white kids and "all-
+rounds," or to insist on becoming millionaires at once, by anything
+I have said, I will give them references to some of the class
+referred to, well known to the public as providers of literary
+diluents, who will weaken any truth so that there is not an old
+woman in the land who cannot take it with perfect impunity.
+
+I am afraid some of the blessed saints in diamonds will think I mean
+to flatter them.  I hope not;--if I do, set it down as a weakness.
+But there is so much foolish talk about wealth and fashion, (which,
+of course, draw a good many heartless and essentially vulgar people
+into the glare of their candelabra, but which have a real
+respectability and meaning, if we will only look at them
+stereoscopically, with both eyes instead of one,) that I thought it
+a duty to speak a few words for them.  Why can't somebody give us a
+list of things that everybody thinks and nobody says, and another
+list of things that everybody says and nobody thinks?
+
+Lest my parish should suppose we have forgotten graver matters in
+these lesser topics, I beg them to drop these trifles and read the
+following lesson for the day.
+
+     THE TWO STREAMS.
+
+Behold the rocky wall
+That down its sloping sides
+Pours the swift rain-drops, blending, as they fall,
+In rushing river-tides!
+
+Yon stream, whose sources run
+Turned by a pebble's edge,
+Is Athabasca, rolling toward the sun
+Through the cleft mountain-ledge.
+
+The slender rill had strayed,
+But for the slanting stone,
+To evening's ocean, with the tangled braid
+Of foam-flecked Oregon.
+
+So from the heights of Will
+Life's parting stream descends,
+And, as a moment turns its slender rill,
+Each widening torrent bends,
+
+From the same cradle's side,
+From the same mother's knee,--
+One to long darkness and the frozen tide,
+One to the Peaceful Sea!
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+Our landlady's daughter is a young lady of some pretensions to
+gentility.  She wears her bonnet well back on her head, which is
+known by all to be a mark of high breeding.  She wears her trains
+very long, as the great ladies do in Europe.  To be sure, their
+dresses are so made only to sweep the tapestried floors of chateaux
+and palaces; as those odious aristocrats of the other side do not go
+draggling through the mud in silks and satins, but, forsooth, must
+ride in coaches when they are in full dress.  It is true, that,
+considering various habits of the American people, also the little
+accidents which the best-kept sidewalks are liable to, a lady who
+has swept a mile of them is not exactly in such a condition that one
+would care to be her neighbor.  But then there is no need of being
+so hard on these slight weaknesses of the poor, dear women as our
+little deformed gentleman was the other day.
+
+--There are no such women as the Boston women, Sir,--he said.
+Forty-two degrees, north latitude, Rome, Sir, Boston, Sir!  They had
+grand women in old Rome, Sir,--and the women bore such men--children
+as never the world saw before.  And so it was here, Sir.  I tell
+you, the revolution the Boston boys started had to run in woman's
+milk before it ran in man's blood, Sir!
+
+But confound the make-believe women we have turned loose in our
+streets!--where do they come from?  Not out of Boston parlors, I
+trust.  Why, there is n't a beast or a bird that would drag its tail
+through the dirt in the way these creatures do their dresses.
+Because a queen or a duchess wears long robes on great occasions, a
+maid-of-all-work or a factory-girl thinks she must make herself a
+nuisance by trailing through the street, picking up and carrying
+about with her pah!--that's what I call getting vulgarity into your
+bones and marrow.  Making believe be what you are not is the essence
+of vulgarity.  Show over dirt is the one attribute of vulgar people.
+If any man can walk behind one of these women and see what she rakes
+up as she goes, and not feel squeamish, he has got a tough stomach.
+I wouldn't let one of 'em into my room without serving 'em as David
+served Saul at the cave in the wilderness,--cut off his skirts, Sir!
+cut off his skirts!
+
+I suggested, that I had seen some pretty stylish ladies who offended
+in the way he condemned.
+
+Stylish women, I don't doubt,--said the Little Gentleman.--Don't
+tell me that a true lady ever sacrifices the duty of keeping all
+about her sweet and clean to the wish of making a vulgar show.  I
+won't believe it of a lady.  There are some things that no fashion
+has any right to touch, and cleanliness is one of those things.  If
+a woman wishes to show that her husband or her father has got money,
+which she wants and means to spend, but doesn't know how, let her
+buy a yard or two of silk and pin it to her dress when she goes out
+to walk, but let her unpin it before she goes into the house;--there
+may be poor women that will think it worth disinfecting.  It is an
+insult to a respectable laundress to carry such things into a house
+for her to deal with.  I don't like the Bloomers any too well,--in
+fact, I never saw but one, and she--or he, or it--had a mob of boys
+after her, or whatever you call the creature, as if she had been
+a-----
+
+The Little Gentleman stopped short,--flushed somewhat, and looked
+round with that involuntary, suspicious glance which the subjects of
+any bodily misfortune are very apt to cast round them.  His eye
+wandered over the company, none of whom, excepting myself and one
+other, had, probably, noticed the movement.  They fell at last on
+Iris,--his next neighbor, you remember.
+
+--We know in a moment, on looking suddenly at a person, if that
+person's eyes have been fixed on us.
+
+Sometimes we are conscious of it before we turn so as to see the
+person.  Strange secrets of curiosity, of impertinence, of malice,
+of love, leak out in this way.  There is no need of Mrs. Felix
+Lorraine's reflection in the mirror, to tell us that she is plotting
+evil for us behind our backs.  We know it, as we know by the ominous
+stillness of a child that some mischief or other is going-on.  A
+young girl betrays, in a moment, that her eyes have been feeding on.
+the face where you find them fixed, and not merely brushing over it
+with their pencils of blue or brown light.
+
+A certain involuntary adjustment assimilates us, you may also
+observe, to that upon which we look.  Roses redden the cheeks of her
+who stoops to gather them, and buttercups turn little people's chins
+yellow.  When we look at a vast landscape, our chests expand as if
+we would enlarge to fill it.  When we examine a minute object, we
+naturally contract, not only our foreheads, but all our dimensions.
+If I see two men wrestling, I wrestle too, with my limbs and
+features.  When a country-fellow comes upon the stage, you will see
+twenty faces in the boxes putting on the bumpkin expression.  There
+is no need of multiplying instances to reach this generalization;
+every person and thing we look upon puts its special mark upon us.
+If this is repeated often enough, we get a permanent resemblance to
+it, or, at least, a fixed aspect which we took from it.  Husband and
+wife come to look alike at last, as has often been noticed.  It is a
+common saying of a jockey, that he is "all horse"; and I have often
+fancied that milkmen get a stiff, upright carriage, and an angular
+movement of the arm, that remind one of a pump and the working of
+its handle.
+
+All this came in by accident, just because I happened to mention
+that the Little Gentleman found that Iris had been looking at him
+with her soul in her eyes, when his glance rested on her after
+wandering round the company.  What he thought, it is hard to say;
+but the shadow of suspicion faded off from his face, and he looked
+calmly into the amber eyes, resting his cheek upon the hand that
+wore the red jewel.
+
+--If it were a possible thing,--women are such strange creatures!
+Is there any trick that love and their own fancies do not play them?
+Just see how they marry!  A woman that gets hold of a bit of manhood
+is like one of those Chinese wood-carvers who work on any odd,
+fantastic root that comes to hand, and, if it is only bulbous above
+and bifurcated below, will always contrive to make a man--such as he
+is--out of it.  I should like to see any kind of a man,
+distinguishable from a Gorilla, that some good and even pretty woman
+could not shape a husband out of.
+
+--A child,--yes, if you choose to call her so, but such a child!  Do
+you know how Art brings all ages together?  There is no age to the
+angels and ideal human forms among which the artist lives, and he
+shares their youth until his hand trembles and his eye grows dim.
+The youthful painter talks of white-bearded Leonardo as if he were a
+brother, and the veteran forgets that Raphael died at an age to
+which his own is of patriarchal antiquity.
+
+But why this lover of the beautiful should be so drawn to one whom
+Nature has wronged so deeply seems hard to explain.  Pity, I
+suppose.  They say that leads to love.
+
+--I thought this matter over until I became excited and curious, and
+determined to set myself more seriously at work to find out what was
+going on in these wild hearts and where their passionate lives were
+drifting.  I say wild hearts and passionate lives, because I think I
+can look through this seeming calmness of youth and this apparent
+feebleness of organization, and see that Nature, whom it is very
+hard to cheat, is only waiting as the sapper waits in his mine,
+knowing that all is in readiness and the slow-match burning quietly
+down to the powder.  He will leave it by-and-by, and then it will
+take care of itself.
+
+One need not wait to see the smoke coming through the roof of a
+house and the flames breaking out of the windows to know that the
+building is on fire.  Hark!  There is a quiet, steady, unobtrusive,
+crisp, not loud, but very knowing little creeping crackle that is
+tolerably intelligible.  There is a whiff of something floating
+about, suggestive of toasting shingles.  Also a sharp pyroligneous-
+acid pungency in the air that stings one's eyes.  Let us get up and
+see what is going on.--Oh,--oh,--oh! do you know what has got hold
+of you?  It is the great red dragon that is born of the little red
+eggs we call sparks, with his hundred blowing red manes, and his
+thousand lashing red tails, and his multitudinous red eyes glaring
+at every crack and key-hole, and his countless red tongues lapping
+the beams he is going to crunch presently, and his hot breath
+warping the panels and cracking the glass and making old timber
+sweat that had forgotten it was ever alive with sap.  Run for your
+life! leap! or you will be a cinder in five minutes, that nothing
+but a coroner would take for the wreck of a human being!
+
+If any gentleman will have the kindness to stop this run-away
+comparison, I shall be much obliged to him.  All I intended to say
+was, that we need not wait for hearts to break out in flames to know
+that they are full of combustibles and that a spark has got among
+them.  I don't pretend to say or know what it is that brings these
+two persons together;--and when I say together, I only mean that
+there is an evident affinity of some kind or other which makes their
+commonest intercourse strangely significant, as that each seems to
+understand a look or a word of the other.  When the young girl laid
+her hand on the Little Gentleman's arm,--which so greatly shocked
+the Model, you may remember,--I saw that she had learned the lion-
+tamer's secret.  She masters him, and yet I can see she has a kind
+of awe of him, as the man who goes into the cage has of the monster
+that he makes a baby of.
+
+One of two things must happen.  The first is love, downright love,
+on the part of this young girl, for the poor little misshapen man.
+You may laugh, if you like.  But women are apt to love the men who
+they think have the largest capacity of loving;--and who can love
+like one that has thirsted all his life long for the smile of youth
+and beauty, and seen it fly his presence as the wave ebbed from the
+parched lips of him whose fabled punishment is the perpetual type of
+human longing and disappointment?  What would become of him, if this
+fresh soul should stoop upon him in her first young passion, as the
+flamingo drops out of the sky upon some lonely and dark lagoon in
+the marshes of Cagliari, with a flutter of scarlet feathers and a
+kindling of strange fires in the shadowy waters that hold her
+burning image?
+
+--Marry her, of course?--Why, no, not of course.  I should think the
+chance less, on the whole, that he would be willing to marry her
+than she to marry him.
+
+There is one other thing that might happen.  If the interest he
+awakes in her gets to be a deep one, and yet has nothing of love in
+it, she will glance off from him into some great passion or other.
+All excitements run to love in women of a certain--let us not say
+age, but youth.  An electrical current passing through a coil of
+wire makes a magnet of a bar of iron lying within it, but not
+touching it.  So a woman is turned into a love-magnet by a tingling
+current of life running round her.  I should like to see one of them
+balanced on a pivot properly adjusted, and watch if she did not turn
+so as to point north and south,--as she would, if the love-currents
+are like those of the earth our mother.
+
+Pray, do you happen to remember Wordsworth's "Boy of Windermere"?
+This boy used to put his hands to his mouth, and shout aloud,
+mimicking the hooting of the owls, who would answer him
+
+               "with quivering peals,
+     And long halloos and screams, and echoes loud
+     Redoubled and redoubled."
+
+When they failed to answer him, and he hung listening intently for
+their voices, he would sometimes catch the faint sound of far
+distant waterfalls, or the whole scene around him would imprint
+itself with new force upon his perceptions.--Read the sonnet, if
+you please;--it is Wordsworth all over,--trivial in subject, solemn
+in style, vivid in description, prolix in detail, true meta-
+physically, but immensely suggestive of "imagination," to use a mild
+term, when related as an actual fact of a sprightly youngster.
+All I want of it is to enforce the principle, that, when the door of
+the soul is once opened to a guest, there is no knowing who will
+come in next.
+
+--Our young girl keeps up her early habit of sketching heads and
+characters.  Nobody is, I should think, more faithful and exact in
+the drawing of the academical figures given her as lessons, but
+there is a perpetual arabesque of fancies that runs round the margin
+of her drawings, and there is one book which I know she keeps to run
+riot in, where, if anywhere, a shrewd eye would be most likely to
+read her thoughts.  This book of hers I mean to see, if I can get at
+it honorably.
+
+I have never yet crossed the threshold of the Little Gentleman's
+chamber.  How he lives, when he once gets within it, I can only
+guess.  His hours are late, as I have said; often, on waking late in
+the night, I see the light through cracks in his window-shutters on
+the wall of the house opposite.  If the times of witchcraft were not
+over, I should be afraid to be so close a neighbor to a place from
+which there come such strange noises.  Sometimes it is the dragging
+of something heavy over the floor, that makes me shiver to hear it,-
+-it sounds so like what people that kill other people have to do now
+and then.  Occasionally I hear very sweet strains of music,--whether
+of a wind or stringed instrument, or a human voice, strange as it
+may seem, I have often tried to find out, but through the partition
+I could not be quite sure.  If I have not heard a woman cry and
+moan, and then again laugh as though she would die laughing, I have
+heard sounds so like them that--I am a fool to confess it--I have
+covered my head with the bedclothes; for I have had a fancy in my
+dreams, that I could hardly shake off when I woke up, about that so-
+called witch that was his great-grandmother, or whatever it was,--a
+sort of fancy that she visited the Little Gentleman,--a young woman
+in old-fashioned dress, with a red ring round her white neck,--not a
+neck-lace, but a dull-stain.
+
+Of course you don't suppose that I have any foolish superstitions
+about the matter,--I, the Professor, who have seen enough to take
+all that nonsense out of any man's head!  It is not our beliefs that
+frighten us half so much as our fancies.  A man not only believes,
+but knows he runs a risk, whenever he steps into a railroad car; but
+it does n't worry him much.  On the other hand, carry that man
+across a pasture a little way from some dreary country-village, and
+show him an old house where there were strange deaths a good many
+years ago, and there are rumors of ugly spots on the walls,--the old
+man hung himself in the garret, that is certain, and ever since the
+country-people have called it "the haunted house,"--the owners
+have n't been able to let it since the last tenants left on account
+of the noises,--so it has fallen into sad decay, and the moss grows
+on the rotten shingles of the roof, and the clapboards have turned
+black, and the windows rattle like teeth that chatter with fear, and
+the walls of the house begin to lean as if its knees were shaking,--
+take the man who did n't mind the real risk of the cars to that old
+house, on some dreary November evening, and ask him to sleep there
+alone,--how do you think he will like it?  He doesn't believe one
+word of ghosts,--but then he knows, that, whether waking or
+sleeping, his imagination will people the haunted chambers with
+ghostly images.  It is not what we believe, as I said before, that
+frightens us commonly, but what we conceive.  A principle that
+reaches a good way if I am not mistaken.  I say, then, that, if
+these odd sounds coming from the Little Gentleman's chamber
+sometimes make me nervous, so that I cannot get to sleep, it is not
+because I suppose he is engaged in any unlawful or mysterious way.
+The only wicked suggestion that ever came into my head was one that
+was founded on the landlady's story of his having a pile of gold; it
+was a ridiculous fancy; besides, I suspect the story of sweating
+gold was only one of the many fables got up to make the Jews odious
+and afford a pretext for plundering them.  As for the sound like a
+woman laughing and crying, I never said it was a woman's voice; for,
+in the first place, I could only hear indistinctly; and, secondly,
+he may have an organ, or some queer instrument or other, with what
+they call the vox humana stop.  If he moves his bed round to get
+away from the window, or for any such reason, there is nothing very
+frightful in that simple operation.  Most of our foolish conceits
+explain themselves in some such simple way.  And, yet, for all that,
+I confess, that, when I woke up the other evening, and heard, first
+a sweet complaining cry, and then footsteps, and then the dragging
+sound,--nothing but his bed, I am quite sure,--I felt a stirring in
+the roots of my hair as the feasters did in Keats's terrible poem of
+"Lamia."
+
+There is nothing very odd in my feeling nervous when I happen to lie
+awake and get listening for sounds.  Just keep your ears open any
+time after midnight, when you are lying in bed in a lone attic of a
+dark night.  What horrid, strange, suggestive, unaccountable noises
+you will hear!  The stillness of night is a vulgar error.  All the
+dead things seem to be alive.  Crack!  That is the old chest of
+drawers; you never hear it crack in the daytime.  Creak!  There's a
+door ajar; you know you shut them all.
+
+Where can that latch be that rattles so?  Is anybody trying it
+softly?  or, worse than any body, is----?  (Cold shiver.) Then a
+sudden gust that jars all the windows;--very strange!--there does
+not seem to be any wind about that it belongs to.  When it stops,
+you hear the worms boring in the powdery beams overhead.  Then steps
+outside,--a stray animal, no doubt.  All right,--but a gentle
+moisture breaks out all over you; and then something like a whistle
+or a cry,--another gust of wind, perhaps; that accounts for the
+rustling that just made your heart roll over and tumble about, so
+that it felt more like a live rat under your ribs than a part of
+your own body; then a crash of something that has fallen,--blown
+over, very likely----Pater noster, qui es in coelis! for you are
+damp and cold, and sitting bolt upright, and the bed trembling so
+that the death-watch is frightened and has stopped ticking!
+
+No,--night is an awful time for strange noises and secret doings.
+Who ever dreamed, till one of our sleepless neighbors told us of it,
+of that Walpurgis gathering of birds and beasts of prey,--foxes, and
+owls, and crows, and eagles, that come from all the country round on
+moonshiny nights to crunch the clams and muscles, and pick out the
+eyes of dead fishes that the storm has thrown on Chelsea Beach?  Our
+old mother Nature has pleasant and cheery tones enough for us when
+she comes in her dress of blue and gold over the eastern hill-tops;
+but when she follows us up-stairs to our beds in her suit of black
+velvet and diamonds, every creak of her sandals and every whisper of
+her lips is full of mystery and fear.
+
+You understand, then, distinctly, that I do not believe there is
+anything about this singular little neighbor of mine which is as it
+should not be.  Probably a visit to his room would clear up all that
+has puzzled me, and make me laugh at the notions which began, I
+suppose, in nightmares, and ended by keeping my imagination at work
+so as almost to make me uncomfortable at times.  But it is not so
+easy to visit him as some of our other boarders, for various reasons
+which I will not stop to mention.  I think some of them are rather
+pleased to get "the Professor" under their ceilings.
+
+The young man John, for instance, asked me to come up one day and
+try some "old Burbon," which he said was A 1.  On asking him what
+was the number of his room, he answered, that it was forty-'leven,
+sky-parlor floor, but that I shouldn't find it, if he did n't go
+ahead to show me the way.  I followed him to his habitat, being very
+willing to see in what kind of warren he burrowed, and thinking I
+might pick up something about the boarders who had excited my
+curiosity.
+
+Mighty close quarters they were where the young man John bestowed
+himself and his furniture; this last consisting of a bed, a chair, a
+bureau, a trunk, and numerous pegs with coats and "pants" and
+"vests,"--as he was in the habit of calling waist-coats and
+pantaloons or trousers,--hanging up as if the owner had melted out
+of them.  Several prints were pinned up unframed,--among them that
+grand national portrait-piece, "Barnum presenting Ossian E. Dodge to
+Jenny Lind," and a picture of a famous trot, in which I admired anew
+the cabalistic air of that imposing array of expressions, and
+especially the Italicized word, "Dan Mace names b. h. Major Slocum,"
+and "Hiram Woodruff names g. m. Lady Smith."  "Best three in five.
+Time: 2.40, 2.46, 2.50."
+
+That set me thinking how very odd this matter of trotting horses is,
+as an index of the mathematical exactness of the laws of living
+mechanism.  I saw Lady Suffolk trot a mile in 2.26.  Flora Temple
+has trotted close down to 2.20; and Ethan Allen in 2.25, or less.
+Many horses have trotted their mile under 2.30; none that I remember
+in public as low down as 2.20.  From five to ten seconds, then, in
+about a hundred and sixty is the whole range of the maxima of the
+present race of trotting horses.  The same thing is seen in the
+running of men.  Many can run a mile in five minutes; but when one
+comes to the fractions below, they taper down until somewhere about
+4.30 the maximum is reached.  Averages of masses have been studied
+more than averages of maxima and minima.  We know from the
+Registrar-General's Reports, that a certain number of children--say
+from one to two dozen--die every year in England from drinking hot
+water out of spouts of teakettles.  We know, that, among suicides,
+women and men past a certain age almost never use fire-arms.  A
+woman who has made up her mind to die is still afraid of a pistol or
+a gun.  Or is it that the explosion would derange her costume?
+
+I say, averages of masses we have, but our tables of maxima we owe
+to the sporting men more than to the philosophers.  The lesson their
+experience teaches is, that Nature makes no leaps,--does nothing per
+saltum.  The greatest brain that ever lived, no doubt, was only a
+small fraction of an idea ahead of the second best.  Just look at
+the chess-players.  Leaving out the phenomenal exceptions, the nice
+shades that separate the skilful ones show how closely their brains
+approximate,--almost as closely as chronometers.  Such a person is a
+"knight-player,"--he must have that piece given him.  Another must
+have two pawns.  Another, "pawn and two," or one pawn and two moves.
+Then we find one who claims "pawn and move," holding himself, with
+this fractional advantage, a match for one who would be pretty sure
+to beat him playing even.--So much are minds alike; and you and I
+think we are "peculiar,"--that Nature broke her jelly-mould after
+shaping our cerebral convolutions.  So I reflected, standing and
+looking at the picture.
+
+--I say, Governor,--broke in the young man John,--them bosses '11
+stay jest as well, if you'll only set down.  I've had 'em this year,
+and they haven't stirred.--He spoke, and handed the chair towards
+me,--seating himself, at the same time, on the end of the bed.
+
+You have lived in this house some time?--I said,--with a note of
+interrogation at the end of the statement.
+
+Do I look as if I'd lost much flesh--said he, answering my question
+by another.
+
+No,--said I;--for that matter, I think you do credit to "the
+bountifully furnished table of the excellent lady who provides so
+liberally for the company that meets around her hospitable board."
+
+[The sentence in quotation-marks was from one of those disinterested
+editorials in small type, which I suspect to have been furnished by
+a friend of the landlady's, and paid for as an advertisement.  This
+impartial testimony to the superior qualities of the establishment
+and its head attracted a number of applicants for admission, and a
+couple of new boarders made a brief appearance at the table.  One of
+them was of the class of people who grumble if they don't get
+canvas-backs and woodcocks every day, for three-fifty per week.  The
+other was subject to somnambulism, or walking in the night, when he
+ought to have been asleep in his bed.  In this state he walked into
+several of the boarders' chambers, his eyes wide open, as is usual
+with somnambulists, and, from some odd instinct or other, wishing to
+know what the hour was, got together a number of their watches, for
+the purpose of comparing them, as it would seem.  Among them was a
+repeater, belonging to our young Marylander.  He happened to wake up
+while the somnambulist was in his chamber, and, not knowing his
+infirmity, caught hold of him and gave him a dreadful shaking, after
+which he tied his hands and feet, and so left him till morning, when
+he introduced him to a gentleman used to taking care of such cases
+of somnambulism.]
+
+If you, my reader, will please to skip backward, over this
+parenthesis, you will come to our conversation, which it has
+interrupted.
+
+It a'n't the feed,--said the young man John,--it's the old woman's
+looks when a fellah lays it in too strong.  The feed's well enough.
+After geese have got tough, 'n' turkeys have got strong, 'n' lamb's
+got old, 'n' veal's pretty nigh beef, 'n' sparragrass 's growin'
+tall 'n' slim 'n' scattery about the head, 'n' green peas are
+gettin' so big 'n' hard they'd be dangerous if you fired 'em out of
+a revolver, we get hold of all them delicacies of the season.  But
+it's too much like feedin' on live folks and devourin' widdah's
+substance, to lay yourself out in the eatin' way, when a fellah 's
+as hungry as the chap that said a turkey was too much for one 'n'
+not enough for two.  I can't help lookin' at the old woman.  Corned-
+beef-days she's tolerable calm.  Roastin'-days she worries some, 'n'
+keeps a sharp eye on the chap that carves.  But when there's
+anything in the poultry line, it seems to hurt her feelin's so to
+see the knife goin' into the breast and joints comin' to pieces,
+that there's no comfort in eatin'.  When I cut up an old fowl and
+help the boarders, I always feel as if I ought to say, Won't you
+have a slice of widdah?--instead of chicken.
+
+The young man John fell into a train of reflections which ended in
+his producing a Bologna sausage, a plate of "crackers," as we Boston
+folks call certain biscuits, and the bottle of whiskey described as
+being A 1.
+
+Under the influence of the crackers and sausage, he grew cordial and
+communicative.
+
+It was time, I thought, to sound him as to those of our boarders who
+had excited my curiosity.
+
+What do you think of our young Iris?--I began.
+
+Fust-rate little filly;-he said.--Pootiest and nicest little chap
+I've seen since the schoolma'am left.  Schoolma'am was a brown-
+haired one,--eyes coffee-color.  This one has got wine-colored
+eyes,--'n' that 's the reason they turn a fellah's head, I suppose.
+
+This is a splendid blonde,--I said,--the other was a brunette.
+Which style do you like best?
+
+Which do I like best, boiled mutton or roast mutton?--said the young
+man John.  Like 'em both,--it a'n't the color of 'em makes the
+goodness.  I 've been kind of lonely since schoolma'am went away.
+Used to like to look at her.  I never said anything particular to
+her, that I remember, but---
+
+I don't know whether it was the cracker and sausage, or that the
+young fellow's feet were treading on the hot ashes of some longing
+that had not had time to cool, but his eye glistened as he stopped.
+
+I suppose she wouldn't have looked at a fellah like me,--he said,--
+but I come pretty near tryin'.  If she had said, Yes, though, I
+shouldn't have known what to have done with her.  Can't marry a
+woman now-a-days till you're so deaf you have to cock your head like
+a parrot to hear what she says, and so longsighted you can't see
+what she looks like nearer than arm's-length.
+
+Here is another chance for you,--I said.--What do you want nicer
+than such a young lady as Iris?
+
+It's no use,--he answered.--I look at them girls and feel as the
+fellah did when he missed catchin' the trout.--'To'od 'a' cost more
+butter to cook him 'n' he's worth,--says the fellah.--Takes a whole
+piece o' goods to cover a girl up now-a-days.  I'd as lief undertake
+to keep a span of elephants,--and take an ostrich to board, too,--as
+to marry one of 'em.  What's the use?  Clerks and counter-jumpers
+ain't anything.  Sparragrass and green peas a'n't for them,--not
+while they're young and tender.  Hossback-ridin' a'n't for them,--
+except once a year, on Fast-day.  And marryin' a'n't for them.
+Sometimes a fellah feels lonely, and would like to have a nice young
+woman, to tell her how lonely he feels.  And sometimes a fellah,--
+here the young man John looked very confidential, and, perhaps, as
+if a little ashamed of his weakness,--sometimes a fellah would like
+to have one o' them small young ones to trot on his knee and push
+about in a little wagon,--a kind of a little Johnny, you know;--it's
+odd enough, but, it seems to me, nobody can afford them little
+articles, except the folks that are so rich they can buy everything,
+and the folks that are so poor they don't want anything.  It makes
+nice boys of us young fellahs, no doubt!  And it's pleasant to see
+fine young girls sittin', like shopkeepers behind their goods,
+waitin', and waitin', and waitin', 'n' no customers,--and the men
+lingerin' round and lookin' at the goods, like folks that want to be
+customers, but have n't the money!
+
+Do you think the deformed gentleman means to make love to Iris?--I
+said.
+
+What!  Little Boston ask that girl to marry him!  Well, now, that's
+cumin' of it a little too strong.  Yes, I guess she will marry him
+and carry him round in a basket, like a lame bantam: Look here!--he
+said, mysteriously;--one of the boarders swears there's a woman
+comes to see him, and that he has heard her singin' and screechin'.
+I should like to know what he's about in that den of his.  He lays
+low 'n' keeps dark,--and, I tell you, there's a good many of the
+boarders would like to get into his chamber, but he don't seem to
+want 'em.  Biddy could tell somethin' about what she's seen when she
+'s been to put his room to rights.  She's a Paddy 'n' a fool, but
+she knows enough to keep her tongue still.  All I know is, I saw her
+crossin' herself one day when she came out of that room.  She looked
+pale enough, 'n' I heard her mutterin' somethin' or other about the
+Blessed Virgin.  If it had n't been for the double doors to that
+chamber of his, I'd have had a squint inside before this; but,
+somehow or other, it never seems to happen that they're both open at
+once.
+
+What do you think he employs himself about?  said I.
+
+The young man John winked.
+
+I waited patiently for the thought, of which this wink was the
+blossom, to come to fruit in words.
+
+I don't believe in witches,--said the young man John.
+
+Nor I.
+
+We were both silent for a few minutes.
+
+
+--Did you ever see the young girl's drawing-books,--I said,
+presently.
+
+All but one,--he answered;--she keeps a lock on that, and won't show
+it.  Ma'am Allen, (the young rogue sticks to that name, in speaking
+of the gentleman with the diamond,) Ma'am Allen tried to peek into
+it one day when she left it on the sideboard.  "If you please," says
+she,--'n' took it from him, 'n' gave him a look that made him curl
+up like a caterpillar on a hot shovel.  I only wished he had n't,
+and had jest given her a little sass, for I've been takin' boxin'-
+lessons, 'n' I 've got a new way of counterin' I want to try on to
+somebody.
+
+--The end of all this was, that I came away from the young fellow's
+room, feeling that there were two principal things that I had to
+live for, for the next six weeks or six months, if it should take so
+long.  These were, to get a sight of the young girl's drawing.
+book, which I suspected had her heart shut up in it, and to get a
+look into the Little Gentleman's room.
+
+I don't doubt you think it rather absurd that I should trouble
+myself about these matters.  You tell me, with some show of reason,
+that all I shall find in the young girl's--book will be some
+outlines of angels with immense eyes, traceries of flowers, rural
+sketches, and caricatures, among which I shall probably have the
+pleasure of seeing my own features figuring.  Very likely.  But I'll
+tell you what I think I shall find.  If this child has idealized the
+strange little bit of humanity over which she seems to have spread
+her wings like a brooding dove,--if, in one of those wild vagaries
+that passionate natures are so liable to, she has fairly sprung upon
+him with her clasping nature, as the sea-flowers fold about the
+first stray shell-fish that brushes their outspread tentacles,
+depend upon it, I shall find the marks of it in this drawing-book of
+hers,--if I can ever get a look at it,--fairly, of course, for I
+would not play tricks to satisfy my curiosity.
+
+Then, if I can get into this Little Gentleman's room under any fair
+pretext, I shall, no doubt, satisfy myself in five minutes that he
+is just like other people, and that there is no particular mystery
+about him.
+
+The night after my visit to the young man John, I made all these and
+many more reflections.  It was about two o'clock in the morning,--
+bright starlight,--so light that I could make out the time on my
+alarm-clock,--when I woke up trembling and very moist.  It was the
+heavy dragging sound, as I had often heard it before that waked me.
+Presently a window was softly closed.  I had just begun to get over
+the agitation with which we always awake from nightmare dreams, when
+I heard the sound which seemed to me as of a woman's voice,--the
+clearest, purest soprano which one could well conceive of.  It was
+not loud, and I could not distinguish a word, if it was a woman's
+voice; but there were recurring phrases of sound and snatches of
+rhythm that reached me, which suggested the idea of complaint, and
+sometimes, I thought, of passionate grief and despair.  It died away
+at last,--and then I heard the opening of a door, followed by a low,
+monotonous sound, as of one talking,--and then the closing of a
+door,--and presently the light on the opposite wall disappeared and
+all was still for the night.
+
+By George!  this gets interesting,--I said, as I got out of bed for
+a change of night-clothes.
+
+I had this in my pocket the other day, but thought I would n't read
+it at our celebration.  So I read it to the boarders instead, and
+print it to finish off this record with.
+
+
+          ROBINSON OF LEYDEN.
+
+He sleeps not here; in hope and prayer
+His wandering flock had gone before,
+But he, the shepherd, might not share
+Their sorrows on the wintry shore.
+
+Before the Speedwell's anchor swung,
+Ere yet the Mayflower's sail was spread,
+While round his feet the Pilgrims clung,
+The pastor spake, and thus he said:--
+
+"Men, brethren, sisters, children dear!
+God calls you hence from over sea;
+Ye may not build by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor yet along the Zuyder-Zee.
+
+"Ye go to bear the saving word
+To tribes unnamed and shores untrod:
+Heed well the lessons ye have heard
+From those old teachers taught of God.
+
+"Yet think not unto them was lent
+All light for all the coming days,
+And Heaven's eternal wisdom spent
+In making straight the ancient ways.
+
+"The living fountain overflows
+For every flock, for every lamb,
+Nor heeds, though angry creeds oppose
+With Luther's dike or Calvin's dam."
+
+He spake; with lingering, long embrace,
+With tears of love and partings fond,
+They floated down the creeping Maas,
+Along the isle of Ysselmond.
+
+They passed the frowning towers of Briel,
+The "Hook of Holland's" shelf of sand,
+And grated soon with lifting keel
+The sullen shores of Fatherland.
+
+No home for these!--too well they knew
+The mitred king behind the throne;
+The sails were set, the pennons flew,
+And westward ho!  for worlds unknown.
+
+--And these were they who gave us birth,
+The Pilgrims of the sunset wave,
+Who won for us this virgin earth,
+And freedom with the soil they gave.
+
+The pastor slumbers by the Rhine,--
+In alien earth the exiles lie,--
+Their nameless graves our holiest shrine,
+His words our noblest battle-cry!
+
+Still cry them, and the world shall hear,
+Ye dwellers by the storm-swept sea!
+Ye have not built by Haerlem Meer,
+Nor on the land-locked Zuyder-Zee!
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+There has been a sort of stillness in the atmosphere of our
+boarding-house since my last record, as if something or other were
+going on.  There is no particular change that I can think of in the
+aspect of things; yet I have a feeling as if some game of life were
+quietly playing and strange forces were at work, underneath this
+smooth surface of every-day boardinghouse life, which would show
+themselves some fine morning or other in events, if not in
+catastrophes.  I have been watchful, as I said I should be, but have
+little to tell as yet.  You may laugh at me, and very likely think
+me foolishly fanciful to trouble myself about what is going on in a
+middling-class household like ours.  Do as you like.  But here is
+that terrible fact to begin with,--a beautiful young girl, with the
+blood and the nerve-fibre that belong to Nature's women, turned
+loose among live men.
+
+-Terrible fact?
+
+Very terrible.  Nothing more so.  Do you forget the angels who lost
+heaven for the daughters of men?  Do you forget Helen, and the fair
+women who made mischief and set nations by the ears before Helen was
+born?  If jealousies that gnaw men's hearts out of their bodies,--if
+pangs that waste men to shadows and drive them into raving madness
+or moping melancholy,--if assassination and suicide are dreadful
+possibilities, then there is always something frightful about a
+lovely young woman.--I love to look at this "Rainbow," as her
+father used sometimes to call her, of ours.  Handsome creature that
+she is in forms and colors,--the very picture, as it seems to me, of
+that "golden blonde" my friend whose book you read last year fell in
+love with when he was a boy, (as you remember, no doubt,)--handsome
+as she is, fit for a sea-king's bride, it is not her beauty alone
+that holds my eyes upon her.  Let me tell you one of my fancies, and
+then you will understand the strange sort of fascination she has for
+me.
+
+It is in the hearts of many men and women--let me add children--that
+there is a Great Secret waiting for them,--a secret of which they
+get hints now and then, perhaps oftener in early than in later
+years.  These hints come sometimes in dreams, sometimes in sudden
+startling flashes,--second wakings, as it were,--a waking out of the
+waking state, which last is very apt to be a half-sleep.  I have
+many times stopped short and held my breath, and felt the blood
+leaving my cheeks, in one of these sudden clairvoyant flashes.  Of
+course I cannot tell what kind of a secret this is, but I think of
+it as a disclosure of certain relations of our personal being to
+time and space, to other intelligences, to the procession of events,
+and to their First Great Cause.  This secret seems to be broken up,
+as it were, into fragments, so that we find here a word and there a
+syllable, and then again only a letter of it; but it never is
+written out for most of us as a complete sentence, in this life.  I
+do not think it could be; for I am disposed to consider our beliefs
+about such a possible disclosure rather as a kind of premonition of
+an enlargement of our faculties in some future state than as an
+expectation to be fulfilled for most of us in this life.  Persons,
+however, have fallen into trances,--as did the Reverend William
+Tennent, among many others,--and learned some things which they
+could not tell in our human words.
+
+Now among the visible objects which hint to us fragments of this
+infinite secret for which our souls are waiting, the faces of women
+are those that carry the most legible hieroglyphics of the great
+mystery.  There are women's faces, some real, some ideal, which
+contain something in them that becomes a positive element in our
+creed, so direct and palpable a revelation is it of the infinite
+purity and love.  I remember two faces of women with wings, such as
+they call angels, of Fra Angelico,--and I just now came across a
+print of Raphael's Santa Apollina, with something of the same
+quality,--which I was sure had their prototypes in the world above
+ours.  No wonder the Catholics pay their vows to the Queen of
+Heaven!  The unpoetical side of Protestantism is, that it has no
+women to be worshipped.
+
+But mind you, it is not every beautiful face that hints the Great
+Secret to us, nor is it only in beautiful faces that we find traces
+of it.  Sometimes it looks out from a sweet sad eye, the only beauty
+of a plain countenance; sometimes there is so much meaning in the
+lips of a woman, not otherwise fascinating, that we know they have a
+message for us, and wait almost with awe to hear their accents.  But
+this young girl has at once the beauty of feature and the unspoken
+mystery of expression.  Can she tell me anything?
+
+Is her life a complement of mine, with the missing element in it
+which I have been groping after through so many friendships that I
+have tired of, and through--Hush!  Is the door fast?  Talking loud
+is a bad trick in these curious boarding-houses.
+
+You must have sometimes noted this fact that I am going to remind
+you of and to use for a special illustration.  Riding along over a
+rocky road, suddenly the slow monotonous grinding of the crushing
+gravel changes to a deep heavy rumble.  There is a great hollow
+under your feet,--a huge unsunned cavern.  Deep, deep beneath you in
+the core of the living rock, it arches its awful vault, and far away
+it stretches its winding galleries, their roofs dripping into
+streams where fishes have been swimming and spawning in the dark
+until their scales are white as milk and their eyes have withered
+out, obsolete and useless.
+
+So it is in life.  We jog quietly along, meeting the same faces,
+grinding over the same thoughts, the gravel of the soul's highway,--
+now and then jarred against an obstacle we cannot crush, but must
+ride over or round as we best may, sometimes bringing short up
+against a disappointment, but still working along with the creaking
+and rattling and grating and jerking that belong to the journey of
+life, even in the smoothest-rolling vehicle.  Suddenly we hear the
+deep underground reverberation that reveals the unsuspected depth of
+some abyss of thought or passion beneath us.
+
+I wish the girl would go.  I don't like to look at her so much, and
+yet I cannot help it.  Always that same expression of something that
+I ought to know,--something that she was made to tell and I to
+hear,--lying there ready to fall off from her lips, ready to leap
+out of her eyes and make a saint of me, or a devil or a lunatic, or
+perhaps a prophet to tell the truth and be hated of men, or a poet
+whose words shall flash upon the dry stubble-field of worn-out
+thoughts and burn over an age of lies in an hour of passion.
+
+It suddenly occurs to me that I may have put you on the wrong track.
+The Great Secret that I refer to has nothing to do with the Three
+Words.  Set your mind at ease about that,--there are reasons I could
+give you which settle all that matter.  I don't wonder, however,
+that you confounded the Great Secret with the Three Words.
+
+I LOVE YOU is all the secret that many, nay, most women have to
+tell.  When that is said, they are like China-crackers on the
+morning of the fifth of July.  And just as that little patriotic
+implement is made with a slender train which leads to the magazine
+in its interior, so a sharp eye can almost always see the train
+leading from a young girl's eye or lip to the "I love you" in her
+heart.  But the Three Words are not the Great Secret I mean.  No,
+women's faces are only one of the tablets on which that is written
+in its partial, fragmentary symbols.  It lies deeper than Love,
+though very probably Love is a part of it.  Some, I think,--
+Wordsworth might be one of them,--spell out a portion of it from
+certain beautiful natural objects, landscapes, flowers, and others.
+I can mention several poems of his that have shadowy hints which
+seem to me to come near the region where I think it lies.  I have
+known two persons who pursued it with the passion of the old
+alchemists,--all wrong evidently, but infatuated, and never giving
+up the daily search for it until they got tremulous and feeble, and
+their dreams changed to visions of things that ran and crawled about
+their floor and ceilings, and so they died.  The vulgar called them
+drunkards.
+
+I told you that I would let you know the mystery of the effect this
+young girl's face produces on me.  It is akin to those influences a
+friend of mine has described, you may remember, as coming from
+certain voices.  I cannot translate it into words,--only into
+feelings; and these I have attempted to shadow by showing that her
+face hinted that revelation of something we are close to knowing,
+which all imaginative persons are looking for either in this world
+or on the very threshold of the next.
+
+You shake your head at the vagueness and fanciful
+incomprehensibleness of my description of the expression in a young
+girl's face.  You forget what a miserable surface-matter this
+language is in which we try to reproduce our interior state of
+being.  Articulation is a shallow trick.  From the light Poh! which
+we toss off from our lips as we fling a nameless scribbler's
+impertinence into our waste-baskets, to the gravest utterances which
+comes from our throats in our moments of deepest need, is only a
+space of some three or four inches.  Words, which are a set of
+clickings, hissings, lispings, and so on, mean very little, compared
+to tones and expression of the features.  I give it up; I thought I
+could shadow forth in some feeble way, by their aid, the effect this
+young girl's face produces on my imagination; but it is of no use.
+No doubt your head aches, trying to make something of my
+description.  If there is here and there one that can make anything
+intelligible out of my talk about the Great Secret, and who has
+spelt out a syllable or two of it on some woman's face, dead or
+living, that is all I can expect.  One should see the person with
+whom he converses about such matters.  There are dreamy-eyed people
+to whom I should say all these things with a certainty of being
+understood;--
+
+          That moment that his face I see,
+          I know the man that must hear me
+          To him my tale I teach.
+
+--I am afraid some of them have not got a spare quarter of a dollar
+for this August number, so that they will never see it.
+
+--Let us start again, just as if we had not made this ambitious
+attempt, which may go for nothing, and you can have your money
+refunded, if you will make the change.
+
+This young girl, about whom I have talked so unintelligibly, is the
+unconscious centre of attraction to the whole solar system of our
+breakfast-table.  The Little Gentleman leans towards her, and she
+again seems to be swayed as by some invisible gentle force towards
+him.  That slight inclination of two persons with a strong affinity
+towards each other, throwing them a little out of plumb when they
+sit side by side, is a physical fact I have often noticed.  Then
+there is a tendency in all the men's eyes to converge on her; and I
+do firmly believe, that, if all their chairs were examined, they
+would be found a little obliquely placed, so as to favor the
+direction in which their occupants love to look.
+
+That bland, quiet old gentleman, of whom I have spoken as sitting
+opposite to me, is no exception to the rule.  She brought down some
+mignonette one morning, which she had grown in her chamber.  She
+gave a sprig to her little neighbor, and one to the landlady, and
+sent another by the hand of Bridget to this old gentleman.
+
+--Sarvant, Ma'am I Much obleeged,--he said, and put it gallantly in
+his button-hole.--After breakfast he must see some of her drawings.
+Very fine performances,--very fine!--truly elegant productions,
+truly elegant!--Had seen Miss Linwood's needlework in London, in
+the year (eighteen hundred and little or nothing, I think he said,)-
+patronized by the nobility and gentry, and Her Majesty,--elegant,
+truly elegant productions, very fine performances; these drawings
+reminded him of them;--wonderful resemblance to Nature; an
+extraordinary art, painting; Mr. Copley made some very fine pictures
+that he remembered seeing when he was a boy.  Used to remember some
+lines about a portrait Written by Mr. Cowper, beginning,
+
+         "Oh that those lips had language! Life has pass'd
+          With me but roughly since I heard thee last."
+
+And with this the old gentleman fell to thinking about a dead mother
+of his that he remembered ever so much younger than he now was, and
+looking, not as his mother, but as his daughter should look.  The
+dead young mother was looking at the old man, her child, as she used
+to look at him so many, many years ago.  He stood still as if in a
+waking dream, his eyes fixed on the drawings till their outlines
+grew indistinct and they ran into each other, and a pale, sweet face
+shaped itself out of the glimmering light through which he saw them.
+--What is there quite so profoundly human as an old man's memory of
+a mother who died in his earlier years?  Mother she remains till
+manhood, and by-and-by she grows to be as a sister; and at last,
+when, wrinkled and bowed and broken, he looks back upon her in her
+fair youth, he sees in the sweet image he caresses, not his parent,
+but, as it were, his child.
+
+If I had not seen all this in the old gentleman's face, the words
+with which he broke his silence would have betrayed his train of
+thought.
+
+--If they had only taken pictures then as they do now!--he said.
+--All gone! all gone! nothing but her face as she leaned on the arms
+of her great chair; and I would give a hundred pound for the poorest
+little picture of her, such as you can buy for a shilling of anybody
+that you don't want to see.--The old gentleman put his hand to his
+forehead so as to shade his eyes.  I saw he was looking at the dim
+photograph of memory, and turned from him to Iris.
+
+How many drawing-books have you filled,--I said,--since you began to
+take lessons?--This was the first,--she answered,--since she was
+here; and it was not full, but there were many separate sheets of
+large size she had covered with drawings.
+
+I turned over the leaves of the book before us.  Academic studies,
+principally of the human figure.  Heads of sibyls, prophets, and so
+forth.  Limbs from statues.  Hands and feet from Nature.  What a
+superb drawing of an arm!  I don't remember it among the figures
+from Michel Angelo, which seem to have been her patterns mainly.
+From Nature, I think, or after a cast from Nature.--Oh!
+
+--Your smaller studies are in this, I suppose,--I said, taking up
+the drawing-book with a lock on it,--Yes,--she said.--I should like
+to see her style of working on a small scale.--There was nothing in
+it worth showing,--she said; and presently I saw her try the lock,
+which proved to be fast.  We are all caricatured in it, I haven't
+the least doubt.  I think, though, I could tell by her way of
+dealing with us what her fancies were about us boarders.  Some of
+them act as if they were bewitched with her, but she does not seem
+to notice it much.  Her thoughts seem to be on her little neighbor
+more than on anybody else.  The young fellow John appears to stand
+second in her good graces.  I think he has once or twice sent her
+what the landlady's daughter calls bo-kays of flowers,--somebody
+has, at any rate.--I saw a book she had, which must have come from
+the divinity-student.  It had a dreary title-page, which she had
+enlivened with a fancy portrait of the author,--a face from memory,
+apparently,--one of those faces that small children loathe without
+knowing why, and which give them that inward disgust for heaven so
+many of the little wretches betray, when they hear that these are
+"good men," and that heaven is full of such.--The gentleman with
+the diamond--the Koh-i-noor, so called by us--was not encouraged, I
+think, by the reception of his packet of perfumed soap.  He pulls
+his purple moustache and looks appreciatingly at Iris, who never
+sees him, as it should seem.  The young Marylander, who I thought
+would have been in love with her before this time, sometimes looks
+from his corner across the long diagonal of the table, as much as to
+say, I wish you were up here by me, or I were down there by you,--
+which would, perhaps, be a more natural arrangement than the present
+one.  But nothing comes of all this,--and nothing has come of my
+sagacious idea of finding out the girl's fancies by looking into her
+locked drawing-book.
+
+Not to give up all the questions I was determined to solve, I made
+an attempt also to work into the Little Gentleman's chamber.  For
+this purpose, I kept him in conversation, one morning, until he was
+just ready to go up-stairs, and then, as if to continue the talk,
+followed him as he toiled back to his room.  He rested on the
+landing and faced round toward me.  There was something in his eye
+which said, Stop there!  So we finished our conversation on the
+landing.  The next day, I mustered assurance enough to knock at his
+door, having a pretext ready.--No answer.--Knock again.  A door,
+as if of a cabinet, was shut softly and locked, and presently I
+heard the peculiar dead beat of his thick-soled, misshapen boots.
+The bolts and the lock of the inner door were unfastened,--with
+unnecessary noise, I thought,--and he came into the passage.  He
+pulled the inner door after him and opened the outer one at which I
+stood.  He had on a flowered silk dressing-gown, such as
+"Mr. Copley" used to paint his old-fashioned merchant-princes in;
+and a quaint-looking key in his hand.  Our conversation was short,
+but long enough to convince me that the Little Gentleman did not
+want my company in his chamber, and did not mean to have it.
+
+I have been making a great fuss about what is no mystery at all,--a
+schoolgirl's secrets and a whimsical man's habits.  I mean to give
+up such nonsense and mind my own business.--Hark!  What the deuse
+is that odd noise in his chamber?
+
+--I think I am a little superstitious.  There were two things, when
+I was a boy, that diabolized my imagination,--I mean, that gave me a
+distinct apprehension of a formidable bodily shape which prowled
+round the neighborhood where I was born and bred.  The first was a
+series of marks called the "Devil's footsteps."  These were patches
+of sand in the pastures, where no grass grew, where the low-bush
+blackberry, the "dewberry," as our Southern neighbors call it, in
+prettier and more Shakspearian language, did not spread its clinging
+creepers,--where even the pale, dry, sadly-sweet "everlasting" could
+not grow, but all was bare and blasted.  The second was a mark in
+one of the public buildings near my home,--the college dormitory
+named after a Colonial Governor.  I do not think many persons are
+aware of the existence of this mark,--little having been said about
+the story in print, as it was considered very desirable, for the
+sake of the Institution, to hush it up.  In the northwest corner,
+and on the level of the third or fourth story, there are signs of a
+breach in the walls, mended pretty well, but not to be mistaken.  A
+considerable portion of that corner must have been carried away,
+from within outward.  It was an unpleasant affair; and I do not care
+to repeat the particulars; but some young men had been using sacred
+things in a profane and unlawful way, when the occurrence, which was
+variously explained, took place.  The story of the Appearance in the
+chamber was, I suppose, invented afterwards; but of the injury to
+the building there could be no question; and the zig-zag line, where
+the mortar is a little thicker than before, is still distinctly
+visible.  The queer burnt spots, called the "Devil's footsteps," had
+never attracted attention before this time, though there is no
+evidence that they had not existed previously, except that of the
+late Miss M., a "Goody," so called, or sweeper, who was positive on
+the subject, but had a strange horror of referring to an affair of
+which she was thought to know something.--I tell you it was not so
+pleasant for a little boy of impressible nature to go up to bed in
+an old gambrel-roofed house, with untenanted, locked upper-chambers,
+and a most ghostly garret,--with the "Devil's footsteps" in the
+fields behind the house and in front of it the patched dormitory
+where the unexplained occurrence had taken place which startled
+those godless youths at their mock devotions, so that one of them
+was epileptic from that day forward, and another, after a dreadful
+season of mental conflict, took holy orders and became renowned for
+his ascetic sanctity.
+
+There were other circumstances that kept up the impression produced
+by these two singular facts I have just mentioned.  There was a dark
+storeroom, on looking through the key-hole of which, I could dimly
+see a heap of chairs and tables, and other four-footed things, which
+seemed to me to have rushed in there, frightened, and in their
+fright to have huddled together and climbed up on each other's
+backs,--as the people did in that awful crush where so many were
+killed, at the execution of Holloway and Haggerty.  Then the Lady's
+portrait, up-stairs, with the sword-thrusts through it,--marks of
+the British officers' rapiers,--and the tall mirror in which they
+used to look at their red coats,--confound them for smashing its
+mate?--and the deep, cunningly wrought arm-chair in which Lord Percy
+used to sit while his hair was dressing;--he was a gentleman, and
+always had it covered with a large peignoir, to save the silk
+covering my grandmother embroidered.  Then the little room
+downstairs from which went the orders to throw up a bank of earth on
+the hill yonder, where you may now observe a granite obelisk,--"the
+study" in my father's time, but in those days the council-chamber of
+armed men,--sometimes filled with soldiers; come with me, and I will
+show you the "dents" left by the butts of their muskets all over the
+floor.  With all these suggestive objects round me, aided by the
+wild stories those awful country-boys that came to live in our
+service brought with them;--of contracts written in blood and left
+out over night, not to be found the next morning, (removed by the
+Evil One, who takes his nightly round among our dwellings, and filed
+away for future use,)--of dreams coming true,--of death-signs,--of
+apparitions, no wonder that my imagination got excited, and I was
+liable to superstitious fancies.
+
+Jeremy Bentham's logic, by which he proved that he couldn't possibly
+see a ghost is all very well-in the day-time.  All the reason in the
+world will never get those impressions of childhood, created by just
+such circumstances as I have been telling, out of a man's head.
+That is the only excuse I have to give for the nervous kind of
+curiosity with which I watch my little neighbor, and the obstinacy
+with which I lie awake whenever I hear anything going on in his
+chamber after midnight.
+
+But whatever further observations I may have made must be deferred
+for the present.  You will see in what way it happened that my
+thoughts were turned from spiritual matters to bodily ones, and how
+I got my fancy full of material images,--faces, heads, figures,
+muscles, and so forth,--in such a way that I should have no chance
+in this number to gratify any curiosity you may feel, if I had the
+means of so doing.
+
+Indeed, I have come pretty near omitting my periodical record this
+time.  It was all the work of a friend of mine, who would have it
+that I should sit to him for my portrait.  When a soul draws a body
+in the great lottery of life, where every one is sure of a prize,
+such as it is, the said soul inspects the said body with the same
+curious interest with which one who has ventured into a "gift
+enterprise" examines the "massive silver pencil-case" with the
+coppery smell and impressible tube, or the "splendid gold ring" with
+the questionable specific gravity, which it has been his fortune to
+obtain in addition to his purchase.
+
+The soul, having studied the article of which it finds itself
+proprietor, thinks, after a time, it knows it pretty well.  But
+there is this difference between its view and that of a person
+looking at us:--we look from within, and see nothing but the mould
+formed by the elements in which we are incased; other observers look
+from without, and see us as living statues.  To be sure, by the aid
+of mirrors, we get a few glimpses of our outside aspect; but this
+occasional impression is always modified by that look of the soul
+from within outward which none but ourselves can take.  A portrait
+is apt, therefore, to be a surprise to us.  The artist looks only
+from without.  He sees us, too, with a hundred aspects on our faces
+we are never likely to see.  No genuine expression can be studied by
+the subject of it in the looking-glass.
+
+More than this; he sees us in a way in which many of our friends or
+acquaintances never see us.  Without wearing any mask we are
+conscious of, we have a special face for each friend.  For, in the
+first place, each puts a special reflection of himself upon us, on
+the principle of assimilation you found referred to in my last
+record, if you happened to read that document.  And secondly, each
+of our friends is capable of seeing just so far, and no farther,
+into our face, and each sees in it the particular thing that he
+looks for.  Now the artist, if he is truly an artist, does not take
+any one of these special views.  Suppose he should copy you as you
+appear to the man who wants your name to a subscription-list, you
+could hardly expect a friend who entertains you to recognize the
+likeness to the smiling face which sheds its radiance at his board.
+Even within your own family, I am afraid there is a face which the
+rich uncle knows, that is not so familiar to the poor relation.  The
+artist must take one or the other, or something compounded of the
+two, or something different from either.  What the daguerreotype and
+photograph do is to give the features and one particular look, the
+very look which kills all expression, that of self-consciousness.
+The artist throws you off your guard, watches you in movement and in
+repose, puts your face through its exercises, observes its
+transitions, and so gets the whole range of its expression.  Out of
+all this he forms an ideal portrait, which is not a copy of your
+exact look at any one time or to any particular person.  Such a
+portrait cannot be to everybody what the ungloved call "as nat'ral
+as life."  Every good picture, therefore, must be considered wanting
+in resemblance by many persons.
+
+There is one strange revelation which comes out, as the artist
+shapes your features from his outline.  It is that you resemble so
+many relatives to whom you yourself never had noticed any particular
+likeness in your countenance.
+
+He is at work at me now, when I catch some of these resemblances,
+thus:
+
+There! that is just the look my father used to have sometimes; I
+never thought I had a sign of it.  The mother's eyebrow and grayish-
+blue eye, those I knew I had.  But there is a something which
+recalls a smile that faded away from my sister's lips--how many
+years ago!  I thought it so pleasant in her, that I love myself
+better for having a trace of it.
+
+Are we not young?  Are we not fresh and blooming?  Wait, a bit.  The
+artist takes a mean little brush and draws three fine lines,
+diverging outwards from the eye over the temple.  Five years.--The
+artist draws one tolerably distinct and two faint lines,
+perpendicularly between the eyebrows.  Ten years.--The artist
+breaks up the contours round the mouth, so that they look a little
+as a hat does that has been sat upon and recovered itself, ready, as
+one would say, to crumple up again in the same creases, on smiling
+or other change of feature.--Hold on!  Stop that!  Give a young
+fellow a chance!  Are we not whole years short of that interesting
+period of life when Mr. Balzac says that a man, etc., etc., etc.?
+
+There now!  That is ourself, as we look after finishing an article,
+getting a three-mile pull with the ten-foot sculls, redressing the
+wrongs of the toilet, and standing with the light of hope in our eye
+and the reflection of a red curtain on our cheek.  Is he not a POET
+that painted us?
+
+          "Blest be the art that can immortalize!"
+                                        COWPER.
+
+--Young folks look on a face as a unit; children who go to school
+with any given little John Smith see in his name a distinctive
+appellation, and in his features as special and definite an
+expression of his sole individuality as if he were the first created
+of his race: As soon as we are old enough to get the range of three
+or four generations well in hand, and to take in large family
+histories, we never see an individual in a face of any stock we
+know, but a mosaic copy of a pattern, with fragmentary tints from
+this and that ancestor.  The analysis of a face into its ancestral
+elements requires that it should be examined in the very earliest
+infancy, before it has lost that ancient and solemn look it brings
+with it out of the past eternity; and again in that brief space when
+Life, the mighty sculptor, has done his work, and Death, his silent
+servant, lifts the veil and lets us look at the marble lines he has
+wrought so faithfully; and lastly, while a painter who can seize all
+the traits of a countenance is building it up, feature after
+feature, from the slight outline to the finished portrait.
+
+--I am satisfied, that, as we grow older, we learn to look upon our
+bodies more and more as a temporary possession and less and less as
+identified with ourselves.  In early years, while the child "feels
+its life in every limb," it lives in the body and for the body to a
+very great extent.  It ought to be so.  There have been many very
+interesting children who have shown a wonderful indifference to the
+things of earth and an extraordinary development of the spiritual
+nature.  There is a perfect literature of their biographies, all
+alike in their essentials; the same "disinclination to the usual
+amusements of childhood "; the same remarkable sensibility; the same
+docility; the same conscientiousness; in short, an almost uniform
+character, marked by beautiful traits, which we look at with a
+painful admiration.  It will be found that most of these children
+are the subjects of some constitutional unfitness for living, the
+most frequent of which I need not mention.  They are like the
+beautiful, blushing, half-grown fruit that falls before its time
+because its core is gnawed out.  They have their meaning,--they do
+not-live in vain,--but they are windfalls.  I am convinced that many
+healthy children are injured morally by being forced to read too
+much about these little meek sufferers and their spiritual
+exercises.  Here is a boy that loves to run, swim, kick football,
+turn somersets, make faces, whittle, fish, tear his clothes, coast,
+skate, fire crackers, blow squash "tooters," cut his name on fences,
+read about Robinson Crusoe and Sinbad the Sailor, eat the widest-
+angled slices of pie and untold cakes and candies, crack nuts with
+his back teeth and bite out the better part of another boy's apple
+with his front ones, turn up coppers, "stick" knives, call names,
+throw stones, knock off hats, set mousetraps, chalk doorsteps, "cut
+behind" anything on wheels or runners, whistle through his teeth,
+"holler" Fire! on slight evidence, run after soldiers, patronize an
+engine-company, or, in his own words, "blow for tub No. 11," or
+whatever it may be;--isn't that a pretty nice sort of a boy, though
+he has not got anything the matter with him that takes the taste of
+this world out?  Now, when you put into such a hot-blooded, hard-
+fisted, round-cheeked little rogue's hand a sad-looking volume or
+pamphlet, with the portrait of a thin, white-faced child, whose life
+is really as much a training for death as the last month of a
+condemned criminal's existence, what does he find in common between
+his own overflowing and exulting sense of vitality and the
+experiences of the doomed offspring of invalid parents?  The time
+comes when we have learned to understand the music of sorrow, the
+beauty of resigned suffering, the holy light that plays over the
+pillow of those who die before their time, in humble hope and trust.
+But it is not until he has worked his way through the period of
+honest hearty animal existence, which every robust child should make
+the most of,--not until he has learned the use of his various
+faculties, which is his first duty,--that a boy of courage and
+animal vigor is in a proper state to read these tearful records of
+premature decay.  I have no doubt that disgust is implanted in the
+minds of many healthy children by early surfeits of pathological
+piety.  I do verily believe that He who took children in His arms
+and blessed them loved the healthiest and most playful of them just
+as well as those who were richest in the tuberculous virtues.  I
+know what I am talking about, and there are more parents in this
+country who will be willing to listen to what I say than there are
+fools to pick a quarrel with me.  In the sensibility and the
+sanctity which often accompany premature decay I see one of the most
+beautiful instances of the principle of compensation which marks the
+Divine benevolence.  But to get the spiritual hygiene of robust
+natures out of the exceptional regimen of invalids is just simply
+what we Professors call "bad practice"; and I know by experience
+that there are worthy people who not only try it on their own
+children, but actually force it on those of their neighbors.
+
+--Having been photographed, and stereographed, and chromatographed,
+or done in colors, it only remained to be phrenologized.  A polite
+note from Messrs. Bumpus and Crane, requesting our attendance at
+their Physiological Emporium, was too tempting to be resisted.  We
+repaired to that scientific Golgotha.
+
+Messrs. Bumpus and Crane are arranged on the plan of the man and the
+woman in the toy called a "weather-house," both on the same wooden
+arm suspended on a pivot,--so that when one comes to the door, the
+other retires backwards, and vice versa.  The more particular
+speciality of one is to lubricate your entrance and exit,--that of
+the other to polish you off phrenologically in the recesses of the
+establishment.  Suppose yourself in a room full of casts and
+pictures, before a counterful of books with taking titles.  I wonder
+if the picture of the brain is there, "approved" by a noted
+Phrenologist, which was copied from my, the Professor's, folio
+plate, in the work of Gall and Spurzheim.  An extra convolution, No.
+9, Destructiveness, according to the list beneath, which was not to
+be seen in the plate, itself a copy of Nature, was very liberally
+supplied by the artist, to meet the wants of the catalogue of
+"organs."  Professor Bumpus is seated in front of a row of women,--
+horn-combers and gold-beaders, or somewhere about that range of
+life,--looking so credulous, that, if any Second-Advent Miller or
+Joe Smith should come along, he could string the whole lot of them
+on his cheapest lie, as a boy strings a dozen "shiners" on a
+stripped twig of willow.
+
+The Professor (meaning ourselves) is in a hurry, as usual; let the
+horn-combers wait,--he shall be bumped without inspecting the
+antechamber.
+
+Tape round the head,--22 inches.  (Come on, old 23 inches, if you
+think you are the better man!)
+
+Feels thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles as those
+horrid old women poke their fingers into the salt-meat on the
+provision-stalls at the Quincy Market.  Vitality, No.  5 or 6, or
+something or other.  Victuality, (organ at epigastrium,) some
+other number equally significant.
+
+Mild champooing of head now commences.  'Extraordinary revelations!
+Cupidiphilous, 6!  Hymeniphilous, 6 +!  Paediphilous, 5!
+Deipniphilous, 6!  Gelasmiphilous, 6!  Musikiphilous, 5!
+Uraniphilous, 5!  Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on.  Meant for a
+linguist.--Invaluable information.  Will invest in grammars and
+dictionaries immediately.--I have nothing against the grand total
+of my phrenological endowments.
+
+I never set great store by my head, and did not think Messrs.
+Bumpus and Crane would give me so good a lot of organs as they did,
+especially considering that I was a dead-head on that occasion.
+Much obliged to them for their politeness.  They have been useful in
+their way by calling attention to important physiological facts.
+(This concession is due to our immense bump of Candor.)
+
+
+A short Lecture on Phrenology, read to the Boarders at our
+Breakfast-Table.
+
+I shall begin, my friends, with the definition of a Pseudo-science.
+A Pseudo-science consists of a nomenclature, with a self-adjusting
+arrangement, by which all positive evidence, or such as favors its
+doctrines, is admitted, and all negative evidence, or such as tells
+against it, is excluded.  It is invariably connected with some
+lucrative practical application.  Its professors and practitioners
+are usually shrewd people; they are very serious with the public,
+but wink and laugh a good deal among themselves.  The believing
+multitude consists of women of both sexes, feeble minded inquirers,
+poetical optimists, people who always get cheated in buying horses,
+philanthropists who insist on hurrying up the millennium, and others
+of this class, with here and there a clergyman, less frequently a
+lawyer, very rarely a physician, and almost never a horse-jockey or
+a member of the detective police.--I do not say that Phrenology was
+one of the Pseudo-sciences.
+
+A Pseudo-science does not necessarily consist wholly of lies.  It
+may contain many truths, and even valuable ones.  The rottenest bank
+starts with a little specie.  It puts out a thousand promises to pay
+on the strength of a single dollar, but the dollar is very commonly
+a good one.  The practitioners of the Pseudo-sciences know that
+common minds, after they have been baited with a real fact or two,
+will jump at the merest rag of a lie, or even at the bare hook.
+When we have one fact found us, we are very apt to supply the next
+out of our own imagination.  (How many persons can read Judges xv.
+16 correctly the first time?) The Pseudo-sciences take advantage of
+this.--I did not say that it was so with Phrenology.
+
+I have rarely met a sensible man who would not allow that there was
+something in Phrenology.  A broad, high forehead, it is commonly
+agreed, promises intellect; one that is "villanous low" and has a
+huge hind-head back of it, is wont to mark an animal nature.  I have
+as rarely met an unbiassed and sensible man who really believed in
+the bumps.  It is observed, however, that persons with what the
+Phrenologists call "good heads" are more prone than others toward
+plenary belief in the doctrine.
+
+It is so hard to prove a negative, that, if a man should assert that
+the moon was in truth a green cheese, formed by the coagulable
+substance of the Milky Way, and challenge me to prove the contrary,
+I might be puzzled.  But if he offer to sell me a ton of this lunar
+cheese, I call on him to prove the truth of the Gaseous nature of
+our satellite, before I purchase.
+
+It is not necessary to prove the falsity of the phrenological
+statement.  It is only necessary to show that its truth is not
+proved, and cannot be, by the common course of argument.  The walls
+of the head are double, with a great air-chamber between them, over
+the smallest and most closely crowded "organs."  Can you tell how
+much money there is in a safe, which also has thick double walls, by
+kneading its knobs with your fingers?  So when a man fumbles about
+my forehead, and talks about the organs of Individuality, Size,
+etc., I trust him as much as I should if he felt of the outside of
+my strong-box and told me that there was a five-dollar or a ten-
+dollar-bill under this or that particular rivet.  Perhaps there is;
+only he does n't know anything about at.  But this is a point that
+I, the Professor, understand, my friends, or ought to, certainly,
+better than you do.  The next argument you will all appreciate.
+
+I proceed, therefore, to explain the self-adjusting mechanism of
+Phrenology, which is very similar to that of the Pseudo-sciences.
+An example will show it most conveniently.
+
+A. is a notorious thief.  Messrs. Bumpus and Crane examine him and
+find a good-sized organ of Acquisitiveness.  Positive fact for
+Phrenology.  Casts and drawings of A. are multiplied, and the bump
+does not lose in the act of copying.--I did not say it gained.--
+What do you look so for?  (to the boarders.)
+
+Presently B. turns up, a bigger thief than A.  But B. has no bump at
+all over Acquisitiveness.  Negative fact; goes against Phrenology.
+--Not a bit of it.  Don't you see how small Conscientiousness is?
+That's the reason B. stole.
+
+And then comes C., ten times as much a thief as either A. or B.,--
+used to steal before he was weaned, and would pick one of his own
+pockets and put its contents in another, if he could find no other
+way of committing petty larceny.  Unfortunately, C.  has a hollow,
+instead of a bump, over Acquisitiveness.  Ah, but just look and see
+what a bump of Alimentiveness!  Did not C. buy nuts and gingerbread,
+when a boy, with the money he stole?  Of course you see why he is a
+thief, and how his example confirms our noble science.
+
+At last comes along a case which is apparently a settler, for there
+is a little brain with vast and varied powers,--a case like that of
+Byron, for instance.  Then comes out the grand reserve-reason which
+covers everything and renders it simply impossible ever to corner a
+Phrenologist.  "It is not the size alone, but the quality of an
+organ, which determines its degree of power."
+
+Oh! oh!  I see.--The argument may be briefly stated thus by the
+Phrenologist: "Heads I win, tails you lose."  Well, that's
+convenient.
+
+It must be confessed that Phrenology has a certain resemblance to
+the Pseudo-sciences.  I did not say it was a Pseudo-science.
+
+I have often met persons who have been altogether struck up and
+amazed at the accuracy with which some wandering Professor of
+Phrenology had read their characters written upon their skulls.  Of
+course the Professor acquires his information solely through his
+cranial inspections and manipulations.--What are you laughing at?
+(to the boarders.)--But let us just suppose, for a moment, that a
+tolerably cunning fellow, who did not know or care anything about
+Phrenology, should open a shop and undertake to read off people's
+characters at fifty cents or a dollar apiece.  Let us see how well
+he could get along without the "organs."
+
+I will suppose myself to set up such a shop.  I would invest one
+hundred dollars, more or less, in casts of brains, skulls, charts,
+and other matters that would make the most show for the money.  That
+would do to begin with.  I would then advertise myself as the
+celebrated Professor Brainey, or whatever name I might choose, and
+wait for my first customer.  My first customer is a middle-aged man.
+I look at him,--ask him a question or two, so as to hear him talk.
+When I have got the hang of him, I ask him to sit down, and proceed
+to fumble his skull, dictating as follows:
+SCALE FROM 1 TO 10.
+
+LIST OF FACULTIES FOR           PRIVATE NOTES FOR MY PUPIL.
+      CUSTOMER.
+                             Each to be accompanied with a wink.
+
+Amativeness, 7.        Most men love the conflicting sex, and all
+                    men love to be told they do.
+
+Alimentiveness, 8.     Don't you see that he has burst off his
+                 lowest waistcoat-button with feeding,--hey
+
+Acquisitiveness, 8.    Of course.  A middle-aged Yankee.
+
+Approbativeness 7+.    Hat well brushed.  Hair ditto.  Mark the
+                       effect of that plus sign.
+
+Self-Esteem 6.         His face shows that.
+
+Benevolence 9.         That'll please him.
+
+Conscientiousness 8 1/2  That fraction looks first-rate.
+
+Mirthfulness 7         Has laughed twice since he came in.
+
+Ideality 9             That sounds well.
+
+Form, Size, Weight,    4 to 6.  Average everything that
+Color, Locality,       cannot be guessed.
+Eventuality, etc. etc.
+
+
+                And so of the other faculties.
+
+
+Of course, you know, that isn't the way the Phrenologists do.  They
+go only by the bumps.--What do you keep laughing so for?  (to the
+boarders.) I only said that is the way I should practise
+"Phrenology" for a living.
+
+                    End of my Lecture.
+
+
+--The Reformers have good heads, generally.  Their faces are
+commonly serene enough, and they are lambs in private intercourse,
+even though their voices may be like
+
+         The wolf's long howl from Oonalaska's shore,
+
+when heard from the platform.  Their greatest spiritual danger is
+from the perpetual flattery of abuse to which they are exposed.
+These lines are meant to caution them.
+
+
+     SAINT ANTHONY THE REFORMER.
+
+          HIS TEMPTATION.
+
+No fear lest praise should make us proud!
+We know how cheaply that is won;
+The idle homage of the crowd
+Is proof of tasks as idly done.
+
+A surface-smile may pay the toil
+That follows still the conquering Right,
+With soft, white hands to dress the spoil
+That sunbrowned valor clutched in fight.
+
+Sing the sweet song of other days,
+Serenely placid, safely true,
+And o'er the present's parching ways
+Thy verse distils like evening dew.
+
+But speak in words of living power,--
+They fall like drops of scalding rain
+That plashed before the burning shower
+Swept o'er the cities of the plain!
+
+Then scowling Hate turns deadly pale,--
+Then Passion's half-coiled adders spring,
+And, smitten through their leprous mail,
+Strike right and left in hope to sting.
+
+If thou, unmoved by poisoning wrath,
+Thy feet on earth, thy heart above,
+Canst walk in peace thy kingly path,
+Unchanged in trust, unchilled in love,--
+
+Too kind for bitter words to grieve,
+Too firm for clamor to dismay,
+When Faith forbids thee to believe,
+And Meekness calls to disobey,--
+
+Ah, then beware of mortal pride!
+The smiling pride that calmly scorns
+Those foolish fingers, crimson dyed
+In laboring on thy crown of thorns!
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+One of our boarders--perhaps more than one was concerned in it--sent
+in some questions to me, the other day, which, trivial as some of
+them are, I felt bound to answer.
+
+1.--Whether a lady was ever known to write a letter covering only a
+single page?
+
+To this I answered, that there was a case on record where a lady had
+but half a sheet of paper and no envelope; and being obliged to send
+through the post-office, she covered only one side of the paper
+(crosswise, lengthwise, and diagonally).
+
+2.--What constitutes a man a gentleman?
+
+To this I gave several answers, adapted to particular classes of
+questioners.
+
+a.  Not trying to be a gentleman.
+
+b.  Self-respect underlying courtesy.
+
+c.  Knowledge and observance of the fitness of things in social
+intercourse.
+
+d.  f. s. d.  (as many suppose.)
+
+3.--Whether face or figure is most attractive in the female sex?
+
+Answered in the following epigram, by a young man about town:
+
+     Quoth Tom, "Though fair her features be,
+     It is her figure pleases me."
+     "What may her figure be?" I cried.
+     "One hundred thousand!" he replied.
+
+When this was read to the boarders, the young man John said he
+should like a chance to "step up" to a figger of that kind, if the
+girl was one of the right sort.
+
+The landlady said them that merried for money didn't deserve the
+blessin' of a good wife.  Money was a great thing when them that had
+it made a good use of it.  She had seen better days herself, and
+knew what it was never to want for anything.  One of her cousins
+merried a very rich old gentleman, and she had heerd that he said he
+lived ten year longer than if he'd staid by himself without anybody
+to take care of him.  There was nothin' like a wife for nussin' sick
+folks and them that couldn't take care of themselves.
+
+The young man John got off a little wink, and pointed slyly with his
+thumb in the direction of our diminutive friend, for whom he seemed
+to think this speech was intended.
+
+If it was meant for him, he did n't appear to know that it was.
+Indeed, he seems somewhat listless of late, except when the
+conversation falls upon one of those larger topics that specially
+interest him, and then he grows excited, speaks loud and fast,
+sometimes almost savagely,--and, I have noticed once or twice,
+presses his left hand to his right side, as if there were something
+that ached, or weighed, or throbbed in that region.
+
+While he speaks in this way, the general conversation is
+interrupted, and we all listen to him.  Iris looks steadily in his
+face, and then he will turn as if magnetized and meet the amber eyes
+with his own melancholy gaze.  I do believe that they have some kind
+of understanding together, that they meet elsewhere than at our
+table, and that there is a mystery, which is going to break upon us
+all of a sudden, involving the relations of these two persons.  From
+the very first, they have taken to each other.  The one thing they
+have in common is the heroic will.  In him, it shows itself in
+thinking his way straightforward, in doing battle for "free trade
+and no right of search" on the high seas of religious controversy,
+and especially in fighting the battles of his crooked old city.  In
+her, it is standing up for her little friend with the most queenly
+disregard of the code of boarding-house etiquette.  People may say
+or look what they like,--she will have her way about this sentiment
+of hers.
+
+The Poor Relation is in a dreadful fidget whenever the Little
+Gentleman says anything that interferes with her own infallibility.
+She seems to think Faith must go with her face tied up, as if she
+had the toothache,--and that if she opens her mouth to the quarter
+the wind blows from, she will catch her "death o' cold."
+
+The landlady herself came to him one day, as I have found out, and
+tried to persuade him to hold his tongue.--The boarders was gettin'
+uneasy,--she said,--and some of 'em would go, she mistrusted, if he
+talked any more about things that belonged to the ministers to
+settle.  She was a poor woman, that had known better days, but all
+her livin' depended on her boarders, and she was sure there was n't
+any of 'em she set so much by as she did by him; but there was them
+that never liked to hear about sech things, except on Sundays.
+
+The Little Gentleman looked very smiling at the landlady, who smiled
+even more cordially in return, and adjusted her cap-ribbon with an
+unconscious movement,--a reminiscence of the long-past pairing-time,
+when she had smoothed her locks and softened her voice, and won her
+mate by these and other bird-like graces.--My dear Madam,--he
+said,--I will remember your interests, and speak only of matters to
+which I am totally indifferent.--I don't doubt he meant this; but a
+day or two after, something stirred him up, and I heard his voice
+uttering itself aloud, thus:
+
+-It must be done, Sir!--he was saying,--it must be done!  Our
+religion has been Judaized, it has been Romanized, it has been
+Orientalized, it has been Anglicized, and the time is at hand when
+it must be AMERICANIZED!  Now, Sir, you see what Americanizing is in
+politics;--it means that a man shall have a vote because he is a
+man,--and shall vote for whom he pleases, without his neighbor's
+interference.  If he chooses to vote for the Devil, that is his
+lookout;--perhaps he thinks the Devil is better than the other
+candidates; and I don't doubt he's often right, Sir.  Just so a
+man's soul has a vote in the spiritual community; and it doesn't do,
+Sir, or it won't do long, to call him "schismatic" and "heretic" and
+those other wicked names that the old murderous Inquisitors have
+left us to help along "peace and goodwill to men"!
+
+As long as you could catch a man and drop him into an oubliette, or
+pull him out a few inches longer by machinery, or put a hot iron
+through his tongue, or make him climb up a ladder and sit on a board
+at the top of a stake so that he should be slowly broiled by the
+fire kindled round it, there was some sense in these words; they led
+to something.  But since we have done with those tools, we had
+better give up those words.  I should like to see a Yankee
+advertisement like this!--(the Little Gentleman laughed fiercely as
+he uttered the words,--)
+
+--Patent thumb-screws,--will crush the bone in three turns.
+
+--The cast-iron boot, with wedge and mallet, only five dollars!
+
+--The celebrated extension-rack, warranted to stretch a man six
+inches in twenty minutes,--money returned, if it proves
+unsatisfactory.
+
+I should like to see such an advertisement, I say, Sir!  Now, what's
+the use of using the words that belonged with the thumb-screws, and
+the Blessed Virgin with the knives under her petticoats and sleeves
+and bodice, and the dry pan and gradual fire, if we can't have the
+things themselves, Sir?  What's the use of painting the fire round a
+poor fellow, when you think it won't do to kindle one under him,--as
+they did at Valencia or Valladolid, or wherever it was?
+
+--What story is that?--I said.
+
+Why,--he answered,--at the last auto-da-fe, in 1824 or '5, or
+somewhere there,--it's a traveller's story, but a mighty knowing
+traveller he is,--they had a "heretic" to use up according to the
+statutes provided for the crime of private opinion.  They could n't
+quite make up their minds to burn him, so they only hung him in a
+hogshead painted all over with flames!
+
+No, Sir!  when a man calls you names because you go to the ballot-
+box and vote for your candidate, or because you say this or that is
+your opinion, he forgets in which half of the world he was born,
+Sir!  It won't be long, Sir, before we have Americanized religion as
+we have Americanized government; and then, Sir, every soul God sends
+into the world will be good in the face of all men for just so much
+of His "inspiration" as "giveth him understanding"!--None of my
+words, Sir!  none of my words!
+
+--If Iris does not love this Little Gentleman, what does love look
+like when one sees it?  She follows him with her eyes, she leans
+over toward him when he speaks, her face changes with the changes of
+his speech, so that one might think it was with her as with
+Christabel,--
+
+          That all her features were resigned
+          To this sole image in her mind.
+
+But she never looks at him with such intensity of devotion as when
+he says anything about the soul and the soul's atmosphere, religion.
+
+Women are twice as religious as men;--all the world knows that.
+Whether they are any better, in the eyes of Absolute Justice, might
+be questioned; for the additional religious element supplied by sex
+hardly seems to be a matter of praise or blame.  But in all common
+aspects they are so much above us that we get most of our religion
+from them,--from their teachings, from their example,--above all,
+from their pure affections.
+
+Now this poor little Iris had been talked to strangely in her
+childhood.  Especially she had been told that she hated all good
+things,--which every sensible parent knows well enough is not true
+of a great many children, to say the least.  I have sometimes
+questioned whether many libels on human nature had not been a
+natural consequence of the celibacy of the clergy, which was
+enforced for so long a period.
+
+The child had met this and some other equally encouraging statements
+as to her spiritual conditions, early in life, and fought the battle
+of spiritual independence prematurely, as many children do.  If all
+she did was hateful to God, what was the meaning of the approving or
+else the disapproving conscience, when she had done "right" or
+"wrong"?  No "shoulder-striker" hits out straighter than a child
+with its logic.  Why, I can remember lying in my bed in the nursery
+and settling questions which all that I have heard since and got out
+of books has never been able to raise again.  If a child does not
+assert itself in this way in good season, it becomes just what its
+parents or teachers were, and is no better than a plastic image.--
+How old was I at the time?--I suppose about 5823 years old,--that
+is, counting from Archbishop Usher's date of the Creation, and
+adding the life of the race, whose accumulated intelligence is a
+part of my inheritance, to my own.  A good deal older than Plato,
+you see, and much more experienced than my Lord Bacon and most of
+the world's teachers.--Old books, as you well know, are books of
+the world's youth, and new books are fruits of its age.  How many of
+all these ancient folios round me are like so many old cupels!  The
+gold has passed out of them long ago, but their pores are full of
+the dross with which it was mingled.
+
+And so Iris--having thrown off that first lasso which not only
+fetters, but chokes those whom it can hold, so that they give
+themselves up trembling and breathless to the great soul-subduer,
+who has them by the windpipe had settled a brief creed for herself,
+in which love of the neighbor, whom we have seen, was the first
+article, and love of the Creator, whom we have not seen, grew out of
+this as its natural development, being necessarily second in order
+of time to the first unselfish emotions which we feel for the
+fellow-creatures who surround us in our early years.
+
+The child must have some place of worship.  What would a young girl
+be who never mingled her voice with the songs and prayers that rose
+all around her with every returning day of rest?  And Iris was free
+to choose.  Sometimes one and sometimes another would offer to carry
+her to this or that place of worship; and when the doors were
+hospitably opened, she would often go meekly in by herself.  It was
+a curious fact, that two churches as remote from each other in
+doctrine as could well be divided her affections.
+
+The Church of Saint Polycarp had very much the look of a Roman
+Catholic chapel.  I do not wish to run the risk of giving names to
+the ecclesiastical furniture which gave it such a Romish aspect; but
+there were pictures, and inscriptions in antiquated characters, and
+there were reading-stands, and flowers on the altar, and other
+elegant arrangements.  Then there were boys to sing alternately in
+choirs responsive to each other, and there was much bowing, with
+very loud responding, and a long service and a short sermon, and a
+bag, such as Judas used to hold in the old pictures, was carried
+round to receive contributions.  Everything was done not only
+"decently and in order," but, perhaps one might say, with a certain
+air of magnifying their office on the part of the dignified
+clergymen, often two or three in number.  The music and the free
+welcome were grateful to Iris, and she forgot her prejudices at the
+door of the chapel.  For this was a church with open doors, with
+seats for all classes and all colors alike,--a church of zealous
+worshippers after their faith, of charitable and serviceable men and
+women, one that took care of its children and never forgot its poor,
+and whose people were much more occupied in looking out for their
+own souls than in attacking the faith of their neighbors.  In its
+mode of worship there was a union of two qualities,--the taste and
+refinement, which the educated require just as much in their
+churches as elsewhere, and the air of stateliness, almost of pomp,
+which impresses the common worshipper, and is often not without its
+effect upon those who think they hold outward forms as of little
+value.  Under the half-Romish aspect of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp, the young girl found a devout and loving and singularly
+cheerful religious spirit.  The artistic sense, which betrayed
+itself in the dramatic proprieties of its ritual, harmonized with
+her taste.  The mingled murmur of the loud responses, in those
+rhythmic phrases, so simple, yet so fervent, almost as if every
+tenth heart-beat, instead of its dull tic-tac, articulated itself as
+"Good Lord, deliver us!  "--the sweet alternation of the two choirs,
+as their holy song floated from side to side, the keen young voices
+rising like a flight of singing-birds that passes from one grove to
+another, carrying its music with it back and forward,--why should
+she not love these gracious outward signs of those inner harmonies
+which none could deny made beautiful the lives of many of her
+fellow-worshippers in the humble, yet not inelegant Chapel of Saint
+Polycarp?
+
+The young Marylander, who was born and bred to that mode of worship,
+had introduced her to the chapel, for which he did the honors for
+such of our boarders as were not otherwise provided for.  I saw them
+looking over the same prayer-book one Sunday, and I could not help
+thinking that two such young and handsome persons could hardly
+worship together in safety for a great while.  But they seemed to
+mind nothing but their prayer-book.  By-and-by the silken bag was
+handed round.--I don't believe she will; so awkward, you know;-
+besides, she only came by invitation.  There she is, with her hand
+in her pocket, though,--and sure enough, her little bit of silver
+tinkled as it struck the coin beneath.  God bless her! she has n't
+much to give; but her eye glistens when she gives it, and that is
+all Heaven asks.--That was the first time I noticed these young
+people together, and I am sure they behaved with the most charming
+propriety,--in fact, there was one of our silent lady-boarders with
+them, whose eyes would have kept Cupid and Psyche to their good
+behavior.  A day or two after this I noticed that the young
+gentleman had left his seat, which you may remember was at the
+corner diagonal to that of Iris, so that they have been as far
+removed from each other as they could be at the table.  His new seat
+is three or four places farther down the table.  Of course I made a
+romance out of this, at once.  So stupid not to see it!  How could
+it be otherwise?--Did you speak, Madam?  I beg your pardon.  (To my
+lady-reader.)
+
+I never saw anything like the tenderness with which this young girl
+treats her little deformed neighbor.  If he were in the way of going
+to church, I know she would follow him.  But his worship, if any, is
+not with the throng of men and women and staring children.
+
+I, the Professor, on the other hand, am a regular church-goer.  I
+should go for various reasons if I did not love it; but I am happy
+enough to find great pleasure in the midst of devout multitudes,
+whether I can accept all their creeds or not.  One place of worship
+comes nearer than the rest to my ideal standard, and to this it was
+that I carried our young girl.
+
+The Church of the Galileans, as it is called, is even humbler in
+outside pretensions than the Church of Saint Polycarp.  Like that,
+it is open to all comers.  The stranger who approaches it looks down
+a quiet street and sees the plainest of chapels,--a kind of wooden
+tent, that owes whatever grace it has to its pointed windows and the
+high, sharp roofs--traces, both, of that upward movement of
+ecclesiastical architecture which soared aloft in cathedral-spires,
+shooting into the sky as the spike of a flowering aloe from the
+cluster of broad, sharp-wedged leaves below.  This suggestion of
+medieval symbolism, aided by a minute turret in which a hand-bell
+might have hung and found just room enough to turn over, was all of
+outward show the small edifice could boast.  Within there was very
+little that pretended to be attractive.  A small organ at one side,
+and a plain pulpit, showed that the building was a church; but it
+was a church reduced to its simplest expression:
+
+Yet when the great and wise monarch of the East sat upon his throne,
+in all the golden blaze of the spoils of Ophir and the freights of
+the navy of Tarshish, his glory was not like that of this simple
+chapel in its Sunday garniture.  For the lilies of the field, in
+their season, and the fairest flowers of the year, in due
+succession, were clustered every Sunday morning over the preacher's
+desk.  Slight, thin-tissued blossoms of pink and blue and virgin
+white in early spring, then the full-breasted and deep-hearted roses
+of summer, then the velvet-robed crimson and yellow flowers of
+autumn, and in the winter delicate exotics that grew under skies of
+glass in the false summers of our crystal palaces without knowing
+that it was the dreadful winter of New England which was rattling
+the doors and frosting the panes,--in their language the whole year
+told its history of life and growth and beauty from that simple
+desk.  There was always at least one good sermon,--this floral
+homily.  There was at least one good prayer,--that brief space when
+all were silent, after the manner of the Friends at their devotions.
+
+Here, too, Iris found an atmosphere of peace and love.  The same
+gentle, thoughtful faces, the same cheerful but reverential spirit,
+the same quiet, the same life of active benevolence.  But in all
+else how different from the Church of Saint Polycarp!  No clerical
+costume, no ceremonial forms, no carefully trained choirs.  A
+liturgy they have, to be sure, which does not scruple to borrow from
+the time-honored manuals of devotion, but also does not hesitate to
+change its expressions to its own liking.
+
+Perhaps the good people seem a little easy with each other;--they
+are apt to nod familiarly, and have even been known to whisper
+before the minister came in.  But it is a relief to get rid of that
+old Sunday--no,--Sabbath face, which suggests the idea that the
+first day of the week is commemorative of some most mournful event.
+The truth is, these brethren and sisters meet very much as a family
+does for its devotions, not putting off their humanity in the least,
+considering it on the whole quite a delightful matter to come
+together for prayer and song and good counsel from kind and wise
+lips.  And if they are freer in their demeanor than some very
+precise congregations, they have not the air of a worldly set of
+people.  Clearly they have not come to advertise their tailors and
+milliners, nor for the sake of exchanging  criticisms on the
+literary character of the sermon they  may hear.  There is no
+restlessness and no restraint  among these quiet, cheerful
+worshippers.  One thing  that keeps them calm and happy during the
+season so evidently trying to many congregations is, that they join
+very generally in the singing.  In this way they  get rid of that
+accumulated nervous force which escapes in all sorts of fidgety
+movements, so that a minister trying to keep his congregation still
+reminds one of a boy with his hand over the nose of a pump which
+another boy is working,--this spirting impatience of the people is
+so like the jets that find their way through his fingers, and the
+grand rush out at the final Amen! has such a wonderful likeness to
+the gush that takes place when the boy pulls his hand away, with
+immense relief, as it seems, to both the pump and the officiating
+youngster.
+
+How sweet is this blending of all voices and all hearts in one
+common song of praise!  Some will sing a little loud, perhaps,--and
+now and then an impatient chorister will get a syllable or two in
+advance, or an enchanted singer so lose all thought of time and
+place in the luxury of a closing cadence that he holds on to the
+last semi-breve upon his private responsibility; but how much more
+of the spirit of the old Psalmist in the music of these imperfectly
+trained voices than in the academic niceties of the paid performers
+who take our musical worship out of our hands!
+
+I am of the opinion that the creed of the Church of the Galileans is
+not laid down in as many details as that of the Church of Saint
+Polycarp.  Yet I suspect, if one of the good people from each of
+those churches had met over the bed of a suffering fellow-creature,
+or for the promotion of any charitable object, they would have found
+they had more in common than all the special beliefs or want of
+beliefs that separated them would amount to.  There are always many
+who believe that the fruits of a tree afford a better test of its
+condition than a statement of the composts with which it is dressed,
+though the last has its meaning and importance, no doubt.
+
+Between these two churches, then, our young Iris divides her
+affections.  But I doubt if she listens to the preacher at either
+with more devotion than she does to her little neighbor when he
+talks of these matters.
+
+What does he believe?  In the first place, there is some deep-rooted
+disquiet lying at the bottom of his soul, which makes him very
+bitter against all kinds of usurpation over the right of private
+judgment.  Over this seems to lie a certain tenderness for humanity
+in general, bred out of life-long trial, I should say, but sharply
+streaked with fiery lines of wrath at various individual acts of
+wrong, especially if they come in an ecclesiastical shape, and
+recall to him the days when his mother's great-grandmother was
+strangled on Witch Hill, with a text from the Old Testament for her
+halter.  With all this, he has a boundless belief in the future of
+this experimental hemisphere, and especially in the destiny of the
+free thought of its northeastern metropolis.
+
+--A man can see further, Sir,--he said one day,--from the top of
+Boston State House, and see more that is worth seeing, than from all
+the pyramids and turrets and steeples in all the places in the
+world!  No smoke, Sir; no fog, Sir; and a clean sweep from the Outer
+Light and the sea beyond it to the New Hampshire mountains!  Yes,
+Sir,--and there are great truths that are higher than mountains and
+broader than seas, that people are looking for from the tops of
+these hills of ours;--such as the world never saw, though it might
+have seen them at Jerusalem, if its eyes had been open!--Where do
+they have most crazy people?  Tell me that, Sir!
+
+I answered, that I had heard it said there were more in New England
+than in most countries, perhaps more than in any part of the world.
+
+Very good, Sir,--he answered.--When have there been most people
+killed and wounded in the course of this century?
+
+During the wars of the French Empire, no doubt,--I said.
+
+That's it! that's it!--said the Little Gentleman;--where the battle
+of intelligence is fought, there are most minds bruised and broken!
+We're battling for a faith here, Sir.
+
+The divinity-student remarked, that it was rather late in the
+world's history for men to be looking out for a new faith.
+
+I did n't say a new faith,--said the Little Gentleman;--old or new,
+it can't help being different here in this American mind of ours
+from anything that ever was before; the people are new, Sir, and
+that makes the difference.  One load of corn goes to the sty, and
+makes the fat of swine,--another goes to the farm-house, and becomes
+the muscle that clothes the right arms of heroes.  It is n't where a
+pawn stands on the board that makes the difference, but what the
+game round it is when it is on this or that square.
+
+Can any man look round and see what Christian countries are now
+doing, and how they are governed, and what is the general condition
+of society, without seeing that Christianity is the flag under which
+the world sails, and not the rudder that steers its course?  No,
+Sir!  There was a great raft built about two thousand years ago,--
+call it an ark, rather,--the world's great ark! big enough to hold
+all mankind, and made to be launched right out into the open waves
+of life,--and here it has been lying, one end on the shore and one
+end bobbing up and down in the water, men fighting all the time as
+to who should be captain and who should have the state-rooms, and
+throwing each other over the side because they could not agree about
+the points of compass, but the great vessel never getting afloat
+with its freight of nations and their rulers;--and now, Sir, there
+is and has been for this long time a fleet of "heretic" lighters
+sailing out of Boston Bay, and they have been saying, and they say
+now, and they mean to keep saying, "Pump out your bilge-water,
+shovel over your loads of idle ballast, get out your old rotten
+cargo, and we will carry it out into deep waters and sink it where
+it will never be seen again; so shall the ark of the world's hope
+float on the ocean, instead of sticking in the dock-mud where it is
+lying!"
+
+It's a slow business, this of getting the ark launched.  The Jordan
+was n't deep enough, and the Tiber was n't deep enough, and the
+Rhone was n't deep enough, and the Thames was n't deep enough, and
+perhaps the Charles is n't deep enough; but I don't feel sure of
+that, Sir, and I love to hear the workmen knocking at the old blocks
+of tradition and making the ways smooth with the oil of the Good
+Samaritan.  I don't know, Sir,--but I do think she stirs a little,--
+I do believe she slides;--and when I think of what a work that is
+for the dear old three-breasted mother of American liberty, I would
+not take all the glory of all the greatest cities in the world for
+my birthright in the soil of little Boston!
+
+--Some of us could not help smiling at this burst of local
+patriotism, especially when it finished with the last two words.
+
+And Iris smiled, too.  But it was the radiant smile of pleasure
+which always lights up her face when her little neighbor gets
+excited on the great topics of progress in freedom and religion, and
+especially on the part which, as he pleases himself with believing,
+his own city is to take in that consummation of human development to
+which he looks forward.
+
+Presently she looked into his face with a changed expression,--the
+anxiety of a mother that sees her child suffering.
+
+You are not well,--she said.
+
+I am never well,--he answered.--His eyes fell mechanically on the
+death's-head ring he wore on his right hand.  She took his hand as
+if it had been a baby's, and turned the grim device so that it
+should be out of sight.  One slight, sad, slow movement of the head
+seemed to say, "The death-symbol is still there!"
+
+A very odd personage, to be sure!  Seems to know what is going on,--
+reads books, old and new,--has many recent publications sent him,
+they tell me, but, what is more curious, keeps up with the everyday
+affairs of the world, too.  Whether he hears everything that is said
+with preternatural acuteness, or whether some confidential friend
+visits him in a quiet way, is more than I can tell.  I can make
+nothing more of the noises I hear in his room than my old
+conjectures.  The movements I mention are less frequent, but I often
+hear the plaintive cry,--I observe that it is rarely laughing of
+late;--I never have detected one articulate word, but I never heard
+such tones from anything but a human voice.
+
+There has been, of late, a deference approaching to tenderness, on
+the part of the boarders generally so far as he is concerned.  This
+is doubtless owing to the air of suffering which seems to have
+saddened his look of late.  Either some passion is gnawing at him
+inwardly, or some hidden disease is at work upon him.
+
+--What 's the matter with Little Boston?--said the young man John to
+me one day.--There a'n't much of him, anyhow; but 't seems to me he
+looks peakeder than ever.  The old woman says he's in a bad way, 'n'
+wants a puss to take care of him.  Them pusses that take care of old
+rich folks marry 'em sometimes,--'n' they don't commonly live a
+great while after that.  No, Sir!  I don't see what he wants to die
+for, after he's taken so much trouble to live in such poor
+accommodations as that crooked body of his.  I should like to know
+how his soul crawled into it, 'n' how it's goin' to get out.  What
+business has he to die, I should like to know?  Let Ma'am Allen (the
+gentleman with the diamond) die, if he likes, and be (this is a
+family-magazine); but we a'n't goin' to have him dyin'.  Not by a
+great sight.  Can't do without him anyhow.  A'n't it fun to hear him
+blow off his steam?
+
+I believe the young fellow would take it as a personal insult, if
+the Little Gentleman should show any symptoms of quitting our table
+for a better world.
+
+--In the mean time, what with going to church in company with our
+young lady, and taking every chance I could get to talk with her, I
+have found myself becoming, I will not say intimate, but well
+acquainted with Miss Iris.  There is a certain frankness and
+directness about her that perhaps belong to her artist nature.  For,
+you see, the one thing that marks the true artist is a clear
+perception and a firm, bold hand, in distinction from that imperfect
+mental vision and uncertain touch which give us the feeble pictures
+and the lumpy statues of the mere artisans on canvas or in stone.  A
+true artist, therefore, can hardly fail to have a sharp, well-
+defined mental physiognomy.  Besides this, many young girls have a
+strange audacity blended with their instinctive delicacy.  Even in
+physical daring many of them are a match for boys; whereas you will
+find few among mature women, and especially if they are mothers, who
+do not confess, and not unfrequently proclaim, their timidity.  One
+of these young girls, as many of us hereabouts remember, climbed to
+the top of a jagged, slippery rock lying out in the waves,--an ugly
+height to get up, and a worse one to get down, even for a bold young
+fellow of sixteen.  Another was in the way of climbing tall trees
+for crows' nests,--and crows generally know about how far boys can
+"shin up," and set their household establishments above that high-
+water mark.  Still another of these young ladies I saw for the first
+time in an open boat, tossing on the ocean ground-swell, a mile or
+two from shore, off a lonely island.  She lost all her daring, after
+she had some girls of her own to look out for.
+
+Many blondes are very gentle, yielding in character, impressible,
+unelastic.  But the positive blondes, with the golden tint running
+through them, are often full of character.  They come, probably
+enough, from those deep-bosomed German women that Tacitus portrayed
+in such strong colors.  The negative blondes, or those women whose
+tints have faded out as their line of descent has become
+impoverished, are of various blood, and in them the soul has often
+become pale with that blanching of the hair and loss of color in the
+eyes which makes them approach the character of Albinesses.
+
+I see in this young girl that union of strength and sensibility
+which, when directed and impelled by the strong instinct so apt to
+accompany this combination of active and passive capacity, we call
+genius.  She is not an accomplished artist, certainly, as yet; but
+there is always an air in every careless figure she draws, as it
+were of upward aspiration,--the elan of John of Bologna's Mercury,--
+a lift to them, as if they had on winged sandals, like the herald of
+the Gods.  I hear her singing sometimes; and though she evidently is
+not trained, yet is there a wild sweetness in her fitful and
+sometimes fantastic melodies,--such as can come only from the
+inspiration of the moment,--strangely enough, reminding me of those
+long passages I have heard from my little neighbor's room, yet of
+different tone, and by no means to be mistaken for those weird
+harmonies.
+
+I cannot pretend to deny that I am interested in the girl.  Alone,
+unprotected, as I have seen so many young girls left in boarding-
+houses, the centre of all the men's eyes that surround the table,
+watched with jealous sharpness by every woman, most of all by that
+poor relation of our landlady, who belongs to the class of women
+that like to catch others in mischief when they themselves are too
+mature for indiscretions, (as one sees old rogues turn to thief-
+catchers,) one of Nature's gendarmerie, clad in a complete suit of
+wrinkles, the cheapest coat-of-mail against the shafts of the great
+little enemy,--so surrounded, Iris spans this commonplace household-
+life of ours with her arch of beauty, as the rainbow, whose name she
+borrows, looks down on a dreary pasture with its feeding flocks and
+herds of indifferent animals.
+
+These young girls that live in boarding-houses can do pretty much as
+they will.  The female gendarmes are off guard occasionally.  The
+sitting-room has its solitary moments, when any two boarders who
+wish to meet may come together accidentally, (accidentally, I said,
+Madam, and I had not the slightest intention of Italicizing the
+word,) and discuss the social or political questions of the day, or
+any other subject that may prove interesting.  Many charming
+conversations take place at the foot of the stairs, or while one of
+the parties is holding the latch of a door,--in the shadow of
+porticoes, and especially on those outside balconies which some of
+our Southern neighbors call "stoops," the most charming places in
+the world when the moon is just right and the roses and honeysuckles
+are in full blow,--as we used to think in eighteen hundred and never
+mention it.
+
+On such a balcony or "stoop," one evening, I walked with Iris.  We
+were on pretty good terms now, and I had coaxed her arm under mine,-
+-my left arm, of course.  That leaves one's right arm free to defend
+the lovely creature, if the rival--odious wretch! attempt, to ravish
+her from your side.  Likewise if one's heart should happen to beat a
+little, its mute language will not be without its meaning, as you
+will perceive when the arm you hold begins to tremble, a
+circumstance like to occur, if you happen to be a good-looking young
+fellow, and you two have the "stoop" to yourselves.
+
+We had it to ourselves that evening.  The Koh-inoor, as we called
+him, was in a corner with our landlady's daughter.  The young fellow
+John was smoking out in the yard.  The gendarme was afraid of the
+evening air, and kept inside, The young Marylander came to the door,
+looked out and saw us walking together, gave his hat a pull over his
+forehead and stalked off.  I felt a slight spasm, as it were, in the
+arm I held, and saw the girl's head turn over her shoulder for a
+second.  What a kind creature this is!  She has no special interest
+in this youth, but she does not like to see a young fellow going off
+because he feels as if he were not wanted.
+
+She had her locked drawing-book under her arm.--Let me take it,--I
+said.
+
+She gave it to me to carry.
+
+This is full of caricatures of all of us, I am sure,--said I.
+
+She laughed, and said,--No,--not all of you.
+
+I was there, of course?
+
+Why, no,--she had never taken so much pains with me.
+
+Then she would let me see the inside of it?
+
+She would think of it.
+
+Just as we parted, she took a little key from her pocket and handed
+it to me.  This unlocks my naughty book,--she said,--you shall see
+it.  I am not afraid of you.
+
+I don't know whether the last words exactly pleased me.  At any
+rate, I took the book and hurried with it to my room.  I opened it,
+and saw, in a few glances, that I held the heart of Iris in my hand.
+
+--I have no verses for you this month, except these few lines
+suggested by the season.
+
+
+          MIDSUMMER.
+
+Here!  sweep these foolish leaves away,
+I will not crush my brains to-day!
+Look! are the southern curtains drawn?
+Fetch me a fan, and so begone!
+
+Not that,--the palm-tree's rustling leaf
+Brought from a parching coral-reef!
+Its breath is heated;--I would swing
+The broad gray plumes,--the eagle's wing.
+
+I hate these roses' feverish blood!
+Pluck me a half-blown lily-bud,
+A long-stemmed lily from the lake,
+Cold as a coiling water-snake.
+
+Rain me sweet odors on the air,
+And wheel me up my Indian chair,
+And spread some book not overwise
+Flat out before my sleepy eyes.
+
+--Who knows it not,--this dead recoil
+Of weary fibres stretched with toil,
+The pulse that flutters faint and low
+When Summer's seething breezes blow?
+
+O Nature!  bare thy loving breast
+And give thy child one hour of rest,
+One little hour to lie unseen
+Beneath thy scarf of leafy green!
+
+So, curtained by a singing pine,
+Its murmuring voice shall blend with mine,
+Till, lost in dreams, my faltering lay
+In sweeter music dies away.
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+          IRIS, HER BOOK
+
+I pray thee by the soul of her that bore thee,
+By thine own sister's spirit I implore thee,
+Deal gently with the leaves that lie before thee!
+
+For Iris had no mother to infold her,
+Nor ever leaned upon a sister's shoulder,
+Telling the twilight thoughts that Nature told her.
+
+She had not learned the mystery of awaking
+Those chorded keys that soothe a sorrow's aching,
+Giving the dumb heart voice, that else were breaking.
+
+Yet lived, wrought, suffered.  Lo, the pictured token!
+Why should her fleeting day-dreams fade unspoken,
+Like daffodils that die with sheaths unbroken?
+
+She knew not love, yet lived in maiden fancies,
+Walked simply clad, a queen of high romances,
+And talked strange tongues with angels in her trances.
+
+Twin-souled she seemed, a twofold nature wearing,
+Sometimes a flashing falcon in her daring,
+Then a poor mateless dove that droops despairing.
+
+Questioning all things: Why her Lord had sent her?
+What were these torturing gifts, and wherefore lent her?
+Scornful as spirit fallen, its own tormentor.
+
+And then all tears and anguish: Queen of Heaven,
+Sweet Saints, and Thou by mortal sorrows riven,
+Save me!  oh, save me!  Shall I die forgiven?
+
+And then--Ah, God!  But nay, it little matters
+Look at the wasted seeds that autumn scatters,
+The myriad germs that Nature shapes and shatters!
+
+If she had--Well!  She longed, and knew not wherefore
+Had the world nothing she might live to care for?
+No second self to say her evening prayer for?
+
+She knew the marble shapes that set men dreaming,
+Yet with her shoulders bare and tresses streaming
+Showed not unlovely to her simple seeming.
+
+Vain?  Let it be so!  Nature was her teacher.
+What if a lonely and unsistered creature
+Loved her own harmless gift of pleasing feature,
+
+Saying, unsaddened,--This shall soon be faded,
+And double-hued the shining tresses braided,
+And all the sunlight of the morning shaded?
+
+--This her poor book is full of saddest follies,
+Of tearful smiles and laughing melancholies,
+With summer roses twined and wintry hollies.
+
+In the strange crossing of uncertain chances,
+Somewhere, beneath some maiden's tear-dimmed glances
+May fall her little book of dreams and fancies.
+
+Sweet sister!  Iris, who shall never name thee,
+Trembling for fear her open heart may shame thee,
+Speaks from this vision-haunted page to claim thee.
+
+Spare her, I pray thee!  If the maid is sleeping,
+Peace with her! she has had her hour of weeping.
+No more!  She leaves her memory in thy keeping.
+
+
+These verses were written in the first leaves of the locked volume.
+As I turned the pages, I hesitated for a moment.  Is it quite fair
+to take advantage of a generous, trusting impulse to read the
+unsunned depths of a young girl's nature, which I can look through,
+as the balloon-voyagers tell us they see from their hanging-baskets
+through the translucent waters which the keenest eye of such as sail
+over them in ships might strive to pierce in vain?  Why has the
+child trusted me with such artless confessions,--self-revelations,
+which might be whispered by trembling lips, under the veil of
+twilight, in sacred confessionals, but which I cannot look at in the
+light of day without a feeling of wronging a sacred confidence?
+
+To all this the answer seemed plain enough after a little thought.
+She did not know how fearfully she had disclosed herself; she was
+too profoundly innocent.  Her soul was no more ashamed than the fair
+shapes that walked in Eden without a thought of over-liberal
+loveliness.  Having nobody to tell her story to,--having, as she
+said in her verses, no musical instrument to laugh and cry with
+her,--nothing, in short, but the language of pen and pencil,--all
+the veinings of her nature were impressed on these pages as those of
+a fresh leaf are transferred to the blank sheets which inclose it.
+It was the same thing which I remember seeing beautifully shown in a
+child of some four or five years we had one day at our boarding-
+house.  The child was a deaf mute.  But its soul had the inner sense
+that answers to hearing, and the shaping capacity which through
+natural organs realizes itself in words.  Only it had to talk with
+its face alone; and such speaking eyes, such rapid alternations of
+feeling and shifting expressions of thought as flitted over its
+face, I have never seen in any other human countenance.
+
+I wonder if something of spiritual transparency is not typified in
+the golden-blonde organization.  There are a great many little
+creatures,--many small fishes, for instance,--which are literally
+transparent, with the exception of some of the internal organs.  The
+heart can be seen beating as if in a case of clouded crystal.  The
+central nervous column with its sheath runs as a dark stripe through
+the whole length of the diaphanous muscles of the body.  Other
+little creatures are so darkened with pigment that we can see only
+their surface.  Conspirators and poisoners are painted with black,
+beady-eyes and swarthy hue; Judas, in Leonardo's picture, is the
+model of them all.
+
+However this may be, I should say there never had been a book like
+this of Iris,--so full of the heart's silent language, so
+transparent that the heart itself could be seen beating through it.
+I should say there never could have been such a book, but for one
+recollection, which is not peculiar to myself, but is shared by a
+certain number of my former townsmen.  If you think I over-color
+this matter of the young girl's book, hear this, which there are
+others, as I just said, besides myself, will tell you is strictly
+true.
+
+
+THE BOOK OF THE THREE MAIDEN SISTERS.
+
+In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
+windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
+dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a
+house inhabited by three maidens.  They left no near kinsfolk, I
+believe; whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them;
+for they lived and died in all good report and maidenly credit.  The
+house they lived in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage
+pattern, after the shape of Esquires' houses, but after the size of
+the dwellings of handicraftsmen.  The lower story was fitted up as a
+shop.  Specially was it provided with one of those half-doors now so
+rarely met with, which are to whole doors as spencers worn by old
+folk are to coats.  They speak of limited commerce united with a
+social or observing disposition--on the part of the shopkeeper,--
+allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping off such as
+have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.  On the
+door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
+perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has
+hanging among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some
+pairs of thick woollen stockings.  More articles, but not very many,
+were stored inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's
+books, out of which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented
+with handsome cuts.  This was the only purchase I ever knew to be
+made at the shop kept by the three maiden ladies, though it is
+probable there were others.  So long as I remember the shop, the
+same scarf and, I should say, the same stockings hung on the door-
+posts.--You think I am exaggerating again, and that shopkeepers
+would not keep the same article exposed for years.  Come to me, the
+Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop in this
+city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very place
+where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of it
+of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass
+alembic, which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner
+of Cambridge and Chambers streets.]
+
+The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had had
+claims to be considered a Beauty.  When I saw them in the old
+meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in
+silks and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them,
+I thought of My Lady Bountiful in the history of "Little King
+Pippin," and of the Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must
+have taken the hint of it from a pleasant poem, "Monsieur de la
+Palisse," attributed to De la Monnoye, in the collection of French
+songs before me).  There was some story of an old romance in which
+the Beauty had played her part.  Perhaps they all had had lovers;
+for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly personages, as I
+remember them; but their lives were out of the flower and in the
+berry at the time of my first recollections.
+
+One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
+attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost
+nothing, and nobody to inherit it.  Not absolutely nothing, of
+course.  There must have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits
+of furniture, a Bible, and the spectacles the good old souls read it
+through, and little keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when
+we find them in old drawers;--such relics there must have been.  But
+there was more.  There was a manuscript of some hundred pages,
+closely written, in which the poor things had chronicled for many
+years the incidents of their daily life.  After their death it was
+passed round somewhat freely, and fell into my hands.  How I have
+cried and laughed and colored over it!  There was nothing in it to
+be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to laugh at, but such
+a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good old women I do
+believe was never drawn before.  And there were all the smallest
+incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life, but which
+die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
+Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their
+temples standing.  I know, for instance, that on a given day of a
+certain year, a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust,
+not without special mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I
+read her name on a proper tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent
+a fractional pudding from her own table to the Maiden Sisters, who,
+I fear, from the warmth and detail of their description, were
+fasting, or at least on short allowance, about that time.  I know
+who sent them the segment of melon, which in her riotous fancy one
+of them compared to those huge barges to which we give the
+ungracious name of mudscows.  But why should I illustrate further
+what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of?  Some kind
+friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious
+strangers into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it,
+and I was glad that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes.
+I learned from it that every good and, alas! every evil act we do
+may slumber unforgotten even in some earthly record.  I got a new
+lesson in that humanity which our sharp race finds it so hard to
+learn.  The poor widow, fighting hard to feed and clothe and educate
+her children, had not forgotten the poorer ancient maidens.
+I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her place of rest, and
+I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere.  I know there are
+prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding went
+upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
+treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall
+remember forever, and with the coats and garments which the good
+women cried over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay
+dead in the upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed
+around her.
+
+--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters.  You will believe me more
+readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
+that lay open before me.  Sometimes it was a poem that held it,
+sometimes a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere
+hieroglyphic symbol of which I could make nothing.  A rag of cloud
+on one page, as I remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of
+it across the paper as naturally as a crack runs through a China
+bowl.  On the next page a dead bird,--some little favorite, I
+suppose; for it was worked out with a special love, and I saw on the
+leaf that sign with which once or twice in my life I have had a
+letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper is slightly corrugated,
+and, if there is writing there, the letters are somewhat faint and
+blurred.  Most of the pages were surrounded with emblematic
+traceries.  It was strange to me at first to see how often she
+introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
+seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none
+too little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her
+artist eye and pencil.  By the side of the garden-flowers,--of
+Spring's curled darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to
+sketching maidens, of flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay,
+oftener than these, and more tenderly caressed by the colored brush
+that rendered them,--were those common growths which fling
+themselves to be crushed under our feet and our wheels, making
+themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that we forget each
+of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
+
+Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we
+see them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the
+kindling sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens
+the fields, to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems
+fair to loving eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round
+with milk-white rays; the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale
+blue flowers aflame, one after another, sparingly, as the lights are
+kindled in the candelabra of decaying palaces where the heirs of
+dethroned monarchs are dying out; the red and white clovers, the
+broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--"the white man's foot," as the
+Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping
+plant which we call "knot-grass," and which loves its life so dearly
+that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings
+to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many more, she
+wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the pages
+were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano
+belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that
+I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if
+they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard
+the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my
+neighbor's chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the
+page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed
+to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-
+hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an
+expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of
+black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.
+The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,--
+one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she did not mean it.
+Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his
+wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very next page a
+procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page
+of Fuller's "Holy War," in which I recognized without difficulty
+every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent
+caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman, myself, and
+one other.
+
+I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
+girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is
+a left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the "Fighting
+Gladiator," the "Jeune Heros combattant" of the Louvre;--there is the
+broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless.  [The separate
+casts of the "Gladiator's" arm look immense; but in its place the
+limb looks light, almost slender,--such is the perfection of that
+miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old
+Greeks until I looked on that statue.]--Here is something very odd,
+to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What
+could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She
+has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy
+grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing
+up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the "ship of the
+desert."  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the
+forehand, light in the hind-quarter.  [The buffalo is the lion of
+the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
+collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.
+And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering
+curves in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under
+their white feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on
+one foot like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold
+stare of monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed!  Not a
+creature in it without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a
+mean figure to look at.  You can make your own comment; I am
+fanciful, you know.  I believe she is trying to idealize what we
+vulgarly call deformity, which she strives to look at in the light
+of one of Nature's eccentric curves, belonging to her system of
+beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong to the conic sections,
+though we cannot see them as symmetrical and entire figures, like
+the circle and ellipse.  At any rate, I cannot help referring this
+paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in her head
+connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the moulding.
+--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine.  I
+believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,
+--if it does not really get freed or half freed from her own.  Did
+you ever see a case of catalepsy?  You know what I mean,--transient
+loss of sense, will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position
+in which they are put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure.  She had
+been talking with him and listening to him one day when the boarders
+moved from the table nearly all at once.  But she sat as before, her
+cheek resting on her hand, her amber eyes wide open and still.  I
+went to her, she was breathing as usual, and her heart was beating
+naturally enough,--but she did not answer.  I bent her arm; it was
+as plastic as softened wag, and kept the place I gave it.--This
+will never do, though, and I sprinkled a few drops of water on her
+forehead.  She started and looked round.--I have been in a dream,--
+she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in this arm;--give me
+your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which looked soft
+and white enough, but--Good Heaven!  I believe she will crack my
+bones!  All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
+those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she
+who could hardly glove herself when in her common health.  Iris
+turned pale, and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given
+pain.  Then she trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the
+poor little soul had been in one of those trances that belong to the
+spiritual pathology of higher natures, mostly those of women.
+
+To come back to this wondrous book of Iris.  Two pages faced each
+other which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind.
+On the left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked
+with a single bird.  No trace of earth, but still the winged
+creature seemed to be soaring upward and upward.  Facing it, one of
+those black dungeons such as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured.
+I am sure she must have seen those awful prisons of his, out of
+which the Opium-Eater got his nightmare vision, described by another
+as "cemeteries of departed greatness, where monstrous and forbidden
+things are crawling and twining their slimy convolutions among
+mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and mutilated inscriptions."
+Such a black dungeon faced the page that held the blue sky and the
+single bird; at the bottom of it something was coiled,--what, and
+whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not make out.
+
+I told you the young girl's soul was in this book.  As I turned over
+the last leaves I could not help starting.  There were all sorts of
+faces among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders
+that ran round the pages.  They had mostly the outline of childish
+or womanly or manly beauty, without very distinct individuality.
+But at last it seemed to me that some of them were taking on a look
+not wholly unfamiliar to me; there were features that did not seem
+new.--Can it be so?  Was there ever such innocence in a creature so
+full of life?  She tells her heart's secrets as a three-years-old
+child betrays itself without need of being questioned!  This was no
+common miss, such as are turned out in scores from the young-lady-
+factories, with parchments warranting them accomplished and
+virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact.  I began to
+understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret of a
+real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
+ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
+
+Poets are never young, in one sense.  Their delicate ear hears the
+far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel
+towards for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by
+them.  A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience.  I
+have frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and
+exhaustion, whose features had a strange look of advanced age.  Too
+often one meets such in our charitable institutions.  Their faces
+are saddened and wrinkled, as if their few summers were threescore
+years and ten.
+
+And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
+before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
+and saddening as that of evening in more common lives.  The profound
+melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
+
+     "I could lie down like a tired child
+      And weep away the life of care
+      Which I have borne and yet must bear."
+
+came from a heart, as he says, "too soon grown old,"--at twenty-six
+years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
+
+I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this
+gift of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as
+well as in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of
+feeling and imagery that takes me by surprise.  And then besides,
+and most of all, I am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy
+confidence in me.  Perhaps I owe it to my--Well, no matter!  How one
+must love the editor who first calls him the venerable So-and-So!
+
+--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down.  The world is
+always ready to receive talent with open arms.  Very often it does
+not know what to do with genius.  Talent is a docile creature.  It
+bows its head meekly while the world slips the collar over it.  It
+backs into the shafts like a lamb.  It draws its load cheerfully,
+and is patient of the bit and of the whip.  But genius is always
+impatient of its harness; its wild blood makes it hard to train.
+
+Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely,
+that it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and
+therefore more distinctly human in its character.  Genius, on the
+other hand, is much more like those instincts which govern the
+admirable movements of the lower creatures, and therefore seems to
+have something of the lower or animal character.  A goose flies by a
+chart which the Royal Geographical Society could not mend.  A poet,
+like the goose, sails without visible landmarks to unexplored
+regions of truth, which philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas.
+The philosopher gets his track by observation; the poet trusts to
+his inner sense, and makes the straighter and swifter line.
+
+And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest
+instinct more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the
+suggestion of reason?  What is a bee's architecture but an
+unobstructed divine thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule
+but an obstructed thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect
+copy of some absolute rule Divine Wisdom has established,
+transmitted through a human soul as an image through clouded glass?
+
+Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
+individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family,
+but rarely a whole brood of either.  Talent is often to be envied,
+and genius very commonly to be pitied.  It stands twice the chance
+of the other of dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute.
+It is a perpetual insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass
+against somebody's vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm,
+or intangible private truth.
+
+--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
+rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making
+their way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius,
+and very likely do not want to know any more.  For a divine
+instinct, such as drives the goose southward and the poet
+heavenward, is a hard thing to manage, and proves too strong for
+many whom it possesses.  It must have been a terrible thing to have
+a friend like Chatterton or Burns.  And here is a being who
+certainly has more than talent, at once poet and artist in tendency,
+if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and genius grafted on
+womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem, as you may see
+a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which cannot keep pace
+with its evolution.
+
+I think now you know something of this young person.  She wants
+nothing but an atmosphere to expand in.  Now and then one meets with
+a nature for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously
+utterly incompetent.  It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by
+accident in one of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow
+into flower among the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that
+surround it.  There is no question that certain persons who are born
+among us find themselves many degrees too far north.  Tropical by
+organization, they cannot fight for life with our eastern and
+northwestern breezes without losing the color and fragrance into
+which their lives would have blossomed in the latitude of myrtles
+and oranges.  Strange effects are produced by suffering any living
+thing to be developed under conditions such as Nature had not
+intended for it.  A French physiologist confined some tadpoles under
+water in the dark.  Removed from the natural stimulus of light, they
+did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their growth,
+and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic tadpoles.
+I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown Zarvce or
+embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
+considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-
+nine millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the
+aid of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs,
+and breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven
+into the lungs made to receive it.  Of course we never try to keep
+young souls in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or
+two of legs by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been
+bred and fed!  Never!  Never.  Never?
+
+Now to go back to our plant.  You may know, that, for the earlier
+stages of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air,
+water, light, and warmth.  But by-and-by, if it is to have special
+complex principles as a part of its organization, they must be
+supplied by the soil;--your pears will crack, if the root of the
+tree gets no iron,--your asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do.
+Just at the period of adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to
+come into flower and to set its fruit.  Then it is that many young
+natures, having exhausted the spiritual soil round them of all it
+contains of the elements they demand, wither away, undeveloped and
+uncolored, unless they are transplanted.
+
+Pray for these dear young souls!  This is the second natural birth;-
+for I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which
+form the point of transition in many lives between the consciousness
+of a general relation to the Divine nature and a special personal
+relation.  The litany should count a prayer for them in the list of
+its supplications; masses should be said for them as for souls in
+purgatory; all good Christians should remember them as they remember
+those in peril through travel or sickness or in warfare.
+
+I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will.  She
+should ripen under an Italian sun.  She should walk under the
+frescoed vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of
+Venetian beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with
+the Greek marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil.  Has she
+not exhausted this lean soil of the elements her growing nature
+requires?
+
+I do not know.  The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on
+Cape Ann, many degrees out of its proper region.  I was riding once
+along that delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we
+passed a thicket where there seemed to be a chance of finding it.
+In five minutes I had fallen on the trees in full blossom, and
+filled my arms with the sweet, resplendent flowers.  I could not
+believe I was in our cold, northern Essex, which, in the dreary
+season when I pass its slate-colored, unpainted farm-houses, and
+huge, square, windy, 'squire-built "mansions," looks as brown and
+unvegetating as an old rug with its patterns all trodden out and the
+colored fringe worn from all its border.
+
+If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a
+poet or a painter come to his full growth here just as well?  Yes,
+but if the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak
+of Nature springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders,
+is there not as much reason to think the perfumed flower of
+imaginative genius will find it hard to be born and harder to spread
+its leaves in the clear, cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone
+of humanity?
+
+Take the poet.  On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
+poetical faculty finds material everywhere.  The grandest objects of
+sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations.  The
+sky, the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope
+and vision of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in
+poetry in every soul which has anything of the divine gift.
+
+On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished
+life, in distinction from a rich and suggestive one.  Which our
+common New England life might be considered, I will not decide.  But
+there are some things I think the poet misses in our western Eden.
+I trust it is not unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view
+as they come before us in so many other aspects.
+
+There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which
+we grow.  At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked
+up an Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow.  At Canoe Meadow, in the
+Berkshire Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads.  So everywhere
+Indian arrowheads.  Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who
+knows? who cares?  There is no history to the red race,--there is
+hardly an individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a
+tomahawk--there is the Indian of all time.  The story of one red ant
+is the story of all red ants.  So, the poet, in trying to wing his
+way back through the life that has kindled, flitted, and faded along
+our watercourses and on our southern hillsides for unknown
+generations, finds nothing to breathe or fly in; he meets
+
+    "A vast vacuity!  all unawares,
+     Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
+     Ten thousand fathom deep."
+
+But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
+ancient civilization!  The stakes of the Britons' stockades are
+still standing in the bed of the Thames.  The ploughman turns up an
+old Saxon's bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the
+time of the Caesars.  In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to
+be of yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding
+newcomer, as we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls
+of Fiesole or Volterra.  It makes a man human to live on these old
+humanized soils.  He cannot help marching in step with his kind in
+the rear of such a procession.  They say a dead man's hand cures
+swellings, if laid on them.  There is nothing like the dead cold
+hand of the Past to take down our tumid egotism and lead us into the
+solemn flow of the life of our race.  Rousseau came out of one of
+his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his eye on the arches of the
+old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
+
+I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving
+railroad village.  The new "depot," the smartly-painted pine houses,
+the spacious brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of
+youthful and leggy trees before it, are exhilarating.  They speak of
+progress, and the time when there shall be a city, with a His Honor
+the Mayor, in the place of their trim but transient architectural
+growths.  Pardon me, if I prefer the pyramids.  They seem to me
+crystals formed from a stronger solution of humanity than the
+steeple of the new meeting-house.  I may be wrong, but the Tiber has
+a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the Pons Alius, even
+more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles eddying round the
+piles of West Boston Bridge.
+
+Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
+migratory race.  A poet wants a home.  He can dispense with an
+apple-parer and a reaping-machine.  I feel this more for others than
+for myself, for the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet
+exempted from the change which has invaded almost everything around
+it.
+
+--Pardon me a short digression.  To what small things our memory and
+our affections attach themselves!  I remember, when I was a child,
+that one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the
+southwest gorner of our front-yard.  Well, I left the paternal roof
+and wandered in other lands, and learned to think in the words of
+strange people.  But after many years, as I looked on the little
+front-yard again, it occurred to me that there used to be some Star-
+of-Bethlehems in the southwest corner.  The grass was tall there,
+and the blade of the plant is very much like grass, only thicker and
+glossier.  Even as Tully parted the briers and brambles when he
+hunted for the sphere-containing cylinder that marked the grave of
+Archimedes, so did I comb the grass with my fingers for my
+monumental memorial-flower.  Nature had stored my keepsake tenderly
+in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were there; they
+are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they are by
+the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
+
+Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
+as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil,
+you remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time.  Even a stone
+with a whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
+back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory.
+This intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their
+faithful storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured
+in the material structure of the thinking centre itself.  In the
+very core of the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the
+soul, is a small mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in
+the microscope, of grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
+
+But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
+Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
+home-feeling.  Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the
+dwelling of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus.  I remember the sweet
+honeysuckle that I saw in flower against the wall of his house a few
+months ago, as long as I remember the sky and stars.  That clump of
+peonies, butting their purple heads through the soil every spring in
+just the same circle, and by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of
+buds in flowers big enough to make a double handful of leaves, has
+come up in just that place, Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years
+than I have passed on this planet.  It is a rare privilege in our
+nomadic state to find the home of one's childhood and its immediate
+neighborhood thus unchanged.  Many born poets, I am afraid, flower
+poorly in song, or not at all, because they have been too often
+transplanted.
+
+Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
+voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
+without elasticity or oil.  I wish it were fair to print a letter a
+young girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since.  "I
+am *** *** ***," she says, and tells her whole name outright.  Ah!--
+said I, when I read that first frank declaration,--you are one of
+the right sort!--She was.  A winged creature among close-clipped
+barn door fowl.  How tired the poor girl was of the dull life about
+her,--the old woman's "skeleton hand" at the window opposite,
+drawing her curtains,--"Ma'am shooing away the hens,"--the vacuous
+country eyes staring at her as only country eyes can stare,--a
+routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's half-articulated cry
+for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for her, and for all
+such!  Faith often cures their longings; but it is so hard to give a
+soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the fullest and
+sweetest human affections!  Too often they fling their hearts away
+on unworthy objects.  Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
+which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth.  The
+immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
+average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
+heart ache.  How many women are born too finely organized in sense
+and soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod!  Life is
+adjusted to the wants of the stronger sex.  There are plenty of
+torrents to be crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are
+measured by the stride of man, and not of woman.
+
+Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart.  So says
+the great medical authority, Laennec.  Incurable cases of this kind
+used to find their hospitals in convents.  We have the disease in
+New England,--but not the hospitals.  I don't like to think of it.
+I will not believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way.
+Providence will find her some great happiness, or affliction, or
+duty,--and which would be best for her, I cannot tell.  One thing is
+sure: the interest she takes in her little neighbor is getting to be
+more engrossing than ever.  Something is the matter with him, and
+she knows it, and I think worries herself about it.
+
+I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
+fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant.  He accounts for
+it in his own way.
+
+The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--
+Used up, Sir,--breathed over and over again.  You must come to this
+side, Sir, for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays.  Did not
+worthy Mr. Higginson say that a breath of New England's air is
+better than a sup of Old England's ale?  I ought to have died when I
+was a boy, Sir; but I could n't die in this Boston air,--and I think
+I shall have to go to New York one of these days, when it's time for
+me to drop this bundle,--or to New Orleans, where they have the
+yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where they have so many doctors.
+
+This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
+said, to be ailing.  An experienced eye, such as I think I may call
+mine, can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long
+before he or his friends are alarmed about him.  I don't like it.
+
+Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
+family, and that she is afraid she has it.  Those who are so endowed
+look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him.  According to
+the degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more
+remote.  It is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like
+it.  Luckily for our friends, most of us who have the scientific
+second-sight school ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or
+look.
+
+Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to
+me that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and
+darker over his countenance.  Nature is struggling with something,
+and I am afraid she is under in the wrestling-match.  You do not
+care much, perhaps, for my particular conjectures as to the nature
+of his difficulty.  I should say, however, from the sudden flushes
+to which he is subject, and certain other marks which, as an expert,
+I know how to interpret, that his heart was in trouble; but then he
+presses his hand to the right side, as if there were the centre of
+his uneasiness.
+
+When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
+sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in
+romances than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality.
+I mean some actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him
+off by slow and painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge
+pang and only time for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke
+through the brave Captain Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light
+Brigade at Balaklava, and with a loud cry he dropped dead from his
+saddle.
+
+I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
+some who were entitled to be warned.  The landlady's face fell when
+I mentioned my fears.
+
+Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty!  Has n't
+he got any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he
+should be took away?  Such a sight of cases, full of everything!
+Never thought of his failin' so suddin.  A complication of diseases,
+she expected.  Liver-complaint one of 'em?
+
+After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
+feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
+be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
+taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--
+after this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement
+of curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of
+the complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who
+may happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better
+feelings struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed
+invalid, until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a
+channel worn for them since the early days of her widowhood.
+
+Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil!
+Of all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and
+lives have to undergo, this is the most painful.  It is all so plain
+to the practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting
+mother, who has never suspected anything, or at least has clung
+always to the hope which you are just going to wrench away from her!
+--I must tell Iris that I think her poor friend is in a precarious
+state.  She seems nearer to him than anybody.
+
+I did tell her.  Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still
+face, except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be
+certain that there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not
+be certain; but it looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my
+life,--she said.
+
+I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic
+power she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she
+wills her strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and
+color from that day.  I have sometimes thought he gained the force
+she lost; but this may have been a whim, very probably.
+
+One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale.  Her lips
+moved, as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a
+word.  Her hair looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes
+were full of wild light.  She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was
+falling into one of her trances.  Something had frozen her blood
+with fear; I thought, from what she said, half audibly, that she
+believed she had seen a shrouded figure.
+
+That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the
+Little Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill.  Bridget, the servant,
+went before me with a light.  The doors were both unfastened, and I
+found myself ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the
+mysterious apartment I had so longed to enter.
+
+I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others.  I
+give them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.
+
+
+          UNDER THE VIOLETS.
+
+Her hands are cold; her face is white;
+No more her pulses come and go;
+Her eyes are shut to life and light;
+Fold the white vesture, snow on snow,
+And lay her where the violets blow.
+
+But not beneath a graven stone,
+To plead for tears with alien eyes;
+A slender cross of wood alone
+Shall say, that here a maiden lies
+In peace beneath the peaceful skies.
+
+And gray old trees of hugest limb
+Shall wheel their circling shadows round
+To make the scorching sunlight dim
+That drinks the greenness from the ground,
+And drop their dead leaves on her mound.
+
+When o'er their boughs the squirrels run,
+And through their leaves the robins call,
+And, ripening in the autumn sun,
+The acorns and the chestnuts fall,
+Doubt not that she will heed them all.
+
+For her the morning choir shall sing
+Its matins from the branches high,
+And every minstrel voice of spring,
+That trills beneath the April sky,
+Shall greet her with its earliest cry.
+
+When, turning round their dial-track,
+Eastward the lengthening shadows pass,
+Her little mourners, clad in black,
+The crickets, sliding through the grass,
+Shall pipe for her an evening mass.
+
+At last the rootlets of the trees
+Shall find the prison where she lies,
+And bear the buried dust they seize
+In leaves and blossoms to the skies.
+So may the soul that warmed it rise!
+
+If any, born of kindlier blood,
+Should ask, What maiden lies below?
+Say only this: A tender bud,
+That tried to blossom in the snow,
+Lies withered where the violets blow.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+You will know, perhaps, in the course of half an hour's reading,
+what has been haunting my hours of sleep and waking for months.  I
+cannot tell, of course, whether you are a nervous person or not.
+If, however, you are such a person,--if it is late at night,--if all
+the rest of the household have gone off to bed,--if the wind is
+shaking your windows as if a human hand were rattling the sashes,--
+if your candle or lamp is low and will soon burn out,--let me advise
+you to take up some good quiet sleepy volume, or attack the
+"Critical Notices" of the last Quarterly and leave this to be read
+by daylight, with cheerful voices round, and people near by who
+would hear you, if you slid from your chair and came down in a lump
+on the floor.
+
+I do not say that your heart will beat as mine did, I am willing to
+confess, when I entered the dim chamber.  Did I not tell you that I
+was sensitive and imaginative, and that I had lain awake with
+thinking what were the strange movements and sounds which I heard
+late at night in my little neighbor's apartment?  It had come to
+that pass that I was truly unable to separate what I had really
+heard from what I had dreamed in those nightmares to which I have
+been subject, as before mentioned.  So, when I walked into the room,
+and Bridget, turning back, closed the door and left me alone with
+its tenant, I do believe you could have grated a nutmeg on my skin,
+such a "goose-flesh" shiver ran over it.  It was not fear, but what
+I call nervousness,--unreasoning, but irresistible; as when, for
+instance, one looking at the sun going down says, "I will count
+fifty before it disappears"; and as he goes on and it becomes
+doubtful whether he will reach the number, he gets strangely
+flurried, and his imagination pictures life and death and heaven and
+hell as the issues depending on the completion or non-completion of
+the fifty he is counting.  Extreme curiosity will excite some people
+as much as fear, or what resembles fear, acts on some other less
+impressible natures.
+
+I may find myself in the midst of strange facts in this little
+conjurer's room.  Or, again, there may be nothing in this poor
+invalid's chamber but some old furniture, such as they say came over
+in the Mayflower.  All this is just what I mean to, find out while
+I am looking at the Little Gentleman, who has suddenly become my
+patient.  The simplest things turn out to be unfathomable mysteries;
+the most mysterious appearances prove to be the most commonplace
+objects in disguise.
+
+I wonder whether the boys who live in Roxbury and Dorchester are
+ever moved to tears or filled with silent awe as they look upon the
+rocks and fragments of "puddingstone" abounding in those localities.
+I have my suspicions that those boys "heave a stone" or "fire a
+brickbat," composed of the conglomerate just mentioned, without any
+more tearful or philosophical contemplations than boys of less
+favored regions expend on the same performance.  Yet a lump of
+puddingstone is a thing to look at, to think about, to study over,
+to dream upon, to go crazy with, to beat one's brains out against.
+Look at that pebble in it.  From what cliff was it broken?  On what
+beach rolled by the waves of what ocean?  How and when imbedded in
+soft ooze, which itself became stone, and by-and-by was lifted into
+bald summits and steep cliffs, such as you may see on Meetinghouse-
+Hill any day--yes, and mark the scratches on their faces left when
+the boulder-carrying glaciers planed the surface of the continent
+with such rough tools that the storms have not worn the marks out of
+it with all the polishing of ever so many thousand years?
+
+Or as you pass a roadside ditch or pool in springtime, take from it
+any bit of stick or straw which has lain undisturbed for a time.
+Some little worm-shaped masses of clear jelly containing specks are
+fastened to the stick: eggs of a small snail-like shell-fish.  One
+of these specks magnified proves to be a crystalline sphere with an
+opaque mass in its centre.  And while you are looking, the opaque
+mass begins to stir, and by-and-by slowly to turn upon its axis like
+a forming planet,--life beginning in the microcosm, as in the great
+worlds of the firmament, with the revolution that turns the surface
+in ceaseless round to the source of life and light.
+
+A pebble and the spawn of a mollusk!  Before you have solved their
+mysteries, this earth where you first saw them may be a vitrified
+slag, or a vapor diffused through the planetary spaces.  Mysteries
+are common enough, at any rate, whatever the boys in Roxbury and
+Dorchester think of "brickbats" and the spawn of creatures that
+live in roadside puddles.
+
+But then a great many seeming mysteries are relatively perfectly
+plain, when we can get at them so as to turn them over.  How many
+ghosts that "thick men's blood with cold" prove to be shirts hung
+out to dry!  How many mermaids have been made out of seals!  How
+many times have horse-mackerels been taken for the sea-serpent!
+
+--Let me take the whole matter coolly, while I see what is the
+matter with the patient.  That is what I say to myself, as I draw a
+chair to the bedside.  The bed is an old-fashioned, dark mahogany
+four-poster.  It was never that which made the noise of something
+moving.  It is too heavy to be pushed about the room.--The Little
+Gentleman was sitting, bolstered up by pillows, with his hands
+clasped and their united palms resting on the back of the head, one
+of the three or four positions specially affected by persons whose
+breathing is difficult from disease of the heart or other causes.
+
+Sit down, Sir,--he said,--sit down!  I have come to the hill
+Difficulty, Sir, and am fighting my way up.--His speech was
+laborious and interrupted.
+
+Don't talk,--I said,--except to answer my questions.--And I
+proceeded to "prospect" for the marks of some local mischief, which
+you know is at the bottom of all these attacks, though we do not
+always find it.  I suppose I go to work pretty much like other
+professional folks of my temperament.  Thus:
+
+Wrist, if you please.--I was on his right side, but he presented
+his left wrist, crossing it over the other.--I begin to count,
+holding watch in left hand.  One, two, three, four,--What a handsome
+hand! wonder if that splendid stone is a carbuncle.--One, two,
+three, four, five, six, seven,--Can't see much, it is so dark,
+except one white object.--One, two, three, four,--Hang it!  eighty
+or ninety in the minute, I guess.--Tongue, if you please.--Tongue
+is put out.  Forget to look at it, or, rather, to take any
+particular notice of it;--but what is that white object, with the
+long arm stretching up as if pointing to the sky, just as Vesalius
+and Spigelius and those old fellows used to put their skeletons?  I
+don't think anything of such objects, you know; but what should he
+have it in his chamber for?  As I had found his pulse irregular and
+intermittent, I took out a stethoscope, which is a pocket-spyglass
+for looking into people's chests with your ears, and laid it over
+the place where the heart beats.  I missed the usual beat of the
+organ.--How is this?--I said,--where is your heart gone to?--He
+took the stethoscope and shifted it across to the right side; there
+was a displacement of the organ.--I am ill-packed,--he said;--there
+was no room for my heart in its place as it is with other men.--God
+help him!
+
+It is hard to draw the line between scientific curiosity and the
+desire for the patient's sake to learn all the details of his
+condition.  I must look at this patient's chest, and thump it and
+listen to it.  For this is a case of ectopia cordis, my boy,--
+displacement of the heart; and it is n't every day you get a chance
+to overhaul such an interesting malformation.  And so I managed to
+do my duty and satisfy my curiosity at the same time.  The torso was
+slight and deformed; the right arm attenuated,--the left full,
+round, and of perfect symmetry.  It had run away with the life of
+the other limbs,--a common trick enough of Nature's, as I told you
+before.  If you see a man with legs withered from childhood, keep
+out of the way of his arms, if you have a quarrel with him.  He has
+the strength of four limbs in two; and if he strikes you, it is an
+arm-blow plus a kick administered from the shoulder instead of the
+haunch, where it should have started from.
+
+Still examining him as a patient, I kept my eyes about me to search
+all parts of the chamber and went on with the double process, as
+before.--Heart hits as hard as a fist,--bellows-sound over mitral
+valves (professional terms you need not attend to).--What the deuse
+is that long case for?  Got his witch grandmother mummied in it?
+And three big mahogany presses,--hey?--A diabolical suspicion came
+over me which I had had once before,--that he might be one of our
+modern alchemists,--you understand, make gold, you know, or what
+looks like it, sometimes with the head of a king or queen or of
+Liberty to embellish one side of the piece.--Don't I remember
+hearing him shut a door and lock it once?  What do you think was
+kept under that lock?  Let's have another look at his hand, to see
+if there are any calluses.
+
+One can tell a man's business, if it is a handicraft, very often by
+just taking a look at his open hand.  Ah!  Four calluses at the end
+of the fingers of the right hand.  None on those of the left.  Ah,
+ha!  What do those mean?
+
+All this seems longer in the telling, of course, than it was in
+fact.  While I was making these observations of the objects around
+me, I was also forming my opinion as to the kind of case with which
+I had to deal.
+
+There are three wicks, you know, to the lamp of a man's life: brain,
+blood, and breath.  Press the brain a little, its light goes out,
+followed by both the others.  Stop the heart a minute and out go all
+three of the wicks.  Choke the air out of the lungs, and presently
+the fluid ceases to supply the other centres of flame, and all is
+soon stagnation, cold, and darkness.  The "tripod of life" a French
+physiologist called these three organs.  It is all clear enough
+which leg of the tripod is going to break down here.  I could tell
+you exactly what the difficulty is;--which would be as intelligible
+and amusing as a watchmaker's description of a diseased timekeeper
+to a ploughman.  It is enough to say, that I found just what I
+expected to, and that I think this attack is only the prelude of
+more serious consequences,--which expression means you very well
+know what.
+
+And now the secrets of this life hanging on a thread must surely
+come out.  If I have made a mystery where there was none, my
+suspicions will be shamed, as they have often been before.  If there
+is anything strange, my visits will clear it up.
+
+I sat an hour or two by the side of the Little Gentleman's bed,
+after giving him some henbane to quiet his brain, and some foxglove,
+which an imaginative French professor has called the "Opium of the
+Heart."  Under their influence he gradually fell into an uneasy,
+half-waking slumber, the body fighting hard for every breath, and
+the mind wandering off in strange fancies and old recollections,
+which escaped from his lips in broken sentences.
+
+--The last of 'em,--he said,--the last of 'em all,--thank God!  And
+the grave he lies in will look just as well as if he had been
+straight.  Dig it deep, old Martin, dig it deep,--and let it be as
+long as other folks' graves.  And mind you get the sods flat, old
+man,--flat as ever a straight-backed young fellow was laid under.
+And then, with a good tall slab at the head, and a foot-stone six
+foot away from it, it'll look just as if there was a man underneath.
+
+A man!  Who said he was a man?  No more men of that pattern to bear
+his name!--Used to be a good-looking set enough.--Where 's all the
+manhood and womanhood gone to since his great-grandfather was the
+strongest man that sailed out of the town of Boston, and poor Leah
+there the handsomest woman in Essex, if she was a witch?
+
+--Give me some light,--he said,--more light.  I want to see the
+picture.
+
+He had started either from a dream or a wandering reverie.  I was
+not unwilling to have more light in the apartment, and presently had
+lighted an astral lamp that stood on a table.--He pointed to a
+portrait hanging against the wall.--Look at her,--he said,--look at
+her!  Wasn't that a pretty neck to slip a hangman's noose over?
+
+The portrait was of a young woman, something more than twenty years
+old, perhaps.  There were few pictures of any merit painted in New
+England before the time of Smibert, and I am at a loss to know what
+artist could have taken this half-length, which was evidently from
+life.  It was somewhat stiff and flat, but the grace of the figure
+and the sweetness of the expression reminded me of the angels of the
+early Florentine painters.  She must have been of some
+consideration, for she was dressed in paduasoy and lace with hanging
+sleeves, and the old carved frame showed how the picture had been
+prized by its former owners.  A proud eye she had, with all her
+sweetness.--I think it was that which hanged her, as his strong arm
+hanged Minister George Burroughs;--but it may have been a little
+mole on one cheek, which the artist had just hinted as a beauty
+rather than a deformity.  You know, I suppose, that nursling imps
+addict themselves, after the fashion of young opossums, to these
+little excrescences.  "Witch-marks" were good evidence that a young
+woman was one of the Devil's wet-nurses;--I should like to have seen
+you make fun of them in those days!--Then she had a brooch in her
+bodice, that might have been taken for some devilish amulet or
+other; and she wore a ring upon one of her fingers, with a red stone
+in it, that flamed as if the painter had dipped his pencil in fire;
+--who knows but that it was given her by a midnight suitor fresh
+from that fierce element, and licensed for a season to leave his
+couch of flame to tempt the unsanctified hearts of earthly maidens
+and brand their cheeks with the print of his scorching kisses?
+
+She and I,--he said, as he looked steadfastly at the canvas,--she
+and I are the last of 'em.--She will stay, and I shall go.  They
+never painted me,--except when the boys used to make pictures of me
+with chalk on the board-fences.  They said the doctors would want my
+skeleton when I was dead.--You are my friend, if you are a doctor,
+--a'n't you?
+
+I just gave him my hand.  I had not the heart to speak.
+
+I want to lie still,--he said,--after I am put to bed upon the hill
+yonder.  Can't you have a great stone laid over me, as they did over
+the first settlers in the old burying-ground at Dorchester, so as to
+keep the wolves from digging them up?  I never slept easy over the
+sod;--I should like to lie quiet under it.  And besides,--he said,
+in a kind of scared whisper,--I don't want to have my bones stared
+at, as my body has been.  I don't doubt I was a remarkable case;
+but, for God's sake, oh, for God's sake, don't let 'em make a show
+of the cage I have been shut up in and looked through the bars of
+for so many years.
+
+I have heard it said that the art of healing makes men hard-hearted
+and indifferent to human suffering.  I am willing to own that there
+is often a professional hardness in surgeons, just as there is in
+theologians,--only much less in degree than in these last.  It does
+not commonly improve the sympathies of a man to be in the habit of
+thrusting knives into his fellow-creatures and burning them with
+red-hot irons, any more than it improves them to hold the blinding-
+white cantery of Gehenna by its cool handle and score and crisp
+young souls with it until they are scorched into the belief of--
+Transubstantiation or the Immaculate Conception.  And, to say the
+plain truth, I think there are a good many coarse people in both
+callings.  A delicate nature will not commonly choose a pursuit
+which implies the habitual infliction of suffering, so readily as
+some gentler office.  Yet, while I am writing this paragraph, there
+passes by my window, on his daily errand of duty, not seeing me,
+though I catch a glimpse of his manly features through the oval
+glass of his chaise, as he drives by, a surgeon of skill and
+standing, so friendly, so modest, so tenderhearted in all his ways,
+that, if he had not approved himself at once adroit and firm, one
+would have said he was of too kindly a mould to be the minister of
+pain, even if he were saving pain.
+
+You may be sure that some men, even among those who have chosen the
+task of pruning their fellow-creatures, grow more and more
+thoughtful and truly compassionate in the midst of their cruel
+experience.  They become less nervous, but more sympathetic.  They
+have a truer sensibility for others' pain, the more they study pain
+and disease in the light of science.  I have said this without
+claiming any special growth in humanity for myself, though I do hope
+I grow tenderer in my feelings as I grow older.  At any rate, this
+was not a time in which professional habits could keep down certain
+instincts of older date than these.
+
+This poor little man's appeal to my humanity against the supposed
+rapacity of Science, which he feared would have her "specimen," if
+his ghost should walk restlessly a thousand years, waiting for his
+bones to be laid in the dust, touched my heart.  But I felt bound to
+speak cheerily.
+
+--We won't die yet awhile, if we can help it,--I said,--and I trust
+we can help it.  But don't be afraid; if I live longest, I will see
+that your resting place is kept sacred till the dandelions and
+buttercups blow over you.
+
+He seemed to have got his wits together by this time, and to have a
+vague consciousness that he might have been saying more than he
+meant for anybody's ears.--I have been talking a little wild, Sir,
+eh? he said.--There is a great buzzing in my head with those drops
+of yours, and I doubt if my tongue has not been a little looser than
+I would have it, Sir.  But I don't much want to live, Sir; that's
+the truth of the matter, and it does rather please me to think that
+fifty years from now nobody will know that the place where I lie
+does n't hold as stout and straight a man as the best of 'em that
+stretch out as if they were proud of the room they take.  You may
+get me well, if you can, Sir, if you think it worth while to try;
+but I tell you there has been no time for this many a year when the
+smell of fresh earth was not sweeter to me than all the flowers that
+grow out of it.  There's no anodyne like your good clean gravel,
+Sir.  But if you can keep me about awhile, and it amuses you to try,
+you may show your skill upon me, if you like.  There is a pleasure
+or two that I love the daylight for, and I think the night is not
+far off, at best.--I believe I shall sleep now; you may leave me,
+and come, if you like, in the morning.
+
+Before I passed out, I took one more glance round the apartment.
+The beautiful face of the portrait looked at me, as portraits often
+do, with a frightful kind of intelligence in its eyes.  The drapery
+fluttered on the still outstretched arm of the tall object near the
+window;--a crack of this was open, no doubt, and some breath of wind
+stirred the hanging folds.  In my excited state, I seemed to see
+something ominous in that arm pointing to the heavens.  I thought of
+the figures in the Dance of Death at Basle, and that other on the
+panels of the covered Bridge at Lucerne, and it seemed to me that
+the grim mask who mingles with every crowd and glides over every
+threshold was pointing the sick man to his far home, and would soon
+stretch out his bony hand and lead him or drag him on the unmeasured
+journey towards it.
+
+The fancy had possession of me, and I shivered again as when I first
+entered the chamber.  The picture and the shrouded shape; I saw only
+these two objects.  They were enough.  The house was deadly still,
+and the night-wind, blowing through an open window, struck me as
+from a field of ice, at the moment I passed into the creaking
+corridor.  As I turned into the common passage, a white figure,
+holding a lamp, stood full before me.  I thought at first it was one
+of those images made to stand in niches and hold a light in their
+hands.  But the illusion was momentary, and my eyes speedily
+recovered from the shock of the bright flame and snowy drapery to
+see that the figure was a breathing one.  It was Iris, in one of her
+statue-trances.  She had come down, whether sleeping or waking, I
+knew not at first, led by an instinct that told her she was wanted,-
+-or, possibly, having overheard and interpreted the sound of our
+movements,--or, it may be, having learned from the servant that
+there was trouble which might ask for a woman's hand.  I sometimes
+think women have a sixth sense, which tells them that others, whom
+they cannot see or hear, are in suffering.  How surely we find them
+at the bedside of the dying!  How strongly does Nature plead for
+them, that we should draw our first breath in their arms, as we sigh
+away our last upon their faithful breasts!
+
+With white, bare feet, her hair loosely knotted, clad as the
+starlight knew her, and the morning when she rose from slumber, save
+that she had twisted a scarf round her long dress, she stood still
+as a stone before me, holding in one hand a lighted coil of
+waxtaper, and in the other a silver goblet.  I held my own lamp
+close to her, as if she had been a figure of marble, and she did not
+stir.  There was no breach of propriety then, to scare the Poor
+Relation with and breed scandal out of.  She had been "warned in a
+dream," doubtless suggested by her waking knowledge and the sounds
+which had reached her exalted sense.  There was nothing more natural
+than that she should have risen and girdled her waist, and lighted
+her taper, and found the silver goblet with "Ex dono pupillorum" on
+it, from which she had taken her milk and possets through all her
+childish years, and so gone blindly out to find her place at the
+bedside,--a Sister of Charity without the cap and rosary; nay,
+unknowing whither her feet were leading her, and with wide blank
+eyes seeing nothing but the vision that beckoned her along.--Well,
+I must wake her from her slumber or trance.--I called her name, but
+she did not heed my voice.
+
+The Devil put it into my head that I would kiss one handsome young
+girl before I died, and now was my chance.  She never would know it,
+and I should carry the remembrance of it with me into the grave, and
+a rose perhaps grow out of my dust, as a brier did out of Lord
+Lovers, in memory of that immortal moment!  Would it wake her from
+her trance?  and would she see me in the flush of my stolen triumph,
+and hate and despise me ever after?  Or should I carry off my trophy
+undetected, and always from that time say to myself, when I looked
+upon her in the glory of youth and the splendor of beauty, "My lips
+have touched those roses and made their sweetness mine forever"?
+You think my cheek was flushed, perhaps, and my eyes were glittering
+with this midnight flash of opportunity.  On the contrary, I believe
+I was pale, very pale, and I know that I trembled.  Ah, it is the
+pale passions that are the fiercest,--it is the violence of the
+chill that gives the measure of the fever!  The fighting-boy of our
+school always turned white when he went out to a pitched battle with
+the bully of some neighboring village; but we knew what his
+bloodless cheeks meant,--the blood was all in his stout heart,--he
+was a slight boy, and there was not enough to redden his face and
+fill his heart both at once.
+
+Perhaps it is making a good deal of a slight matter, to tell the
+internal conflicts in the heart of a quiet person something more
+than juvenile and something less than senile, as to whether he
+should be guilty of an impropriety, and, if he were, whether he
+would get caught in his indiscretion.  And yet the memory of the
+kiss that Margaret of Scotland gave to Alain Chartier has lasted
+four hundred years, and put it into the head of many an ill-favored
+poet, whether Victoria, or Eugenie, would do as much by him, if she
+happened to pass him when he was asleep.  And have we ever forgotten
+that the fresh cheek of the young John Milton tingled under the lips
+of some high-born Italian beauty, who, I believe, did not think to
+leave her card by the side of the slumbering youth, but has
+bequeathed the memory of her pretty deed to all coming time?  The
+sound of a kiss is not so loud as that of a cannon, but its echo
+lasts a deal longer.
+
+There is one disadvantage which the man of philosophical habits of
+mind suffers, as compared with the man of action.  While he is
+taking an enlarged and rational view of the matter before him, he
+lets his chance slip through his fingers.  Iris woke up, of her own
+accord, before I had made up my mind what I was going to do about
+it.
+
+When I remember how charmingly she looked, I don't blame myself at
+all for being tempted; but if I had been fool enough to yield to the
+impulse, I should certainly have been ashamed to tell of it.  She
+did not know what to make of it, finding herself there alone, in
+such guise, and me staring at her.  She looked down at her white
+robe and bare feet, and colored,--then at the goblet she held in her
+hand, then at the taper; and at last her thoughts seemed to clear
+up.
+
+I know it all,--she said.--He is going to die, and I must go and
+sit by him.  Nobody will care for him as I shall, and I have nobody
+else to care for.
+
+I assured her that nothing was needed for him that night but rest,
+and persuaded her that the excitement of her presence could only do
+harm.  Let him sleep, and he would very probably awake better in the
+morning.  There was nothing to be said, for I spoke with authority;
+and the young girl glided away with noiseless step and sought her
+own chamber.
+
+The tremor passed away from my limbs, and the blood began to burn in
+my cheeks.  The beautiful image which had so bewitched me faded
+gradually from my imagination, and I returned to the still
+perplexing mysteries of my little neighbor's chamber.
+
+All was still there now.  No plaintive sounds, no monotonous
+murmurs, no shutting of windows and doors at strange hours, as if
+something or somebody were coming in or going out, or there was
+something to be hidden in those dark mahogany presses.  Is there an
+inner apartment that I have not seen?  The way in which the house is
+built might admit of it.  As I thought it over, I at once imagined a
+Bluebeard's chamber.  Suppose, for instance, that the narrow
+bookshelves to the right are really only a masked door, such as we
+remember leading to the private study of one of our most
+distinguished townsmen, who loved to steal away from his stately
+library to that little silent cell.  If this were lighted from
+above, a person or persons might pass their days there without
+attracting attention from the household, and wander where they
+pleased at night,--to Copp's-Hill burial-ground, if they liked,--I
+said to myself, laughing, and pulling the bed-clothes over my head.
+There is no logic in superstitious-fancies any more than in dreams.
+A she-ghost wouldn't want an inner chamber to herself.  A live
+woman, with a valuable soprano voice, wouldn't start off at night to
+sprain her ankles over the old graves of the North-End cemetery.
+
+It is all very easy for you, middle-aged reader, sitting over this
+page in the broad daylight, to call me by all manner of asinine and
+anserine unchristian names, because I had these fancies running
+through my head.  I don't care much for your abuse.  The question is
+not, what it is reasonable for a man to think about, but what he
+actually does think about, in the dark, and when be is alone, and
+his whole body seems but one great nerve of hearing, and he sees the
+phosphorescent flashes of his own eyeballs as they turn suddenly in
+the direction of the last strange noise,--what he actually does
+think about, as he lies and recalls all the wild stories his head is
+full of, his fancy hinting the most alarming conjectures to account
+for the simplest facts about him, his common-sense laughing them to
+scorn the next minute, but his mind still returning to them, under
+one shape or another, until he gets very nervous and foolish, and
+remembers how pleasant it used to be to have his mother come and
+tuck him up and go and sit within call, so that she could hear him
+at any minute, if he got very much scared and wanted her.  Old
+babies that we are!
+
+Daylight will clear up all that lamp-light has left doubtful.  I
+longed for the morning to come, for I was more curious than ever.
+So, between my fancies and anticipations, I had but a poor night of
+it, and came down tired to the breakfast-table.  My visit was not to
+be made until after this morning hour; there was nothing urgent, so
+the servant was ordered to tell me.
+
+It was the first breakfast at which the high chair at the side of
+Iris had been unoccupied.--You might jest as well take away that
+chair,--said our landlady,--he'll never want it again.  He acts like
+a man that 's struck with death, 'n' I don't believe he 'll ever
+come out of his chamber till he 's laid out and brought down a
+corpse.--These good women do put things so plainly!  There were two
+or three words in her short remark that always sober people, and
+suggest silence or brief moral reflections.
+
+--Life is dreadful uncerting,--said the Poor Relation,--and pulled
+in her social tentacles to concentrate her thoughts on this fact of
+human history.
+
+--If there was anything a fellah could do,--said the young man John,
+so called,--a fellah 'd like the chance o' helpin' a little cripple
+like that.  He looks as if he couldn't turn over any handier than a
+turtle that's laid on his back; and I guess there a'n't many people
+that know how to lift better than I do.  Ask him if he don't want
+any watchers.  I don't mind settin' up any more 'n a cat-owl.  I was
+up all night twice last month.
+
+[My private opinion is, that there was no small amount of punch
+absorbed on those two occasions, which I think I heard of at the
+time];--but the offer is a kind one, and it is n't fair to question
+how he would like sitting up without the punch and the company and
+the songs and smoking.  He means what he says, and it would be a
+more considerable achievement for him to sit quietly all night by a
+sick man than for a good many other people.  I tell you this odd
+thing: there are a good many persons, who, through the habit of
+making other folks uncomfortable, by finding fault with all their
+cheerful enjoyments, at last get up a kind of hostility to comfort
+in general, even in their own persons.  The correlative to loving
+our neighbors as ourselves is hating ourselves as we hate our
+neighbors.  Look at old misers; first they starve their dependants,
+and then themselves.  So I think it more for a lively young fellow
+to be ready to play nurse than for one of those useful but forlorn
+martyrs who have taken a spite against themselves and love to
+gratify it by fasting and watching.
+
+--The time came at last for me to make my visit.  I found Iris
+sitting by the Little Gentleman's pillow.  To my disappointment, the
+room was darkened.  He did not like the light, and would have the
+shutters kept nearly closed.  It was good enough for me; what
+business had I to be indulging my curiosity, when I had nothing to
+do but to exercise such skill as I possessed for the benefit of my
+patient?  There was not much to be said or done in such a case; but
+I spoke as encouragingly as I could, as I think we are always bound
+to do.  He did not seem to pay any very anxious attention, but the
+poor girl listened as if her own life and more than her own life
+were depending on the words I uttered.  She followed me out of the
+room, when I had got through my visit.
+
+How long?--she said.
+
+Uncertain.  Any time; to-day,--next week, next month,--I answered.
+--One of those cases where the issue is not doubtful, but may be
+sudden or slow.
+
+The women of the house were kind, as women always are in trouble.
+But Iris pretended that nobody could spare the time as well as she,
+and kept her place, hour after hour, until the landlady insisted
+that she'd be killin' herself, if she begun at that rate, 'n' haf to
+give up, if she didn't want to be clean beat out in less 'n a week.
+
+At the table we were graver than common.  The high chair was set
+back against the wall, and a gap left between that of the young girl
+and her nearest neighbor's on the right.  But the next morning, to
+our great surprise, that good-looking young Marylander had very
+quietly moved his own chair to the vacant place.  I thought he was
+creeping down that way, but I was not prepared for a leap spanning
+such a tremendous parenthesis of boarders as this change of position
+included.  There was no denying that the youth and maiden were a
+handsome pair, as they sat side by side.  But whatever the young
+girl may have thought of her new neighbor she never seemed for a
+moment to forget the poor little friend who had been taken from her
+side.  There are women, and even girls, with whom it is of no use to
+talk.  One might as well reason with a bee as to the form of his
+cell, or with an oriole as to the construction of his swinging nest,
+as try to stir these creatures from their own way of doing their own
+work.  It was not a question with Iris, whether she was entitled by
+any special relation or by the fitness of things to play the part of
+a nurse.  She was a wilful creature that must have her way in this
+matter.  And it so proved that it called for much patience and long
+endurance to carry through the duties, say rather the kind offices,
+the painful pleasures, which she had chosen as her share in the
+household where accident had thrown her.  She had that genius of
+ministration which is the special province of certain women, marked
+even among their helpful sisters by a soft, low voice, a quiet
+footfall, a light hand, a cheering smile, and a ready self-surrender
+to the objects of their care, which such trifles as their own food,
+sleep, or habits of any kind never presume to interfere with.
+Day after day, and too often through the long watches of the night,
+she kept her place by the pillow.
+
+That girl will kill herself over me, Sir,--said the poor Little
+Gentleman to me, one day,--she will kill herself, Sir, if you don't
+call in all the resources of your art to get me off as soon as may
+be.  I shall wear her out, Sir, with sitting in this close chamber
+and watching when she ought to be sleeping, if you leave me to the
+care of Nature without dosing me.
+
+This was rather strange pleasantry, under the circumstances.  But
+there are certain persons whose existence is so out of parallel with
+the larger laws in the midst of which it is moving, that life
+becomes to them as death and death as life.--How am I getting
+along?--he said, another morning.  He lifted his shrivelled hand,
+with the death's-head ring on it, and looked at it with a sad sort
+of complacency.  By this one movement, which I have seen repeatedly
+of late, I know that his thoughts have gone before to another
+condition, and that he is, as it were, looking back on the
+infirmities of the body as accidents of the past.  For, when he was
+well, one might see him often looking at the handsome hand with the
+flaming jewel on one of its fingers.  The single well-shaped limb
+was the source of that pleasure which in some form or other Nature
+almost always grants to her least richly endowed children.  Handsome
+hair, eyes, complexion, feature, form, hand, foot, pleasant voice,
+strength, grace, agility, intelligence,--how few there are that have
+not just enough of one at least of these gifts to show them that the
+good Mother, busy with her millions of children, has not quite
+forgotten them!  But now he was thinking of that other state, where,
+free from all mortal impediments, the memory of his sorrowful burden
+should be only as that of the case he has shed to the insect whose
+"deep-damasked wings" beat off the golden dust of the lily-anthers,
+as he flutters in the ecstasy of his new life over their full-blown
+summer glories.
+
+No human being can rest for any time in a state of equilibrium,
+where the desire to live and that to depart just balance each other.
+If one has a house, which he has lived and always means to live in,
+he pleases himself with the thought of all the conveniences it
+offers him, and thinks little of its wants and imperfections.  But
+once having made up his mind to move to a better, every incommodity
+starts out upon him, until the very ground-plan of it seems to have
+changed in his mind, and his thoughts and affections, each one of
+them packing up its little bundle of circumstances, have quitted
+their several chambers and nooks and migrated to the new home, long
+before its apartments are ready to receive their coming tenant.  It
+is so with the body.  Most persons have died before they expire,--
+died to all earthly longings, so that the last breath is only, as it
+were, the locking of the door of the already deserted mansion.  The
+fact of the tranquillity with which the great majority of dying
+persons await this locking of those gates of life through which its
+airy angels have been going and coming, from the moment of the first
+cry, is familiar to those who have been often called upon to witness
+the last period of life.  Almost always there is a preparation made
+by Nature for unearthing a soul, just as on the smaller scale there
+is for the removal of a milktooth.  The roots which hold human life
+to earth are absorbed before it is lifted from its place.  Some of
+the dying are weary and want rest, the idea of which is almost
+inseparable in the universal mind from death.  Some are in pain, and
+want to be rid of it, even though the anodyne be dropped, as in the
+legend, from the sword of the Death-Angel.  Some are stupid,
+mercifully narcotized that they may go to sleep without long tossing
+about.  And some are strong in faith and hope, so that, as they draw
+near the next world, they would fair hurry toward it, as the caravan
+moves faster over the sands when the foremost travellers send word
+along the file that water is in sight.  Though each little party
+that follows in a foot-track of its own will have it that the water
+to which others think they are hastening is a mirage, not the less
+has it been true in all ages and for human beings of every creed
+which recognized a future, that those who have fallen worn out by
+their march through the Desert have dreamed at least of a River of
+Life, and thought they heard its murmurs as they lay dying.
+
+The change from the clinging to the present to the welcoming of the
+future comes very soon, for the most part, after all hope of life is
+extinguished, provided this be left in good degree to Nature, and
+not insolently and cruelly forced upon those who are attacked by
+illness, on the strength of that odious foreknowledge often imparted
+by science, before the white fruit whose core is ashes, and which we
+call death, has set beneath the pallid and drooping flower of
+sickness.  There is a singular sagacity very often shown in a
+patient's estimate of his own vital force.  His physician knows the
+state of his material frame well enough, perhaps,--that this or that
+organ is more or less impaired or disintegrated; but the patient has
+a sense that he can hold out so much longer,--sometimes that he must
+and will live for a while, though by the logic of disease he ought
+to die without any delay.
+
+The Little Gentleman continued to fail, until it became plain that
+his remaining days were few.  I told the household what to expect.
+There was a good deal of kind feeling expressed among the boarders,
+in various modes, according to their characters and style of
+sympathy.  The landlady was urgent that he should try a certain
+nostrum which had saved somebody's life in jest sech a case.  The
+Poor Relation wanted me to carry, as from her, a copy of "Allein's
+Alarm," etc.  I objected to the title, reminding her that it
+offended people of old, so that more than twice as many of the book
+were sold when they changed the name to "A Sure Guide to Heaven."
+The good old gentleman whom I have mentioned before has come to the
+time of life when many old men cry easily, and forget their tears as
+children do.--He was a worthy gentleman,--he said,--a very worthy
+gentleman, but unfortunate,--very unfortunate.  Sadly deformed about
+the spine and the feet.  Had an impression that the late Lord Byron
+had some malformation of this kind.  Had heerd there was something
+the matter with the ankle-j'ints of that nobleman, but he was a man
+of talents.  This gentleman seemed to be a man of talents.  Could
+not always agree with his statements,--thought he was a little over-
+partial to this city, and had some free opinions; but was sorry to
+lose him,--and if--there was anything--he--could--.  In the midst of
+these kind expressions, the gentleman with the diamond, the Koh-i-
+noor, as we called him, asked, in a very unpleasant sort of way, how
+the old boy was likely to cut up,--meaning what money our friend was
+going to leave behind.
+
+The young fellow John spoke up, to the effect that this was a
+diabolish snobby question, when a man was dying and not dead.--To
+this the Koh-i-noor replied, by asking if the other meant to insult
+him.  Whereto the young man John rejoined that he had no particul'r
+intentions one way or t'other. -The Kohi-noor then suggested the
+young man's stepping out into the yard, that he, the speaker, might
+"slap his chops."--Let 'em alone, said young Maryland,--it 'll soon
+be over, and they won't hurt each other much.--So they went out.
+
+The Koh-i-noor entertained the very common idea, that, when one
+quarrels with another, the simple thing to do is to knock the man
+down, and there is the end of it.  Now those who have watched such
+encounters are aware of two things: first, that it is not so easy to
+knock a man down as it is to talk about it; secondly, that, if you
+do happen to knock a man down, there is a very good chance that he
+will be angry, and get up and give you a thrashing.
+
+So the Koh-i-noor thought he would begin, as soon as they got into
+the yard, by knocking his man down, and with this intention swung
+his arm round after the fashion of rustics and those unskilled in
+the noble art, expecting the young fellow John to drop when his
+fist, having completed a quarter of a circle, should come in contact
+with the side of that young man's head.  Unfortunately for this
+theory, it happens that a blow struck out straight is as much
+shorter, and therefore as much quicker than the rustic's swinging
+blow, as the radius is shorter than the quarter of a circle.  The
+mathematical and mechanical corollary was, that the Koh-i-noor felt
+something hard bring up suddenly against his right eye, which
+something he could have sworn was a paving-stone, judging by his
+sensations; and as this threw his person somewhat backwards, and the
+young man John jerked his own head back a little, the swinging blow
+had nothing to stop it; and as the Jewel staggered between the hit
+he got and the blow he missed, he tripped and "went to grass," so
+far as the back-yard of our boardinghouse was provided with that
+vegetable.  It was a signal illustration of that fatal mistake, so
+frequent in young and ardent natures with inconspicuous calves and
+negative pectorals, that they can settle most little quarrels on the
+spot by "knocking the man down."
+
+We are in the habit of handling our faces so carefully, that a heavy
+blow, taking effect on that portion of the surface, produces a most
+unpleasant surprise, which is accompanied with odd sensations, as of
+seeing sparks, and a kind of electrical or ozone-like odor, half-
+sulphurous in character, and which has given rise to a very vulgar
+and profane threat sometimes heard from the lips of bullies.  A
+person not used to pugilistic gestures does not instantly recover
+from this surprise.  The Koh-i-noor exasperated by his failure, and
+still a little confused by the smart hit he had received, but
+furious, and confident of victory over a young fellow a good deal
+lighter than himself, made a desperate rush to bear down all before
+him and finish the contest at once.  That is the way all angry
+greenhorns and incompetent persons attempt to settle matters.  It
+does n't do, if the other fellow is only cool, moderately quick, and
+has a very little science.  It didn't do this time; for, as the
+assailant rushed in with his arms flying everywhere, like the vans
+of a windmill, be ran a prominent feature of his face against a fist
+which was travelling in the other direction, and immediately after
+struck the knuckles of the young man's other fist a severe blow with
+the part of his person known as the epigastrium to one branch of
+science and the bread-basket to another.  This second round closed
+the battle.  The Koh-i-noor had got enough, which in such cases is
+more than as good as a feast.  The young fellow asked him if he was
+satisfied, and held out his hand.  But the other sulked, and
+muttered something about revenge.--Jest as ye like,--said the young
+man John.--Clap a slice o' raw beefsteak on to that mouse o' yours
+'n' 't'll take down the swellin'.  (Mouse is a technical term for a
+bluish, oblong, rounded elevation occasioned by running one's
+forehead or eyebrow against another's knuckles.) The young fellow
+was particularly pleased that he had had an opportunity of trying
+his proficiency in the art of self-defence without the gloves.  The
+Koh-i-noor did not favor us with his company for a day or two, being
+confined to his chamber, it was said, by a slight feverish, attack.
+He was chop-fallen always after this, and got negligent in his
+person.  The impression must have been a deep one; for it was
+observed, that, when he came down again, his moustache and whiskers
+had turned visibly white about the roots.  In short, it disgraced
+him, and rendered still more conspicuous a tendency to drinking, of
+which he had been for some time suspected.  This, and the disgust
+which a young lady naturally feels at hearing that her lover has
+been "licked by a fellah not half his size," induced the landlady's
+daughter to take that decided step which produced a change in the
+programme of her career I may hereafter allude to.
+
+I never thought he would come to good, when I heard him attempting
+to sneer at an unoffending city so respectable as Boston.  After a
+man begins to attack the State-House, when he gets bitter about the
+Frog-Pond, you may be sure there is not much left of him.  Poor
+Edgar Poe died in the hospital soon after he got into this way of
+talking; and so sure as you find an unfortunate fellow reduced to
+this pass, you had better begin praying for him, and stop lending
+him money, for he is on his last legs.  Remember poor Edgar!  He is
+dead and gone; but the State-House has its cupola fresh-gilded, and
+the Frog-Pond has got a fountain that squirts up a hundred feet into
+the air and glorifies that humble sheet with a fine display of
+provincial rainbows.
+
+--I cannot fulfil my promise in this number.  I expected to gratify
+your curiosity, if you have become at all interested in these
+puzzles, doubts, fancies, whims, or whatever you choose to call
+them, of mine.  Next month you shall hear all about it.
+
+--It was evening, and I was going to the sick-chamber.  As I paused
+at the door before entering, I heard a sweet voice singing.  It was
+not the wild melody I had sometimes heard at midnight:--no, this was
+the voice of Iris, and I could distinguish every word.  I had seen
+the verses in her book; the melody was new to me.  Let me finish my
+page with them.
+
+
+          HYMN OF TRUST.
+
+O Love Divine, that stooped to share
+Our sharpest pang, our bitterest tear,
+On Thee we cast each earthborn care,
+We smile at pain while Thou art near!
+
+Though long the weary way we tread,
+And sorrow crown each lingering year,
+No path we shun, no darkness dread,
+Our hearts still whispering, Thou art near!
+
+When drooping pleasure turns to grief,
+And trembling faith is changed to fear,
+The murmuring wind, the quivering leaf
+Shall softly tell us, Thou art near!
+
+On Thee we fling our burdening woe,
+O Love Divine, forever dear,
+Content to suffer, while we know,
+Living and dying, Thou art near!
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+A young fellow, born of good stock, in one of the more thoroughly
+civilized portions of these United States of America, bred in good
+principles, inheriting a social position which makes him at his ease
+everywhere, means sufficient to educate him thoroughly without
+taking away the stimulus to vigorous exertion, and with a good
+opening in some honorable path of labor, is the finest sight our
+private satellite has had the opportunity of inspecting on the
+planet to which she belongs.  In some respects it was better to be a
+young Greek.  If we may trust the old marbles, my friend with his
+arm stretched over my head, above there, (in plaster of Paris,) or
+the discobolus, whom one may see at the principal sculpture gallery
+of this metropolis,--those Greek young men were of supreme beauty.
+Their close curls, their elegantly set heads, column-like necks,
+straight noses, short, curled lips, firm chins, deep chests, light
+flanks, large muscles, small joints, were finer than anything we
+ever see.  It may well be questioned whether the human shape will
+ever present itself again in a race of such perfect symmetry.  But
+the life of the youthful Greek was local, not planetary, like that
+of the young American.  He had a string of legends, in place of our
+Gospels.  He had no printed books, no newspaper, no steam caravans,
+no forks, no soap, none of the thousand cheap conveniences which
+have become matters of necessity to our modern civilization.  Above
+all things, if he aspired to know as well as to enjoy, he found
+knowledge not diffused everywhere about him, so that a day's labor
+would buy him more wisdom than a year could master, but held in
+private hands, hoarded in precious manuscripts, to be sought for
+only as gold is sought in narrow fissures, and in the beds of
+brawling streams.  Never, since man came into this atmosphere of
+oxygen and azote, was there anything like the condition of the young
+American of the nineteenth century.  Having in possession or in
+prospect the best part of half a world, with all its climates and
+soils to choose from; equipped with wings of fire and smoke than fly
+with him day and night, so that he counts his journey not in miles,
+but in degrees, and sees the seasons change as the wild fowl sees
+them in his annual flights; with huge leviathans always ready to
+take him on their broad backs and push behind them with their
+pectoral or caudal fins the waters that seam the continent or
+separate the hemispheres; heir of all old civilizations, founder of
+that new one which, if all the prophecies of the human heart are not
+lies, is to be the noblest, as it is the last; isolated in space
+from the races that are governed by dynasties whose divine right
+grows out of human wrong, yet knit into the most absolute solidarity
+with mankind of all times and places by the one great thought he
+inherits as his national birthright; free to form and express his
+opinions on almost every subject, and assured that he will soon
+acquire the last franchise which men withhold from man,--that of
+stating the laws of his spiritual being and the beliefs he accepts
+without hindrance except from clearer views of truth,--he seems to
+want nothing for a large, wholesome, noble, beneficent life.  In
+fact, the chief danger is that he will think the whole planet is
+made for him, and forget that there are some possibilities left in
+the debris of the old-world civilization which deserve a certain
+respectful consideration at his hands.
+
+The combing and clipping of this shaggy wild continent are in some
+measure done for him by those who have gone before.  Society has
+subdivided itself enough to have a place for every form of talent.
+Thus, if a man show the least sign of ability as a sculptor or a
+painter, for instance, he finds the means of education and a demand
+for his services.  Even a man who knows nothing but science will be
+provided for, if he does not think it necessary to hang about his
+birthplace all his days,--which is a most unAmerican weakness.  The
+apron-strings of an American mother are made of India-rubber.  Her
+boy belongs where he is wanted; and that young Marylander of ours
+spoke for all our young men, when he said that his home was wherever
+the stars and stripes blew over his head.
+
+And that leads me to say a few words of this young gentleman, who
+made that audacious movement lately which I chronicled in my last
+record,--jumping over the seats of I don't know how many boarders to
+put himself in the place which the Little Gentleman's absence had
+left vacant at the side of Iris.  When a young man is found
+habitually at the side of any one given young lady,--when he lingers
+where she stays, and hastens when she leaves,--when his eyes follow
+her as she moves and rest upon her when she is still,--when he
+begins to grow a little timid, he who was so bold, and a little
+pensive, he who was so gay, whenever accident finds them alone,--
+when he thinks very often of the given young lady, and names her
+very seldom,--
+
+What do you say about it, my charming young expert in that sweet
+science in which, perhaps, a long experience is not the first of
+qualifications?
+
+--But we don't know anything about this young man, except that he is
+good-looking, and somewhat high-spirited, and strong-limbed, and has
+a generous style of nature,--all very promising, but by no means
+proving that he is a proper lover for Iris, whose heart we turned
+inside out when we opened that sealed book of hers.
+
+Ah, my dear young friend!  When your mamma then, if you will believe
+it, a very slight young lady, with very pretty hair and figure--came
+and told her mamma that your papa had--had--asked No, no, no! she
+could n't say it; but her mother--oh the depth of maternal sagacity!
+--guessed it all without another word!--When your mother, I say,
+came and told her mother she was engaged, and your grandmother told
+your grandfather, how much did they know of the intimate nature of
+the young gentleman to whom she had pledged her existence?  I will
+not be so hard as to ask how much your respected mamma knew at that
+time of the intimate nature of your respected papa, though, if we
+should compare a young girl's man-as-she-thinks-him with a forty-
+summered matron's man-as-she-finds-him, I have my doubts as to
+whether the second would be a facsimile of the first in most cases.
+
+The idea that in this world each young person is to wait until he or
+she finds that precise counterpart who alone of all creation was
+meant for him or her, and then fall instantly in love with it, is
+pretty enough, only it is not Nature's way.  It is not at all
+essential that all pairs of human beings should be, as we sometimes
+say of particular couples, "born for each other."  Sometimes a man
+or a woman is made a great deal better and happier in the end for
+having had to conquer the faults of the one beloved, and make the
+fitness not found at first, by gradual assimilation.  There is a
+class of good women who have no right to marry perfectly good men,
+because they have the power of saving those who would go to ruin but
+for the guiding providence of a good wife.  I have known many such
+cases.  It is the most momentous question a woman is ever called
+upon to decide, whether the faults of the man she loves are beyond
+remedy and will drag her down, or whether she is competent to be his
+earthly redeemer and lift him to her own level.
+
+A person of genius should marry a person of character.  Genius does
+not herd with genius.  The musk-deer and the civet-cat are never
+found in company.  They don't care for strange scents,--they like
+plain animals better than perfumed ones.  Nay, if you will have the
+kindness to notice, Nature has not gifted my lady musk-deer with the
+personal peculiarity by which her lord is so widely known.
+
+Now when genius allies itself with character, the world is very apt
+to think character has the best of the bargain.  A brilliant woman
+marries a plain, manly fellow, with a simple intellectual
+mechanism;--we have all seen such cases.  The world often stares a
+good deal and wonders.  She should have taken that other, with a far
+more complex mental machinery.  She might have had a watch with the
+philosophical compensation-balance, with the metaphysical index
+which can split a second into tenths, with the musical chime which
+can turn every quarter of an hour into melody.  She has chosen a
+plain one, that keeps good time, and that is all.
+
+Let her alone!  She knows what she is about.  Genius has an
+infinitely deeper reverence for character than character can have
+for genius.  To be sure, genius gets the world's praise, because its
+work is a tangible product, to be bought, or had for nothing.  It
+bribes the common voice to praise it by presents of speeches, poems,
+statues, pictures, or whatever it can please with.  Character
+evolves its best products for home consumption; but, mind you, it
+takes a deal more to feed a family for thirty years than to make a
+holiday feast for our neighbors once or twice in our lives.  You
+talk of the fire of genius.  Many a blessed woman, who dies unsung
+and unremembered, has given out more of the real vital heat that
+keeps the life in human souls, without a spark flitting through her
+humble chimney to tell the world about it, than would set a dozen
+theories smoking, or a hundred odes simmering, in the brains of so
+many men of genius.  It is in latent caloric, if I may borrow a
+philosophical expression, that many of the noblest hearts give out
+the life that warms them.  Cornelia's lips grow white, and her pulse
+hardly warms her thin fingers,--but she has melted all the ice out
+of the hearts of those young Gracchi, and her lost heat is in the
+blood of her youthful heroes.  We are always valuing the soul's
+temperature by the thermometer of public deed or word.  Yet the
+great sun himself, when he pours his noonday beams upon some vast
+hyaline boulder, rent from the eternal ice-quarries, and floating
+toward the tropics, never warms it a fraction above the thirty-two
+degrees of Fahrenheit that marked the moment when the first drop
+trickled down its side.
+
+How we all like the spirting up of a fountain, seemingly against the
+law that makes water everywhere slide, roll, leap, tumble headlong,
+to get as low as the earth will let it!  That is genius.  But what
+is this transient upward movement, which gives us the glitter and
+the rainbow, to that unsleeping, all-present force of gravity, the
+same yesterday, to-day, and forever, (if the universe be eternal,)
+--the great outspread hand of God himself, forcing all things down
+into their places, and keeping them there?  Such, in smaller
+proportion, is the force of character to the fitful movements of
+genius, as they are or have been linked to each other in many a
+household, where one name was historic, and the other, let me say
+the nobler, unknown, save by some faint reflected ray, borrowed from
+its lustrous companion.
+
+Oftentimes, as I have lain swinging on the water, in the swell of
+the Chelsea ferry-boats, in that long, sharp-pointed, black cradle
+in which I love to let the great mother rock me, I have seen a tall
+ship glide by against the tide, as if drawn by some invisible
+towline, with a hundred strong arms pulling it.  Her sails hung
+unfilled, her streamers were drooping, she had neither side-wheel
+nor stern-wheel; still she moved on, stately, in serene triumph, as
+if with her own life.  But I knew that on the other side of the
+ship, hidden beneath the great hulk that swam so majestically, there
+was a little toiling steam-tug, with heart of fire and arms of iron,
+that was hugging it close and dragging it bravely on; and I knew,
+that, if the little steam-tug untwined her arms and left the tall
+ship, it would wallow and roll about, and drift hither and thither,
+and go off with the refluent tide, no man knows whither.  And so I
+have known more than one genius, high-decked, full-freighted, wide-
+sailed, gay-pennoned, that, but for the bare toiling arms, and
+brave, warm, beating heart of the faithful little wife, that nestled
+close in his shadow, and clung to him, so that no wind or wave could
+part them, and dragged him on against all the tide of circumstance,
+would soon have gone down the stream and been heard of no more.
+--No, I am too much a lover of genius, I sometimes think, and too
+often get impatient with dull people, so that, in their weak talk,
+where nothing is taken for granted, I look forward to some future
+possible state of development, when a gesture passing between a
+beatified human soul and an archangel shall signify as much as the
+complete history of a planet, from the time when it curdled to the
+time when its sun was burned out.  And yet, when a strong brain is
+weighed with a true heart, it seems to me like balancing a bubble
+against a wedge of gold.
+
+--It takes a very true man to be a fitting companion for a woman of
+genius, but not a very great one.  I am not sure that she will not
+embroider her ideal better on a plain ground than on one with a
+brilliant pattern already worked in its texture.  But as the very
+essence of genius is truthfulness, contact with realities, (which
+are always ideas behind shows of form or language,) nothing is so
+contemptible as falsehood and pretence in its eyes.  Now it is not
+easy to find a perfectly true woman, and it is very hard to find a
+perfectly true man.  And a woman of genius, who has the sagacity to
+choose such a one as her companion, shows more of the divine gift in
+so doing than in her finest talk or her most brilliant work of
+letters or of art.
+
+I have been a good while coming at a secret, for which I wished to
+prepare you before telling it.  I think there is a kindly feeling
+growing up between Iris and our young Marylander.  Not that I
+suppose there is any distinct understanding between them, but that
+the affinity which has drawn him from the remote corner where he sat
+to the side of the young girl is quietly bringing their two natures
+together.  Just now she is all given up to another; but when he no
+longer calls upon her daily thoughts and cares, I warn you not to be
+surprised, if this bud of friendship open like the evening primrose,
+with a sound as of a sudden stolen kiss, and lo! the flower of full-
+blown love lies unfolded before you.
+
+And now the days had come for our little friend, whose whims and
+weaknesses had interested us, perhaps, as much as his better traits,
+to make ready for that long journey which is easier to the cripple
+than to the strong man, and on which none enters so willingly as he
+who has borne the life-long load of infirmity during his earthly
+pilgrimage.  At this point, under most circumstances, I would close
+the doors and draw the veil of privacy before the chamber where the
+birth which we call death, out of life into the unknown world, is
+working its mystery.  But this friend of ours stood alone in the
+world, and, as the last act of his life was mainly in harmony with
+the rest of its drama, I do not here feel the force of the objection
+commonly lying against that death-bed literature which forms the
+staple of a certain portion of the press.  Let me explain what I
+mean, so that my readers may think for themselves a little, before
+they accuse me of hasty expressions.
+
+The Roman Catholic Church has certain formulas for its dying
+children, to which almost all of them attach the greatest
+importance.  There is hardly a criminal so abandoned that he is not
+anxious to receive the "consolations of religion" in his last hours.
+Even if he be senseless, but still living, I think that the form is
+gone through with, just as baptism is administered to the
+unconscious new-born child.  Now we do not quarrel with these forms.
+We look with reverence and affection upon all symbols which give
+peace and comfort to our fellow-creatures.  But the value of the
+new-born child's passive consent to the ceremony is null, as
+testimony to the truth of a doctrine.  The automatic closing of a
+dying man's lips on the consecrated wafer proves nothing in favor of
+the Real Presence, or any other dogma.  And, speaking generally, the
+evidence of dying men in favor of any belief is to be received with
+great caution.
+
+They commonly tell the truth about their present feelings, no doubt.
+A dying man's deposition about anything he knows is good evidence.
+But it is of much less consequence what a man thinks and says when
+he is changed by pain, weakness, apprehension, than what he thinks
+when he is truly and wholly himself.  Most murderers die in a very
+pious frame of mind, expecting to go to glory at once; yet no man
+believes he shall meet a larger average of pirates and cut-throats
+in the streets of the New Jerusalem than of honest folks that died
+in their beds.
+
+Unfortunately, there has been a very great tendency to make capital
+of various kinds out of dying men's speeches.  The lies that have
+been put into their mouths for this purpose are endless.  The prime
+minister, whose last breath was spent in scolding his nurse, dies
+with a magnificent apothegm on his lips, manufactured by a reporter.
+Addison gets up a tableau and utters an admirable sentiment,--or
+somebody makes the posthumous dying epigram for him.  The incoherent
+babble of green fields is translated into the language of stately
+sentiment.  One would think, all that dying men had to do was to say
+the prettiest thing they could,--to make their rhetorical point,--
+and then bow themselves politely out of the world.
+
+Worse than this is the torturing of dying people to get their
+evidence in favor of this or that favorite belief.  The camp-
+followers of proselyting sects have come in at the close of every
+life where they could get in, to strip the languishing soul of its
+thoughts, and carry them off as spoils.  The Roman Catholic or other
+priest who insists on the reception of his formula means kindly, we
+trust, and very commonly succeeds in getting the acquiescence of the
+subject of his spiritual surgery, but do not let us take the
+testimony of people who are in the worst condition to form opinions
+as evidence of the truth or falsehood of that which they accept.  A
+lame man's opinion of dancing is not good for much.  A poor fellow
+who can neither eat nor drink, who is sleepless and full of pains,
+whose flesh has wasted from him, whose blood is like water, who is
+gasping for breath, is not in a condition to judge fairly of human
+life, which in all its main adjustments is intended for men in a
+normal, healthy condition.  It is a remark I have heard from the
+wise Patriarch of the Medical Profession among us, that the moral
+condition of patients with disease above the great breathing-muscle,
+the diaphragm, is much more hopeful than that of patients with
+disease below it, in the digestive organs.  Many an honest ignorant
+man has given us pathology when he thought he was giving us
+psychology.  With this preliminary caution I shall proceed to the
+story of the Little Gentleman's leaving us.
+
+When the divinity-student found that our fellow-boarder was not
+likely to remain long with us, he, being a young man of tender
+conscience and kindly nature, was not a little exercised on his
+behalf.  It was undeniable that on several occasions the Little
+Gentleman had expressed himself with a good deal of freedom on a
+class of subjects which, according to the divinity-student, he had
+no right to form an opinion upon.  He therefore considered his
+future welfare in jeopardy.
+
+The Muggletonian sect have a very odd way of dealing with people.
+If I, the Professor, will only give in to the Muggletonian doctrine,
+there shall be no question through all that persuasion that I am
+competent to judge of that doctrine; nay, I shall be quoted as
+evidence of its truth, while I live, and cited, after I am dead, as
+testimony in its behalf.  But if I utter any ever so slight Anti-
+Muggletonian sentiment, then I become incompetent to form any
+opinion on the matter.  This, you cannot fail to observe, is exactly
+the way the pseudo-sciences go to work, as explained in my Lecture
+on Phrenology.  Now I hold that he whose testimony would be accepted
+in behalf of the Muggletonian doctrine has a right to be heard
+against it.  Whoso offers me any article of belief for my signature
+implies that I am competent to form an opinion upon it; and if my
+positive testimony in its favor is of any value, then my negative
+testimony against it is also of value.
+
+I thought my young friend's attitude was a little too much like that
+of the Muggletonians.  I also remarked a singular timidity on his
+part lest somebody should "unsettle" somebody's faith,--as if faith
+did not require exercise as much as any other living thing, and were
+not all the better for a shaking up now and then.  I don't mean that
+it would be fair to bother Bridget, the wild Irish girl, or Joice
+Heth, the centenarian, or any other intellectual non-combatant; but
+all persons who proclaim a belief which passes judgment on their
+neighbors must be ready to have it "unsettled," that is, questioned,
+at all times and by anybody,--just as those who set up bars across a
+thoroughfare must expect to have them taken down by every one who
+wants to pass, if he is strong enough.
+
+Besides, to think of trying to water-proof the American mind against
+the questions that Heaven rains down upon it shows a misapprehension
+of our new conditions.  If to question everything be unlawful and
+dangerous, we had better undeclare our independence at once; for
+what the Declaration means is the right to question everything, even
+the truth of its own fundamental proposition.
+
+The old-world order of things is an arrangement of locks and canals,
+where everything depends on keeping the gates shut, and so holding
+the upper waters at their level; but the system under which the
+young republican American is born trusts the whole unimpeded tide of
+life to the great elemental influences, as the vast rivers of the
+continent settle their own level in obedience to the laws that
+govern the planet and the spheres that surround it.
+
+The divinity-student was not quite up to the idea of the
+commonwealth, as our young friend the Marylander, for instance,
+understood it.  He could not get rid of that notion of private
+property in truth, with the right to fence it in, and put up a sign-
+board, thus:
+
+               ALL TRESPASSERS ARE WARNED OFF THESE
+                              GROUNDS!
+
+He took the young Marylander to task for going to the Church of the
+Galileans, where he had several times accompanied Iris of late.
+
+I am a Churchman,--the young man said,--by education and habit.  I
+love my old Church for many reasons, but most of all because I think
+it has educated me out of its own forms into the spirit of its
+highest teachings.  I think I belong to the "Broad Church," if any
+of you can tell what that means.
+
+I had the rashness to attempt to answer the question myself.--Some
+say the Broad Church means the collective mass of good people of all
+denominations.  Others say that such a definition is nonsense; that
+a church is an organization, and the scattered good folks are no
+organization at all.  They think that men will eventually come
+together on the basis of one or two or more common articles of
+belief, and form a great unity.  Do they see what this amounts to?
+It means an equal division of intellect!  It is mental agrarianism!
+a thing that never was and never will be until national and
+individual idiosyncrasies have ceased to exist.  The man of thirty-
+nine beliefs holds the man of one belief a pauper; he is not going
+to give up thirty-eight of them for the sake of fraternizing with
+the other in the temple which bears on its front, "Deo erexit
+Voltaire."  A church is a garden, I have heard it said, and the
+illustration was neatly handled.  Yes, and there is no such thing as
+a broad garden.  It must be fenced in, and whatever is fenced in is
+narrow.  You cannot have arctic and tropical plants growing together
+in it, except by the forcing system, which is a mighty narrow piece
+of business.  You can't make a village or a parish or a family think
+alike, yet you suppose that you can make a world pinch its beliefs
+or pad them to a single pattern!  Why, the very life of an
+ecclesiastical organization is a life of induction, a state of
+perpetually disturbed equilibrium kept up by another charged body in
+the neighborhood.  If the two bodies touch and share their
+respective charges, down goes the index of the electrometer!
+
+Do you know that every man has a religious belief peculiar to
+himself?  Smith is always a Smithite.  He takes in exactly Smith's-
+worth of knowledge, Smith's-worth of truth, of beauty, of divinity.
+And Brown has from time immemorial been trying to burn him, to
+excommunicate him, to anonymous-article him, because he did not take
+in Brown's-worth of knowledge, truth, beauty, divinity.  He cannot
+do it, any more than a pint-pot can hold a quart, or a quart-pot be
+filled by a pint.  Iron is essentially the same everywhere and
+always; but the sulphate of iron is never the same as the carbonate
+of iron.  Truth is invariable; but the Smithate of truth must always
+differ from the Brownate of truth.
+
+The wider the intellect, the larger and simpler the expressions in
+which its knowledge is embodied.  The inferior race, the degraded
+and enslaved people, the small-minded individual, live in the
+details which to larger minds and more advanced tribes of men reduce
+themselves to axioms and laws.  As races and individual minds must
+always differ just as sulphates and carbonates do, I cannot see
+ground for expecting the Broad Church to be founded on any fusion of
+intellectual beliefs, which of course implies that those who hold
+the larger number of doctrines as essential shall come down to those
+who hold the smaller number.  These doctrines are to the negative
+aristocracy what the quarterings of their coats are to the positive
+orders of nobility.
+
+The Broad Church, I think, will never be based on anything that
+requires the use of language. Freemasonry gives an idea of such a
+church, and a brother is known and cared for in a strange land where
+no word of his can be understood.  The apostle of this church may be
+a deaf mute carrying a cup of cold water to a thirsting
+fellow-creature.  The cup of cold water does not require to be
+translated for a foreigner to understand it.  I am afraid the only
+Broad Church possible is one that has its creed in the heart, and
+not in the head,--that we shall know its members by their fruits,
+and not by their words.  If you say this communion of well-doers is
+no church, I can only answer, that all organized bodies have their
+limits of size, and that when we find a man a hundred feet high and
+thirty feet broad across the shoulders, we will look out for an
+organization that shall include all Christendom.
+
+Some of us do practically recognize a Broad Church and a Narrow
+Church, however.  The Narrow Church may be seen in the ship's boats
+of humanity, in the long boat, in the jolly boat, in the captain's
+gig, lying off the poor old vessel, thanking God that they are safe,
+and reckoning how soon the hulk containing the mass of their
+fellow-creatures will go down.  The Broad Church is on board,
+working hard at the pumps, and very slow to believe that the ship
+will be swallowed up with so many poor people in it, fastened down
+under the hatches ever since it floated.
+
+--All this, of course, was nothing but my poor notion about these
+matters. I am simply an "outsider," you know; only it doesn't do
+very well for a nest of Hingham boxes to talk too much about
+outsiders and insiders!
+
+After this talk of ours, I think these two young people went pretty
+regularly to the Church of the Galileans.  Still they could not keep
+away from the sweet harmonies and rhythmic litanies of Saint
+Polycarp on the great Church festival-days; so that, between the
+two, they were so much together, that the boarders began to make
+remarks, and our landlady said to me, one day, that, though it was
+noon of her business, them that had eyes couldn't help seein' that
+there was somethin' goin', on between them two young people; she
+thought the young man was a very likely young man, though jest what
+his prospecs was was unbeknown to her; but she thought he must be
+doing well, and rather guessed he would be able to take care of a
+femily, if he didn't go to takin' a house; for a gentleman and his
+wife could board a great deal cheaper than they could keep house;
+--but then that girl was nothin' but a child, and wouldn't think of
+bein' married this five year.  They was good boarders, both of 'em,
+paid regular, and was as pooty a couple as she ever laid eyes on.
+
+--To come back to what I began to speak of before, -the divinity-
+student was exercised in his mind about the Little Gentleman, and,
+in the kindness of his heart,--for he was a good young man,--and in
+the strength of his convictions,--for he took it for granted that he
+and his crowd were right, and other folks and their crowd were
+wrong,--he determined to bring the Little Gentleman round to his
+faith before he died, if he could.  So he sent word to the sick man,
+that he should be pleased to visit him and have some conversation
+with him; and received for answer that he would be welcome.
+
+The divinity-student made him a visit, therefore and had a somewhat
+remarkable interview with him, which I shall briefly relate, without
+attempting to justify the positions taken by the Little Gentleman.
+He found him weak, but calm.  Iris sat silent by his pillow.
+
+After the usual preliminaries, the divinity-student said; in a kind
+way, that he was sorry to find him in failing health, that he felt
+concerned for his soul, and was anxious to assist him in making
+preparations for the great change awaiting him.
+
+I thank you, Sir,--said the Little Gentleman, permit me to ask you,
+what makes you think I am not ready for it, Sir, and that you can do
+anything to help me, Sir?
+
+I address you only as a fellow-man,--said the divinity-student,--and
+therefore a fellow-sinner.
+
+I am not a man, Sir!--said the Little Gentleman.--I was born into
+this world the wreck of a man, and I shall not be judged with a race
+to which I do not belong.  Look at this!--he said, and held up his
+withered arm.--See there!--and he pointed to his misshapen
+extremities.--Lay your hand here!--and he laid his own on the
+region of his misplaced heart.--I have known nothing of the life of
+your race.  When I first came to my consciousness, I found myself an
+object of pity, or a sight to show.  The first strange child I ever
+remember hid its face and would not come near me.  I was a broken-
+hearted as well as broken-bodied boy.  I grew into the emotions of
+ripening youth, and all that I could have loved shrank from my
+presence.  I became a man in years, and had nothing in common with
+manhood but its longings.  My life is the dying pang of a worn-out
+race, and I shall go down alone into the dust, out of this world of
+men and women, without ever knowing the fellowship of the one or the
+love of the other.  I will not die with a lie rattling in my throat.
+If another state of being has anything worse in store for me, I have
+had a long apprenticeship to give me strength that I may bear it.  I
+don't believe it, Sir!  I have too much faith for that.  God has not
+left me wholly without comfort, even here.  I love this old place
+where I was born;--the heart of the world beats under the three
+hills of Boston, Sir!  I love this great land, with so many tall men
+in it, and so many good, noble women.--His eyes turned to the
+silent figure by his pillow.--I have learned to accept meekly what
+has been allotted to me, but I cannot honestly say that I think my
+sin has been greater than my suffering.  I bear the ignorance and
+the evil-doing of whole generations in my single person.  I never
+drew a breath of air nor took a step that was not a punishment for
+another's fault.  I may have had many wrong thoughts, but I cannot
+have done many wrong deeds,--for my cage has been a narrow one, and
+I have paced it alone.  I have looked through the bars and seen the
+great world of men busy and happy, but I had no part in their
+doings.  I have known what it was to dream of the great passions;
+but since my mother kissed me before she died, no woman's lips have
+pressed my cheek,--nor ever will.
+
+--The young girl's eyes glittered with a sudden film, and almost
+without a thought, but with a warm human instinct that rushed up
+into her face with her heart's blood, she bent over and kissed him.
+It was the sacrament that washed out the memory of long years of
+bitterness, and I should hold it an unworthy thought to defend her.
+The Little Gentleman repaid her with the only tear any of us ever
+saw him shed.
+
+The divinity-student rose from his place, and, turning away from the
+sick man, walked to the other side of the room, where he bowed his
+head and was still.  All the questions he had meant to ask had faded
+from his memory.  The tests he had.  prepared by which to judge of
+his fellow-creature's fitness for heaven seemed to have lost their
+virtue.  He could trust the crippled child of sorrow to the Infinite
+Parent.  The kiss of the fair-haired girl had been like a sign from
+heaven, that angels watched over him whom he was presuming but a
+moment before to summon before the tribunal of his private judgment.
+Shall I pray with you?--he said, after a pause.  A little before he
+would have said, Shall I pray for you?--The Christian religion, as
+taught by its Founder, is full of sentiment.  So we must not blame
+the divinity-student, if he was overcome by those yearnings of human
+sympathy which predominate so much more in the sermons of the Master
+than in the writings of his successors, and which have made the
+parable of the Prodigal Son the consolation of mankind, as it has
+been the stumbling-block of all exclusive doctrines.
+
+Pray!--said the Little Gentleman.
+
+The divinity-student prayed, in low, tender tones,
+
+Iris and the Little Gentleman that God would look on his servant
+lying helpless at the feet of his mercy; that He would remember his
+long years of bondage in the flesh; that He would deal gently with
+the bruised reed.  Thou hast visited the sins of the fathers upon
+this their child.  Oh, turn away from him the penalties of his own
+transgressions!  Thou hast laid upon him, from infancy, the cross
+which thy stronger children are called upon to take up; and now that
+he is fainting under it, be Thou his stay, and do Thou succor him
+that is tempted!  Let his manifold infirmities come between him and
+Thy judgment; in wrath remember mercy!  If his eyes are not opened
+to all Thy truth, let Thy compassion lighten the darkness that rests
+upon him, even as it came through the word of thy Son to blind
+Bartimeus, who sat by the wayside, begging!
+
+Many more petitions he uttered, but all in the same subdued tone of
+tenderness.  In the presence of helpless suffering, and in the fast-
+darkening shadow of the Destroyer, he forgot all but his Christian
+humanity, and cared more about consoling his fellow-man than making
+a proselyte of him.
+
+This was the last prayer to which the Little Gentleman ever
+listened.  Some change was rapidly coming over him during this last
+hour of which I have been speaking.  The excitement of pleading his
+cause before his self-elected spiritual adviser,--the emotion which
+overcame him, when the young girl obeyed the sudden impulse of her
+feelings and pressed her lips to his cheek,--the thoughts that
+mastered him while the divinity-student poured out his soul for him
+in prayer, might well hurry on the inevitable moment.  When the
+divinity-student had uttered his last petition, commending him to
+the Father through his Son's intercession, he turned to look upon
+him before leaving his chamber.  His face was changed.--There is a
+language of the human countenance which we all understand without an
+interpreter, though the lineaments belong to the rudest savage that
+ever stammered in an unknown barbaric dialect.  By the stillness of
+the sharpened features, by the blankness of the tearless eyes, by
+the fixedness of the smileless mouth, by the deadening tints, by the
+contracted brow, by the dilating nostril, we know that the soul is
+soon to leave its mortal tenement, and is already closing up its
+windows and putting out its fires.--Such was the aspect of the face
+upon which the divinity-student looked, after the brief silence
+which followed his prayer.  The change had been rapid, though not
+that abrupt one which is liable to happen at any moment in these
+cases.--The sick man looked towards him.--Farewell,--he said,--I
+thank you.  Leave me alone with her.
+
+When the divinity-student had gone, and the Little Gentleman found
+himself alone with Iris, he lifted his hand to his neck, and took
+from it, suspended by a slender chain, a quaint, antique-looking
+key,--the same key I had once seen him holding.  He gave this to
+her, and pointed to a carved cabinet opposite his bed, one of those
+that had so attracted my curious eyes and set me wondering as to
+what it might contain.
+
+Open it,--he said,--and light the lamp.--The young girl walked to
+the cabinet and unlocked the door.  A deep recess appeared, lined
+with black velvet, against which stood in white relief an ivory
+crucifix.  A silver lamp hung over it.  She lighted the lamp and
+came back to the bedside.  The dying man fixed his eyes upon the
+figure of the dying Saviour.--Give me your hand, he said; and Iris
+placed her right hand in his left.  So they remained, until
+presently his eyes lost their meaning, though they still remained
+vacantly fixed upon the white image.  Yet he held the young girl's
+hand firmly, as if it were leading him through some deep-shadowed
+valley and it was all he could cling to.  But presently an
+involuntary muscular contraction stole over him, and his terrible
+dying grasp held the poor girl as if she were wedged in an engine of
+torture.  She pressed her lips together and sat still.  The
+inexorable hand held her tighter and tighter, until she felt as if
+her own slender fingers would be crushed in its gripe.  It was one
+of the tortures of the Inquisition she was suffering, and she could
+not stir from her place.  Then, in her great anguish, she, too, cast
+her eyes upon that dying figure, and, looking upon its pierced hands
+and feet and side and lacerated forehead, she felt that she also
+must suffer uncomplaining.  In the moment of her sharpest pain she
+did not forget the duties of her under office, but dried the dying
+man's moist forehead with her handkerchief, even while the dews of
+agony were glistening on her own.  How long this lasted she never
+could tell.  Time and thirst are two things you and I talk about;
+but the victims whom holy men and righteous judges used to stretch
+on their engines knew better what they meant than you or I!--What
+is that great bucket of water for?  said the Marchioness de
+Brinvilliers, before she was placed on the rack.--For you to
+drink,--said the torturer to the little woman.--She could not think
+that it would take such a flood to quench the fire in her and so
+keep her alive for her confession.  The torturer knew better than
+she.
+
+After a time not to be counted in minutes, as the clock measures,--
+without any warning,--there came a swift change of his features; his
+face turned white, as the waters whiten when a sudden breath passes
+over their still surface; the muscles instantly relaxed, and Iris,
+released at once from her care for the sufferer and from his
+unconscious grasp, fell senseless, with a feeble cry,--the only
+utterance of her long agony.
+
+Perhaps you sometimes wander in through the iron gates of the Copp's
+Hill burial-ground.  You love to stroll round among the graves that
+crowd each other in the thickly peopled soil of that breezy summit.
+You love to lean on the freestone slab which lies over the bones of
+the Mathers,--to read the epitaph of stout William Clark, "Despiser
+of Sorry Persons and little Actions,"--to stand by the stone grave
+of sturdy Daniel Malcolm and look upon the splintered slab that
+tells the old rebel's story,--to kneel by the triple stone that says
+how the three Worthylakes, father, mother, and young daughter, died
+on the same day and lie buried there; a mystery; the subject of a
+moving ballad, by the late BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, as may be seen in his
+autobiography, which will explain the secret of the triple
+gravestone; though the old philosopher has made a mistake, unless
+the stone is wrong.
+
+Not very far from that you will find a fair mound, of dimensions fit
+to hold a well-grown man.  I will not tell you the inscription upon
+the stone which stands at its head; for I do not wish you to be sure
+of the resting-place of one who could not bear to think that he
+should be known as a cripple among the dead, after being pointed at
+so long among the living.  There is one sign, it is true, by which,
+if you have been a sagacious reader of these papers, you will at
+once know it; but I fear you read carelessly, and must study them
+more diligently before you will detect the hint to which I allude.
+
+The Little Gentleman lies where he longed to lie, among the old
+names and the old bones of the old Boston people.  At the foot of
+his resting-place is the river, alive with the wings and antennae of
+its colossal water-insects; over opposite are the great war-ships,
+and the heavy guns, which, when they roar, shake the soil in which
+he lies; and in the steeple of Christ Church, hard by, are the sweet
+chimes which are the Boston boy's Ranz des Vaches, whose echoes
+follow him all the world over.
+
+
+                         In Pace!
+
+I, told you a good while ago that the Little Gentleman could not do
+a better thing than to leave all his money, whatever it might be, to
+the young girl who has since that established such a claim upon him.
+He did not, however.  A considerable bequest to one of our public
+institutions keeps his name in grateful remembrance.  The telescope
+through which he was fond of watching the heavenly bodies, and the
+movements of which had been the source of such odd fancies on my
+part, is now the property of a Western College.  You smile as you
+think of my taking it for a fleshless human figure, when I saw its
+tube pointing to the sky, and thought it was an arm, under the white
+drapery thrown over it for protection.  So do I smile now; I belong
+to the numerous class who are prophets after the fact, and hold my
+nightmares very cheap by daylight
+
+I have received many letters of inquiry as to the sound resembling a
+woman's voice, which occasioned me so many perplexities.  Some
+thought there was no question that he had a second apartment, in
+which he had made an asylum for a deranged female relative.  Others
+were of opinion that he was, as I once suggested, a "Bluebeard" with
+patriarchal tendencies, and I have even been censured for
+introducing so Oriental an element into my record of boarding-house
+experience.
+
+Come in and see me, the Professor, some evening when I have nothing
+else to do, and ask me to play you Tartini's Devil's Sonata on that
+extraordinary instrument in my possession, well known to amateurs as
+one of the masterpieces of Joseph Guarnerius.  The vox humana of the
+great Haerlem organ is very lifelike, and the same stop in the organ
+of the Cambridge chapel might be mistaken in some of its tones for a
+human voice; but I think you never heard anything come so near the
+cry of a prima donna as the A string and the E string of this
+instrument.  A single fact will illustrate the resemblance.  I was
+executing some tours de force upon it one evening, when the
+policeman of our district rang the bell sharply, and asked what was
+the matter in the house.  He had heard a woman's screams,--he was
+sure of it.  I had to make the instrument sing before his eyes
+before he could be satisfied that he had not heard the cries of a
+woman.  The instrument was bequeathed to me by the Little Gentleman.
+Whether it had anything to do with the sounds I heard coming from
+his chamber, you can form your own opinion;--I have no other
+conjecture to offer.  It is not true that a second apartment with a
+secret entrance was found; and the story of the veiled lady is the
+invention of one of the Reporters.
+
+Bridget, the housemaid, always insisted that he died a Catholic.
+She had seen the crucifix, and believed that he prayed on his knees
+before it.  The last circumstance is very probably true; indeed,
+there was a spot worn on the carpet just before this cabinet which
+might be thus accounted for.  Why he, whose whole life was a
+crucifixion, should not love to look on that divine image of
+blameless suffering, I cannot see; on the contrary, it seems to me
+the most natural thing in the world that he should.  But there are
+those who want to make private property of everything, and can't
+make up their minds that people who don't think as they do should
+claim any interest in that infinite compassion expressed in the
+central figure of the Christendom which includes us all.
+
+The divinity-student expressed a hope before the boarders that he
+should meet him in heaven.--The question is, whether he'll meet
+you,--said the young fellow John, rather smartly.  The divinity-
+student had n't thought of that.
+
+However, he is a worthy young man, and I trust I have shown him in a
+kindly and respectful light.  He will get a parish by-and-by; and,
+as he is about to marry the sister of an old friend,--the
+Schoolmistress, whom some of us remember,--and as all sorts of
+expensive accidents happen to young married ministers, he will be
+under bonds to the amount of his salary, which means starvation, if
+they are forfeited, to think all his days as he thought when he was
+settled,--unless the majority of his people change with him or in
+advance of him.  A hard ease, to which nothing could reconcile a
+man, except that the faithful discharge of daily duties in his
+personal relations with his parishioners will make him useful enough
+in his way, though as a thinker he may cease to exist before he has
+reached middle age.
+
+--Iris went into mourning for the Little Gentleman.  Although, as I
+have said, he left the bulk of his property, by will, to a public
+institution, he added a codicil, by which he disposed of various
+pieces of property as tokens of kind remembrance.  It was in this
+way I became the possessor of the wonderful instrument I have spoken
+of, which had been purchased for him out of an Italian convent.  The
+landlady was comforted with a small legacy.  The following extract
+relates to Iris: "in consideration of her manifold acts of
+kindness, but only in token of grateful remembrance, and by no means
+as a reward for services which cannot be compensated, a certain
+messuage, with all the land thereto appertaining, situated in ______
+Street, at the North End, so called, of Boston, aforesaid, the same
+being the house in which I was born, but now inhabited by several
+families, and known as 'The Rookery.'" Iris had also the crucifix,
+the portrait, and the red-jewelled ring.  The funeral or death's-
+head ring was buried with him.
+
+It was a good while, after the Little Gentleman was gone, before our
+boarding-house recovered its wonted cheerfulness.  There was a
+flavor in his whims and local prejudices that we liked, even while
+we smiled at them.  It was hard to see the tall chair thrust away
+among useless lumber, to dismantle his room, to take down the
+picture of Leah, the handsome Witch of Essex, to move away the
+massive shelves that held the books he loved, to pack up the tube
+through which he used to study the silent stars, looking down at him
+like the eyes of dumb creatures, with a kind of stupid half-
+consciousness that did not worry him as did the eyes of men and
+women,--and hardest of all to displace that sacred figure to which
+his heart had always turned and found refuge, in the feelings it
+inspired, from all the perplexities of his busy brain.  It was hard,
+but it had to be done.
+
+And by-and-by we grew cheerful again, and the breakfast-table wore
+something of its old look.  The Koh-i-noor, as we named the
+gentleman with the diamond, left us, however, soon after that
+"little mill," as the young fellow John called it, where he came off
+second best.  His departure was no doubt hastened by a note from the
+landlady's daughter, inclosing a lock of purple hair which she "had
+valued as a pledge of affection, ere she knew the hollowness of the
+vows he had breathed," speedily followed by another, inclosing the
+landlady's bill.  The next morning he was missing, as were his
+limited wardrobe and the trunk that held it.  Three empty bottles of
+Mrs. Allen's celebrated preparation, each of them asserting, on its
+word of honor as a bottle, that its former contents were "not a
+dye," were all that was left to us of the Koh-i-noor.
+
+From this time forward, the landlady's daughter manifested a decided
+improvement in her style of carrying herself before the boarders.
+She abolished the odious little flat, gummy side-curl.  She left off
+various articles of "jewelry."  She began to help her mother in some
+of her household duties.  She became a regular attendant on the
+ministrations of a very worthy clergyman, having been attracted to
+his meetin' by witnessing a marriage ceremony in which he called a
+man and a woman a "gentleman" and a "lady,"--a stroke of gentility
+which quite overcame her.  She even took a part in what she called a
+Sabbath school, though it was held on Sunday, and by no means on
+Saturday, as the name she intended to utter implied.  All this,
+which was very sincere, as I believe, on her part, and attended with
+a great improvement in her character, ended in her bringing home a
+young man, with straight, sandy hair, brushed so as to stand up
+steeply above his forehead, wearing a pair of green spectacles, and
+dressed in black broadcloth.  His personal aspect, and a certain
+solemnity of countenance, led me to think he must be a clergyman;
+and as Master Benjamin Franklin blurted out before several of us
+boarders, one day, that "Sis had got a beau," I was pleased at the
+prospect of her becoming a minister's wife.  On inquiry, however, I
+found that the somewhat solemn look which I had noticed was indeed a
+professional one, but not clerical.  He was a young undertaker, who
+had just succeeded to a thriving business.  Things, I believe, are
+going on well at this time of writing, and I am glad for the
+landlady's daughter and her mother.  Sextons and undertakers are the
+cheerfullest people in the world at home, as comedians and circus-
+clowns are the most melancholy in their domestic circle.
+
+As our old boarding-house is still in existence, I do not feel at
+liberty to give too minute a statement of the present condition of
+each and all of its inmates.  I am happy to say, however, that they
+are all alive and well, up to this time.  That amiable old gentleman
+who sat opposite to me is growing older, as old men will, but still
+smiles benignantly on all the boarders, and has come to be a kind of
+father to all of them,--so that on his birthday there is always
+something like a family festival.  The Poor Relation, even, has
+warmed into a filial feeling towards him, and on his last birthday
+made him a beautiful present, namely, a very handsomely bound copy
+of Blair's celebrated poem, "The Grave."
+
+The young man John is still, as he says, "in fustrate fettle."  I
+saw him spar, not long since, at a private exhibition, and do
+himself great credit in a set-to with Henry Finnegass, Esq., a
+professional gentleman of celebrity.  I am pleased to say that he
+has been promoted to an upper clerkship, and, in consequence of his
+rise in office, has taken an apartment somewhat lower down than
+number "forty-'leven," as he facetiously called his attic.  Whether
+there is any truth, or not, in the story of his attachment to, and
+favorable reception by, the daughter of the head of an extensive
+wholesale grocer's establishment, I will not venture an opinion; I
+may say, however, that I have met him repeatedly in company with a
+very well-nourished and high-colored young lady, who, I understand,
+is the daughter of the house in question.
+
+Some of the boarders were of opinion that Iris did not return the
+undisguised attentions of the handsome young Marylander.  Instead of
+fixing her eyes steadily on him, as she used to look upon the Little
+Gentleman, she would turn them away, as if to avoid his own.  They
+often went to church together, it is true; but nobody, of course,
+supposes there is any relation between religious sympathy and those
+wretched "sentimental" movements of the human heart upon which it is
+commonly agreed that nothing better is based than society,
+civilization, friendship, the relation of husband and wife, and of
+parent and child, and which many people must think were singularly
+overrated by the Teacher of Nazareth, whose whole life, as I said
+before, was full of sentiment, loving this or that young man,
+pardoning this or that sinner, weeping over the dead, mourning for
+the doomed city, blessing, and perhaps kissing, the little children,
+so that the Gospels are still cried over almost as often as the last
+work of fiction!
+
+But one fine June morning there rumbled up to the door of our
+boarding-house a hack containing a lady inside and a trunk on the
+outside.  It was our friend the lady-patroness of Miss Iris, the
+same who had been called by her admiring pastor "The Model of all
+the Virtues."  Once a week she had written a letter, in a rather
+formal hand, but full of good advice, to her young charge.  And now
+she had come to carry her away, thinking that she had learned all
+she was likely to learn under her present course of teaching.  The
+Model, however, was to stay awhile,--a week, or more,--before they
+should leave together.
+
+Iris was obedient, as she was bound to be.  She was respectful,
+grateful, as a child is with a just, but not tender parent.  Yet
+something was wrong.  She had one of her trances, and became statue-
+like, as before, only the day after the Model's arrival.  She was
+wan and silent, tasted nothing at table, smiled as if by a forced
+effort, and often looked vaguely away from those who were looking at
+her, her eyes just glazed with the shining moisture of a tear that
+must not be allowed to gather and fall.  Was it grief at parting
+from the place where her strange friendship had grown up with the
+Little Gentleman?  Yet she seemed to have become reconciled to his
+loss, and rather to have a deep feeling of gratitude that she had
+been permitted to care for him in his last weary days.
+
+The Sunday after the Model's arrival, that lady had an attack of
+headache, and was obliged to shut herself up in a darkened room
+alone.  Our two young friends took the opportunity to go together to
+the Church of the Galileans.  They said but little going,--
+"collecting their thoughts" for the service, I devoutly hope.  My
+kind good friend the pastor preached that day one of his sermons
+that make us all feel like brothers and sisters, and his text was
+that affectionate one from John, "My little children, let us not
+love in word, neither in tongue, but in deed and in truth."  When
+Iris and her friend came out of church, they were both pale, and
+walked a space without speaking.
+
+At last the young man said,--You and I are not little children,
+Iris!
+
+She looked in his face an instant, as if startled, for there was
+something strange in the tone of his voice.  She smiled faintly, but
+spoke never a word.
+
+In deed and in truth, Iris,----
+
+What shall a poor girl say or do, when a strong man falters in his
+speech before her, and can do nothing better than hold out his hand
+to finish his broken sentence?
+
+The poor girl said nothing, but quietly laid her ungloved hand in
+his,--the little soft white hand which had ministered so tenderly
+and suffered so patiently.
+
+The blood came back to the young man's cheeks, as he lifted it to
+his lips, even as they walked there in the street, touched it gently
+with them, and said, "It is mine!"
+
+Iris did not contradict him.
+
+The seasons pass by so rapidly, that I am startled to think how much
+has happened since these events I was describing.  Those two young
+people would insist on having their own way about their own affairs,
+notwithstanding the good lady, so justly called the Model, insisted
+that the age of twenty-five years was as early as any discreet young
+lady should think of incurring the responsibilities, etc., etc.
+Long before Iris had reached that age, she was the wife of a young
+Maryland engineer, directing some of the vast constructions of his
+native State,--where he was growing rich fast enough to be able to
+decline that famous Russian offer which would have made him a kind
+of nabob in a few years.  Iris does not write verse often, nowadays,
+but she sometimes draws.  The last sketch of hers I have seen in my
+Southern visits was of two children, a boy and girl, the youngest
+holding a silver goblet, like the one she held that evening when I--
+I was so struck with her statue-like beauty.  If in the later,
+summer months you find the grass marked with footsteps around that
+grave on Copp's Hill I told you of, and flowers scattered over it,
+you may be sure that Iris is here on her annual visit to the home of
+her childhood and that excellent lady whose only fault was, that
+Nature had written out her list of virtues an ruled paper, and
+forgotten to rub out the lines.
+
+One thing more I must mention.  Being on the Common, last Sunday, I
+was attracted by the cheerful spectacle of a well-dressed and
+somewhat youthful papa wheeling a very elegant little carriage
+containing a stout baby.  A buxom young lady watched them from one
+of the stone seats, with an interest which could be nothing less
+than maternal.  I at once recognized my old friend, the young fellow
+whom we called John.  He was delighted to see me, introduced me to
+"Madam," and would have the lusty infant out of the carriage, and
+hold him up for me to look at.
+
+Now, then,--he said to the two-year-old,--show the gentleman how you
+hit from the shoulder.  Whereupon the little imp pushed his fat fist
+straight into my eye, to his father's intense satisfaction.
+
+Fust-rate little chap,--said the papa.--Chip of the old block.
+Regl'r little Johnny, you know.
+
+I was so much pleased to find the young fellow settled in life, and
+pushing about one of "them little articles" he had seemed to want so
+much, that I took my "punishment" at the hands of the infant
+pugilist with great equanimity.--And how is the old boarding-
+house?--I asked.
+
+A 1,--he answered.--Painted and papered as good as new.  Gabs in
+all the rooms up to the skyparlors.  Old woman's layin' up money,
+they say.  Means to send Ben Franklin to college.  Just then the
+first bell rang for church, and my friend, who, I understand, has
+become a most exemplary member of society, said he must be off to
+get ready for meetin', and told the young one to "shake dada," which
+he did with his closed fist, in a somewhat menacing manner.  And so
+the young man John, as we used to call him, took the pole of the
+miniature carriage, and pushed the small pugilist before him
+homewards, followed, in a somewhat leisurely way, by his pleasant-
+looking lady-companion, and I sent a sigh and a smile after him.
+
+That evening, as soon as it was dark, I could not help going round
+by the old boarding-house.  The "gahs" was lighted, but the
+curtains, or more properly, the painted shades; were not down.  And
+so I stood there and looked in along the table where the boarders
+sat at the evening meal,--our old breakfast-table, which some of us
+feel as if we knew so well.  There were new faces at it, but also
+old and familiar ones.--The landlady, in a wonderfully smart cap,
+looking young, comparatively speaking, and as if half the wrinkles
+had been ironed out of her forehead.--Her daughter, in rather
+dressy half-mourning, with a vast brooch of jet, got up, apparently,
+to match the gentleman next her, who was in black costume and sandy
+hair,--the last rising straight from his forehead, like the marble
+flame one sometimes sees at the top of a funeral urn.--The Poor
+Relation, not in absolute black, but in a stuff with specks of
+white; as much as to say, that, if there were any more Hirams left
+to sigh for her, there were pin-holes in the night of her despair,
+through which a ray of hope might find its way to an adorer.
+--Master Benjamin Franklin, grown taller of late, was in the act of
+splitting his face open with a wedge of pie, so that his features
+were seen to disadvantage for the moment.--The good old gentleman
+was sitting still and thoughtful.  All at once he turned his face
+toward the window where I stood, and, just as if he had seen me,
+smiled his benignant smile.  It was a recollection of some past
+pleasant moment; but it fell upon me like the blessing of a father.
+
+I kissed my hand to them all, unseen as I stood in the outer
+darkness; and as I turned and went my way, the table and all around
+it faded into the realm of twilight shadows and of midnight dreams.
+
+                   ---------------------
+
+And so my year's record is finished. The Professor has talked less
+than his predecessor, but he has heard and seen more.  Thanks to all
+those friends who from time to time have sent their messages of
+kindly recognition and fellow-feeling!  Peace to all such as may
+have been vexed in spirit by any utterance these pages have
+repeated!  They will, doubtless, forget for the moment the
+difference in the hues of truth we look at through our human prisms,
+and join in singing (inwardly) this hymn to the Source of the light
+we all need to lead us, and the warmth which alone can make us all
+brothers.
+
+
+          A SUN-DAY HYMN.
+
+Lord of all being! throned afar,
+Thy glory flames from sun and star,
+Centre and soul of every sphere,
+Yet to each loving heart how near!
+
+Sun of our life, thy quickening ray
+Sheds on our path the glow of day;
+Star of our hope, thy softened light
+Cheers the long watches of the night.
+
+Our midnight is thy smile withdrawn;
+Our noontide is thy gracious dawn;
+Our rainbow arch thy mercy's sign;
+All, save the clouds of sin, are thine!
+
+Lord of all life, below, above,
+Whose light is truth, whose warmth is love,
+Before thy ever-blazing throne
+We ask no lustre of our own.
+
+Grant us thy truth to make us free,
+And kindling hearts that burn for thee,
+Till all thy living altars claim
+One holy light, one heavenly flame.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of The Project Gutenberg Etext The Professor at the Breakfast Table
+
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