PART II.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

* * * * *

VOL. IX.--JUNE, 1862.--NO. LVI.

* * * * *

WALKING.

I wish to speak a word for Nature, for absolute freedom and wildness, as

contrasted with a freedom and culture merely civil,--to regard man as

an inhabitant, or a part and parcel of Nature, rather than a member

of society. I wish to make an extreme statement, if so I may make an

emphatic one, for there are enough champions of civilization: the

minister, and the school-committee, and every one of you will take care

of that.

I have met with but one or two persons in the course of my life who

understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks,--who had a

genius, so to speak, for _sauntering_: which word is beautifully derived

"from idle people who roved about the country, in the Middle Ages, and

asked charity, under pretence of going _à la Sainte Terre_," to the Holy

Land, till the children exclaimed, "There goes a _Sainte-Terrer_" a

Saunterer,--a Holy-Lander. They who never go to the Holy Land in their

walks, as they pretend, are indeed mere idlers and vagabonds; but they

who do go there are saunterers in the good sense, such as I mean. Some,

however, would derive the word from _sans terre_, without land or

a home, which, therefore, in the good sense, will mean, having no

particular home, but equally at home everywhere. For this is the secret

of successful sauntering. He who sits still in a house all the time may

be the greatest vagrant of all; but the saunterer, in the good sense,

is no more vagrant than the meandering river, which is all the while

sedulously seeking the shortest course to the sea. But I prefer the

first, which, indeed, is the most probable derivation. For every walk is

a sort of crusade, preached by some Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth

and reconquer this Holy Land from the hands of the Infidels.

It is true, we are but faint-hearted crusaders, even the walkers,

nowadays, who undertake no persevering, never-ending enterprises. Our

expeditions are but tours, and come round again at evening to the old

hearth-side from which we set out. Half the walk is but retracing our

steps. We should go forth on the shortest walk, perchance, in the spirit

of undying adventure, never to return,--prepared to send back our

embalmed hearts only as relics to our desolate kingdoms. If you are

ready to leave father and mother, and brother and sister, and wife and

child and friends, and never see them again,--if you have paid your

debts, and made your will, and settled all your affairs, and are a free

man, then you are ready for a walk.

To come down to my own experience, my companion and I, for I sometimes

have a companion, take pleasure in fancying ourselves knights of a new,

or rather an old, order,--not Equestrians or Chevaliers, not Ritters or

Riders, but Walkers, a still more ancient and honorable class, I trust.

The chivalric and heroic spirit which once belonged to the Rider seems

now to reside in, or perchance to have subsided into, the Walker,--not

the Knight, but Walker Errant. He is a sort of fourth estate, outside of

Church and State and People.

We have felt that we almost alone hereabouts practised this noble art;

though, to tell the truth, at least, if their own assertions are to be

received, most of my townsmen would fain walk sometimes, as I do, but

they cannot. No wealth can buy the requisite leisure, freedom, and

independence, which are the capital in this profession. It comes only

by the grace of God. It requires a direct dispensation from Heaven

to become a walker. You must be born into the family of the Walkers.

_Ambulator nascitur, non fit_. Some of my townsmen, it is true, can

remember and have described to me some walks which they took ten years

ago, in which they were so blessed as to lose themselves for half

an hour in the woods; but I know very well that they have confined

themselves to the highway ever since, whatever pretensions they may make

to belong to this select class. No doubt they were elevated for a moment

as by the reminiscence of a previous state of existence, when even they

were foresters and outlaws.

"When he came to grene wode,

In a mery mornynge,

There he herde the notes small

Of byrdes mery syngynge.

"It is ferre gone, sayd Robyn,

That I was last here;

Me lyste a lytell for to shote

At the donne dere."

I think that I cannot preserve my health and spirits, unless I spend

four hours a day at least--and it is commonly more than that--sauntering

through the woods and over the hills and fields, absolutely free from

all worldly engagements. You may safely say, A penny for your thoughts,

or a thousand pounds. When sometimes I am reminded that the mechanics

and shopkeepers stay in their shops not only all the forenoon, but all

the afternoon too, sitting with crossed legs, so many of them,--as if

the legs were made to sit upon, and not to stand or walk upon,--I think

that they deserve some credit for not having all committed suicide long

ago.

I, who cannot stay in my chamber for a single day without acquiring some

rust, and when sometimes I have stolen forth for a walk at the eleventh

hour of four o'clock in the afternoon, too late to redeem the day,

when the shades of night were already beginning to be mingled with the

daylight, have felt as if I had committed some sin to be atoned for,--I

confess that I am astonished at the power of endurance, to say nothing

of the moral insensibility, of my neighbors who confine themselves to

shops and offices the whole day for weeks and months, ay, and years

almost together. I know not what manner of stuff they are of,--sitting

there now at three o'clock in the afternoon, as if it were three o'clock

in the morning. Bonaparte may talk of the three-o'clock-in-the-morning

courage, but it is nothing to the courage which can sit down cheerfully

at this hour in the afternoon over against one's self whom you have

known all the morning, to starve out a garrison to whom you are bound

by such strong ties of sympathy. I wonder that about this time, or say

between four and five o'clock in the afternoon, too late for the morning

papers and too early for the evening ones, there is not a general

explosion heard up and down the street, scattering a legion of

antiquated and house-bred notions and whims to the four winds for an

airing,--and so the evil cure itself.

How womankind, who are confined to the house still more than men, stand

it I do not know; but I have ground to suspect that most of them do

not _stand_ it at all. When, early in a summer afternoon, we have been

shaking the dust of the village from the skirts of our garments, making

haste past those houses with purely Doric or Gothic fronts, which have

such an air of repose about them, my companion whispers that probably

about these times their occupants are all gone to bed. Then it is that I

appreciate the beauty and the glory of architecture, which itself never

turns in, but forever stands out and erect, keeping watch over the

slumberers.

No doubt temperament, and, above all, age, have a good deal to do with

it. As a man grows older, his ability to sit still and follow in-door

occupations increases. He grows vespertinal in his habits as the evening

of life approaches, till at last he comes forth only just before

sundown, and gets all the walk that he requires in half an hour.

But the walking of which I speak has nothing in it akin to taking

exercise, as it is called, as the sick take medicine at stated

hours,--as the swinging of dumb-bells or chairs; but is itself the

enterprise and adventure of the day. If you would get exercise, go in

search of the springs of life. Think of a man's swinging dumb-bells

for his health, when those springs are bubbling up in far-off pastures

unsought by him!

Moreover, you must walk like a camel, which is said to be the only

beast which ruminates when walking. When a traveller asked Wordsworth's

servant to show him her master's study, she answered, "Here is his

library, but his study is out of doors."

Living much out of doors, in the sun and wind, will no doubt produce a

certain roughness of character,--will cause a thicker cuticle to grow

over some of the finer qualities of our nature, as on the face and

hands, or as severe manual labor robs the hands of some of their

delicacy of touch. So staying in the house, on the other hand, may

produce a softness and smoothness, not to say thinness of skin,

accompanied by an increased sensibility to certain impressions. Perhaps

we should be more susceptible to some influences important to our

intellectual and moral growth, if the sun had shone and the wind blown

on us a little less; and no doubt it is a nice matter to proportion

rightly the thick and thin skin. But methinks that is a scurf that will

fall off fast enough,--that the natural remedy is to be found in the

proportion which the night bears to the day, the winter to the summer,

thought to experience. There will be so much the more air and sunshine

in our thoughts. The callous palms of the laborer are conversant with

finer tissues of self-respect and heroism, whose touch thrills the

heart, than the languid fingers of idleness. That is mere sentimentality

that lies abed by day and thinks itself white, far from the tan and

callus of experience.

When we walk, we naturally go to the fields and woods: what would become

of us, if we walked only in a garden or a mall? Even some sects

of philosophers have felt the necessity of importing the woods to

themselves, since they did not go to the woods. "They planted groves and

walks of Platanes," where they took _subdiales ambulationes_ in porticos

open to the air. Of course it is of no use to direct our steps to the

woods, if they do not carry us thither. I am alarmed when it happens

that I have walked a mile into the woods bodily, without getting there

in spirit. In my afternoon walk I would fain forget all my morning

occupations and my obligations to society. But it sometimes happens that

I cannot easily shake off the village. The thought of some work will run

in my head, and I am not where my body is,--I am out of my senses. In

my walks I would fain return to my senses. What business have I in the

woods, if I am thinking of something out of the woods? I suspect myself,

and cannot help a shudder, when I find myself so implicated even in what

are called good works,--for this may sometimes happen.

My vicinity affords many good walks; and though for so many years I have

walked almost every day, and sometimes for several days together, I have

not yet exhausted them. An absolutely new prospect is a great happiness,

and I can still get this any afternoon. Two or three hours' walking

will carry me to as strange a country as I expect ever to see. A single

farm-house which I had not seen before is sometimes as good as the

dominions of the King of Dahomey. There is in fact a sort of harmony

discoverable between the capabilities of the landscape within a circle

of ten miles' radius, or the limits of an afternoon walk, and the

threescore years and ten of human life. It will never become quite

familiar to you.

Nowadays almost all man's improvements, so called, as the building of

houses, and the cutting down of the forest and of all large trees,

simply deform the landscape, and make it more and more tame and cheap. A

people who would begin by burning the fences and let the forest stand!

I saw the fences half consumed, their ends lost in the middle of the

prairie, and some worldly miser with a surveyor looking after his

bounds, while heaven had taken place around him, and he did not see the

angels going to and fro, but was looking for an old post-hole in the

midst of paradise. I looked again, and saw him standing in the middle of

a boggy, stygian fen, surrounded by devils, and he had found his bounds

without a doubt, three little stones, where a stake had been driven, and

looking nearer, I saw that the Prince of Darkness was his surveyor.

I can easily walk ten, fifteen, twenty, any number of miles, commencing

at my own door, without going by any house, without crossing a road

except where the fox and the mink do: first along by the river, and then

the brook, and then the meadow and the wood-side. There are square miles

in my vicinity which have no inhabitant. From many a hill I can see

civilization and the abodes of man afar. The farmers and their works are

scarcely more obvious than woodchucks and their burrows. Man and

his affairs, church and state and school, trade and commerce, and

manufactures and agriculture, even politics, the most alarming of

them all,--I am pleased to see how little space they occupy in the

landscape. Politics is but a narrow field, and that still narrower

highway yonder leads to it. I sometimes direct the traveller thither. If

you would go to the political world, follow the great road,--follow that

market-man, keep his dust in your eyes, and it will lead you straight to

it; for it, too, has its place merely, and does not occupy all space. I

pass from it as from a beanfield into the forest, and it is forgotten.

In one half-hour I can walk off to some portion of the earth's surface

where a man does not stand from one year's end to another, and there,

consequently, politics are not, for they are but as the cigar-smoke of a

man.

The village is the place to which the roads tend, a sort of expansion of

the highway, as a lake of a river. It is the body of which roads are

the arms and legs,--a trivial or quadrivial place, the thoroughfare

and ordinary of travellers. The word is from the Latin _villa_, which,

together with _via_, a way, or more anciently _ved_ and _vella_, Varro

derives from _veho_, to carry, because the villa is the place to and

from which things are carried. They who got their living by teaming were

said _vellaturam facere_. Hence, too, apparently, the Latin word _vilis_

and our vile; also _villain_. This suggests what kind of degeneracy

villagers are liable to. They are wayworn by the travel that goes by and

over them, without travelling themselves.

Some do not walk at all; others walk in the highways; a few walk across

lots. Roads are made for horses and men of business. I do not travel

in them much, comparatively, because I am not in a hurry to get to any

tavern or grocery or livery-stable or depot to which they lead. I am

a good horse to travel, but not from choice a roadster. The

landscape-painter uses the figures of men to mark a road. He would not

make that use of my figure. I walk out into a Nature such as the old

prophets and poets, Menu, Moses, Homer, Chaucer, walked in. You may

name it America, but it is not America: neither Americus Vespucius, nor

Columbus, nor the rest were the discoverers of it. There is a truer

account of it in mythology than in any history of America, so called,

that I have seen.

However, there are a few old roads that may be trodden with profit, as

if they led somewhere now that they are nearly discontinued. There

is the Old Marlborough Road, which does not go to Marlborough now,

methinks, unless that is Marlborough where it carries me. I am the

bolder to speak of it here, because I presume that there are one or two

such roads in every town.

THE OLD MARLBOROUGH ROAD.

Where they once dug for money,

But never found any;

Where sometimes Martial Miles

Singly files,

And Elijah Wood,

I fear for no good:

No other man,

Save Elisha Dugan,--

O man of wild habits,

Partridges and rabbits,

Who hast no cares

Only to set snares,

Who liv'st all alone,

Close to the bone,

And where life is sweetest

Constantly eatest.

When the spring stirs my blood

With the instinct to travel,

I can get enough gravel

On the Old Marlborough Road.

Nobody repairs it,

For nobody wears it;

It is a living way,

As the Christians say.

Not many there be

Who enter therein,

Only the guests of the

Irishman Quin.

What is it, what is it,

But a direction out there,

And the bare possibility

Of going somewhere?

Great guide-boards of stone,

But travellers none;

Cenotaphs of the towns

Named on their crowns.

It is worth going to see

Where you _might_ be.

What king

Did the thing,

Set up how or when,

By what selectmen,

Gourgas or Lee,

Clark or Darby?

They're a great endeavor

To be something forever;

Blank tablets of stone,

Where a traveller might groan,

And in one sentence

Grave all that is known;

Which another might read,

In his extreme need.

I know one or two

Lines that would do,

Literature that might stand

All over the land,

Which a man could remember

Till next December,

And road again in the spring,

After the thawing.

If with fancy unfurled

You leave your abode,

You may go round the world

By the Old Marlborough Road.

At present, in this vicinity, the best part of the land is not private

property; the landscape is not owned, and the walker enjoys comparative

freedom. But possibly the day will come when it will be partitioned off

into so-called pleasure-grounds, in which a few will take a narrow and

exclusive pleasure only,--when fences shall be multiplied, and man-traps

and other engines invented to confine men to the _public_ road, and

walking over the surface of God's earth shall be construed to mean

trespassing on some gentleman's grounds. To enjoy a thing exclusively

is commonly to exclude yourself from the true enjoyment of it. Let us

improve our opportunities, then, before the evil days come.

What is it that makes it so hard sometimes to determine whither we will

walk?

I believe that there is a subtile magnetism in Nature, which, if we

unconsciously yield to it, will direct us aright. It is not indifferent

to us which way we walk. There is a right way; but we are very liable

from heedlessness and stupidity to take the wrong one. We would fain

take that walk, never yet taken by us through this actual world, which

is perfectly symbolical of the path which we love to travel in the

interior and ideal world; and sometimes, no doubt, we find it difficult

to choose our direction, because it does not yet exist distinctly in our

idea.

When I go out of the house for a walk, uncertain as yet whither I will

bend my steps, and submit myself to my instinct to decide for me,

I find, strange and whimsical as it may seem, that I finally and

inevitably settle southwest, toward some particular wood or meadow

or deserted pasture or hill in that direction. My needle is slow to

settle,--varies a few degrees, and does not always point due southwest,

it is true, and it has good authority for this variation, but it always

settles between west and south-southwest. The future lies that way to

me, and the earth seems more unexhausted and richer on that side.

The outline which would bound my walks would be, not a circle, but a

parabola, or rather like one of those cometary orbits which have been

thought to be non-returning curves, in this case opening westward, in

which my house occupies the place of the sun. I turn round and round

irresolute sometimes for a quarter of an hour, until I decide, for the

thousandth time, that I will walk into the southwest or west. Eastward I

go only by force; but westward I go free. Thither no business leads

me. It is hard for me to believe that I shall find fair landscapes or

sufficient wildness and freedom behind the eastern horizon. I am not

excited by the prospect of a walk thither; but I believe that the forest

which I see in the western horizon stretches uninterruptedly towards

the setting sun, and that there are no towns nor cities in it of enough

consequence to disturb me. Let me live where I will, on this side is the

city, on that the wilderness, and ever I am leaving the city more and

more, and withdrawing into the wilderness. I should not lay so much

stress on this fact, if I did not believe that something like this is

the prevailing tendency of my countrymen. I must walk toward Oregon, and

not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that

mankind progress from east to west. Within a few years we have witnessed

the phenomenon of a southeastward migration, in the settlement of

Australia; but this affects us as a retrograde movement, and, judging

from the moral and physical character of the first generation of

Australians, has not yet proved a successful experiment. The eastern

Tartars think that there is nothing west beyond Thibet. "The world ends

there," say they; "beyond there is nothing but a shoreless sea." It is

unmitigated East where they live.

We go eastward to realize history and study the works of art and

literature, retracing the steps of the race; we go westward as into the

future, with a spirit of enterprise and adventure. The Atlantic is a

Lethean stream, in our passage over which we have had an opportunity to

forget the Old World and its institutions. If we do not succeed this

time, there is perhaps one more chance for the race left before it

arrives on the banks of the Styx; and that is in the Lethe of the

Pacific, which is three times as wide.

I know not how significant it is, or how far it is an evidence of

singularity, that an individual should thus consent in his pettiest walk

with the general movement of the race; but I know that something akin

to the migratory instinct in birds and quadrupeds,--which, in some

instances, is known to have affected the squirrel tribe, impelling them

to a general and mysterious movement, in which they were seen, say some,

crossing the broadest rivers, each on its particular chip, with its tail

raised for a sail, and bridging narrower streams with their dead,--that

something like the _furor_ which affects the domestic cattle in the

spring, and which is referred to a worm in their tails,--affects both

nations and individuals, either perennially or from time to time. Not

a flock of wild geese cackles over our town, but it to some extent

unsettles the value of real estate here, and, if I were a broker, I

should probably take that disturbance into account.

"Than longen folk to gon on pilgrimages,

And palmeres for to seken strange strondes."

Every sunset which I witness inspires me with the desire to go to a West

as distant and as fair as that into which the sun goes down. He appears

to migrate westward daily, and tempt us to follow him. He is the Great

Western Pioneer whom the nations follow. We dream all night of those

mountain-ridges in the horizon, though they may be of vapor only, which

were last gilded by his rays. The island of Atlantis, and the islands

and gardens of the Hesperides, a sort of terrestrial paradise, appear

to have been the Great West of the ancients, enveloped in mystery and

poetry. Who has not seen in imagination, when looking into the sunset

sky, the gardens of the Hesperides, and the foundation of all those

fables?

Columbus felt the westward tendency more strongly than any before. He

obeyed it, and found a New World for Castile and Leon. The herd of men

in those days scented fresh pastures from afar.

"And now the sun had stretched out all the

hills,

And now was dropped into the western bay;

At last _he_ rose, and twitched his mantle blue;

To-morrow to fresh woods and pastures new."

Where on the globe can there be found an area of equal extent with that

occupied by the bulk of our States, so fertile and so rich and varied in

its productions, and at the same time so habitable by the European, as

this is? Michaux, who knew but part of them, says that "the species of

large trees are much more numerous in North America than in Europe; in

the United States there are more than one hundred and forty species that

exceed thirty feet in height; in France there are but thirty that attain

this size." Later botanists more than confirm his observations. Humboldt

came to America to realize his youthful dreams of a tropical vegetation,

and he beheld it in its greatest perfection in the primitive forests of

the Amazon, the most gigantic wilderness on the earth, which he has so

eloquently described. The geographer Guyot, himself a European, goes

farther,--farther than I am ready to follow him; yet not when he

says,--"As the plant is made for the animal, as the vegetable world is

made for the animal world, America is made for the man of the Old

World .... The man of the Old World sets out upon his way. Leaving the

highlands of Asia, he descends from station to station towards Europe.

Each of his steps is marked by a new civilization superior to the

preceding, by a greater power of development. Arrived at the Atlantic,

he pauses on the shore of this unknown ocean, the bounds of which he

knows not, and turns upon his footprints for an instant." When he has

exhausted the rich soil of Europe, and reinvigorated himself, "then

recommences his adventurous career westward as in the earliest ages." So

far Guyot.

From this western impulse coming in contact with the barrier of the

Atlantic sprang the commerce and enterprise of modern times. The younger

Michaux, in his "Travels West of the Alleghanies in 1802," says that the

common inquiry in the newly settled West was, "'From what part of

the world have you come?' As if these vast and fertile regions would

naturally be the place of meeting and common country of all the

inhabitants of the globe."

To use an obsolete Latin word, I might say, _Ex Oriente lux; ex

Occidente_ FRUX. From the East light; from the West fruit.

Sir Francis Head, an English traveller and a Governor-General of Canada,

tells us that "in both the northern and southern hemispheres of the New

World, Nature has not only outlined her works on a larger scale, but has

painted the whole picture with brighter and more costly colors than she

used in delineating and in beautifying the Old World.... The heavens of

America appear infinitely higher, the sky is bluer, the air is fresher,

the cold is intenser, the moon looks larger, the stars are brighter, the

thunder is louder, the lightning is vivider, the wind is stronger,

the rain is heavier, the mountains are higher, the rivers longer, the

forests bigger, the plains broader." This statement will do at least

to set against Buffon's account of this part of the world and its

productions.

Linnaeus said long ago, "Nescio quae facies _laeta, glabra_ plantis

Americanis: I know not what there is of joyous and smooth in the aspect

of American plants"; and I think that in this country there are no, or

at most very few, _Africanae bestice_, African beasts, as the Romans

called them, and that in this respect also it is peculiarly fitted for

the habitation of man. We are told that within three miles of the centre

of the East-Indian city of Singapore, some of the inhabitants are

annually carried off by tigers; but the traveller can lie down in the

woods at night almost anywhere in North America without fear of wild

beasts.

These are encouraging testimonies. If the moon looks larger here than in

Europe, probably the sun looks larger also. If the heavens of America

appear infinitely higher, and the stars brighter, I trust that these

facts are symbolical of the height to which the philosophy and poetry

and religion of her inhabitants may one day soar. At length, perchance,

the immaterial heaven will appear as much higher to the American mind,

and the intimations that star it as much brighter. For I believe

that climate does thus react on man,--as there is something in the

mountain-air that feeds the spirit and inspires. Will not man grow to

greater perfection intellectually as well as physically under these

influences? Or is it unimportant how many foggy days there are in his

life? I trust that we shall be more imaginative, that our thoughts will

be clearer, fresher, and more ethereal, as our sky,--our understanding

more comprehensive and broader, like our plains,--our intellect

generally on a grander scale, like our thunder and lightning, our rivers

and mountains and forests,--and our hearts shall even correspond in

breadth and depth and grandeur to our inland seas. Perchance there will

appear to the traveller something, he knows not what, of _laeta_ and

_glabra_, of joyous and serene, in our very faces. Else to what end does

the world go on, and why was America discovered?

To Americans I hardly need to say,--

"Westward the star of empire takes its way."

As a true patriot, I should be ashamed to think that Adam in paradise

was more favorably situated on the whole than the backwoodsman in this

country.

Our sympathies in Massachusetts are not confined to New England; though

we may be estranged from the South, we sympathize with the West. There

is the home of the younger sons, as among the Scandinavians they took to

the sea for their inheritance. It is too late to be studying Hebrew; it

is more important to understand even the slang of to-day.

Some months ago I went to see a panorama of the Rhine. It was like

a dream of the Middle Ages. I floated down its historic stream in

something more than imagination, under bridges built by the Romans, and

repaired by later heroes, past cities and castles whose very names were

music to my ears, and each of which was the subject of a legend. There

were Ehrenbreitstein and Rolandseck and Coblentz, which I knew only in

history. They were ruins that interested me chiefly. There seemed to

come up from its waters and its vine-clad hills and valleys a hushed

music as of Crusaders departing for the Holy Land. I floated along under

the spell of enchantment, as if I had been transported to an heroic age,

and breathed an atmosphere of chivalry.

Soon after, I went to see a panorama of the Mississippi, and as I worked

my way up the river in the light of to-day, and saw the steamboats

wooding up, counted the rising cities, gazed on the fresh ruins of

Nauvoo, beheld the Indians moving west across the stream, and, as before

I had looked up the Moselle, now looked up the Ohio and the Missouri,

and heard the legends of Dubuque and of Wenona's Cliff,--still thinking

more of the future than of the past or present,--I saw that this was a

Rhine stream of a different kind; that the foundations of castles were

yet to be laid, and the famous bridges were yet to be thrown over the

river; and I felt that _this was the heroic age itself_, though we know

it not, for the hero is commonly the simplest and obscurest of men.

The West of which I speak is but another name for the Wild; and what I

have been preparing to say is, that in Wildness is the preservation of

the world. Every tree sends its fibres forth in search of the Wild. The

cities import it at any price. Men plough and sail for it. From the

forest and wilderness come the tonics and barks which brace mankind. Our

ancestors were savages. The story of Romulus and Remus being suckled by

a wolf is not a meaningless fable. The founders of every State which has

risen to eminence have drawn their nourishment and vigor from a similar

wild source. It was because the children of the Empire were not suckled

by the wolf that they were conquered and displaced by the children of

the Northern forests who were.

I believe in the forest, and in the meadow, and in the night in which

the corn grows. We require an infusion of hemlock-spruce or arbor-vitae

in our tea. There is a difference between eating and drinking for

strength and from mere gluttony. The Hottentots eagerly devour the

marrow of the koodoo and other antelopes raw, as a matter of course.

Some of our Northern Indians eat raw the marrow of the Arctic reindeer,

as well as various other parts, including the summits of the antlers, as

long as they are soft. And herein, perchance, they have stolen a march

on the cooks of Paris. They get what usually goes to feed the fire. This

is probably better than stall-fed beef and slaughter-house pork to

make a man of. Give me a wildness whose glance no civilization can

endure,--as if we lived on the marrow of koodoos devoured raw.

There are some intervals which border the strain of the wood-thrush, to

which I would migrate,--wild lands where no settler has squatted; to

which, methinks, I am already acclimated.

The African hunter Cummings tells us that the skin of the eland, as well

as that of most other antelopes just killed, emits the most delicious

perfume of trees and grass. I would have every man so much like a wild

antelope, so much a part and parcel of Nature, that his very person

should thus sweetly advertise our senses of his presence, and remind us

of those parts of Nature which he most haunts. I feel no disposition to

be satirical, when the trapper's coat emits the odor of musquash even;

it is a sweeter scent to me than that which commonly exhales from the

merchant's or the scholar's garments. When I go into their wardrobes and

handle their vestments, I am reminded of no grassy plains and flowery

meads which they have frequented, but of dusty merchants' exchanges and

libraries rather.

A tanned skin is something more than respectable, and perhaps olive is

a fitter color than white for a man,--a denizen of the woods. "The pale

white man!" I do not wonder that the African pitied him. Darwin the

naturalist says, "A white man bathing by the side of a Tahitian was like

a plant bleached by the gardener's art, compared with a fine, dark green

one, growing vigorously in the open fields."

Ben Jonson exclaims,--

"How near to good is what is fair!"

So I would say,--

How near to good is what is _wild!_

Life consists with wildness. The most alive is the wildest. Not yet

subdued to man, its presence refreshes him. One who pressed forward

incessantly and never rested from his labors, who grew fast and made

infinite demands on life, would always find himself in a new country

or wilderness, and surrounded by the raw material of life. He would be

climbing over the prostrate stems of primitive forest-trees.

Hope and the future for me are not in lawns and cultivated fields, not

in towns and cities, but in the impervious and quaking swamps. When,

formerly, I have analyzed my partiality for some farm which I had

contemplated purchasing, I have frequently found that I was attracted

solely by a few square rods of impermeable and unfathomable bog,--a

natural sink in one corner of it. That was the jewel which dazzled me. I

derive more of my subsistence from the swamps which surround my native

town than from the cultivated gardens in the village. There are no

richer parterres to my eyes than the dense beds of dwarf andromeda

(_Cassandra calyculata_) which cover these tender places on the earth's

surface. Botany cannot go farther than tell me the names of the shrubs

which grow there,--the high-blueberry, panicled andromeda, lamb-kill,

azalea, and rhodora,--all standing in the quaking sphagnum. I often

think that I should like to have my house front on this mass of dull red

bushes, omitting other flower plots and borders, transplanted spruce

and trim box, even gravelled walks,--to have this fertile spot under my

windows, not a few imported barrow-fulls of soil only to cover the sand

which was thrown out in digging the cellar. Why not put my house, my

parlor, behind this plot, instead of behind that meagre assemblage of

curiosities, that poor apology for a Nature and Art, which I call my

front-yard? It is an effort to clear up and make a decent appearance

when the carpenter and mason have departed, though done as much for the

passer-by as the dweller within. The most tasteful front-yard fence was

never an agreeable object of study to me; the most elaborate ornaments,

acorn-tops, or what not, soon wearied and disgusted me. Bring your sills

up to the very edge of the swamp, then, (though it may not be the best

place for a dry cellar,) so that there be no access on that side to

citizens. Front-yards are not made to walk in, but, at most, through,

and you could go in the back way.

Yes, though you may think me perverse, if it were proposed to me to

dwell in the neighborhood of the most beautiful garden that ever human

art contrived, or else of a dismal swamp, I should certainly decide for

the swamp. How vain, then, have been all your labors, citizens, for me!

My spirits infallibly rise in proportion to the outward dreariness. Give

me the ocean, the desert, or the wilderness! In the desert, pure air and

solitude compensate for want of moisture and fertility. The traveller

Burton says of it,--"Your _morale_ improves; you become frank and

cordial, hospitable and single-minded.... In the desert, spirituous

liquors excite only disgust. There is a keen enjoyment in a mere animal

existence." They who have been travelling long on the steppes of Tartary

say,--"On reëntering cultivated lands, the agitation, perplexity, and

turmoil of civilization oppressed and suffocated us; the air seemed to

fail us, and we felt every moment as if about to die of asphyxia." When

I would recreate myself, I seek the darkest wood, the thickest and most

interminable, and, to the citizen, most dismal swamp. I enter a swamp

as a sacred place,--a _sanctum sanctorum_. There is the strength, the

marrow of Nature. The wild-wood covers the virgin mould,--and the same

soil is good for men and for trees. A man's health requires as many

acres of meadow to his prospect as his farm does loads of muck. There

are the strong meats on which he feeds. A town is saved, not more by the

righteous men in it than by the woods and swamps that surround it. A

township where one primitive forest waves above, while another primitive

forest rots below,--such a town is fitted to raise not only corn and

potatoes, but poets and philosophers for the coming ages. In such a soil

grew Homer and Confucius and the rest, and out of such a wilderness

comes the Reformer eating locusts and wild honey.

To preserve wild animals implies generally the creation of a forest for

them to dwell in or resort to. So is it with man. A hundred years ago

they sold bark in our streets peeled from our own woods. In the very

aspect of those primitive and rugged trees, there was, methinks, a

tanning principle which hardened and consolidated the fibres of men's

thoughts. Ah! already I shudder for these comparatively degenerate days

of my native village, when you cannot collect a load of bark of good

thickness,--and we no longer produce tar and turpentine.

The civilized nations--Greece, Rome, England--have been sustained by the

primitive forests which anciently rotted where they stand. They survive

as long as the soil is not exhausted. Alas for human culture! little is

to be expected of a nation, when the vegetable mould is exhausted, and

it is compelled to make manure of the bones of its fathers. There

the poet sustains himself merely by his own superfluous fat, and the

philosopher comes down on his marrow-bones.

It is said to be the task of the American "to work the virgin soil," and

that "agriculture here already assumes proportions unknown everywhere

else." I think that the farmer displaces the Indian even because he

redeems the meadow, and so makes himself stronger and in some respects

more natural. I was surveying for a man the other day a single straight

line one hundred and thirty-two rods long, through a swamp, at whose

entrance might have been written the words which Dante read over

the entrance to the infernal regions,--"Leave all hope, ye that

enter,"--that is, of ever getting out again; where at one time I saw

my employer actually up to his neck and swimming for his life in his

property, though it was still winter. He had another similar swamp which

I could not survey at all, because it was completely under water, and

nevertheless, with regard to a third swamp, which I did _survey_ from a

distance, he remarked to me, true to his instincts, that he would not

part with it for any consideration, on account of the mud which it

contained. And that man intends to put a girdling ditch round the whole

in the course of forty months, and so redeem it by the magic of his

spade. I refer to him only as the type of a class.

The weapons with which we have gained our most important victories,

which should be handed down as heirlooms from father to son, are not the

sword and the lance, but the bush-whack, the turf-cutter, the spade, and

the bog-hoe, rusted with the blood of many a meadow, and begrimed with

the dust of many a hard-fought field. The very winds blew the Indian's

cornfield into the meadow, and pointed out the way which he had not

the skill to follow. He had no better implement with which to intrench

himself in the land than a clamshell. But the farmer is armed with

plough and spade.

In Literature it is only the wild that attracts us. Dulness is but

another name for lameness. It is the uncivilized free and wild thinking

in "Hamlet" and the "Iliad," in all the Scriptures and Mythologies, not

learned in the schools, that delights us. As the wild duck is more swift

and beautiful than the tame, so is the wild--the mallard--thought, which

'mid falling dews wings its way above the fens. A truly good book is

something as natural, and as unexpectedly and unaccountably fair and

perfect, as a wild flower discovered on the prairies of the West or in

the jungles of the East. Genius is a light which makes the darkness

visible, like the lightning's flash, which perchance shatters the temple

of knowledge itself,--and not a taper lighted at the hearth-stone of the

race, which pales before the light of common day.

English literature, from the days of the minstrels to the Lake

Poets,--Chaucer and Spenser and Milton, and even Shakespeare,

included,--breathes no quite fresh and in this sense wild strain. It

is an essentially tame and civilized literature, reflecting Greece and

Rome. Her wilderness is a green-wood,--her wild man a Robin Hood. There

is plenty of genial love of Nature, but not so much of Nature herself.

Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild

man in her, became extinct.

The science of Humboldt is one thing, poetry is another thing. The

poet to-day, notwithstanding all the discoveries of science, and the

accumulated learning of mankind, enjoys no advantage over Homer.

Where is the literature which gives expression to Nature? He would be a

poet who could impress the winds and streams into his service, to speak

for him; who nailed words to their primitive senses, as farmers drive

down stakes in the spring, which the frost has heaved; who derived his

words as often as he used them,--transplanted them to his page with

earth adhering to their roots; whose words were so true and fresh and

natural that they would appear to expand like the buds at the approach

of spring, though they lay half-smothered between two musty leaves in a

library,--ay, to bloom and bear fruit there, after their kind, annually,

for the faithful reader, in sympathy with surrounding Nature.

I do not know of any poetry to quote which adequately expresses this

yearning for the Wild. Approached from this side, the best poetry is

tame. I do not know where to find in any literature, ancient or modern,

any account which contents me of that Nature with which even I am

acquainted. You will perceive that I demand something which no Augustan

nor Elizabethan age, which no _culture_, in short, can give. Mythology

comes nearer to it than anything. How much more fertile a Nature, at

least, has Grecian mythology its root in than English literature!

Mythology is the crop which the Old World bore before its soil was

exhausted, before the fancy and imagination were affected with blight;

and which it still bears, wherever its pristine vigor is unabated. All

other literatures endure only as the elms which overshadow our houses;

but this is like the great dragon-tree of the Western Isles, as old as

mankind, and, whether that does or not, will endure as long; for the

decay of other literatures makes the soil in which it thrives.

The West is preparing to add its fables to those of the East. The

valleys of the Ganges, the Nile, and the Rhine, having yielded their

crop, it remains to be seen what the valleys of the Amazon, the Plate,

the Orinoco, the St. Lawrence, and the Mississippi will produce.

Perchance, when, in the course of ages, American liberty has become

a fiction of the past,--as it is to some extent a fiction of the

present,--the poets of the world will be inspired by American mythology.

The wildest dreams of wild men, even, are not the less true, though they

may not recommend themselves to the sense which is most common among

Englishmen and Americans to-day. It is not every truth that recommends

itself to the common sense. Nature has a place for the wild clematis

as well as for the cabbage. Some expressions of truth are

reminiscent,--others merely sensible, as the phrase is,--others

prophetic. Some forms of disease, even, may prophesy forms of health.

The geologist has discovered that the figures of serpents, griffins,

flying dragons, and other fanciful embellishments of heraldry, have

their prototypes in the forms of fossil species which were extinct

before man was created, and hence "indicate a faint and shadowy

knowledge of a previous state of organic existence." The Hindoos dreamed

that the earth rested on an elephant, and the elephant on a tortoise,

and the tortoise on a serpent; and though it may be an unimportant

coincidence, it will not be out of place here to state, that a fossil

tortoise has lately been discovered in Asia large enough to support

an elephant. I confess that I am partial to these wild fancies, which

transcend the order of time and development. They are the sublimest

recreation of the intellect. The partridge loves peas, but not those

that go with her into the pot.

In short, all good things are wild and free. There is something in a

strain of music, whether produced by an instrument or by the

human voice,--take the sound of a bugle in a summer night, for

instance,--which by its wildness, to speak without satire, reminds me of

the cries emitted by wild beasts in their native forests. It is so

much of their wildness as I can understand. Give me for my friends and

neighbors wild men, not tame ones. The wildness of the savage is but a

faint symbol of the awful ferity with which good men and lovers meet.

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native

rights,--any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild

habits and vigor; as when my neighbor's cow breaks out of her pasture

early in the spring and boldly swims the river, a cold, gray tide,

twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the

buffalo crossing the Mississippi. This exploit confers some dignity

on the herd in my eyes,--already dignified. The seeds of instinct are

preserved under the thick hides of cattle and horses, like seeds in the

bowels of the earth, an indefinite period.

Any sportiveness in cattle is unexpected. I saw one day a herd of a

dozen bullocks and cows running about and frisking in unwieldy sport,

like huge rats, even like kittens. They shook their heads, raised their

tails, and rushed up and down a hill, and I perceived by their horns, as

well as by their activity, their relation to the deer tribe. But, alas!

a sudden loud _Whoa!_ would have damped their ardor at once, reduced

them from venison to beef, and stiffened their sides and sinews like the

locomotive. Who but the Evil One has cried, "Whoa!" to mankind?

Indeed, the life of cattle, like that of many men, is but a sort of

locomotiveness; they move a side at a time, and man, by his machinery,

is meeting the horse and ox half-way. Whatever part the whip has touched

is thenceforth palsied. Who would ever think of a _side_ of any of the

supple cat tribe, as we speak of a _side_ of beef?

I rejoice that horses and steers have to be broken before they can be

made the slaves of men, and that men themselves have some wild oats

still left to sow before they become submissive members of society.

Undoubtedly, all men are not equally fit subjects for civilization;

and because the majority, like dogs and sheep, are tame by inherited

disposition, this is no reason why the others should have their natures

broken that they may be reduced to the same level. Men are in the main

alike, but they were made several in order that they might be various.

If a low use is to be served, one man will do nearly or quite as well as

another; if a high one, individual excellence is to be regarded. Any man

can stop a hole to keep the wind away, but no other man could serve so

rare a use as the author of this illustration did. Confucius says,--"The

skins of the tiger and the leopard, when they are tanned, are as the

skins of the dog and the sheep tanned." But it is not the part of a true

culture to tame tigers, any more than it is to make sheep ferocious; and

tanning their skins for shoes is not the best use to which they can be

put.

When looking over a list of men's names in a foreign language, as of

military officers, or of authors who have written on a particular

subject, I am reminded once more that there is nothing in a name. The

name Menschikoff, for instance, has nothing in it to my ears more human

than a whisker, and it may belong to a rat. As the names of the Poles

and Russians are to us, so are ours to them. It is as if they had

been named by the child's rigmarole,--_Iery wiery ichery van,

tittle-tol-tan_. I see in my mind a herd of wild creatures swarming over

the earth, and to each the herdsman has affixed some barbarous sound in

his own dialect. The names of men are of course as cheap and meaningless

as _Bose_ and _Tray_, the names of dogs.

Methinks it would be some advantage to philosophy, if men were named

merely in the gross, as they are known. It would be necessary only to

know the genus, and perhaps the race or variety, to know the individual.

We are not prepared to believe that every private soldier in a Roman

army had a name of his own,--because we have not supposed that he had a

character of his own. At present our only true names are nicknames. I

knew a boy who, from his peculiar energy, was called "Buster" by

his playmates, and this rightly supplanted his Christian name. Some

travellers tell us that an Indian had no name given him at first, but

earned it, and his name was his fame; and among some tribes he acquired

a new name with every new exploit. It is pitiful when a man bears a name

for convenience merely, who has earned neither name nor fame.

I will not allow mere names to make distinctions for me, but still

see men in herds for all them. A familiar name cannot make a man less

strange to me. It may be given to a savage who retains in secret his

own wild title earned in the woods. We have a wild savage in us, and

a savage name is perchance somewhere recorded as ours. I see that my

neighbor, who bears the familiar epithet William, or Edwin, takes it off

with his jacket. It does not adhere to him when asleep or in anger, or

aroused by any passion or inspiration. I seem to hear pronounced by some

of his kin at such a time his original wild name in some jaw-breaking or

else melodious tongue.

Here is this vast, savage, howling mother of ours, Nature, lying all

around, with such beauty, and such affection for her children, as the

leopard; and yet we are so early weaned from her breast to society, to

that culture which is exclusively an interaction of man on man,--a sort

of breeding in and in, which produces at most a merely English nobility,

a civilization destined to have a speedy limit.

In society, in the best institutions of men, it is easy to detect a

certain precocity. When we should still be growing children, we are

already little men. Give me a culture which imports much muck from

the meadows, and deepens the soil,--not that which trusts to heating

manures, and improved implements and modes of culture only!

Many a poor sore-eyed student that I have heard of would grow faster,

both intellectually and physically, if, instead of sitting up so very

late, he honestly slumbered a fool's allowance.

There may be an excess even of informing light. Niépce, a Frenchman,

discovered "actinism," that power in the sun's rays which produces a

chemical effect,--that granite rocks, and stone structures, and statues

of metal, "are all alike destructively acted upon during the hours of

sunshine, and, but for provisions of Nature no less wonderful, would

soon perish under the delicate touch of the most subtile of the agencies

of the universe." But he observed that "those bodies which underwent

this change during the daylight possessed the power of restoring

themselves to their original conditions during the hours of night, when

this excitement was no longer influencing them." Hence it has been

inferred that "the hours of darkness are as necessary to the inorganic

creation as we know night and sleep are to the organic kingdom." Not

even does the moon shine every night, but gives place to darkness.

I would not have every man nor every part of a man cultivated, any more

than I would have every acre of earth cultivated: part will be tillage,

but the greater part will be meadow and forest, not only serving an

immediate use, but preparing a mould against a distant future, by the

annual decay of the vegetation which it supports.

There are other letters for the child to learn than those which Cadmus

invented. The Spaniards have a good term to express this wild and dusky

knowledge,--_Gramática parda_, tawny grammar,--a kind of mother-wit

derived from that same leopard to which I have referred.

We have heard of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. It is

said that knowledge is power; and the like. Methinks there is equal need

of a Society for the Diffusion of Useful Ignorance, what we will call

Beautiful Knowledge, a knowledge useful in a higher sense: for what

is most of our boasted so-called knowledge but a conceit that we know

something, which robs us of the advantage of our actual ignorance?

What we call knowledge is often our positive ignorance; ignorance our

negative knowledge. By long years of patient industry and reading of

the newspapers--for what are the libraries of science but files of

newspapers?--a man accumulates a myriad facts, lays them up in his

memory, and then when in some spring of his life he saunters abroad into

the Great Fields of thought, he, as it were, goes to grass like a horse,

and leaves all his harness behind in the stable. I would say to the

Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, sometimes,----Go to

grass. You have eaten hay long enough. The spring has come with its

green crop. The very cows are driven to their country pastures before

the end of May; though I have heard of one unnatural farmer who kept his

cow in the barn and fed her on hay all the year round. So, frequently,

the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge treats its cattle.

A man's ignorance sometimes is not only useful, but beautiful,--while

his knowledge, so called, is oftentimes worse than useless, besides

being ugly. Which is the best man to deal with,--he who knows nothing

about a subject, and, what is extremely rare, knows that he knows

nothing, or be who really knows something about it, but thinks that he

knows all?

My desire for knowledge is intermittent; but my desire to bathe my head

in atmospheres unknown to my feet is perennial and constant. The highest

that we can attain to is not Knowledge, but Sympathy with Intelligence.

I do not know that this higher knowledge amounts to anything more

definite than a novel and grand surprise on a sudden revelation of the

insufficiency of all that we called Knowledge before,--a discovery that

there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in our

philosophy. It is the lighting up of the mist by the sun. Man cannot

_know_ in any higher sense than this, any more than he can look serenely

and with impunity in the face of the sun: [Greek: Os thi noon, on

kehinon nohaeseis,]--"You will not perceive that, as perceiving a

particular thing," say the Chaldean Oracles.

There is something servile in the habit of seeking after a law which we

may obey. We may study the laws of matter at and for our convenience,

but a successful life knows no law. It is an unfortunate discovery

certainly, that of a law which binds us where we did not know before

that we were bound. Live free, child of the mist,--and with respect to

knowledge we are all children of the mist. The man who takes the liberty

to live is superior to all the laws, by virtue of his relation to the

law-maker. "That is active duty," says the Vishnu Purana, "which is not

for our bondage; that is knowledge which is for our liberation: all

other duty is good only unto weariness; all other knowledge is only the

cleverness of an artist."

It is remarkable how few events or crises there are in our histories;

how little exercised we have been in our minds; how few experiences we

have had. I would fain be assured that I am growing apace and rankly,

though my very growth disturb this dull equanimity,--though it be with

struggle through long, dark, muggy nights or seasons of gloom. It would

be well, if all our lives were a divine tragedy even, instead of this

trivial comedy or farce. Dante, Bunyan, and others, appear to have been

exercised in their minds more than we: they were subjected to a kind of

culture such as our district schools and colleges do not contemplate.

Even Mahomet, though many may scream at his name, had a good deal more

to live for, ay, and to die for, than they have commonly.

When, at rare intervals, some thought visits one, as perchance he is

walking on a railroad, then indeed the cars go by without his hearing

them. But soon, by some inexorable law, our life goes by and the cars

return.

"Gentle breeze, that wanderest unseen,

And bendest the thistles round Loira of storms,

Traveller of the windy glens,

Why hast thou left my ear so soon?"

While almost all men feel an attraction drawing them to society, few are

attracted strongly to Nature. In their relation to Nature men appear

to me for the most part, notwithstanding their arts, lower than the

animals. It is not often a beautiful relation, as in the case of the

animals. How little appreciation of the beauty of the landscape there is

among us! We have to be told that the Greeks called the world [Greek:

Kosmos], Beauty, or Order, but we do not see clearly why they did so,

and we esteem it at best only a curious philological fact.

For my part, I feel that with regard to Nature I live a sort of border

life, on the confines of a world into which I make occasional and

transient forays only, and my patriotism and allegiance to the State

into whose territories I seem to retreat are those of a moss-trooper.

Unto a life which I call natural I would gladly follow even a

will-o'-the-wisp through bogs and sloughs unimaginable, but no moon nor

fire-fly has shown me the causeway to it. Nature is a personality so

vast and universal that we have never seen one of her features. The

walker in the familiar fields which stretch around my native town

sometimes finds himself in another land than is described in their

owners' deeds, as it were in some far-away field on the confines of the

actual Concord, where her jurisdiction ceases, and the idea which the

word Concord suggests ceases to be suggested. These farms which I have

myself surveyed, these bounds which I have set up appear dimly still as

through a mist; but they have no chemistry to fix them; they fade from

the surface of the glass; and the picture which the painter painted

stands out dimly from beneath. The world with which we are commonly

acquainted leaves no trace, and it will have no anniversary.

I took a walk on Spaulding's Farm the other afternoon. I saw the setting

sun lighting up the opposite side of a stately pine wood. Its golden

rays straggled into the aisles of the wood as into some noble hall. I

was impressed as if some ancient and altogether admirable and shining

family had settled there in that part of the land called Concord,

unknown to me,--to whom the sun was servant,--who had not gone into

society in the village,--who had not been called on. I saw their

park, their pleasure-ground, beyond through the wood, in Spaulding's

cranberry-meadow. The pines furnished them with gables as they grew.

Their house was not obvious to vision; the trees grew through it. I do

not know whether I heard the sounds of a suppressed hilarity or not.

They seemed to recline on the sunbeams. They have sons and daughters.

They are quite well. The farmer's cart-path, which leads directly

through their hall, does not in the least put them out,--as the muddy

bottom of a pool is sometimes seen through the reflected skies.

They never heard of Spaulding, and do not know that he is their

neighbor,--notwithstanding I heard him whistle as he drove his team

through the house. Nothing can equal the serenity of their lives. Their

coat of arms is simply a lichen. I saw it painted on the pines and oaks.

Their attics were in the tops of the trees. They are of no politics.

There was no noise of labor. I did not perceive that they were weaving

or spinning. Yet I did detect, when the wind lulled and hearing was done

away, the finest imaginable sweet musical hum,--as of a distant hive in

May, which perchance was the sound of their thinking. They had no idle

thoughts, and no one without could see their work, for their industry

was not as in knots and excrescences embayed.

But I find it difficult to remember them. They fade irrevocably out

of my mind even now while I speak and endeavor to recall them, and

recollect myself. It is only after a long and serious effort to

recollect my best thoughts that I become again aware of their

cohabitancy. If it were not for such families as this, I think I should

move out of Concord.

We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons visit

us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it would seem,

few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to year, for the

grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed unnecessary fires of

ambition, or sent to mill, and there is scarcely a twig left for them to

perch on. They no longer build nor breed with us. In some more genial

season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across the landscape of the

mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its vernal or autumnal

migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect the substance of

the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to poultry. They

no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and Cochin-China

grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate men_ you hear of!

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate

ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my

account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top

of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for I

discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen before,--

so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have walked about

the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and yet I certainly

should never have seen them. But, above all, I discovered around me,--it

was near the end of June,--on the ends of the topmost branches only, a

few minute and delicate red cone-like blossoms, the fertile flower of

the white pine looking heavenward. I carried straightway to the village

the topmost spire, and showed it to stranger jurymen who walked the

streets,--for it was court-week,--and to farmers and lumber-dealers and

wood-choppers and hunters, and not one had ever seen the like before,

but they wondered as at a star dropped down. Tell of ancient architects

finishing their works on the tops of columns as perfectly as on the

lower and more visible parts! Nature has from the first expanded the

minute blossoms of the forest only toward the heavens, above men's heads

and unobserved by them. We see only the flowers that are under our feet

in the meadows. The pines have developed their delicate blossoms on the

highest twigs of the wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads

of Nature's red children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or

hunter in the land has ever seen them.

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed

over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in remembering

the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in every barn-yard

within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly reminds us that

we are growing rusty and antique in our employments and habits of

thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time than ours.

There is something suggested by it that is a newer testament,--the

gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen astern; he has got up

early, and kept up early, and to be where he is is to be in season,

in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression of the health and

soundness of Nature, a brag for all the world,--healthiness as of a

spring burst forth, a new fountain of the Muses, to celebrate this last

instant of time. Where he lives no fugitive slave laws are passed. Who

has not betrayed his master many times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all

plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,

but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in

doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on

a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a

cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us well,

at any rate,"--and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a

meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before

setting, after a cold gray day, reached a clear stratum in the horizon,

and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry grass and on

the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon, and on the leaves of the

shrub-oaks on the hill-side, while our shadows stretched long over the

meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its beams. It was such

a light as we could not have imagined a moment before, and the air also

was so warm and serene that nothing was wanting to make a paradise of

that meadow. When we reflected that this was not a solitary phenomenon,

never to happen again, but that it would happen forever and ever an

infinite number of evenings, and cheer and reassure the latest child

that walked there, it was more glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with all

the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and, perchance, as it

has never set before,--where there is but a solitary marsh-hawk to have

his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his cabin, and

there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the marsh, just

beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying stump. We walked

in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered grass and leaves,

so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never bathed in such a

golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The west side of every

wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of Elysium, and the sun

on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine

more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our

minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening

light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bank-side in autumn.

WAR AND LITERATURE.

It would be a task worthy of a volume, and requiring that space in order

to be creditably performed, to show how war affects literature, at what

points they meet, where they are at variance, if any wars stimulate, and

what kinds depress the intellectual life of nations. The subject is very

wide. It would embrace a discussion of the effects of war when it occurs

during a period of great literary and artistic splendor, as in Athens

and in the Italian Republics; whether intellectual decline is postponed

or accelerated by the interests and passions of the strife; whether the

preliminary concentration of the popular heart may claim the merit of

adding either power or beauty to the intellectual forms which bloom

together with the war.

These things are not entirely clear, and the experience of different

countries is conflicting. The Thirty Years' War, though it commenced

with the inspiration of great political and religious ideas, did not

lift the German mind to any new demonstrations of truth or impassioned

utterances of the imagination. The nation sank away from it into a

barren and trivial life, although the war itself occasioned a multitude

of poems, songs, hymns, and political disquisitions. The hymns of this

period, which are filled with a sense of dependence, of the greatness

and awfulness of an invisible eternity, and breathe a desire for the

peaceful traits of a remote religious life, are at once a confession of

the weariness of the best minds at the turmoil and uncertainty of the

contest and a permanent contribution of the finest kind to that form of

sacred literature. But princes and electors were fighting as much for

the designation and establishment of their petty nationalities, which

first checkered the map of Europe after the imperial Catholic power was

rolled southwardly, as they were for the pure interest of Protestantism.

The German intellect did eventually gain something from this political

result, because it interrupted the literary absolutism which reigned at

Vienna; no doubt literature grew more popular and German, but it did

not very strikingly improve the great advantage, for there was at last

exhaustion instead of a generously nourishing enthusiasm, and the great

ideas of the period became the pieces with which diplomatists carried on

their game. The _Volkslied_ (popular song) came into vogue again, but it

was not so fresh and natural as before; Opitz, one of the best poets of

this period, is worth reading chiefly when he depicts his sources of

consolation in the troubles of the time. Long poetical bulletins were

written, in the epical form, to describe the battles and transactions

of the war. They had an immense circulation, and served the place of

newspapers. They were bright and characteristic enough for that; and

indeed newspapers in Germany date from this time, and from the doggerel

broadsides of satire and description which then supplanted minstrels

of whatsoever name or guild, as they were carried by post, and read in

every hamlet.[A] But the best of these poems were pompous, dull, and

tediously elaborated. They have met the fate of newspapers, and are now

on file. The more considerable poets themselves appeared to be jealous

of the war; they complained bitterly that Mars had displaced Apollo; but

later readers regret the ferocious sack of Magdeburg, or the death of

Gustavus Adolphus, more than the silencing of all those pens.

[Footnote A: Newspapers proper appeared as early as 1615 in Germany. But

these rhymed gazettes were very numerous. They were more or less bulky

pamphlets, with pithy sarcastic programmes for titles, and sometimes a

wood or copper cut prefixed. A few of them were of Catholic origin, and

one, entitled _Post-Bole_, (_The Express_,) is quite as good as anything

issued by the opposite party.]

On the other hand, Spain, while fighting for religion and a secure

nationality, had her Cervantes, Lope de Vega, and Calderon, all of whom

saw service in the field, and other distinguished names, originators

of literary forms and successful cultivators of established ones. They

created brilliant epochs for a bigoted and cruel country. All that was

noble or graceful in the Spanish spirit survives in works which that

country once stimulated through all the various fortunes of popular

wars. But they were not wars for the sake of the people; the country has

therefore sunk away from the literature which foretold so well how great

she might have become, if she had been fortunate enough to represent, or

to sympathize with, a period of moral and spiritual ideas. Her literary

forms do not describe growth, but arrested development.

A different period culminated in the genius of Milton, whose roots were

in that golden age when England was flowering into popular freedom. He

finally spoke for the true England, and expressed the vigorous thoughts

which a bloody epoch cannot quench. Some of his noblest things were

inspired by the exigencies of the Commonwealth, which he saw "as an

eagle nursing her mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the

full mid-day beam."

The Dutch people, in their great struggle against Philip II., seemed to

find a stimulus in the very exhaustions of war. The protesting ideas for

which they fought drew fresh tenacity from the soil, wet with blood and

tears, into which generous passion and resolution sank with every death.

Here it is plain that a milder conflict, carried on by intrigue and

diplomatic forms alone, for peaceable separation from the Catholic

interest, would not have so quickened the intelligence which afterwards

nourished so many English exiles and helped to freight the Mayflower.

And we see the German mind first beginning to blossom with a language

and a manifold literature during and after the Seven Years' War, which

developed a powerful Protestant State and a native German feeling.

Frederic's Gallic predilections did not infect the country which his

arms had rendered forever anti-Gallic and anti-Austrian. The popular

enthusiasm for himself, which his splendid victories mainly created, was

the first instinctive form of the coming German sense of independence.

The nation's fairest period coincided with the French Revolution and

the aggressions of the Empire. "Hermann and Dorothea" felt the people's

pulse, which soon beat so high at Jena and Leipsic with rage and hope.

The hope departed with the Peace of 1815, and pamphleteering, pragmatic

writing, theological investigation, historical research, followed the

period of creative genius, whose flowers did not wither while the fields

ran red.

A war must be the last resort of truly noble and popular ideas, if it

would do more than stimulate the intelligence of a few men, who write

best with draughts of glory and success. It must be the long-repressed

understanding of a nation suffused with strong primitive emotions,

that flies to arms to secure the precious privilege of owning and

entertaining its knowledge and its national advantages. And in

proportion as any war has ever been leavened with the fine excitement of

religion or humanity, however imperfectly, and though tyrannized over

by political selfishness, we can see that the honest feeling has done

something to obliterate the traces of violence, to offer the comfort of

worth in the cause to wounded lips.

When the people themselves take to fighting, not for dynastic objects,

to secure the succession of an Infant to the throne, to fix a Pope in

his chair, or to horse a runaway monarch around their necks, not to

extort some commercial advantage, or to resist a tampering with the

traditional balance of power, but to drive back the billows of Huns or

Turks from fields where cities and a middle class must rise, to oppose

citizen-right to feudal-right, and inoculate with the lance-head Society

with the popular element, to assert the industrial against the baronial

interest, or to expel the invader who forages among their rights to

sweep them clean and to plant a system which the ground cannot receive,

then we find that the intense conviction, which has been long gathering

and brooding in the soul, thunders and lightens through the whole brain,

and quickens the germs of Art, Beauty and Knowledge. Then war is only a

process of development, which threatens terribly and shakes the locks

upon its aegis in the face of the brutes which infest its path. Minerva

is aware that wisdom and common sense will have to fight for recognition

and a world: she fends blows from her tranquil forehead with the

lowering crest; the shield is not always by her side, nor the

sword-point resting on the ground. What is so vital as this armed and

conscious intelligence? The pen, thus tempered to a sword, becomes a pen

again, but flows with more iron than before.

But the original intellectual life begins while the pen is becoming

tempered in the fires of a great national controversy, before it is hard

enough to draw blood. Magnetic streams attract each slender point to a

centre of prophesying thought long before the blood-red aurora stains

suddenly the midnight sky and betrays the influence which has been none

the less mighty because it has been colorless. Sometimes a people says

all that it has in its mind to say, during that comfortless period

while the storm is in the air and has not yet precipitated its cutting

crystals. The most sensitive minds are goaded to express emphatically

their moral feeling and expectation in such a rude climate, which

stimulates rather than depresses, but which is apt to fall away into

languor and content. This only shows that the people have no commanding

place in history, but are only bent upon relieving themselves from

sundry annoyances, or are talking about great principles which they are

not in a position, from ethnical or political disability, to develop.

Such is all the Panslavic literature which is not Russian.[B]

But sometimes a people whose intellect passes through a noble

pre-revolutionary period, illustrating it by impetuous eloquence,

indignant lyrics, and the stern lines which a protesting conscience

makes upon the faces of the men who are lifted above the crowd, finds

that its ideas reach beyond the crisis in its life into a century of

power and beauty, during which its emancipated tendency springs forward,

with graceful gestures, to seize every spiritual advantage. Its

movements were grand and impressive while it struggled for the

opportunity to make known the divine intent that inspired it; but when

the fetters burst, and every limb enjoys the victory and the release,

the movements become unbounded, yet rhythmical, like Nature's, and

smite, or flow, or penetrate, like hers. To such a people war comes

as the disturbance of the earth's crust which helps it to a habitable

surface and lifts fair slopes to ripen wine and grain.

[Footnote B: Some cultivated Bohemians who can recall the glories of

Ziska and his chiefs, and who comprehend the value of the tendency which

they strove to represent, think that there would have grown a Bohemian

people, a great centre of Protestant and Slavonic influence, if it

had not been for the Battle of Weissenberg in 1620, when the Catholic

Imperialists defeated their King Frederic. A verse of a popular song,

_The Patriot's Lament_, runs thus, in Wratislaw's translation:--

"Cursed mountain, mountain white!

Upon thee was crushed our might;

What in thee lies covered o'er

Ages cannot back restore."

If there had been a Bohemian people, preserving a real vital tendency,

the Battle of the White Mountain would have resulted differently, even

had it been a defeat.

Other patriots, cultivated enough to be Panslavists, indulge a more

cheerful vein. They see a good time coming, and raise the cry of _Hej

Slované_!

"Hey, Slavonians! our Slavonic language still is living,

Long as our true loyal heart is for our nation striving;

Lives, lives the Slavonic spirit, and 't will live forever:

Hell and thunder! vain against us all your rage shall shiver."

This is nothing but a frontier feeling. The true Slavonic centre is

at St. Petersburg; thence will roll a people and a language over all

kindred ground.]

After all, then, we must carefully discover what a war was about, before

we can trace it, either for good or for evil, into the subsequent life

of a nation. There can be no such thing as exhaustion or deterioration,

if the eternal laws have won the laurel of a fight; for they are

fountains of youth, from which new blood comes rushing through the

depleted veins. And it soon mantles on the surface, to mend the

financial and industrial distress. Its blush of pride and victory

announces no heady passion. It is the signal which Truth waves from the

hearts of her children.

If we wish directly to consider the effect of war upon our own

intellectual development, we must begin by asking what ideas of

consequence are suggested by our copious use of the word Country. What a

phrase is that--Our Country--which we have been accustomed for eighty

years to use upon all festivals that commemorate civic rights, with

flattering and pompous hopes! We never understood what it meant, till

this moment which threatens to deprive us of the ideas and privileges

which it really represents. We never appreciated till now its depth and

preciousness. Orators have built up, sentence by sentence, a magnificent

estimate of the elements which make our material success, and they

thought it was a patriotic chord which they touched with the climax of

their fine periods. It was such patriotism as thrives in the midst of

content and satisfactory circumstances, which loves to have an inventory

made of all the fixtures and conveniences and the crude splendor of a

country's housekeeping,--things which are not indeed to be despised, for

they show what a people can do when cast upon their own resources, at a

distance from Governmental interference, free to select their own way

of living, to be fervent in business, in charities, in the cause of

education, in the explorations which lay open new regions to the

emigration of a world, in the inventiveness which gives labor new

pursuits and increases the chances of poor men, in the enterprise which

has made foundries, mines, workshops, manufactories, and granaries of

independent States. We have loved to linger over the praises of our

common schools and our voluntary system of congregational worship, to

count the spires which mark every place that man clears to earn his

living in. It has been pleasant to trace upon the map the great arteries

of intercommunication, flowing east and west, churned by countless

paddle-wheels, as they force a vast freight of wealth, material, social,

intellectual, to and fro, a freshet of fertilizing life to swell every

stream. We love to repeat the names which self-taught men have hewn out

in rude places, with the only advantage of being members of Mankind,

holding their own share in the great heart and soul of it, and making

that itself more illustrious than lineage and fortune. Every element of

an unexhausted soil, and all the achievements of a people let loose upon

it to settle, build, sow, and reap, with no master but ambition and no

dread but of poverty, and a long list of rights thrust suddenly into

their hands, with liberty to exercise them,--the right to vote, to

speak, to print, to be tried by jury,--all this margin for unfettered

action, even the corresponding vastness of the country itself, whose

ruggedest features and greatest distances were playthings of the popular

energy,--to love and extol these things were held by us equivalent to

having a native land and feeding a patriotic flame. But now all at once

this catalogue of advantages, which we were accustomed to call "our

country," is stripped of all its value, because we begin to feel that it

depends upon something else, more interior and less easy to appraise,

which we had not noticed much before. Just as when suddenly, in a

favorite child, endowed with strength, beauty, and effective gifts of

every member, of whom we were proud and expected great things, and whom

we took unlimited comfort in calling our own, there appears the solemn

intention of a soul to use this fine body to express its invisible truth

and honor, a wonderful revelation of a high mind filled with aspirations

which we had not suspected,--a sudden lifting of the whole body like an

eyelid before an inner eye, and we are astonished at the look it gives

us: so this body of comfort and success, which we worshipped as our

country, is suddenly possessed by great passions and ideas, by a

consciousness that providential laws demand the use of it, and will not

be restrained from inspiring the whole frame, and directing every member

of it with a new plan of Unity, and a finer feeling for Liberty, and a

more generous sense of Fraternity than ever before. Lately we did as we

pleased, but now we are going to be real children of Liberty. Formerly

we had a Union which transacted business for us, secured the payment of

our debts, and made us appear formidable abroad while it corrupted and

betrayed us at home,--a Union of colporteurs, and caucuses, and drummers

of Southern houses; not a Union, but a long coffle of patriotic laymen,

southerly clergymen, and slaves. Now the soul of a Democracy, gazing

terribly through eyes that are weeping for the dead and for indignation

at the cause of their dying, holds the thing which we call Union, and

determines to keep its mighty hold till it can be informed with Unity,

of which justice is the prime condition. See a Country at last, that

is, a Republican Soul, making the limbs of free states shiver with the

excitement of its great ideas, turning all our comfortable and excellent

institutions into ministers to execute its will, resolved, to wring the

great sinews of the body with the stress of its awakening, and to tax,

for a spiritual purpose, all the material resources and those forms

of liberty which we had pompously called our native land. A people in

earnest, smarting with the wounds of war and the deeper inflictions of

treachery, is abroad seeking after a country. It has been repeating with

annual congratulations for eighty years the self-evident truths of the

document which declared its independence; now it discovers that more

evidence of it is needed than successful trading and building can

bring, and it sends it forth afresh, with half a million of glittering

specialities to enforce its doctrines, while trade, and speculation, and

all the ambitions of prosperous men, and delicately nurtured lives, and

other lives as dearly cherished and nursed to maturity, are sent out

with an imperative commission to buy, at all hazards, a real country, to

exchange what is precious for the sake of having finally what we dreamed

we had before,--the most precious of all earthly things,--a Commonwealth

of God. Yes, our best things go, like wads for guns, to bid our purpose

speak more emphatically, as it expresses the overruling inspiration of

the hour.

Is this really the character of our war, or is it only an ideal picture

of what the war might be? That depends solely upon ourselves.

Our soldiers kindle nightly their bivouac fires from East to West, and

set their watch. They are the advance posts of the great idea, which is

destined to make a country as it advances southwardly, and to settle

it with republicans. If we put it in a single sentence, "Freedom of

industry for hand and brain to all men," we must think awhile upon it

before we can see what truths and temporal advantages it involves. We

see them best, in this night of our distress and trial, by the soldiers'

watch-fires. They encroach upon the gloom, and open it for us with

hopes. They shine like the stare of a deeper sky than day affords, and

we can see a land stretching to the Gulf, and lying expectant between

either sea, whose surface is given to a Republic to people and civilize

for the sake of Man. Whoever is born here, or whoever comes here,

brought by poverty or violence, an exile from misery or from power,

and whatever be his ethnological distinction, is a republican of this

country because he is a man. Here he is to find safety, cooperation,

and welcome. His very ignorance and debasement are to be welcomed by

a country eager to exhibit the plastic power of its divine idea,--how

animal restrictions can be gradually obliterated, how superstition and

prejudice must die out of stolid countenances before the steady gaze of

republican good-will, how ethnic peculiarities shall subserve the

great plan and be absorbed by it. The country no longer will have a

conventional creed, that men are more important than circumstances and

governments; we always said so, but our opinion was at the mercy of a

Know-Nothing club, a slaveholding cabal, a selfish democracy: it will

have a living faith, born with the pangs of battle, that nothing on

earth is so precious as the different kinds of men. It will want them,

to illustrate its preeminent idea, and it will go looking for them

through all the neglected places of the world, to invite them in from

the by-lanes and foul quarters of every race, expressly to show that

man is superior to his accidents, by bringing their bodies into a place

where their souls can get the better of them. Where can that be except

where a democracy has been waging a religious war against its own great

evil, and has repented in blood for having used all kinds of men as the

white and black pawns in its games of selfish politics, with its own

country for the board, and her peace and happiness lying in the pool for

stakes? Where can man be respected best except here, where he has

been undervalued most, and bitterness and blood have sprung from that

contempt?

This is the first truly religious war ever waged. Can there be such a

thing as a religious war? There can be wars in the interest of different

theologies, and mixed wars of diplomacy and confessions of belief, wars

to transfer the tradition of infallibility from a pope to a book, wars

of Puritans against the divine right of kings in the Old World and the

natural rights of Indians in the New, in all of which the name of God

has been invoked for sanction, and Scripture has been quoted, and Psalms

uplifted on the battle-field for encouragement. And it is true that

every conflict, in which there are ideas that claim their necessary

development against usage and authority, has a religious character so

far as the ideas vindicate God by being good for man. But a purely

religious war must be one to restore the attributes and prerogatives of

manhood, to confirm primitive rights that are given to finite souls as

fast as they are created, to proclaim the creed of humanity, which is so

far from containing a single article of theology, that it is solely and

distinctively religious without it, because it proclaims one Father in

heaven and one blood upon the earth. Manhood is always worth fighting

for, to resist and put down whatever evil tendency impairs the full

ability to be a man, with a healthy soul conscious of rights and duties,

owning its gifts, and valuing above everything else the liberty to place

its happiness in being noble and good. Every man wages a religious war,

when he attacks his own passions in the interest of his own humanity.

The most truly religious thing that a man can do is to fight his way

through habits and deficiencies back to the pure manlike elements of his

nature, which are the ineffaceable traces of the Divine workmanship, and

alone really worth fighting for. And when a nation imitates this private

warfare, and attacks its own gigantic evils, lighted through past

deficiencies and immediate temptations by its best ideas, as its human

part rallies against its inhuman, and all the kingly attributes of a

freeborn individual rise up in final indignation against its slavish

attributes, then commences the true and only war of a people, and the

only war of which we dare say, though it have the repulsive features

that belong to all wars, that it is religious. But that we do say; for

it is to win and keep the unity of a country for the great purposes of

mankind, a place where souls can have their chances to work, with the

largest freedom and under the fewest disabilities, at the divine image

stamped upon them,--to get here the tools, both temporal and spiritual,

with which to strike poverty and misery out of those glorious traces,

and to chisel deep and fresh the handwriting where God says, This is a

Man!

Here is a sufficient ground for expecting that intellectual as well as

political enlargement will succeed this trial of our country. It is well

to think of all the approaching advantages, even those remote ones which

will wear the forms of knowledge and art. For it is undeniable, that a

war cannot be so just as to bring no evils in its train,--not only the

disturbance of all kinds of industry, the suppression of some, the

difficulty of diverting, at a moment's notice, labor towards new

objects,--not only financial embarrassment and exhaustion, and the

shadow of a coming debt,--not the maiming of strong men and their

violent removal from the future labors of peace, nor the emotional

suffering of thousands of families whose hearts are in the field with

their dear ones, tossed to and fro in every skirmish, where the balls

slay more than the bodies which are pierced: not these evils alone,--nor

the feverish excitement of eighteen millions of people, whose gifts

and intelligence are all distraught, and at the mercy of every

bulletin,--nor yet the possible violations of private rights, and the

overriding of legal defences, which, when once attempted in a state of

war, is not always relinquished on the return of peace. These do not

strike us so much as the moral injury which many weak and passionate

minds sustain from the necessity of destroying life, of ravaging and

burning, of inflicting upon the enemy politic distresses. There will be

a taint in the army and the community which will endure in the relations

of pacific life. And more than half a million of men, who have tasted

the fierce joy of battle, have suffered the moral privations and dangers

of the camp, are to be returned suddenly to us, and cast adrift, with no

hope of finding immediate employment, and hankering for some excitements

to replace those of the distant field. If little truth and little

conscience have been at stake, these are the reasons which make wars so

demoralizing: they leave society restored to peace, but still at war

within itself, infested by those strange cravings, and tempted by a

new ambition, that of waging successful wars. This will be the most

dangerous country on the face of the earth, after the termination of

this war; for it will see its own ideas more clearly than ever before,

and long to propagate them with its battle-ardors and its scorn of

hypocritical foreign neutralities. We have the elements to make the most

martial nation in the world, with a peculiar combination of patience and

impulse, coldness and daring, the capacity to lie in watchful calm and

to move with the vibrations of the earthquake. And if ever the voice of

our brother, crying out to us from the ground of any country, shall sigh

among the drums which are then gathering dust in our arsenals, the long

roll would wake again, and the arms would rattle in that sound, which is

part of the speech of Liberty. But it is useless to affirm or to deny

such possibilities. It is plain, however, that we are organizing most

formidable elements, and learning how to forge them into bolts. The

spirit of the people, therefore, must be high and pure. The more

emphatically we declare, in accordance with the truth, that this war is

for a religious purpose, to prepare a country for the growing of souls,

a place where every element of material success and all the ambitions of

an enthusiastic people shall only provide fortunate circumstances, so

that men can be educated in the freedom which faith, knowledge, and awe

before the Invisible secure, the better will it be for us when peace

returns. A great believing people will more readily absorb the hurts of

war. Spiritual vitality will throw off vigorously the malaria which must

arise from deserted fields of battle. It must be our daily supplication

to feel the religious purport of the truths for which we fight. We must

disavow vindictiveness, and purge our hearts of it. There must be no

vulgar passion illustrated by our glorious arms. And when we say that we

are fighting for mankind, to release souls and bodies from bondage,

we must understand, without affectation, that we are fighting for the

slaveholder himself, who knows it not, as he hurls his iron disbelief

and hatred against us. For we are to have one country, all of whose

children, shall repeat in unison its noble creed, which the features of

the land itself proclaim, and whose railroads and telegraphs are its

running-hand.

How often we have enumerated and deprecated the evils of war! The

Mexican War, in which Slavery herself involved us, (using the power of

the Republic against which she conspired to further her conspiracy,)

gave us occasion to extol the benefits of peace, and to draw up a

formidable indictment against the spirit which lusted for the appeal to

arms. We have not lusted for it, and the benefits of peace seem greater

than ever; but the benefits of equity and truth seem greater than all.

Show me justice, or try to make me unjust,--force upon me at the point

of the sword the unspeakable degradation of abetting villany, and I will

seize the hilt, if I can, and write my protest clear with the blade, and

while I have it in my hand I will reap what advantages are possible in

the desolation which it makes.

Among these advantages of a war waged to secure the rights of

citizenship to all souls will be the excitement of a national

intellectual life, which will take on the various forms of a national

literature. This is to be expected for two reasons. First, because our

arms will achieve unity. By this is meant not only that there will be a

real union of all the States, consequent upon an eventual agreement in

great political and moral ideas, but also that this very consent will

bring the different characteristic groups of the country so near

together, in feeling and mutual appreciation, and with a free

interchange of traits, that we shall begin to have a nationality. And

there can be no literature until there is a nation; when the varieties

of the popular life begin to coalesce, as all sections are drawn

together towards the centre of great political ideas which the people

themselves establish, there will be such a rich development of

intellectual action as the Old World has not seen. Without this unity,

literature may be cultivated by cliques of men of talent, who are

chiefly stimulated to express themselves by observing the thought and

beauty which foreign intellects and past times produced; but their

productions will not spring from the country's manifold life, nor

express its mighty individuality. The sections of the country which are

nearest to the intelligence of the Old World will furnish the readiest

writers and the most polished thinkers, until the New World dwarfs the

Old World by its unity, and inspires the best brains with the collected

richness of the popular heart. Up to the period of this war the

country's most original men have been those who, by protesting against

its evils and displaying a genius emancipated from the prescriptions of

Church and State, have prophesied the revolution, and given to America

the first rich foretaste of her growing mind. The thunder rolled up the

sky in the orator's great periods, the lightning began to gleam in the

preacher's moral indignation, the glittering steel slumbered uneasily

and showed its half-drawn menace from the subtle lines of poets and

essayists who have been carrying weapons these twenty years; their souls

thirsted for an opportunity to rescue fair Liberty from the obscene rout

who had her in durance for their purposes, and to hail her accession to

a lawful throne with the rich gifts of knowledge, use, and beauty, a

homage that only free minds can pay, and only when freedom claims it.

We do not forget the literary activity with which a thousand ready

intellects have furnished convenient food for the people: there has been

no lack of books, nor of the ambition to attempt all the intellectual

forms. Some of this pabulum was not good for a growing frame; the excuse

for offering it may be found in the exigencies of squatter-life. We are

a notable people for our attachment to the frying-pan, and there is no

doubt that it is a shifty utensil: it can be slung at the saddle-bow or

carried in a valise, it will bear the jolting of a corduroy road, and

furnish a camp-mess in the minimum of time out of material that was

perhaps but a moment before sniffing or pecking at its rim. A very

little blaze sets the piece of cold fat swimming, and the black cavity

soon glows and splutters with extemporaneous content. But what dreams

howl about the camp-fires, what hideous scalping-humor creeps from the

leathery supper into the limbs and blood of the adventurous pioneer!

No better, and quite as scrofulous, has been the nourishment furnished

by the rhetorical time-servers and polished conventionalists, whose

gifts have been all directed against the highest good of the country's

mind, to offer sweets to its crying conscience, and draughts of fierce

or languid cordials to lull the uneasy moods of this fast-growing child

of Liberty. Such men are fabricators of smooth speech; they have brought

their gilding to put upon the rising pillars of the country, instead

of strength to plant them firmly in their places and to spread the

protecting roof. This period of storm will wash off their dainty

work. When the clean granite stands where it should to shelter the

four-and-thirty States as they walk the vast colonnades together, intent

upon the great interchanges of the country's thought and work, this

tinsel will not be missed; as men look upon the grave lines that

assure them of security, they will rejoice that the time for the truly

beautiful has arrived, and hasten to relieve the solid space with shapes

as durable as the imagination which conceives.

There must be a great people before there can be a great character in

its books, its instructions, or its works of art. This character is

prophesied only in part by what is said and thought while the people is

becoming great, and the molten constituents are sparkling as they run

into their future form. We have been so dependent upon traditional ideas

that we suppose an epic, for instance, to be the essential proof that

a people is alive and has something to express. Let us cease to wonder

whether there will ever be an American poem, an American symphony, or an

American Novum Organon. It is a sign of weakness and subservience: and

this is a period crowded with acts of emancipation. We cannot escape

from the past, if we would; we have a right to inherit all the previous

life of men that does not surfeit us and impede our proper work, but

let us stop our unavailing sighs for Iliads. The newspaper gathers and

circulates all true achievements faster than blind poets can plod round

with the story. The special form of the epic answered to a state of

society when the harper connected cities with his golden wire, slowly

unrolling its burden as he went. Vibrations travel faster now; men would

be foolish to expect that the new life will go journeying in classic

vehicles. When the imagination becomes free, it can invent forms equally

surprising and better adapted to the face of the country.

There is no part of this country which has not its broad characters and

tendencies, different from anything ever seen before, imperfect while

they are doomed to isolation, during which they show only a maimed and

grotesque vitality. The religious tendency is different, the humor is

different, the imagination differs from anything beyond the Atlantic.

And the East differs from the West, the North from the South; and

the Pacific States will have also to contribute gifts peculiar to

themselves, as the silt of the Sacramento glitters unlike that of the

Merrimac or the Potomac. We are not yet a People; but we have great,

vivid masses of popular life, which a century of literary expression

will not exhaust. All these passionate characters are running together

in this general danger, having seized a weapon: they have found an idea

in common, they are pervaded by their first really solemn feeling, they

issue the same word for the night from East to West. The nationality

thus commenced will introduce the tendency to blend in place of the

tendency to keep apart, and each other's gifts will pass sympathetically

from hand to hand.

The heightened life of this epoch is another cause which shall prepare

a great development of intellectual forms. Excitement and enthusiasm

pervade all classes of the people. All the primitive emotions of

the human heart--friendship, scorn, sympathy, human and religious

love--break into the liveliest expression, penetrate every quarter of

society; a great river is let loose from the rugged mountain-recesses of

the people; its waters, saturated with Nature's simple fertility, cover

the whole country, and will not retire without depositing their renewing

elements. A sincere and humble people Is feeling the exigency. A million

families have fitted out their volunteers with the most sumptuous of all

equipments, which no Government could furnish, love, tears of anxiety

and pride, last kisses and farewells, and prayers more heaven-cleaving

than a time of peace can breathe. What an invisible cloud of domestic

pathos overhung for a year the course of the Potomac, and settled upon

those huts and tents where the best part of home resided! what an ebb

and flow of letters, bearing solemnity and love upon their surface! what

anxiety among us, with all its brave housekeeping shifts, to keep want

from the door while labor is paralyzed, and the strong arms have beaten

their ploughshares into swords! What self-sacrifice of millions of

humble wives and daughters whose works and sorrows are now refining the

history of their country, and lifting the popular nobleness: they are

giving _all that they are_ to keep their volunteers in the field. The

flag waves over no such faithfulness; its stars sparkle not like this

sincerity. The feeling and heroism of women are enough to refresh and

to remould the generation. Like subtle lightning, the womanly nature

is penetrating the life of the age. From every railroad-station the

ponderous train bore off its freight of living valor, amid the cheers

of sympathizing thousands who clustered upon every shed and pillar, and

yearned forward as if to make their tumultuous feelings the motive

power to carry those dear friends away. What an ardent and unquenchable

emotion! Drums do not throb like these hearts, bullets do not patter

like these tears. There is not a power of the soul which is not

vitalized and expanded by these scenes. But long after the crowd

vanishes, there stands a woman at the corner, with a tired child asleep

upon her shoulder; the bosom does not heave so strongly as to break its

sleep. There are no regrets in the calm, proud face; no, indeed!--for it

is the face of our country, waiting to suffer and be strong for liberty,

and to put resolutely the dearest thing where it can serve mankind. In

her face read the history of the future as it shall be sung and written

by pens which shall not know whence their sharpened impulse springs; the

page shall reflect the working of that woman's face, daughter of the

people; and when exulting posterity shall draw new patriotism from it,

and declare that it is proud, pathetic, resolved, sublime, they shall

not yet call it by its Christian name, for that will be concealed with

moss upon her forgotten head-stone.

* * * * *

AN ORDER FOR A PICTURE.

O good painter, tell me true,

Has your hand the cunning to draw

Shapes of things that you never saw?

Ay? Well, here is an order for you.

Woods and cornfields, a little brown,--

The picture must not be over-bright,--

Yet all in the golden and gracious light

Of a cloud, when the summer sun is down.

Alway and alway, night and morn,

Woods upon woods, with fields of corn

Lying between them, not quite sere,

And not in the full, thick, leafy bloom,

When the wind can hardly find breathing-room

Under their tassels,--cattle near,

Biting shorter the short green grass,

And a hedge of sumach and sassafras,

With bluebirds twittering all around,--

(Ah, good painter, you can't paint sound!)--

These, and the house where I was born,

Low and little, and black and old,

With children, many as it can hold,

All at the windows, open wide,--

Heads and shoulders clear outside,

And fair young faces all ablush:

Perhaps you may have seen, some day,

Roses crowding the self-same way,

Out of a wilding, way-side bush.

Listen closer. When you have done

With woods and cornfields and grazing herds,

A lady, the loveliest ever the sun

Looked down upon, you must paint for me:

Oh, if I only could make you see

The clear blue eyes, the tender smile,

The sovereign sweetness, the gentle grace,

The woman's soul, and the angel's face

That are beaming on me all the while!

I need not speak these foolish words:

Yet one word tells you all I would say,--

She is my mother: you will agree

That all the rest may be thrown away.

Two little urchins at her knee

You must paint, Sir: one like me,--

The other with a clearer brow,

And the light of his adventurous eyes

Flashing with boldest enterprise:

At ten years old he went to sea,--

God knoweth if he be living now,--

He sailed in the good ship "Commodore,"--

Nobody ever crossed her track

To bring us news, and she never came back.

Ah, 'tis twenty long years and more

Since that old ship went out of the bay

With my great-hearted brother on her deck:

I watched him till he shrank to a speck,

And his face was toward me all the way.

Bright his hair was, a golden brown,

The time we stood at our mother's knee:

That beauteous head, if it did go down,

Carried sunshine into the sea!

Out in the fields one summer night

We were together, half afraid

Of the corn-leaves' rustling, and of the shade

Of the high hills, stretching so still and far,--

Loitering till after the low little light

Of the candle shone through the open door,

And over the hay-stack's pointed top,

All of a tremble, and ready to drop,

The first half-hour, the great yellow star,

That we, with staring, ignorant eyes,

Had often and often watched to see

Propped and held in its place in the skies

By the fork of a tall red mulberry-tree,

Which close in the edge of our flax-field grew,--

Dead at the top,--just one branch full

Of leaves, notched round, and lined with wool,

From which it tenderly shook the dew

Over our heads, when we came to play

In its handbreadth of shadow, day after day.

Afraid to go home, Sir; for one of us bore

A nest full of speckled and thin-shelled eggs,--

The other, a bird, held fast by the legs,

Not so big as a straw of wheat:

The berries we gave her she wouldn't eat,

But cried and cried, till we held her bill,

So slim and shining, to keep her still.

At last we stood at our mother's knee.

Do you think, Sir, if you try,

You can paint the look of a lie?

If you can, pray have the grace

To put it solely in the face

Of the urchin that is likest me:

I think't was solely mine, indeed:

But that's no matter,--paint it so;

The eyes of our mother--(take good heed)--

Looking not on the nest-full of eggs,

Nor the fluttering bird, held so fast by the legs,

But straight through our faces down to our lies,

And, oh, with such injured, reproachful surprise!

I felt my heart bleed where that glance went, as though

A sharp blade struck through it.

You, Sir, know,

That you on the canvas are to repeat

Things that are fairest, things most sweet,--

Woods and cornfields and mulberry-tree,--

The mother,--the lads, with their bird, at her knee:

But, oh, that look of reproachful woe!

High as the heavens your name I'll shout,

If you paint me the picture, and leave that out.

THE SOUTH BREAKER.

IN TWO PARTS

PART II.

Blue-fish were about done with, when one day Dan brought in some

mackerel from Boon Island: they hadn't been in the harbor for some time,

though now there was a probability of their return. So they were going

out when the tide served--the two boys--at midnight for mackerel, and

Dan had heard me wish for the experience so often, a long while ago,

that he said, Why shouldn't they take the girls? and Faith snatched at

the idea, and with that Mr. Gabriel agreed to fetch me at the hour, and

so we parted. I was kind of sorry, but there was no help for it.

When we started, it was in that clear crystal dark that looks as if you

could see through it forever till you reached infinite things, and we

seemed to be in a great hollow sphere, and the stars were like living

beings who had the night to themselves. Always, when I'm up late, I feel

as if it were something unlawful, as if affairs were in progress which

I had no right to witness, a kind of grand freemasonry. I've felt it

nights when I've been watching with mother, and there has come up across

the heavens the great caravan of constellations, and a star that I'd

pulled away the curtain on the east side to see came by-and-by and

looked in at the south window; but I never felt it as I did this night.

The tide was near the full, and so we went slipping down the dark water

by the starlight; and as we saw them shining above us, and then looked

down and saw them sparkling up from below,--the stars,--it really seemed

as if Dan's oars must be two long wings, as if we swam on them through a

motionless air. By-and-by we were in the island creek, and far ahead,

in a streak of wind that didn't reach us, we could see a pointed sail

skimming along between the banks, as if some ghost went before to show

us the way; and when the first hush and mystery wore off, Mr. Gabriel

was singing little French songs in tunes like the rise and fall of the

tide. While he sang, he rowed, and Dan was gangeing the hooks. At length

Dan took the oars again, and every now and then he paused to let us

float along with the tide as it slacked, and take the sense of the

night. And all the tall grass that edged the side began to wave in a

strange light, and there blew on a little breeze, and over the rim of

the world tipped up a waning moon. If there'd been anything needed to

make us feel as if we were going to find the Witch of Endor, it was

this. It was such a strange moon, pointing such a strange way, with such

a strange color, so remote, and so glassy,--it was like a dead moon, or

the spirit of one, and was perfectly awful.

"She has come to look at Faith," said Mr. Gabriel; for Faith, who once

would have been nodding here and there all about the boat, was sitting

up pale and sad, like another spirit, to confront it. But Dan and I both

felt a difference.

Mr. Gabriel, he stepped across and went and sat down behind Faith, and

laid his hand lightly on her arm. Perhaps he didn't mind that he touched

her,--he had a kind of absent air; but if any one had looked at the

nervous pressure of the slender fingers, they would have seen as much

meaning in that touch as in many an embrace; and Faith lifted her face

to his, and they forgot that I was looking at them, and into the eyes of

both there stole a strange deep smile,--and my soul groaned within me.

It made no odds to me then that the air blew warm off the land from

scented hay-ricks, that the moon hung like some exhumed jewel in the

sky, that all the perfect night was widening into dawn. I saw and felt

nothing but the wretchedness that must break one day on Dan's head.

Should I warn him? I couldn't do that. And what then?

The sail was up, we had left the headland and the hills, and when they

furled it and cast anchor we were swinging far out on the back of the

great monster that was frolicking to itself and thinking no more of us

than we do of a mote in the air. Elder Snow, he says that it's singular

we regard day as illumination and night as darkness,--day that really

hems us in with narrow light and shuts us upon ourselves, night that

sets us free and reveals to us all the secrets of the sky. I thought of

that when one by one the stars melted and the moon became a breath, and

up over the wide grayness crept color and radiance and the sun himself,

--the sky soaring higher and higher, like a great thin bubble of flaky

hues,--and, all about, nothing but the everlasting wash of waters

broke the sacred hush. And it seemed as if God had been with us, and

withdrawing we saw the trail of His splendid garments,--and I remembered

the words mother had spoken to Dan once before, and why couldn't I leave

him in heavenly hands? And then it came into my heart to pray. I knew I

hadn't any right to pray expecting to be heard; but yet mine would be

the prayer of the humble, and wasn't Faith of as much consequence as a

sparrow? By-and-by, as we all sat leaning over the gunwale, the words

of a hymn that I'd heard at camp-meetings came into my mind, and I sang

them out, loud and clear. I always had a good voice, though Dan 'd never

heard me do anything with it except hum little low things, putting

mother to sleep; but here I had a whole sky to sing in, and the hymns

were trumpet-calls. And one after another they kept thronging up, and

there was a rush of feeling in them that made you shiver, and as I sang

them they thrilled me through and through. Wide as the way before us

was, it seemed to widen; I felt myself journeying with some vast host

towards the city of God, and its light poured over us, and there was

nothing but joy and love and praise and exulting expectancy in my heart.

And when the hymn died on my lips because the words were too faint and

the tune was too weak for the ecstasy, and when the silence had soothed

me back again, I turned and saw Dan's lips bitten, and his cheek white,

and his eyes like stars, and Mr. Gabriel's face fallen forward in his

hands, and he shaking with quick sobs; and as for Faith,--Faith, she

had dropped asleep, and one arm was thrown above her head, and the other

lay where it had slipped from Mr. Gabriel's loosened grasp. There's a

contagion, you know, in such things, but Faith was never of the catching

kind.

Well, this wasn't what we'd come for,--turning all out-doors into a

church,--though what's a church but a place of God's presence? and for

my part, I never see high blue sky and sunshine without feeling that.

And all of a sudden there came a school of mackerel splashing and

darkening and curling round the boat, after the bait we'd thrown out on

anchoring. 'Twould have done you good to see Dan just at that moment;

you'd have realized what it was to have a calling. He started up,

forgetting everything else, his face all flushed, his eyes like coals,

his mouth tight and his tongue silent; and how many hooks he had out I'm

sure I don't know, but he kept jerking them in by twos and threes, and

finally they bit at the bare barb and were taken without any bait at

all, just as if they'd come and asked to be caught. Mr. Gabriel, he

didn't pay any attention at first, but Dan called to him to stir

himself, and so gradually he worked back into his old mood; but he was

more still and something sad all the rest of the morning. Well, when

we'd gotten about enough, and they were dying in the boat there, as they

cast their scales, like the iris, we put in-shore; and building a fire,

we cooked our own dinner and boiled our own coffee. Many's the icy

winter-night I've wrapped up Dan's bottle of hot coffee in rolls on

rolls of flannel, that he might drink it hot and strong far out at sea

in a wherry at daybreak!

But as I was saying,--all this time, Mr. Gabriel, he scarcely looked at

Faith. At first she didn't comprehend, and then something swam all over

her face as if the very blood in her veins had grown darker, and there

was such danger in her eye that before we stepped into the boat again

I wished to goodness I had a life-preserver. But in the beginning the

religious impression lasted and gave him great resolutions; and then

strolling off and along the beach, he fell in with some men there and

did as he always did, scraped acquaintance. I verily believe that these

men were total strangers, that he'd never laid eyes on them before, and

after a few words he wheeled about. As he did so, his glance fell on

Faith standing there alone against the pale sky, for the weather 'd

thickened, and watching the surf break at her feet. He was motionless,

gazing at her long, and then, when he had turned once or twice

irresolutely, he ground his heel into the sand and went back. The men

rose and wandered on with him, and they talked together for a while, and

I saw money pass; and pretty soon Mr. Gabriel returned, his face vividly

pallid, but smiling, and he had in his hand some little bright shells

that you don't often find on these Northern beaches, and he said he had

bought them of those men. And all this time he'd not spoken with Faith,

and there was the danger yet in her eye. But nothing came of it, and I

had accused myself of nearly every crime in the Decalogue, and on the

way back we had put up the lines, and Mr. Gabriel had hauled in the

lobster-net for the last time. He liked that branch of the business;

he said it had all the excitement of gambling,--the slow settling

downwards, the fading of the last ripple, the impenetrable depth and

shade and the mystery of the work below, five minutes of expectation,

and it might bring up a scale of the sea-serpent, or the king of the

crabs might have crept in for a nap in the folds, or it might come up

as if you'd dredged for pearls, or it might hold the great

backward-crawling lobsters, or a tangle of seaweed, or the long yellow

locks of some drowned girl,--or nothing at all. So he always drew in

that net, and it needed muscle, and his was like steel,--not good for

much in the long pull, but just for a breathing could handle the biggest

boatman in the harbor. Well,--and we'd hoisted the sail and were in the

creek once more, for the creek was only to be used at high-water, and

I'd told Dan I couldn't be away from mother over another tide and so we

mustn't get aground, and he'd told me not to fret, there was nothing too

shallow for us on the coast--"This boat," said Dan, "she'll float in a

heavy dew." And he began singing a song he liked:--

"I cast my line in Largo Bay,

And fishes I caught nine:

There's three to boil, and three to fry,

And three to bait the line."

And Mr. Gabriel 'd never heard it before, and he made him sing it again

and again.

"The boatie rows, the boatie rows,

The boatie rows indeed,"

repeated Mr. Gabriel, and he said it was the only song he knew that held

the click of the oar in the rowlock.

The little birds went skimming by us, as we sailed, their breasts upon

the water, and we could see the gunners creeping through the marshes

beside them.

"The wind changes," said Mr. Gabriel. "The equinox treads close behind

us. Sst! Is it that you do not feel its breath? And you hear nothing?"

"It's the Soul of the Bar," said Dan; and he fell to telling us one

of the wild stories that fishermen can tell each other by the lantern

rocking outside at night in the dory.

The wind was dead east, and now we flew before it, and now we tacked in

it, up and up the winding stream, and always a little pointed sail came

skimming on in suit.

"What sail is that, Dan?" asked I. "It looks like the one that flitted

ahead this morning."

"It is the one," said Dan,--for he'd brought up a whole horde of

superstitious memories, and a gloom that had been hovering off and on

his face settled there for good. "As much of a one as that was. It's no

sail at all. It's a death-sign. And I've never been down here and seen

it but trouble was on its heels. Georgie! there's two of them!"

We all looked, but it was hidden in a curve, and when it stole in sight

again there _were_ two of them, filmy and faint as spirits' wings,--and

while we gazed they vanished, whether supernaturally or in the mist that

was rising mast-high I never thought, for my blood was frozen as it ran.

"You have fear?" asked Mr. Gabriel,--his face perfectly pale, and his

eye almost lost in darkness. "If it is a phantom, it can do you no

harm."

Faith's teeth chattered,--I saw them. He turned to her, and as their

look met, a spot of carnation burned into his cheek almost as a brand

would have burned. He seemed to be balancing some point, to be searching

her and sifting her; and Faith half rose, proudly, and pale, as if his

look pierced her with pain. The look was long,--but before it fell, a

glow and sparkle filled the eyes, and over his face there curled the

deep, strange smile of the morning, till the long lids and heavy lashes

dropped and made it sad. And Faith,--she started in a new surprise, the

darkness gathered and crept off her face as cream wrinkles from milk,

and spleen or venom or what-not became absorbed again and lost, and

there was nothing in her glance but passionate forgetfulness. Some souls

are like the white river-lilies,--fixed, yet floating; but Mr. Gabriel

had no firm root anywhere, and was blown about with every breeze, like a

leaf on the flood. His purposes melted and made with his moods.

The wind got round more to the north, the mist fell upon the waters or

blew away over the meadows, and it was cold. Mr. Gabriel wrapped the

cloak about Faith and fastened it, and tied her bonnet. Just now Dan was

so busy handling the boat--and it's rather risky, you have to wriggle up

the creek so--that he took little notice of us. Then Mr. Gabriel stood

up, as if to change his position; and taking off his hat, he held it

aloft, while he passed the other hand across his forehead. And leaning

against the mast, he stood so, many minutes.

"Dan," I said, "did your spiritual craft ever hang out a purple

pennant?"

"No," said Dan.

"Well," says I. And we all saw a little purple ribbon running up the

rope and streaming on the air behind us.

"And why do we not hoist our own?" said Mr. Gabriel, putting on his hat.

And suiting the action to the word, a little green signal curled up and

flaunted above us like a bunch of the weed floating there in the water

beneath and dyeing all the shallows so that they looked like caves of

cool emerald, and wide off and over them the west burned smoulderingly

red like a furnace. Many a time since, I've felt the magical color

between those banks and along those meadows, but then I felt none of it;

every wit I had was too awake and alert and fast-fixed in watching.

"Is it that the phantoms can be flesh and blood?" said Mr. Gabriel

laughingly; and lifting his arm again, he hailed the foremost.

"Boat ahoy! What names?" said he.

The answer came back on the wind full and round.

"'Speed,' and 'Follow.'"

"Where from?" asked Dan, with just a glint in his eye,--for usually he

knew every boat on the river, but he didn't know these.

"From the schooner Flyaway, taking in sand over at Black Rocks."

Then Mr. Gabriel spoke again, as they drew near,--but whether he spoke

so fast that I couldn't understand, or whether he spoke French, I never

knew; and Dan, with some kind of feeling that it was Mr. Gabriel's

acquaintance, suffered the one we spoke to pass us.

Once or twice Mr. Gabriel had begun some question to Dan about the

approaching weather, but had turned it off again before anybody could

answer. You see he had some little nobility left, and didn't want the

very man he was going to injure to show him how to do it. Now, however,

he asked him that was steering the Speed by, if it was going to storm.

The man thought it was.

"How is it, then, that your schooner prepares to sail?"

"Oh, wind's backed in; we'll be on blue water before the gale breaks, I

reckon, and then beat off where there's plenty of sea-room."

"But she shall make shipwreck!"

"'Not if the court know herself, and he think she do,'" was the reply

from another, as they passed.

Somehow I began to hate myself, I was so full of poisonous suspicions.

How did Mr. Gabriel know the schooner prepared to sail? And this man,

could he tell boom from bowsprit? I didn't believe it; he had the hang

of the up-river folks. But there stood Mr. Gabriel, so quiet and easy,

his eyelids down, and he humming an underbreath of song; and there sat

Faith, so pale and so pretty, a trifle sad, a trifle that her conscience

would brew for her, whether or no. Yet, after all, there was an odd

expression in Mr. Gabriel's face, an eager, restless expectation; and if

his lids were lowered, it was only to hide the spark that flushed and

quenched in his eye like a beating pulse.

We had reached the draw, it was lifted for the Speed, she had passed,

and the wind was in her sail once more. Yet, somehow, she hung back. And

then I saw that the men in her were of those with whom Mr. Gabriel had

spoken at noon. Dan's sail fell slack, and we drifted slowly through,

while he poled us along with an oar.

"Look out, Georgie!" said Dan, for he thought I was going to graze my

shoulder upon the side there. I looked; and when I turned again, Mr.

Gabriel was rising up from some earnest and hurried sentence to Faith.

And Faith, too, was standing, standing and swaying with indecision, and

gazing away out before her,--so flushed and so beautiful,--so loath and

so willing. Poor thing! poor thing! as if her rising in itself were not

the whole!

Mr. Gabriel stepped across the boat, stooped a minute, and then also

took an oar. How perfect he was, as he stood there that moment!--perfect

like a statue, I mean,--so slender, so clean-limbed, his dark face pale

to transparency in the green light that filtered through the draw! and

then a ray from the sunset came creeping over the edge of the high

fields and smote his eyes sidelong so that they glowed like jewels, and

he with his oar planted firmly hung there bending far back with it,

completely full of strength and grace.

"It is not the _bateaux_ in the rapids," said he.

"What are you about?" asked Dan, with sudden hoarseness. "You are

pulling the wrong way!"

Mr. Gabriel laughed, and threw down his oar, and stepped back again;

gave his hand to Faith, and half led, half lifted her, over the side,

and into the Speed, followed, and never looked behind him. They let

go something they had held, the Speed put her nose in the water and

sprinkled us with spray, plunged, and dashed off like an arrow.

It was like him,--daring and insolent coolness! Just like him! Always

the soul of defiance! None but one so reckless and impetuous as he would

have dreamed of flying into the teeth of the tempest in that shell of a

schooner. But he was mad with love, and they--there wasn't a man among

them but was the worse for liquor.

For a moment Dan took it, as Mr. Gabriel had expected him to do, as a

joke, and went to trim the boat for racing, not meaning they should

reach town first. But I--I saw It all.

"Dan!" I sung out, "save her! She's not coming back! They'll make for

the schooner at Black Rocks! Oh, Dan, he's taken her off!"

Now one whose intelligence has never been trained, who shells his five

wits and gets rid of the pods as best he can, mayn't be so quick as

another, but, like an animal, he feels long before he sees; and a vague

sense of this had been upon Dan all day. Yet now he stood thunderstruck,

and the thing went on before his very eyes. It was more than he could

believe at once,--and perhaps his first feeling was, Why should he

hinder? And then the flood fell. No thought of his loss,--though loss it

wa'n't,--only of his friend,--of such stunning treachery, that, if

the sun fell hissing into the sea at noon, it would have mattered

less,--only of _that_ loss that tore his heart out with it.

"Gabriel!" he shouted,--"Gabriel!" And his voice was heart-rending. I

know that Mr. Gabriel felt it, for he never turned nor stirred.

Then I don't know what came over Dan: a blind rage swelling in his heart

seemed to make him larger in every limb; he towered like a flame. He

sprang to the tiller, but, as he did so, saw with one flash of his eye

that Mr. Gabriel had unshipped the rudder and thrown it away. He seized

an oar to steer with in its place; he saw that they, in their ignorance

fast edging on the flats, would shortly be aground; more fisherman than

sailor, he knew a thousand tricks of boat-craft that they had never

heard of. We flew, we flew through cloven ridges, we became a wind

ourselves, and while I tell it he was beside them, had gathered himself

as if to leap the chasm between time and eternity, and had landed among

them in the Speed. The wherry careened with the shock and the water

poured into her, and she flung headlong and away as his foot spurned

her. Heaven knows why she didn't upset, for I thought of nothing but the

scene before me as I drifted off from it. I shut the eyes in my soul

now, that I mayn't see that horrid scuffle twice. Mr. Gabriel, he rose,

he turned. If Dan was the giant beside him, he himself was so well-knit,

so supple, so adroit, that his power was like the blade in the hand.

Dan's strength was lying round loose, but Mr. Gabriel's was trained, it

hid like springs of steel between brain and wrist, and from him the clap

fell with the bolt. And then, besides, Dan did not love Faith, and he

did love Gabriel. Any one could see how it would go. I screamed. I

cried, "Faith! Faith!" And some natural instinct stirred in Faith's

heart, for she clung to Mr. Gabriel's arm to pull him off from Dan. But

he shook her away like rain. Then such a mortal weakness took possession

of me that I saw everything black, and, when it was clean gone, I

looked, and they were locked in each other's arms, fierce, fierce and

fell, a death-grip. They were staggering to the boat's edge: only this I

saw, that Mr. Gabriel was inside: suddenly the helmsman interposed with

an oar, and broke their grasps. Mr. Gabriel reeled away, free, for a

second; then, the passion, the fury, the hate in his heart feeding his

strength as youth fed the locks of Samson, he darted, and lifted Dan in

his two arms and threw him like a stone into the water. Stiffened to

ice, I waited for Dan to rise; the other craft, the Follow, skimmed

between us, and one man managing her that she shouldn't heel, the rest

drew Dan in,--it's not the depth of two foot there,--tacked about, and

after a minute came along-side, seized our painter, and dropped him

gently into his own boat. Then--for the Speed had got afloat again--the

thing stretched her two sails wing and wing, and went ploughing up a

great furrow of foam before her.

I sprang to Dan. He was not senseless, but in a kind of stupor: his head

had struck the fluke of a half-sunk anchor and it had stunned him, but

as the wound bled he recovered slowly and opened his eyes. Ah, what

misery was in them! I turned to the fugitives. They were yet in sight,

Mr. Gabriel sitting and seeming to adjure Faith, whose skirts he

held; but she stood, and her arms were outstretched, and, pale as a

foam-wreath her face, and piercing as a night-wind her voice, I heard

her cry, "Oh, Georgie! Georgie!" It was too late for her to cry or to

wring her hands now. She should have thought of that before. But Mr.

Gabriel rose and drew her down, and hid her face in his arms and bent

over it; and so they fled up the basin and round the long line of sand,

and out into the gloom and the curdling mists.

I bound up Dan's head. I couldn't steer with an oar,--that was out of

the question,--but, as luck would have it, could row tolerably; so I got

down the little mast, and at length reached the wharves. The town-lights

flickered up in the darkness and flickered back from the black rushing

river, and then out blazed the great mills; and as I felt along, I

remembered times when we'd put in by the tender sunset, as the rose

faded out of the water and the orange ebbed down the west, and one by

one the sweet evening-bells chimed forth, so clear and high, and each

with a different tone, that it seemed as if the stars must flock,

tinkling, into the sky. And here were the bells ringing out again,

ringing out of the gray and the gloom, dull and brazen, as if they rang

from some cavern of shadows, or from the mouth of hell,--but no, _that_

was down-river! Well, I made my way, and the men on the landing took up

Dan, and helped him in and got him on my little bed, and no sooner there

than the heavy sleep with which he had struggled fell on him like lead.

The story flew from mouth to mouth, the region rang with it; nobody had

any need to add to it, or to make it out a griffin or a dragon that had

gripped Faith and carried her off in his talons. But everybody declared

that those boats could be no ship's yawls at all, but must belong to

parties from up-river camping out on the beach, and that a parcel of

such must have gone sailing with some of the hands of a sand-droger:

there was one in the stream now, that had got off with the tide, said

the Jerdan boys, who'd been down there that afternoon, though there was

no such name as "Flyaway" on her stern, and they were waiting for the

master of her, who'd gone off on a spree,--a dare-devil fellow, that

used to run a smuggler between Bordeaux and Bristol, as they'd heard

say: and all agreed that Mr. Gabriel could never have had to do with

them before that day, or he'd have known what a place a sand-droger

would be for a woman; and everybody made excuses for Gabriel, and

everybody was down on Faith. So there things lay. It was raw and chill

when the last neighbor left us, the sky was black as a cloak, not a star

to be seen, the wind had edged back to the east again and came in wet

and wild from the sea and fringed with its thunder. Oh, poor little

Faith, what a night! what a night for her!

I went back and sat down by Dan, and tried to keep his head cool. Father

was up walking the kitchen-floor till late, but at length he lay down

across the foot of mother's bed, as if expecting to be called. The

lights were put out, there was no noise in the town, every one

slept,--every one, except they watched like me, on that terrible night.

No noise in the town, did I say? Ah, but there was! It came creeping

round the corners, it poured rushing up the street, it rose from

everywhere,--a voice, a voice of woe, the heavy booming rote of the

sea. I looked out, but it was pitch-dark, light had forsaken the world,

we were beleaguered by blackness. It grew colder, as if one felt a fog

fall, and the wind, mounting slowly, now blew a gale. It eddied in

clouds of dead and whirling leaves, and sent big torn branches flying

aloft; it took the house by the four corners and shook it to loosening

the rafters, and I felt the chair rock under me; it rumbled down the

chimney as if it would tear the life out of us. And with every fresh

gust of the gale the rain slapped against the wall, the rain that fell

in rivers, and went before the wind in sheets,--and sheltered as I was,

the torrents seemed to pour over me like cataracts, and every drop

pierced me like a needle, and I put my fingers in my ears to shut out

the howl of the wind and the waves. I couldn't keep my thoughts away

from Faith. Oh, poor girl, this wasn't what she'd expected! As plainly

as if I were aboard-ship I felt the scene, the hurrying feet, the

slippery deck, the hoarse cries, the creaking cordage, the heaving and

plunging and straining, and the wide wild night. And I was beating

off those dreadful lines with them, two dreadful lines of white froth

through the blackness, two lines where the horns of breakers guard the

harbor,--all night long beating off the lee with them, my life in my

teeth, and chill, blank, shivering horror before me. My whole soul, my

whole being, was fixed in that one spot, that little vessel driving on

the rocks: it seemed as if a madness took possession of me, I reeled

as I walked, I forefelt the shivering shock, I waited till she should

strike. And then I thought I heard cries, and I ran out in the storm,

and down upon the causeway, but nothing met me but the hollow night and

the roaring sea and the wind. I came back, and hurried up and down and

wrung my hands in an agony. Pictures of summer nights flashed upon me

and faded,--where out of deep-blue vaults the stars hung like lamps,

great and golden,--or where soft films just hazing heaven caught the

rays, till all above gleamed like gauze faintly powdered and spangled

with silver,--or heavy with heat, slipping over silent waters, through

scented airs, under purple skies. And then storms rolled in and rose

before my eyes, distinct for a moment, and breaking,--such as I'd seen

them from the Shoals in broad daylight, when tempestuous columns

scooped themselves up from the green gulfs and shattered in loam on

the shuddering rock,--ah! but that was day, and this was midnight and

murk!--storms as I'd heard tell of them off Cape Race, when great

steamers went down with but one cry, and the waters crowded them out of

sight,--storms where, out of the wilderness of waves that far and wide

wasted white around, a single one came ploughing on straight to the

mark, gathering its grinding masses mast-high, poising, plunging, and

swamping and crashing them into bottomless pits of destruction,--storms

where waves toss and breakers gore, where, hanging on crests that slip

from under, reefs impale the hull, and drowning wretches cling to the

crags with stiffening hands, and the sleet ices them, and the spray, and

the sea lashes and beats them with great strokes and sucks them down

to death: and right in the midst of it all there burst a gun,--one,

another, and no more. "Oh, Faith! Faith!" I cried again, and I ran and

hid my head in the bed.

How long did I stay so? An hour, or maybe two. Dan was still dead with

sleep, but mother had no more closed an eye than I. There was no rain

now, the wind had fallen, the dark had lifted; I looked out once more,

and could just see dimly the great waters swinging in the river from

bank to bank. I drew the bucket fresh, and bound the cloths cold on

Dan's head again. I hadn't a thought in my head, and I fell to counting

the meshes in the net that hung from the wall, but in my ears there was

the everlasting rustle of the sea and shore. It grew clearer,--it got

to being a universal gray; there'd been no sunrise, but it was day.

Dan stirred,--he turned over heavily; then he opened his eyes wide and

looked about him.

"I've had such a fright!" he said. "Georgie! is that you?"

With that it swept over him afresh, and he fell back. In a moment or two

he tried to rise, but he was weak as a child. He contrived to keep on

his elbow a moment, though, and to give a look out of the window.

"It came on to blow, didn't it?" he asked; but there he sank down again.

"I can't stay so!" he murmured soon. "I can't stay so! Here,--I must

tell you. Georgie, get out the spy-glass, and go up on the roof and

look over. I've had a dream, I tell you! I've had a dream. Not that

either,--but it's just stamped on me! It was like a storm,--and I

dreamed that that schooner--the Flyaway--had parted. And the half of

her's crashed down just as she broke, and Faith and that man are high

up on the bows in the middle of the South Breaker! Make haste, Georgie!

Christ! make haste!"

I flew to the drawers and opened them, and began to put the spy-glass

together. Suddenly he cried out again,--

"Oh, here's where the fault was! What right had I ever to marry the

child, not loving her? I bound her! I crushed her! I stifled her! If she

lives, it is my sin; if she dies, I murder her!"

He hid his face, as he spoke, so that his voice came thick, and great

choking groans rent their way up from his heart.

All at once, as I looked up, there stood mother, in her long white gown,

beside the bed, and bending over and taking Dan's hot head in her two

hands.

"Behold, He cometh with clouds!" she whispered.

It always did seem to me as if mother had the imposition of

hands,--perhaps every one feels just so about their mother,--but only

her touch always lightens an ache for me, whether it's in the heart or

the head.

"Oh, Aunt Rhody," said Dan, looking up in her face with his distracted

eyes, "can't you help me?"

"I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help,"

said mother.

"There's no help, there!" called Dan. "There's no God there! He wouldn't

have let a little child run into her damnation!"

"Hush, hush, Dan!" murmured mother. "Faith never can have been at sea in

such a night as this, and not have felt God's hand snatching her out of

sin. If she lives, she's a changed woman; and if she dies, her soul is

whitened and fit to walk with saints. Through much tribulation."

"Yes, yes," muttered father, in the room beyond, spitting on his hands,

as if he were going to take hold of the truth by the handle,--"it's best

to clean up a thing with the first spot, and not wait for it to get all

rusty with crime."

"And he!" said Dan,--"and he,--that man,--Gabriel!"

"Between the saddle and the ground

If mercy's asked, mercy's found,"

said I.

"Are you there yet, Georgie?" he cried, turning to me. "Here! I'll go

myself!" But he only stumbled and fell on the bed again.

"In all the terror and the tempest of these long hours,--for there's

been a fearful storm, though you haven't felt it," said mother,--"in all

that, Mr. Gabriel can't have slept. But at first it must have been that

great dread appalled him, and he may have been beset with sorrow. He'd

brought her to this. But at last, for he's no coward, he has looked

death in the face and not flinched; and the danger, and the grandeur

there is in despair, have lifted his spirit to great heights,--heights

found now in an hour, but which in a whole life long he never would have

gained,--heights from which he has seen the light of God's face and been

transfigured in it,--heights where the soul dilates to a stature it can

never lose. Oh, Dan, there's a moment, a moment when the dross strikes

off, and the impurities, and the grain sets, and there comes out the

great white diamond. For by grace are ye saved, through faith, and that

not of yourselves, it is the gift of God,--of Him that maketh the seven

stars and Orion, and turneth the shadow of death into the morning. Oh, I

_will_ believe that Mr. Gabriel hadn't any need to grope as we do, but

that suddenly he saw the Heavenly Arm and clung to it, and the grasp

closed round him, and death and hell can have no power over him now.

Dan, poor boy, is it better to lie in the earth with the ore than to

be forged in the furnace and beaten to a blade fit for the hands of

archangels?"

And mother stopped, trembling like a leaf.

I'd been wiping and screwing the glass, and I'd waited a breath, for

mother always talked so like a preacher; but when she'd finished, after

a second or two Dan looked up, and said, as if he'd just come in--

"Aunt Rhody! how come you out of bed?"

And then mother, she got upon the bed, and she took Dan's head on her

breast and fell to stroking his brows, laying her cool palms on his

temples and on his eyelids, as once I'd have given my ears to do,--and I

slipped out of the room.

Oh, I hated to go up those stairs, to mount that ladder, to open the

scuttle! And once there, I waited and waited before I dared to look. The

night had unnerved me. At length I fixed the glass. I swept the broad

swollen stream, to the yellowing woods, and over the meadows, where a

pale transient beam crept under and pried up the hay-cocks,--the smoke

that began to curl from the chimneys and fall as soon,--the mists

blowing off from Indian Hill, but brooding blue and dense down the

turnpike, and burying the red spark of the moon, that smothered like a

half-dead coal in her ashes,--anywhere, anywhere but that spot! I don't

know why it was, but I couldn't level the glass there,--my arm would

fall, my eye haze. Finally I brought it round nearer and tried again.

Everywhere, as far as your eye could reach, the sea was yeasty and white

with froth, and great streaks of it were setting up the inky river,

and against it there were the twin light-houses quivering their little

yellow rays as if to mock the dawn, and far out on the edge of day the

great light at the Isles of Shoals blinked and blinked, crimson and

gold, fainter and fainter, and lost at last. It was no use, I didn't

dare point it, my hand trembled so I could see nothing plain, when

suddenly an engine went thundering over the bridge and startled me into

stillness. The tube slung in my hold and steadied against the chimney,

and there----What was it in the field? what ghastly picture?

The glass crashed from my hand, and I staggered shrieking down the

ladder.

The sound wasn't well through my lips, when the door slammed, and Dan

had darted out of the house and to the shore. I after him. There was a

knot sitting and standing round there in the gray, shivering, with their

hands in their pockets and their pipes set in their teeth; but the gloom

was on them as well, and the pipes went out between the puffs.

"Where's Dennis's boat?" Dan demanded, as he strode.

"The six-oar's all the one not"----

"The six-oar I want. Who goes with me?"

There wasn't a soul in the ward but would have followed Dan's lead to

the end of the world and jumped off; and before I could tell their names

there were three men on the thwarts, six oars in the air, Dan stood in

the bows, a word from him, and they shot away.

I watched while I could see, and then in and up to the attic, forgetting

to put mother in her bed, forgetting all things but the one. And there

lay the glass broken. I sat awhile with the pieces in my hand, as if I'd

lost a kingdom; then down, and mechanically put things to rights, and

made mother comfortable,--and she's never stood on her feet from that

day to this. At last I seated myself before the fire, and stared into it

to blinding.

"Won't some one lend you a glass, Georgie?" said mother.

"Of course they will!" I cried,--for, you see, I hadn't a wit of my

own,--and I ran out.

There's a glass behind every door in the street, you should know, and

there's no day in the year that you'll go by and not see one stretching

from some roof where the heart of the house is out on the sea. Oh,

sometimes I think all the romance of the town is clustered down here on

the Flats and written in pale cheeks and starting eyes. But what's the

use? After one winter, one, I gave mine away, and never got another.

It's just an emblem of despair. Look, and look again, and look till your

soul sinks, and the thing you want never crosses it; but you're down in

the kitchen stirring a porridge, or you're off at a neighbor's asking

the news, and somebody shouts at you round the corner, and there, black

and dirty and dearer than gold, she lies between the piers.

All the world was up on their house-tops spying, that morning, but there

was nobody would keep their glass while I had none; so I went back

armed, and part of it all I saw, and part of it father told me.

I waited till I thought they were 'most across, and then I rubbed the

lens. At first I saw nothing, and I began to quake with a greater fear

than any that had yet taken root in me. But with the next moment there

they were, pulling close up. I shut my eyes for a flash with some kind

of a prayer that was most like an imprecation, and when I looked again

they had dashed over and dashed over, taking the rise of the long roll,

and were in the midst of the South Breaker. O God! that terrible South

Breaker! The oars bent lithe as willow-switches, a moment they

skimmed on the caps, a moment were hid in the snow of the spray. Dan,

red-shirted, still stood there, his whole soul on the aim before him,

like that of some leaper flying through the air; he swayed to the

stroke, he bowed, he rose, perfectly balanced, and flexile as the wave.

The boat behaved beneath their hands like a live creature: she bounded

so that you almost saw the light under her; her whole steal lifted

itself slowly out of the water, caught the back of a roller and rode

over upon the next; the very things that came rushing in with their

white rage to devour her bent their necks and bore her up like a bubble.

Constantly she drew nearer that dark and shattered heap up to which the

fierce surf raced, and over which it leaped. And there all the time, all

the time, they had been clinging, far out on the bowsprit, those two

figures, her arms close-knit about him, he clasping her with one, the

other twisted in the hawser, whose harsh thrilling must have filled

their ears like an organ-note as it swung them to and fro,--clinging

to life,--clinging to each other more than to life. The wreck scarcely

heaved with the stoutest blow of the tremendous surge; here and there,

only, a plank shivered off and was bowled on and thrown high upon the

beach beside fragments of beams broken and bruised to a powder; it

seemed to be as firmly planted there as the breaker itself. Great

feathers of foam flew across it, great waves shook themselves thin

around it and veiled it in shrouds, and with their every breath the

smothering sheets dashed over them,--the two. And constantly the boat

drew nearer, as I said; they were almost within hail; Dan saw her hair

streaming on the wind; he waited only for the long wave. On it came,

that long wave,--oh! I can see it now!--plunging and rearing and

swelling, a monstrous billow, sweeping and swooning and rocking in. Its

hollows gaped with slippery darkness, it towered and sent the scuds

before its trembling crest, breaking with a mighty rainbow as the sun

burst forth, it fell in a white blindness everywhere, rushed seething up

the sand,--and the bowsprit was bare!----

When father came home, the rack had driven down the harbor and left

clear sky; it was near nightfall; they'd been searching the shore all

day,--to no purpose. But that rainbow,--I always took it for a sign.

Father was worn out, yet he sat in the chimney-side, cutting off great

quids and chewing and thinking and sighing. At last he went and wound up

the clock,--it was the stroke of twelve,--and then he turned to me and

said,--

"Dan sent you this, Georgie. He hailed a pilot-boat, and's gone to the

Cape to join the fall fleet to the fish'ries; and he sent you this."

It was just a great hand-grip to make your nails purple, but there was

heart's-blood in it. See, there's the mark to-day.

So there was Dan off in the Bay of Chaleur. It was the best place for

him. And I went about my work once more. There was a great gap in my

life, but I tried not to look at it. I durstn't think of Dan, and I

wouldn't think of them,--the two. Always in such times it's as if a

breath had come and blown across the pool and you could see down its

dark depths and into the very bottom, but time scums it all over again.

And I tell you it's best to look trouble in the face: if you don't,

you'll have more of it. So I got a lot of shoes to bind, and what part

of my spare time I wa'n't at my books the needle flew. But I turned no

more to the past than I could help, and the future trembled too much to

be seen.

Well, the two months dragged away, it got to be Thanksgiving-week, and

at length the fleet was due. I mind me I made a great baking that

week; and I put brandy into the mince for once, instead of vinegar and

dried-apple juice,--and there were the fowls stuffed and trussed on

the shelf,--and the pumpkin-pies like slices of split gold,--and the

cranberry-tarts, plats of crimson and puffs of snow,--and I was brewing

in my mind a right-royal red Indian-pudding to come out of the oven

smoking hot and be soused with thick clots of yellow cream,--when one of

the boys ran in and told us the fleet'd got back, but no Dan with it,

--he'd changed over to a fore-and-after, and wouldn't be home at all,

but was to stay down in the Georges all winter, and he'd sent us word.

Well, the baking went to the dogs, or the Thanksgiving beggars, which is

the same thing.

Then days went by, as days will, and it was well into the New Year.

I used to sit there at the window, reading,--but the lines would run

together, and I'd forget what 'twas all about, and gather no sense, and

the image of the little fore-and-after, the "Feather," raked in between

the leaves, and at last I had to put all that aside; and then I sat

stitching, stitching, but got into a sad habit of looking up and looking

out each time I drew the thread. I felt it was a shame of me to be so

glum, and mother missed my voice; but I could no more talk than I could

have given conundrums to King Solomon, and as for singing--Oh, I used to

long so for just a word from Dan!

We'd had dry fine weeks all along, and father said he'd known we should

have just such a season, because the goose's breast-bone was so white;

but St. Valentine's day the weather broke, broke in a chain of storms

that the September gale was a whisper to. Ah, it was a dreadful winter,

that! You've surely heard of it. It made forty widows in our town. Of

the dead that were found on Prince Edward's Island's shores there were

four corpses in the next house yonder, and two in the one behind. And

what waiting and watching and cruel pangs of suspense for them that

couldn't have even the peace of certainty! And I was one of those.

The days crept on, I say, and got bright again; no June days ever

stretched themselves to half such length; there was perfect stillness in

the house,--it seemed to me that I counted every tick of the clock. In

the evenings the neighbors used to drop in and sit mumbling over their

fearful memories till the flesh crawled on my bones. Father, then, he

wanted cheer, and he'd get me to singing "Caller Herrin'." Once, I'd

sung the first part, but as I reached the lines,--

"When ye were sleepin' on your pillows,

Dreamt ye aught o' our puir fellows

Darklin' as they face the billows,

A' to fill our woven willows,"--

as I reached those lines, my voice trembled so's to shake the tears out

of my eyes, and Jim Jerdan took it up himself and sung it through for

me to words of his own invention. He was always a kindly fellow, and he

knew a little how the land lay between me and Dan.

"When I was down in the Georges," said Jim Jerdan----

"You? When was you down there?" asked father.

"Well,--once I was. There's worse places."

"Can't tell me nothing about the Georges," said father. "'Ta'n't the

rivers of Damascus exactly, but 'ta'n't the Marlstrom neither."

"Ever ben there, Cap'n?"

"A few. Spent more nights under cover roundabouts than Georgie'll have

white hairs in her head,--for all she's washing the color out of her

eyes now."

You see, father knew I set by my hair,--for in those days I rolled it

thick as a cable, almost as long, black as that cat's back,--and he

thought he'd touch me up a little.

"Wash the red from her cheek and the light from her look, and she'll

still have the queen's own tread," said Jim.

"If Loisy Currier'd heern that, you'd wish your cake was dough," says

father.

"I'll resk it," says Jim. "Loisy knows who's second choice, as well as

if you told her."

"But what about the Georges, Jim?" I asked; for though I hated to hear,

I could listen to nothing else.

"Georges? Oh, not much. Just like any other place."

"But what do you do down there?"

"Do? Why, we fish,--in the pleasant weather."

"And when it's not pleasant?"

"Oh, then we make things taut, hoist fores'l, clap the hellum into the

lee becket, and go below and amuse ourselves."

"How?" I asked, as if I hadn't heard it all a hundred times.

"One way 'n' another. Pipes, and mugs, and poker, if it a'n't too rough;

and if it is, we just bunk and snooze till it gets smooth."

"Why, Jim,--how do you know when that is?"

"Well, you can jedge,--'f the pipe falls out of your pocket and don't

light on the ceiling."

"And who's on deck?"

"There's no one on deck. There's no danger, no trouble, no nothing.

Can't drive ashore, if you was to try: hundred miles off, in the first

place. Hatches are closed, she's light as a cork, rolls over and over

just like any other log in the water, and there can't a drop get into

her, if she turns bottom-side up."

"But she never can right herself!"

"Can't she? You just try her. Why, I've known 'em to keel over and rake

bottom and bring up the weed on the topmast. I tell you now! there was

one time we knowed she'd turned a somerset, pretty well. Why? Because,

when it cleared and we come up, there was her two masts broke short

off!"

And Jim went home thinking he'd given me a night's sleep. But it was

cold comfort; the Georges seemed to me a worse place than the Hellgate.

And mother she kept murmuring,--"He layeth the beams of His chambers in

the waters, His pavilion round about Him is dark waters and thick clouds

of the skies." And I knew by that she thought it pretty bad.

So the days went in cloud and wind. The owners of the Feather 'd been

looking for her a month and more, and there were strange kind of rumors

afloat; and nobody mentioned Dan's name, unless they tripped. I went

glowering like a wild thing. I knew I'd never see Dan now nor hear his

voice again, but I hated the Lord that had done it, and I made my heart

like the nether millstone. I used to try and get out of folks's sight;

and roaming about the back-streets one day, as the snow went off, I

stumbled on Miss Catharine. "Old Miss Catharine" everybody called her,

though she was but a pauper, and had black blood in her veins. Eighty

years had withered her,--a little woman at best, and now bent so that

her head and shoulders hung forward and she couldn't lift them, and she

never saw the sky. Her face to the ground as no beast's face is turned

even, she walked with a cane, and fixing it every few steps she would

throw herself back, and so get a glimpse of her way and go on. I looked

after her, and for the first time in weeks my heart ached for somebody

beside myself. The next day mother sent me with a dish to Miss

Catharine's room, and I went in and sat down. I didn't like her at

first; she'd got a way of looking sidelong that gave her an evil air;

but soon she tilted herself backward, and I saw her face,--such a happy

one!

"What's the matter of ye, honey?" said she. "D'ye read your Bible?"

Read my Bible!

"Is that what makes you happy, Miss Catharine?" I asked.

"Well, I can't read much myself, I don't know the letters," says she;

"but I've got the blessed promises in my heart."

"Do you want me to read to you?"

"No, not to-day. Next time you come, maybe."

So I sat awhile and listened to her little humming voice, and we fell to

talking about mother's ailments, and she said how fine it would be, if

we could only afford to take mother to Bethesda.

"There's no angel there now," said I.

"I know it, dear,--but then there might be, you know. At any rate,

there's always the living waters running to make us whole: I often think

of that."

"And what else do you think of, Miss Catharine?"

"Me?" said she. "Oh, I ha'n't got no husband nor no child to think about

and hope for, and so I think of myself, and what I should like, honey.

And sometimes I remember them varses,--here! you read 'em now,--Luke

xiii. 11."

So I read:--

"And, behold, there was a woman which had a spirit of infirmity eighteen

years, and was bowed together, and could in no wise lift up herself. And

when Jesus saw her, he called her to him, and said unto her, 'Woman,

thou art loosed from thine infirmity.' And he laid his hands on her: and

immediately she was made straight, and glorified God."

"Ay, honey, I see that all as if it was me. And I think, as I'm setting

here, What if the latch should lift, and the gracious stranger should

come in, His gown a-sweepin' behind Him and a-sweet'nin' the air, and He

should look down on me with His heavenly eyes, and He should smile, and

lay His hands on my head, warm?--and I say to myself, 'Lord, I am not

worthy,'--and He says, 'Miss Catharine, thou art loosed from thine

infirmity!' And the latch lifts, as I think, and I wait,--but it's not

Him."

Well, when I went out of that place I wasn't the same girl that had

gone in. My will gave way; I came home and took up my burden and was in

peace. Still I couldn't help my thoughts,--and they ran perpetually to

the sea. I hadn't need to go up on the house-tops, for I didn't shut my

eyes but there it stretched before me. I stirred about the rooms and

tried to make them glad once more; but I was thin and blanched as if I'd

been rising from a fever. Father said it was the salt air I wanted; and

one day he was going out for frost-fish, and he took me with him, and

left me and my basket on the sands while he was away. It was this side

of the South Breaker that he put me out, but I walked there; and where

the surf was breaking in the light, I went and sat down and looked over

it. I could do that now.

There was the Cape sparkling miles and miles across the way, unconcerned

that he whose firm foot had rung last on its flints should ring there no

more; there was the beautiful town lying large and warm along the river;

here gay craft went darting about like gulls, and there up the channel

sped a larger one, with all her canvas flashing in the sun, and

shivering a little spritsail in the shadow, as she went; and fawning in

upon my feet came the foam from the South Breaker, that still perhaps

cradled Faith and Gabriel. But as I looked, my eye fell, and there came

the sea-scenes again,--other scenes than this, coves and corners of

other coasts, sky-girt regions of other waters. The air was soft, that

April day, and I thought of the summer calms; and with that rose long

sheets of stillness, far out from any strand, purple beneath the noon;

fields slipping close in-shore, emerald-backed and scaled with sunshine;

long sleepy swells that hid the light in their hollows, and came

creaming along the cliffs. And if upon these broke suddenly a wild

glimpse of some storm careering over a merciless mid-ocean, of a dear

dead face tossing up on the surge and snatched back again into the

depths, of mad wastes rushing to tear themselves to fleece above clear

shallows and turbid sand-bars,--they melted and were lost in peaceful

glimmers of the moon on distant flying foam-wreaths, in solemn midnight

tides chanting in under hushed heavens, in twilight stretches kissing

twilight slopes, in rosy morning waves flocking up the singing shores.

And sitting so, with my lids still fallen, I heard a quick step on the

beach, and a voice that said, "Georgie!" And I looked, and a figure,

red-shirted, towered beside me, and a face, brown and bearded and

tender, bent above me.

Oh! it was Dan!

THE SAM ADAMS REGIMENTS IN THE TOWN OF BOSTON.[A]

[Footnote A: This monograph, has been prepared almost entirely from

original authorities. Citations will be found in it from letters written

by General Gage, Governor Bernard, John Pownall, Lord Barrington, and

Lord Hillsborough, which have not been heretofore printed or used. They

are from the rich historical collections of JARED SPARKS,--who has

liberally permitted the writer to use original papers as freely as

though they were his own. Among other sources from which the narrative

has been drawn is an unfinished Life of Samuel Adams, in manuscript, by

Samuel Adams Wells, for the liberal use of which, and for other papers,

the writer is indebted to GEORGE BANCROFT. The materials have been

mostly taken, however, from a compilation which the writer has had for

several years in manuscript, entitled, "The Life and Times of Joseph

Warren."]

THE LANDING.

As John Adams, in the evening of his life, and in the retirement of

Quincy, looked back on the scenes through which he had passed, he dwelt

on the removal of the British troops from Boston in the month of March,

1770, as an event that profoundly stirred the public mind, and thus

contributed to promote that radical change in affections and principles

on the paramount subject of sovereignty, which he regarded as

constituting the real American Revolution.

The more this chapter of history is examined, the more there will be

found in it to justify the judgment of the venerable patriot. It is

fragrant with the political aroma of the time; and the event seems

worthy to stand out in the American Revolution, like the Arrest of the

Five Members in the English Revolution. It is identified with a great

principle. It formed the crisis of an issue of the deepest moment. It

culminated in the triumph of the people when roused by passion and high

resolve to heroic manhood. The trial-scene was on so important a stage,

was so richly dramatic, had actors of such dignity of character, and was

so instinct with the national life, as "to deserve to be painted as much

as the Surrender of Burgoyne." It was the moment when Samuel Adams, in

the name of a resolute people, made the demand, as an ultimatum, for an

immediate removal of the troops. The close connection of this patriot

with the whole transaction led Lord North, ever after, to call these

troops by the title of "Sam Adams's Two Regiments."

The story of the introduction of these troops into Boston, also, is rich

in matter illustrative of the springs of political action. The narrative

soon shows that it relates to far more than an ordinary transfer of

a military force from one station to another. Such transfers are not

preceded by long hesitation in cabinets, or by long torture of peaceful

communities in expectation of their arrival. Yet such was the preface

to the landing of this force in Boston. It was sent on an uncommon

service,--a service insulting to a loyal people; and though this people

had hailed the flag that waved over it with enthusiasm from the fields

of Louisburg and Quebec, they now looked upon it with sorrowing eyes as

the symbol of arbitrary power.

These troops were ordered to Boston at an interesting period of the

American struggle. The movement against the Stamp Act, noble as it

was in the main, had phases that were deeply deplored by reflecting

patriots. Such were the riots, attended by destruction of property and

personal outrage, which, though common in England, were violative of

that reverence for law that was thoroughly ingrained in the American

character; and they were, besides, rather in the spirit of hasty and

irregular insurrection than of the slow and majestic development of

revolution. "We are not able in this way," wrote Jonathan Mayhew, "to

contend against Great Britain."

On the repeal of the Stamp Act, there was an expression of general joy,

and controversy subsided. When fresh aggressions, in, the passage of

the Revenue Acts of 1767, required a new movement, the popular leaders,

profiting by past sad experience, strove to prevent excesses, and

patiently labored to build up their cause in the growth of an

intelligent public opinion. Even in reference to obnoxious local

officials, the word ran through the ranks,--"Let there be no mobs, no

riots. Let not the hair of their scalps be touched." Hard as it is to

restrain the rash, when the popular passion is excited, not a life was

sacrificed, not a limb even was dislocated, by the patriots of Boston in

political action, until the ripe hour of the Lexington rising.

In this way Massachusetts, when called upon to stand by old customs and

rights, acted not only in a spirit of fidelity to liberty, but also in a

spirit of loyalty to law and order. Her conduct in the Stamp Act crisis

turned towards her the eyes and drew towards her the hearts of the other

Colonies, and elevated her into what was then a perilous, but is now a

proud, pre-eminence; and the call was made on her (1767) in the journals

of other Colonies, and copied into the Boston papers, as "the liberties

of a common country were again in danger," "to kindle the sacred flame

that should warm and illuminate the continent." So instinctively did the

common peril suggest the thought and expression of a common country.

The Loyalists, for years, put Boston as in a pillory for punishment. It

was (they said) the head-quarters of sedition. It was the fountain of

opposition to the Government. It was under the rule of a trained mob.

It was swayed to and fro by a few popular leaders. It was the nest of a

faction. James Otis and Samuel Adams were the two consuls. Joseph Warren

was one of the chiefs. John Hancock was possessed of great wealth and of

large social and commercial influence. Such leaders, bankrupts on the

exchange or in character, controlled everything. They controlled the

clubs,--and there was not a social company or political club that

did not claim to have to do with the Government: they controlled the

town-meetings,--and these were the instrumentalities of rebellion: and

the town-meetings controlled the legislature, and this controlled the

Province. Then the local press was filled with incendiary matter from

the cabinet of the faction. Thus the spirits who led in the clubs, the

town-meetings, and the legislature supplied the seditious writing that

was scattered broadcast over the Colonies, and poisoned as it spread.

There was some truth in this Loyalist strain. Patriotic rays gathered

and drew to a focus in Boston, and there became intensified with a

steady power. The town had jealousies to encounter and prejudices to

overcome; but, as if to the manner born, it acted in a spirit of such

comprehensive patriotism that it came to be regarded as an exponent of

the feelings of the whole country. Its key-note was Union. In fitting

words Philadelphia (1768) grandly said to Boston,--"Let us never forget

that our strength depends on our union, and our liberty on our strength;

united we conquer, divided we die." Boston returned the pledge, "warmly

to recommend and industriously to promote that union among the several

Colonies which is so indispensably necessary for the security of the

whole."

Boston at this period is usually described as a noted and opulent

trading town,--the Great Town,--the Metropolis of New England,--the

best situated for commerce in North America,--the largest city in

the American British Empire. It had the air of an English city. Its

commodious residences had spacious lawns and gardens and fields; while

the contents of its stores, as seen in advertisements that sometimes

cover a broadside of the journals, and the number of ship-yards that

are shown by the maps to have girdled the town, betoken its business

activity. Its population of sixteen thousand, with its three thousand

voters, and no pauper class, had carefully nurtured the common school,

and was characterized not only by love of order, but by enterprise,

intelligence, and public spirit. It early welcomed the doctrine of a

right in the people to interpret the religious law and to fashion, the

political law, and thus practically welcomed freedom of thought and of

utterance, and acknowledged allegiance only to truth. It had tested for

more than a century the working of this principle, as it was carried out

in the congregation and in the municipality, in the Church and in the

State. By it each citizen was made deeply interested in the support of

liberty; and thus the town had not only a public, but a public life,

quietly nurtured as worthy citizens were successively called to manage

the local affairs. It furnished the instance of a community composed of

men of small estates who very rarely had to use a mark for their name,

and imbued by the spirit of individual independence toned into a respect

for law, which, on the decline of feudalism, began to play a part on

the national stage. Thus the political character of Boston was sharply

defined and firmly fixed. It started in the republican way, went on for

over a century in republican habits, and had the priceless heirloom of

principles and traditions that were certainly life-giving, and may not

inaptly be termed national. The prediction was publicly uttered here,

two centuries ago, and printed, that a day would come when "those that

were branded before for Huguenots and Lollards and Hereticks, they

should be thought the only men to be fit to have crowns upon their

heads, and independent government committed to them"; and the crown that

shone with superior lustre was progress in things that elevate and adorn

humanity.

Such a government, so far as it regarded local affairs, the people

substantially enjoyed under the protecting wing of a proud nationality.

They loved the old flag. They claimed its history as their history, and

its glory as their glory. It gave security to their rights as men, as

Christians, and as Englishmen. It thus sheltered the precious body of

civil and religious liberties which they were in the habit of speaking

of as the rights of mankind. For this they were attached to the

English Constitution. For this they said, "Dear England!" Their strong

expressions in favor of the union with Great Britain were sincere. The

turn of the words showed the honest bent of the mind. No man respected

the English Constitution more than Samuel Adams, and his strong language

now (1768) was,--"I pray God that harmony may be cultivated between

Great Britain and the Colonies, and that they may long flourish in one

undivided empire." His resolution was no less strong to stand for

local self-government. As the idea began to be entertained that the

preservation of this right might require a new nationality, nothing legs

worthy for country was thought of than a union of all the Colonies in an

American commonwealth, with one constitution, which should be supreme

over all in questions common to country, and have one flag. The great

idea was expressed by New Jersey, that the continent must protect the

continent.

This idea of creating a new nationality was forced on the Colonies by

wanton aggressions on the local self-government. There was far from

unanimity of opinion as to the acts, much less as to the ascribed

purposes of the Ministry. Setting aside a class of no-party men in peace

and of non-combatants in war, the people of Boston, as of other places,

were divided into the friends and the opponents of the Administration,

Loyalists and Whigs. The Whigs held that the new policy was flat

aggression on the old republican way, hostile to their normal political

life,--in a word, unconstitutional: the Loyalists maintained that the

new policy was required to preserve the dependence on Great Britain, and

therefore a necessity. The Whigs, zealous as they were for the local

government, claimed to be loyal to the King: the Loyalists, however

zealous for the independence of Parliament, claimed, in supporting the

supremacy of law, to be friends of freedom. As it was not the original

purpose of the Loyalists to invoke for their country the curse of

arbitrary power, so it was not the original purpose of the Whigs

to sever relations with the British crown. Men, however, are but

instruments in the hands of Providence. Both parties drifted into

measures which neither party originally proposed or even desired; and

thus the Loyalist, to maintain the sovereignty of Parliament, grew into

the defender of arbitrary power, and the Whig, to preserve the local

government, grew into the asserter of national independence.

Nor was there unanimity among the Patriots themselves as to the way in

which the Revenue Acts ought to be opposed; indeed, some were averse to

making any opposition to them; but at length the policy of uniting the

Colonies in the non-importation agreement, after being talked over

at one of the political clubs in Boston, was agreed upon at a public

meeting, and sent out to the country. Hence this was the period

fixed upon by the Ministry as the time when the popular leaders made

themselves liable to the penalties of violated law. When, in England,

the idea was entertained and acted upon, that nothing would restore the

authority of the Government but the arrest and transportation to

London of the originators of the opposition to the Revenue Acts,

Lord Hillsborough's instructions to the Massachusetts Executive ran

thus:--"The King has thought fit to direct me to signify to you his

Majesty's commands that you do take the most effectual methods for

procuring the fullest information that can be obtained touching all

treasons or misprisions of treason committed within your government

since the 30th day of December, 1767, and transmit the same to me,

together with the names of persons who were most active in the

commission of such offences."

This language was addressed to Francis Bernard, who was at this time the

highest representative of British power in Boston. He was a native of

England, an Oxford graduate, and, from the training of Solicitor

of Doctors Commons, was sent over, by the favor of aristocratic

relationship, to be the Governor of New Jersey, and now for eight years

had been Governor of Massachusetts. He was a scholar, and kept his

memory of Alma Mater fresh. He loved literature and science, could write

elegies in Latin and Greek, used to say that he could repeat the whole

of Shakspeare, and had such gifts of conversation as to charm the social

circle. His politics were of the Oxford school, and old at that. He

looked upon the people with distrust, and upon the king with veneration:

the people had good claim to be well governed, and British Imperialism

had the divine right to govern them well. He was a good hater of

republican institutions; habitually spoke of the local self-government

as a trained mob; and to it (he was not far from right here) he ascribed

the temper of the community which he was set to care for and to rule. It

was vexatious to his Tory spirit to see the democratic element, which

had excluded primogeniture and the hereditary principle and large landed

estates, so firmly bedded here, as if for a mighty superstructure; and

his reform plans tended to a change to centralization. It was a marvel

to him, that this work, which he deemed essential to the maintenance of

British power here, had not been begun long before,--that Charles II.

had not made a clean sweep of the little New England republics. He urged

that this ought to be done now,--that more general governments ought

to take their place, with executives having vice-regal powers; and of

course, being English, he urged that they should be moulded by England

into a shape as nearly as possible like England and for the benefit of

England, and thus be made homogeneous. He sighed to impose the dazzle of

a miniature St. James on reality-loving New England: as though the soil

which had been furrowed for a race of sovereigns could grow a crop of

lords; as though the Norman _rôle_ of privilege could be engrafted on a

society imbued with the Saxon spirit of equality: and he clinched the

absurdity of his thought by uttering the prediction, that, though the

people might bluster a little when such reform was proposed, yet they

never would resist by force; and if they did, a demonstration of British

power, such as the presence of the King's troops in a few coast-towns

and the occupation of a few harbors by the royal navy, would soon settle

the contest.

As such an arrogant official, from yet unsealed Oxford heights, thus

paternally looked down over Boston and New England, he could see in

the little self-directing communities that clustered about the village

church and the public school but a race of nobodies. He may be pardoned

for not finding greatness in art, literature, or science in the circle

that has been called the Athens of America; he could not be expected to

measure the rich and enduring fame of a Jonathan Edwards; and it was an

article in the then Oxford creed, that there could not be, unmoulded by

the influences of an hereditary nobility, such a general product as a

people lifted up by education and religion into a self-directing race of

high-minded men, as the basis of a State. But a small class of British

observers, who had other principles and other eyes, saw now in Boston

the most orderly town and the most intelligent and moral people on the

face of the earth; and said--the words were printed (1768) in London,

and reproduced in the local press here--that no people since the ruin of

the Roman Commonwealth seemed to entertain more just ideas of liberty

or breathed forth a truer spirit of independence than these American

colonists. Now Governor Bernard and his political friends regarded the

chafings of such a people at what they held to be palpable aggressions

on their established system of local government as the acts of a trained

mob, and proofs of a long-matured design to cast off allegiance to the

British crown and of an immediate purpose of insurrection; and for years

they systematically urged, and attempted to fortify their policy by the

most unscrupulous misrepresentations, that nothing could check this

anarchical element and traitorous design but the abrogation of

fundamental parts of the local constitution and the implanting of a

feudal exotic by military power. The people claimed to be as free as the

English were, and the calumnies were heaped on them of being anarchists

and rebels.

This theory of insurrection was acted upon by the Governor as long as

he remained in the Province. Every hasty word of the violent, and every

public deliberation of the wise as well, were made to nurture this

theory. By acting on such premises, besides doing gross injustice to the

people, he made himself ridiculous. Still he clung tenaciously to his

error and his plans as long as he remained in office; and even after he

returned to England, the course of the Patriots continued to strengthen

his convictions, and he wrote back that it was "plainly the design of

the chiefs of the Boston faction to measure swords with Great Britain."

Though Governor Bernard had long thought a military force necessary to

sustain the new measures, yet he refused to make a requisition for it.

He expected the Government, of its own motion, would order troops to

Boston in the time of the Stamp Act, and looked for trouble on their

arrival. "The crisis," he wrote, (September 1, 1766,) "which I apprehend

most danger from, is the introduction of King's troops into this town,

which, having become necessary to the support of the Government, will be

placed to the account of the Governor." But no troops were ordered then.

He never was able to get his Council, even when he supposed a majority

agreed with him in politics, to recommend their introduction; for no

policy or measure which even such a Council indorsed required troops to

enforce it. The Governor, however, was a zealous advocate of the new

policy of the Ministry, which he judged could not be carried out

without military force; but his point was, that, along with the stiff

instructions to carry that policy out, the Ministry ought to supply

force enough to do it.

The new Revenue Acts provided for a Board called the Commissioners of

Customs, who were empowered to collect duties along a truly imperial

line of coast, extending from Labrador to the Gulf of Mexico. They were

appointed to reside in Boston. They were five in number,--Charles

Paxton, Henry Hulton, William Burch, John Robinson, and John Temple. Not

much is said of Hulton and Burch, who appear to have been simply zealous

partisans; Robinson's violent temper is seen in his savage assault on

Otis; Temple was not in favor of the creation of the Board, and won its

enmity by taking exceptions to its doings; Paxton was charged with being

the father of the Board and its chief. He was a zealous official, with a

clean Tory record, of bland, courtlike ways, and certificated to England

as Bernard's confidential friend. There he is said to have "whined,

cried, professed, swore, and made his will in favor of that great man,"

Charles Townshend, whom, when in Boston, he had supplied with funds, and

thus gained his objects. This Board soon became a severe and chronic

local irritant. The foreign ways of its members, for most of them were

strangers, supplied the wits of the town with material for satire, while

its main acts were as iron to the soul of a high-spirited community. As

it was created to collect taxes held to be unconstitutional, it could

not have been popular; but it discharged an ungracious task in an

ungracious way; and so singularly ill-judged was its action, that, while

it excited odium here, it elicited censure in England.

The Commissioners were full believers in the theory that the popular

leaders designed insurrection. The Governor, in a letter to Lord

Barrington, (March 8, 1768,) relates that they would ask him what

support he could give them, "if there should be insurrection." "I

answer," Bernard says, "'None at all.' They then desire me to apply to

the General for troops. I tell them I cannot do it; for I am directed to

consult the Council about requiring troops, and they will never advise

it, let the case be ever so desperate. Indeed, I no more dare apply

for troops than the Council dare advise me to it. Ever since I have

perceived that the wickedness of some and the folly of others will in

the end bring troops here, I have conducted myself so as to be able to

say, and swear to it, if the Sons of Liberty shall require it, that

I have never applied for troops; and therefore, my Lord, I beg that

nothing I now write may be considered such an application." This is a

fair show for this royal official. He begins his letter by telling how,

within ten days just passed, nights have been twice fixed upon for a

mob; at the close, he returns to the matter of a mob, and tells how he

has promised the Commissioners an asylum at the Castle in case of a

mob; and he warns his superior that a mob, unchecked, "might put the

Commissioners and all their officers on board ship, and send them back

to England." This was the Governor's method of not asking for troops.

The Commissioners, at least, asked for troops in a manly way. "About a

fortnight ago," Lieutenant-Governor Hutchinson writes, (March 23, 1768,)

"I was in consultation with the Commissioners. They were very desirous

the Governor should----for a R----. If he had done it, by some means

or other it would have transpired, and there is no saying to what

lengths the people would have gone in their resentment." The letter just

cited explains why the Governor did not send for a regiment.

A few days after this consultation the Patriots celebrated the

anniversary of the repeal of the Stamp Act by a day of general

rejoicing. There were things that could be perverted, and were

perverted, into signs of mob-rule and disloyalty. Daylight revealed

hanging on the Liberty Tree effigies of Commissioner Paxton and

Inspector Williams, the latter of whom, being a cabinet-maker, had a

glue-pot by his side, but by order of the popular leaders they were

soon removed; there were salutes, liberty toasts, and other joyful

demonstrations, and in the evening a procession, which was quite

harmless, though, as it went along the street by the Province House,

somewhat noisy, so that the Governor said that he and his family were

disturbed. But there was an allegation that ran deeper than processions,

and which went to the meaning of these rejoicings. The Loyalists said

that the Patriots congratulated one another on their glorious victory

over England in the repeal of the Stamp Act; and if the Tory relations

may be believed, there were men in Boston who were so foolish as

to say,--We have shown our spirit; we have convinced them of our

resentment; they repealed their foolish act; they durst not do

otherwise; if they had, we should have ruined them. And the Loyalists

said, that, when the mother-country had a right to look for gratitude,

she actually met with insult.

With such views of the day, it is easy to see how its proceedings might

be perverted. They were represented to the Ministry by Governor Bernard

as signs of a rebellious spirit; and were made the ground by the

Commissioners of a direct application to Commodore Hood, at Halifax, for

the protection of a naval force,--he being advised that the conduct

and temper of the people, the adverse aspect of things in general, the

security of the revenue, the safety of its officers, and the honor of

Government required immediate aid; and the hope being expressed that he

would find it consistent with the King's other service to afford such

assistance. The Commodore ordered the Romney to be fitted out with all

possible despatch, and, accompanied by two armed schooners, she sailed

for Boston. As they came into the harbor, being short of men, a

press-gang landed from them, who impressed on board Massachusetts

citizens. Ever since the revival of the aggressions on Colonial rights,

"Hyperion" (Josiah Quincy, Jr.) says, the Loyalists publicly threatened

the defenders of the rights of America with halters, fire, and fagots;

but there was nothing more serious than threats, or more authentic than

rumors, until this appearance of the Romney and her two tenders.

This show of naval force, though no troops came, was irritating, and

multiplied the sayings of the violent, which appear to have been

reported to the Governor, who advised the Ministry that he was "well

assured that it was the intention of the faction in Boston to cause an

insurrection against the crown officers." At this time he favored Lord

Hillsborough with a lucid explanation of a paradox,--how a few leaders

of bankrupt reputation ruled with a rod of iron the most virtuous town

in the world. "It has been a subject of wonder," are the Governor's

words, (May 19,1768,) "how the faction which harasses this town, and

through it the whole continent, which is known to consist of very few

of the lowest kind of gentry, and is directed by three or four persons,

bankrupts in reputation as well as in property, should be able to keep

in subjection the inhabitants of such a town as this, who possess a

hundred times the credit and property (I might say much more) of those

who rule them with a rod of iron. This paradox is at once solved by

showing that this town is governed by the lowest of the people, and from

the time of the Stamp Act to this hour has been and is in the hands

of the mob." He represented the friends of the Government as very

desponding, on seeing, unchecked, the imperial power treated with a

contempt not only indecent, but almost treasonable. Of such cast were

letters read to George III. in his closet, and made the basis of royal

instructions which it was claimed had the force of law.

This was an anxious hour in Boston. The journals carried into every

circle the reports, private and public, that the Ministry were resolved

upon new and decisive measures; and thus this show of force had a

painful significance. It was the common talk, that the people were

doomed to be taxed to maintain a parcel of sycophants, court

favorites, and hungry dependants; that needy lawyers from abroad

or tools of power at home would be their judges; and that

their governors, if natives, would be partisans rewarded for

mercenary service, or if foreigners, would be nobles of wasted fortunes

and greedy for salaries to replenish them. Kindling-matter from abroad

was thrown on this inflammable public mind at home; for after each

arrival the journals would be filled with the enthusiasm of the Wilkes

controversy, which then was at its height in England; and if "London

resounded the word Liberty from every corner and every voice," there was

an echo in every street and every home in Boston. The people knew they

were misrepresented and ill-used, and were sullen. They knew they were

in the right, and they were resolute.