Miss Sheppard's style was something very novel. Based, perhaps, on an

admiration of one whose later exploits have dwarfed his earlier in the

general estimation, there was yet no more resemblance than between the

string-courses of a building and its sculptured friezes. Indeed, writing

was not her virtual expression: this may be learned even in her peculiar

way of loving Nature, for it was not so much Nature itself as Nature's

effects that she prized; and between the work now performed and that

awaiting her in some further life one feels the difference that exists

between the soft clay model with its mild majesty, its power clogged and

covered, and the same when it issues in the white radiance of marble.

She does not seem to have been an extensive reader, and certainly no

student, while she totally disregarded all rules and revision. Her

sentences were so long that one got lost in them, and had finally to go

back and clutch a nominative case and drag it down the page with him;

there were ambiguities and obscurities in plenty: her thoughts were so

bright that they darkened her words; one must go through a process of

initiation,--but having mastered the style, one knew the writer. It

was well worth while, this shrouding rhetoric, for beneath it were no

reserves; superficially no one ever kept more out of sight, but the

real reader could not fail to know that here he had the freedom of the

author's nature: and although she somewhere said that a woman "thus

intensely feminine, thus proud and modest, betraying herself to the

world in her writings, is an exception, and one in the whole world the

most rare," she knew not that she sketched herself in that exception.

But there are not elsewhere to be found pages so drenched with beauty as

hers; and for all her vague abstractions of language, and wide, suffused

effects, she possessed yet the skill to present a picture, keenly etched

and vividly colored, in the fewest words, when she chose. Not to mention

Rose and Bernard, who, oddly enough, are a series of the most exquisite

pictures in themselves, bathed in changing and ever-living light, let

us take, for instance, Maria Cerinthia walking in the streets of Paris,

having worn out her mantilla, and with only a wreath of ivy on her

head,--or Clotilda at her books, "looking very much like an old picture

of a young person sitting there,"--or the charming one of Laura's _pas_,

which the little boy afterwards describes in saying, "She quite swam,

and turned her eyes upward,"--or, better, yet, that portrait of a

Romagnese woman: "of the ancient Roman beauty, rare now, if still

remembered, with hair to her knees, wrapping her form in a veil vivid as

woven gold, with the emerald eyes of Dante's Beatrice, a skin of yellow

whiteness, and that mould of figure in which undulating softness

quenches majesty,--the mould of the mystical Lucretia." There are

sea-sketches scattered among these leaves which no painter's brush will

ever equal, and morning and twilight gain new splendor and tenderness

beneath her touch.

But, after all, this was not her style's chief excellence; she cared

little for such pictorial achievements, and in presenting her fancies

she often sacrificed outline to melody; it is necessary for you to feel

rather than to see her meaning. What distinguished her yet more was the

ability by means of this style to interpret music into words. Although

this may not be correct practice, there was never a musical critic who

did not now and then attempt it: musicians themselves never do, because

music is to them nothing to see or to describe, but the air they

breathe, and in fact a state of being. Do you remember that tone-wreath

of heather and honeysuckle? "It was a movement of such intense meaning

that it was but one sigh of unblended and unfaltering melody isolated as

the fragrance of a single flower, and only the perfumes of Nature exhale

a bliss as sweet, how far more unexpressed! This short movement, that in

its oneness was complete, grew, as it were, by fragmentary harmonies,

intricate, but most gradual, into another,--a prestissimo so delicately

fitful that it was like moonlight dancing upon crested ripples; or, for

a better similitude, like quivering sprays in a summer wind. And in less

than fifty bars of regularly broken time--how ravishingly sweet I say

not--the first subject in refrain flowed through the second, and they,

interwoven even as creepers and flowers densely tangled, closed together

simultaneously." And if you have not the book by you, will you pardon

another,--the awful and eternal flow of the Mer de Glace?

"At first awoke the strange, smooth wind-notes of the opening adagio;

the fetterless chains of ice seemed to close around my heart. The

movement had no blandness in its solemnity; and so still and shiftless

was the grouping of the harmonies, that a frigidity, actual as well as

ideal, passed over my pores and hushed my pulses. After a hundred such

tense yet clinging chords, the sustaining calm was illustrated, not

broken, by a serpentine phrase of one lone oboë, pianissimo over the

piano-surface, which it crisped not, but on and above which it breathed

like the track of a sunbeam aslant from a parted cloud. The slightest

possible retardation at its close brought us to the refrain of the

simple adagio, interrupted again by a rush of violoncello-notes, rapid

and low, like some sudden under-current striving to burst through the

frozen sweetness. Then spread wide the subject, as plains upon plains of

_water-land_; though the time was gradually increased. Amplifications of

the same harmonies introduced a fresh accession of violoncelli and oboi

contrasted artfully in syncopation, till at length the strides of the

accelerando gave a glittering precipitation to the entrance of the

second and longest movement.

"Then Anastase turned upon me, and with the first bar we fell into a

tumultuous presto. Far beyond all power to analyze as it was just then,

the complete idea embraced me as instantaneously as had the picturesque

chillness of the first. I have called it tumultuous,--but merely in

respect of rhythm:--the harmonies were as clear and evolved as the

modulation itself was sharp, keen, and unapproachable. Through every bar

reigned that vividly enunciated ideal, whose expression pertains to

the one will alone in any age,--the ideal, that, binding together in

suggestive imagery every form of beauty, symbolizes and represents

something beyond them all.

"Here over the surge-like, but fast-bound motivo--only like those tost

ice-waves, dead still in their heaped-up crests--were certain swelling

crescendos of a second subject, so unutterably if vaguely sweet, that

the souls of all deep blue Alp-flowers, the clarity of all high blue

skies, had surely passed into them, and was passing from them again....

"It was not until the very submerging climax that the playing of

Anastase was recalled to me. Then, amidst long ringing notes of the wild

horns, and intermittent sighs of the milder wood, swept from the violins

a torrent of coruscant arpeggi, and above them all I heard his tone,

keen but solvent, as his bow seemed to divide the very strings with

fire, and I felt as if some spark had fallen upon my fingers to kindle

mine. As soon as it was over, I looked up and laughed in his face with

sheer pleasure."

Nothing of the kind was ever half so delightful, if one excepts Mr.

Dwight's translation of a _Gondel-lied_. As literal description it is

wondrous, but as imagination it equals the music itself. Let us pause

for an instant here and recall the singular inventive and combining

grace with which a Spectacle is always given in these stories. It is

well known that Mendelssohn contemplated an opera upon the "Tempest,"

although he did not live to execute the idea; but how charmingly is

that taken and mingled with what he had already done in the

"Midsummer-Night's Dream," at the festival of the Silver Wedding, when

the lonely tones from age to age frozen on the cups of lilies, the orbed

harmonies bound burning within the roses, the dreaming song thrilled

along the veins of violets, intricate sounds hushed under green gloom

of myrtle-leaves, mourning chords with which the cedars stood

charged,--were all disenchanted and stole forth on longing

wind-instruments and on the splendor of violins, "accumulating in

orchestral richness, as if flower after flower of music were unsheathing

to the sun"!

Yet the unlovely is not to be found within these covers: there was a

quality in the writer's mind like that fervid, all-vivifying sunshine

which so illumines the cities of the desert, so steeps the pavements,

so soaks through the pores of solids, so sharpens angles and softens

curves, as Fromentin tells us, that even squalor borrows brilliant dyes,

and rags and filth lighten into picturesque and burnished glory. And

this is well for the reader, as all have not time for philosophy, nor

can all transmute pain into treasure. But for her, sweet sounds and

sights abound in everything; bird and breeze and bee alike are winged

with melody; the music of the sea satisfies her heart, and there

"the artist-ear,--which makes a spectrum for all sounds that are

not separate, distinguishes the self-same harmonies that govern the

gradations of the orchestra, from deep to deep descending, until sounds

are lost in sound as lights in light";--the trains have their thunderous

music in her hearing; and the bells to which Cecilia listens seem to be

ringing in the last day:--"The ravishing and awful sound of them, which

is only heard by the few,--the passion in their rise and fall,--their

wavering,--their rushing fulness,--drew off all consciousness: most like

the latest and last passion,--the passion of death."

There seems to be no subject which this woman has not pondered deeply.

Her theory of Temperament is an attendant fairy that does marvellous

things for her, and not only apportions natures, but corresponding

bodies, so that we can easily see how the golden age is to return again,

when peradventure deceits shall be impossible, and all the virtues

thrive by mere necessity under the reign of this perfected Science of

the Soul. Yet, roam where she would, there were always two mysteries

that allured her back again, as Thoné's curt sentence told,--"_Tonkunst

und Arzenei_"; and to these might be added Race, in defiance of Mr.

Buckle. Assuredly the Hebrew owes acknowledgment to her, and not George

Borrow, with all his weird learning, enters more deeply into the Burden

of Egypt; Browning's appreciation of the gypsy standing alone beside

hers,--Browning, between whose writings and her own a rich sympathy

exists, both being so possessed of fulness. Yet verse could not chain

her wide eloquence in its fetters; and whenever she attempted it, its

music made her thought shapeless. There is one exception to this,

however, and we give it below,--for, inartistic as this mould may seem,

and amorphous as its ideas may be, it is the only instance of any rhymes

fully translating the meaning of music, and it is as full of clinging

pathos and melody as the great creation it paraphrases, and to which no

words will quite respond.

"In gardens where the languid roses keep

Perpetual sweetness for the hearts that smile,

Perpetual sadness for the hearts that weep,

Lonely, unseen, I wander, to beguile

The day that only shines to show thee bright,

The night whose stars burn wan beside thy light,

Adelaïda!

"Adelaïda! all the birds are singing

Low, as thou passest, where in leaves they lie;

With timid chirp unto their soft mates clinging,

They greet that presence without which they die,--

Die, even with Nature's universal heart,

When thou, her queen, dost in thy pride depart,

Adelaïda!

"Depart! and dim her beauty evermore;

Go, from the shivering leaves and lily-flowers,

That, white as saints on the eternal shore,

Stand wavering, beckoning, in the moony bowers,--

Beckon me on where their moist feet are laid

In the dark mould, fast by the alder-shade,

Adelaïda!

"Adelaïda! 'tis the Grave or Love

Must fight for this great first, last mastery.

I feed in faith on spicy gales above,

Where all along that blue unchanging sky

Thy name is traced;--its sweetness never fails

To sound in streams of peace in spicy gales,

Adelaïda!

"Adelaïda! woe is me, woe, woe!

Not only in the sky, in starry gold,

I see thy name,--where peaceful rivers flow,

Not only hear its sweetness manifold;

On every white and purple flower 'tis written,

Its echo every aspen-quake hath smitten,

Adelaïda!

"Go farther! let me leave thee! I depart!--

Who whispered I would linger by thy side?

Who said it beat so warm, my feeble heart?

Who told, I dared to claim thee as my bride?

Who cried, I roamed without thee all the day

And clasped thee in my dreams? Away, away,

Adelaïda!

"I die, but thou shall live; in the loud noon

Thy feet shall crush the long grass o'er my head,

Not rudely, rudely,--gently, gently, soon

Shall tread me heavier down in that dark bed;

And thou shalt know not on whose head they pass,

Whose silent hands, whose frozen heart!--Alas,

Adelaïda!"

There are those who in "Charles Auchester," charmed by the simplicity

and truth of that first part called "Choral Life," objected to the rest

on the score of extravagance. But this book records the adoration of

music, and in an age replete with the _dilettanti_ of indifference may

we not thank God for one enthusiast? Yet, indeed, everything about

Mendelssohn was itself extravagant,--his childhood, his youth, his life,

his beauty, his power: should the instrument, then, be tuned lower than

such key-note? And again, to us who live a somewhat commonplace routine,

the life of musical artists, especially abroad, must necessarily seem

redundant; yet it is only that life, natural and actual, into which we

are here inducted. The same is possible to no other class of artists:

even the scholar, buried in his profound studies, must descend from his

abstraction; the poet, the painter, cannot share it: for the latter,

however much he clubs and cliques, is seldom sufficiently dispossessed

of himself; and the other, though he strike out of his heat poems as

immortal as stars, may yet live among clods and feel no thrill returning

on himself. But the musician cannot dwell alone: his art requires that

he should cluster, and the orchestra enforces it; therefore he acts and

reacts like the vibrations ridged within a Stradivarius, he is kept in

his art's atmosphere till it becomes his life, its aura bathes every

trivial thing, and existence which might otherwise be meagre is raised

and glorified. Thus yet more, when we recall that even were the

musician's life not so, still it ought to be, and it is the right of

the author to idealize, one can believe "Charles Auchester" to be but a

faithful transcript. "In proportion to our appreciation of music is also

our appreciation of what is not music," Sarona says; and so faithfully

does this writer prove it, by her attention to minute and usual

circumstances, that one might certainly allow her some exaltation

when touching on one theme,--yet how this exaltation can be called in

question by any who espouse Bettine von Arnim's sublime ravings the

morning after entering Vienna is mysterious. Were the real condition

of these natures--which certainly exist--bared to view, many from their

phlegmatic experience might deem all the nerves to be in a state of

excitation, when in fact they saw only normal and healthy play. It is

true that the power of modulated tones arouses everything most ethereal

and lofty in our composition, and it must therefore be wrong to charge

with extravagance any description of a life in music, which is a life in

the highest, because truly it cannot be extravagant enough, since all

words fail before that of which it discourses,--while it gives you the

sense of the universe and of the eternities, and is to the other arts

what the soul is to the body. And is it not, moreover, the voice of

Nature, the murmur of wind and tree, the thrill of all the dropping

influences of the heavens, the medium of spiritual communication, the

universal language in which all can exchange thought and feeling, and

through which the whole world becomes one nation? Out of the spirit

blossom spirits, Bettine tells us, and we subject ourselves to their

power: "Ah, wonderful mediation of the ineffable, which oppresses the

bosom! Ah, music!" To go further, there is certainly no exaggeration

in Charles Auchester's treatment of his hero; for, reading the

contemporaneous articles of musical journals, you will find them one and

all speaking in even more unrestrained profligacy of praise, recognizing

in the cloud of composers but nine worthy the name of Master, of whom

Mendelssohn was one, and declaring that under his baton the orchestra

was electrified. We all remember the solemnly pathetic and passionate

beauty of Seraphael's burial by night, with the music winding up among

the stars; but did it in reality exceed the actual progress of the dead

Master's ashes from city to city, met in the twilight and the evening by

music, gray-headed Capellmeisters receiving him with singing in the open

midnight, and fresh songs being flung upon his coffin like wreaths with

the sunrise?

There is a wonderful strength exhibited in the sketch of Seraphael from

first to last: not to mention the happiness of the name, of which

this is by no means a single instance, and the fact of his having no

_pramomen_, both of which so insignificant atoms in themselves lift him

at once a line above the level in the reader's sympathy,--it was a most

difficult thing to present such delicacy and lightness, and yet to

preserve "the awful greatness of his lonely genius," as somewhere else

she calls it; but all must confess that it is done, and perfectly. It

is not alone in Seraphael that this strength is shown; a new mould of

character in fiction is given us,--masculine characters which, though

light and airy, are yet brilliant and strong, most sweet, and surcharged

with loveliness. It is this perfect sweetness that constitutes half

the charm of her books,--for in the only one where it is deficient,

"Beatrice Reynolds," the whole fails. One feels sure that it was never

deficient in herself, that her own heart must have been overflowing with

warm and cordial tenderness,--and if any testimony were wanting, we

should have it in her evident love of children. It is only by love that

understanding comes, and no one ever understood children better or

painted them half so well: they are no mites of puny perfection, no

angels astray, no Psyches in all the agonies of the bursting chrysalis,

but real little flesh-and-blood people in pinafores, approached by

nobody's hand so nearly as George Eliot's. They are flawless: the boy

who, having swung himself giddy, felt "the world turning round, as

papa says it does, nurse,"--the other boy, who, immured in studies and

dreams, found all life to be "a fairy-tale book with half the leaves

uncut,"--the charming little snow-drop of a Carlotta, "who would sit

next him, would stick her tiny fork into his face, with a morsel of

turkey at the end of it, would poke crumbs into his mouth with her

finger, would put up her lips to kiss him, would say, every moment, 'I

like you much,--much!' with all Davy's earnestness, though with just

so much of her mother's modesty as made her turn pink and shy, and put

herself completely over the chair into Seraphael's lap when we laughed

at her." And Philippa, and Philippa's conversation, capers, and cat!

an impossibility to those who have never experienced her whirlwinds of

exuberance,--and to those who have, a reproduction of the drollest days

of their existence. Never was there a personage so perfectly drawn,

never such a grotesque storm of noisy health,--the matchless Philippa!

After reading Miss Sheppard's juveniles, you feel that you have been in

most good and innocent company all day; and since it is necessary for

an author to become for the moment that nature of which he writes, this

author must have been something very good and innocent in herself in

order to uphold this strain so long. Of those accessible, the best is

that entitled, "Round the Fire,"--a series of tales purporting to be

told by little girls, and each of extraordinary interest; but the

one she herself preferred is yet with four others in the hands of an

Edinburgh publisher, and perhaps yet in manuscript,--the name of

this being "Prince Gentil, Prince Joujou, and Prince Bonbon, or the

Children's Cities." This reminds one that cities, in the abstract, seem

to have been with her a subject of unceasing wonder and pleasure,--from

Venice, with its shadowy, slippery, silent water-ways to X, that ideal

city of the North; and where is there anything to excel the Picture of

Paris, drawn minutely and colored, his prison-prophecy, Paris as it was

to be created, rather than restored, by Louis Napoleon? "Then he took

from his pocket a strong magnifying-glass, and put it gently into

Rodomant's hand. Rodomant grasped it, and through it gazed long and

eagerly. And from that hieroglyphic mist there started, sudden and

distinct as morn without a cloud, a brilliant bird's-eye view of a

superb and stupendous city, a dream of imaginative architecture, almost

in itself a poem. Each house of each street, each lamp and fountain,

each line of road and pavement, marked as vividly as the glorious

domes, the pointing pillars, grand gates and arches, proud palaces in

inclosures of solemn leafage, the bridges traced like webs of shadow,

the stately terraces and dim cathedrals. Green groves and avenues and

vivid gardens interlaced and divided the city within the walls; and

without, masses of delicate shrubbery, as perfectly defined, were

studded with fair villas of every varied form, melting gradually and

peacefully, as it seemed, to a bright champaign embroidered with fence

and hedge-row.... A sort of visionary pageant unrolled to him, partly

memorial, in part prophetic. He knew he had seen something like it,--but

when and where? What planet boasted that star of cities for strength

and lustre that must surpass new London and old Thebes? For Rodomant had

the mathematical gift of all the highest harmonists, and his brain could

magnify and actualize the elfin-sized images under his eye to their just

and proper proportion in the real." It must have been like heaven, this

city so stilly and so fair,--for, you see, there were no people there.

Miss Sheppard's plots are not conspicuous, for her characters make

circumstance and are their own fate; still her capacity in that line is

finely exhibited by the plot of the opera of "Alarcos." In mere filling

up, having excepted the incident,--always original and delightful,--the

lofty imagination, and the descriptions of wind and weather,--one of her

best points will be found to be costume, a minor thing, but then there

are few who excel in modern millinery. "Salome was beautiful. Her

splendid delicate dress, all rosy folds, skirt over skirt of drapery

falling softly into each other, made her clear skin dazzle in the midst

of them; and the masses of vivid geraniums here and there without their

leaves were not too gorgeous for her bearing,--nor for her hair, in

whose rich darkness geraniums also glowed, long wreaths curling down

into her neck." Rose in white, with wreaths of rubies weighing down her

slender arms;--Adelaïda, with her lace robe like woven light on satin

like woven moon-beams, and large water-lilies in her golden hair;--my

Lady Barres, whose dress "consisted almost always of levantine, with

demi-train and under-petticoat of white brocaded silk peeping through

its open front; the hair showing the shape of the head, and confined by

a narrow band of black velvet across the brow, fastened in the morning

with onyx or agate, in the evening with a brilliant only; she always

wore upon her wrists delicate bands of cambric embroidered with

seed-pearl so minutely that it seemed a pattern wrought out of the

threads of the stuff, and little pearl tassels drooped there scarcely

eclipsing her hands in fairness."

But a far stronger point is the power of portraiture. Seraphael having

been identified, people turned their attention to the other cipher.

Disregarding the orchestral similitude of sound in his name, which, by

the way, nobody pronounces as Aronach instructed, they chose to infer

that Charles Auchester himself was the Herr Joachim, that Starwood

Burney stood for Sterndale Bennett, that Diamid Albany meant Disraeli,

that Zelter figured as Aronach, and that Jenny Lind, of whom Mendelssohn

himself said there would not in a whole century be born another being so

gifted, and whom the Italians, those lovers of fair pseudonymes, called

"La Benedetta," is no other than Clara Benette. But these are trivial,

compared with Rodomant and Porphyro. It was daring enough, when

Beckendorf mimicked Prince Metternich; but to undertake and to contrast

Louis Napoleon and Beethoven, without belittling either, pales every

other performance. They tower before us grand and immutable as if cast

in bronze, and so veritable that they throw shadows; the prison-gloom is

sealed on Porphyro's face,--power and purpose indomitable; just as the

"gruesome Emperor" is to-day, we find him in that book,--dark in the

midst of his glory, as enduring as a Ninevite sculpture, strong and

inscrutable as the Sphinx. But his heights topple over with this world's

decline, while the other builds for the eternal aeons. Rodomant,--did

one fail to find his identity, they would yet recognize him in those old

prints, the listening head bent forwards, the features like discords

melting info chords; it is hard to tell how such strength was given in

such slight sentences,--but from the time when he contemptuously tossed

out his tune-fooleries, through the hour when with moonlight fancies "a

serene ecstatic serenade was rippling silently beneath his pen," to that

when the organ burst upon his ear in thunders quenchless and everlasting

as the sea's, he is still Beethoven, gigantic in pride, purity, and

passion. "I dream now," said Rodomant; "like the Spirit of God moving

upon the face of the waters, so stir my shadows, dim shapes of sound,

across the chaos of my fathomless intention." This "Rumour" has never

been reprinted in America; it will, then, be excusable to give here a

scene which Is indeed its climax.

"A spiritual nature has for its highest and hardest temptation a

disposition to outrage, precedent,--sometimes propriety. It is sure

of itself--very likely--but it may endanger the machinery, moral or

tangible, which it employs for agent. Again, who has not dreamed of a

dream? who has not remembered dimly what yet experience contradicts? who

does not confound fact and imagination, to the damage of his reputation

for truth?

"Rodomant was in a lawless frame, a frame he had fixed on himself by his

outrage on precedent; his subsequent excitement had enchanted him more

wildly, and any number of imps and elves were ready to rush at his

silent word from the caverns of his haunted brain. Again, he felt

he must spend his energy, his long idleness reacted on a sudden in

prodigious strength of intellect, it stirred like a giant refreshed.

Long time ago he had dreamed--he had entirely forgotten it was a fact

that he had been told--that, if the whole force of that organ were put

out, the result would be tremendous. He had also _dreamed_--that is,

been assured--that there was a law made to the purpose that the whole

force of the organ was never to be employed. The law had never been

broken, except once;--but there his memories waxed dim and indistinct;

he was at the mercy of his own volition, which resolved on recalling

nothing that could dissuade him from his rash and forbidden longing.

Unknown to himself, perhaps the failure of his design to escape, of

which the princess had assured him, drove him to the crisis of a more

desperate endeavor. But, whether it was so or not, he was unconscious of

it,--so far innocent. He sat down, believing himself alone.... 'Softly,

softly,' mocked his whisper--to himself,--and he touched alone the

whispering reeds, Adelaïda held her breath, and chid the beating of her

heart, which seemed louder than the mellow pulse that throbbed in tune

above. The symphony that followed fell like a mighty universal

hush, through which the clarionet-stop chanted, unuttered but

articulate,--'Give to us peace.' Then the hush dissolved into a sea

of sighs: 'Peace, peace!' they yearned, and the mild deep diapason

muttered, 'Peace.' She, the one listener, felt, as it were, her brain

fill soft with tears, her eyes rained them, and her heart, whose pulses

had dropped as calm as dew, echoed the peaceful longing of the whole

heart of humanity. A longing as peaceful in its expression as the peace

it longed for; the creation's travail seemed spent to the edge of joy.

"Suddenly, as light swept chaos, this peaceful fancy was disrupted,--her

heart ravished from its rest, its calm torn from it. Down went the pedal

which forced the whole first organ out at once, and as if shouted by

hosts of men and by myriad angels echoed, pealed the great Hosanna. The

mighty rapture of the princess won her instantly from regret; no peace

could be so glorious as that praise; and vast as was the volume

of sound, the hands that invoked it had it so completely under

control--voluntary control as yet--that it did not swamp her sense; her

spirit floated on the wide stream with harmonious waves towards the

measureless immensity of music at its source. To reach that centre

without a circle,--that perfection which imperfection shadows not,--that

unborn, undying principle, which art tries humbly, falteringly, to

illustrate,--was never given to man on earth; and tries he to attain it,

some fate, of which the chained Prometheus is at once the symbol and the

warning, fastens to his soul for life.

"The princess had bowed her head, and the soft and plenteous waters

of her eyes had dried like dew under the midsummer sun; yet still she

closed her eyes, for her brain felt fixed and alight with a nameless

awe, such as passion lends presentiment.

"Suddenly, in the words of Albericus, there burst overhead a noise like

the roaring of 'enormous artificial golden lions,'--that was the drum:

less, in this instance, like smitten parchment than the crackling roll

of clouds that embrace in thunder. The noise amazed himself,--yet

Rodomant exulted in it, his audacity expanded with it, broke down the

last barrier of reason. He added stop after stop,--at the last and

sixtieth stop, he unfettered the whole volume of the wind. That instant

was a blast, not to speak irreverently, which sounded like the crack

of doom. To her standing stricken underneath, it seemed to explode

somewhere in the roof with a shock beyond all artillery,--to tear up the

ground under her feet, like the spasm of an earthquake,--to rend the

walls, like lightning's electric finger; and to shriek in her ringing

brain the advent of some implacable and dreadful judgment, but not the

doom of all men,--only one, which doom, alas! she felt might be also

hers _in_ his.

"All men and women within a mile had heard the shock, or rather felt it,

and interpreted it in various ways. Only the prince himself--who was

standing on the terrace, and had distinctly perceived the rich vibration

of the strong, but calm, _Hosanna_--interpreted it rightly and directly;

more than that, his animal sagacity told him it was Rodomant, who,

having amused himself, was now _indulging_ the same individual....

"To Adelaïda there was something more terrible in the succeeding silence

than in the shock of sound; it had ceased directly, died first into a

discordant groan, which, rising to a scream, was still. She listened

intensely: there was no fall of rattling fragments, the vibration had

been insufficient, or not prolonged enough, to injure the window,--that

had been her first, chief fear. This removed, however, she felt doubly,

desperately anxious. Why did he not come down, or speak, or stir? The

men employed to feed the monstrous machine with wind had all rushed away

together by the back-ladder through which they entered: hence the cause

of the shrieking groan and silence. He was there alone,--for he knew not

that she was there. Oh that he would give some sign!

"In a few minutes a sign was given, but not from him. The princess heard

the grinding of the immense door near the altar; it was opened;

steps entered hurriedly. She heard, next instant, her father's

voice,--impregnated with icy ire, low with smothered hatred, distinct

with the only purpose he ever entertained,--punishment. She flew, with

feet that gave no echo, up the stair on her side of the lobby. Rodomant

was sitting dead-still, with his face in his hands; they looked rigid;

the veins in his forehead, as it showed above his hands, were swollen

and stood out, but colorless as the keys that stretched beneath. His

calmness chilled her blood. She thought him dead, and all within her

that lived seemed to pass out of her in the will, nay, the power also,

to restore him. She grasped his arm. He was not dead, then, for he

sighed,--an awful sigh; it shook him like a light reed in the tempest,

he shuddered from head to foot; he leaned towards her, as if about to

faint, but never removed his close-locked hands from his eyes.... She

had only clasped his arm before; as hand met hand, or touch thrilled

touch, he shivered, his grasping fingers relaxed in their hold on each

other, but closed on hers.... She waited long,--she listened to his

breathing, intermittent with tearless sobs. At last he gasped violently,

a cold tear dropped on her hand, and he thrust it rudely from him.

"'God has taken my punishment into Hiss own hands: yet I defied not Him,

only something made by man, and man himself.' He spoke loudly, yet in

halting words, with gaps of silence between each phrase; then stared

wildly round him, and clapped both his hands upon his ears,--withdrew

them,--closed his ears with his fingers, then dropped his hands, and

cast on her a glance that implored--that demanded--the whole pity of her

heart. 'Have mercy!' were his words; 'I have lost my hearing, and it is

forever!'"

The discrimination of character exercised by Miss Sheppard is very

wonderful. Many as are the figures on her stage, they are never

repeated, and they are all as separate, as finely edged and bevelled,

as gems. The people grow under her pen,--whether you take Auchester,

developing so when first thrown on himself in Germany, and becoming at

length the rare type of manhood which he presents,--or the one change

wrought by years in Miss Benette, just the addition of something that

would have been impossible in any child, a deepened sweetness, that

completest touch of the perfect woman, "like perfume from unseen

flowers, diffusing itself when the wind awakens, while we know neither

whence the windy fragrance comes nor whither it flows." Perhaps this

characterization is most noticeable in "Counterparts," which she called

her small party of opposing temperaments: Salome, so gracious; Rose,

like the spirit of a sunbeam; Sarona, so keen and incisive, his passion

confronting Bernard's sweetness; and Cecilia, who, it is easy to

conjecture, wrote the book. I have always fancied that some mystic

trine was chorded by three beings who, with all their separate gifts,

possessed an equal power and sweetness,--Raphael, Shelley, and

Mendelssohn. And perhaps the same occurred more emphatically to Miss

Sheppard, for after Seraphael she drew Bernard,--Bernard, who is

exceeded by none in the whole range of romance. "Counterparts" is a

novel of ideal life; it is the land of one's dreams and one's delights;

its dwellers are more real to us than the men and women into whose eyes

we look upon the street, they haunt us and enrapture us, they breathe

about us an atmosphere of gentle and delicious melancholy like the soft

azure haze spread over meadow and hills by the faint south-wind. With

fresh incident on every leaf, with a charm in every scene, its spell is

enthralling, and its chapters are enchanted. There is no fault in

it; nothing can be more perfect, nothing more beautiful. One may put

"Consuelo" side by side with "Charles Auchester," but what novel in

the wide world deserves a place by "Counterparts"? It was worth having

lived, to have once thrown broadcast such handfuls of beauty.

Between the publication of Miss Sheppard's second book and "Rumour" two

others were issued,--"Beatrice Reynolds" and "The Double Coronet,"--for

which one wishes there were some younger sister, some Acton or Ellis, to

whom to impute them,--evidently the result of illness, weariness, and

physical weakness, perhaps wrung from her by inexorable necessity, but

which should never have been written. In the last, in spite of its very

Radcliffean air, there are truly terrible things, as Gutilyn and his

green-eyed child bear witness; but the other reminds one, as nearly as a

modern book may do so, of no less a model than the redoubtable "Thaddeus

of Warsaw!" But Miss Sheppard had already written all that at present

there was to say; rest was imperative till the intermittent springs

again overflowed. "Rumour," which approached the old excellence, was no

result of a soul's ardor,--merely very choice work. Notwithstanding,

everything is precious that filters through such a medium, and in

these three publications she found opportunity for expressing many a

conviction and for weaving many a fancy; moreover, she was afraid of

no one, and never minced matters, therefore they are interspersed

with criticisms: she praised Charlotte Bronté, condemned George Sand,

ridiculed Chopin, reproved Elizabeth Browning, and satirized "Punch." In

her last book there was a great, but scarcely a good change of style,

she having been obliged by its thinness to pepper the page with Italics;

still these are only marks of a period of transition, and in spite of

them the book is priceless. Judging from internal evidence, she here

appears to have frequented more society, and the contact of this

carelessly marrying world with her own pure perception of right struck

the spark which kindled into "Almost a Heroine." Here awakens again that

graceful humor which is the infallible sign of health, and which was so

lightly inwrought through the earlier volumes. Reading it over, one is

struck with its earnestness, its truth and noble courage,--one feels

that lofty social novels, which might have infused life and principle

and beauty into the mass of custom, were promised in this, and are now

no longer a possibility. And herein are the readers of this magazine

especially affected; since there is no reason to suppose that the work

promised and begun by her for these pages would not have been the peer

of her best production, some bold and beautiful elucidation of one of

the many mysteries in life; for the lack of appreciation in England was

no longer to concern her, and, unshackled and unrestrained, she could

feel herself surrounded by the genial atmosphere of loving listeners.

But perhaps it was not lawful that she should further impart these great

secrets which she had learned. "I sometimes think," she murmurs, "when

women try to rise too high either in their deeds or their desires, that

the spirit which bade them so rise sinks back beneath the weakness of

their earthly constitution, and never appeals again,--or else that the

spirit, being too strong, does away with the mortal altogether,--they

die, or rather they live again." It was like forecasting her own

horoscope. All suffering seems to have descended upon her,--and there

are some natures whose power of enjoyment, so infinite, yet so deep as

to be hidden, is balanced only by as infinite a power to endure; she

learned anew, as she says, and intensely, "what a long dream of misery

is life from which health's bloom has been brushed,--that irreparable

bloom,--and how far more terrible is the doom of those in whom the

nerve-life has been untoned." Sun-stroke and fever, vibration between

opiates at night and tonics at noon,--but the flame was too strong

to fan away lightly, it must burn itself out, the spirit was too

quenchless,--pain, wretchedness, exhaustion. On one of those delicious

days that came in the middle of this year's April,--warmth and fresh

earth-smells breathing all about,--the wide sprays of the lofty boughs

lying tinged in rosy purple, a web-like tracery upon the sky whose azure

was divine,--the air itself lucid and mellow, as if some star had been

dissolved within it,--on such a day the little foreign letter

came, telling that at length balm had dropped upon the weary

eyelids,--Elizabeth Sheppard was dead.

But in the midst of regret,--since all lovely examples lend their

strength, since they give such grace even to the stern facts of

suffering and death, and since there are too few such records on

Heaven's scroll,--be glad to know that for every throb of anguish, for

every swooning lapse of pain, there was one beside her with tenderest

hands, most careful eyes, most yearning and revering heart,--one into

whose sacred grief our intrusion is denied, but the remembrance of whose

long and deep devotion shall endure while there are any to tell how

Severn watched the Roman death-bed of Keats!

It is impossible to estimate our loss, because it draws upon infinitude;

there was so much growth yet possible to this soul; to all that she was

not she might yet have enlarged; and while at first her audience had

limits, she would in a calm and prosperous future have become that which

she herself described in saying that a really vast genius who is as vast

an artist will affect all classes, "touch even the uninitiated with

trembling and delight, and penetrate even the ignorant with strong, if

transient spell, as the galvanic energy binds each and all who embrace

in the chain-circle of grasping hands, in the shock of perfect

sympathy." Nevertheless, she has served Art incalculably,--Art, which

is the interpretation of God in Nature. And if, as she believed, in

spiritual things Beauty is the gage of immortality, the pledge may yet

be redeemed on earth, ever forbidding her memory to die.

ASTRAEA AT THE CAPITOL.

ABOLITION OF SLAVERY IN THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA, 1862.

When first I saw our banner wave

Above the nation's council-hall,

I heard beneath its marble wall

The clanking fetters of the slave!

In the foul market-place I stood,

And saw the Christian mother sold,

And childhood with its locks of gold,

Blue-eyed and fair with Saxon blood.

I shut my eyes, I held my breath,

And, smothering down the wrath and shame

That set my Northern blood aflame,

Stood silent--where to speak was death.

Beside me gloomed the prison-cell

Where wasted one in slow decline

For uttering simple words of mine,

And loving freedom all too well.

The flag that floated from the dome

Flapped menace in the morning air;

I stood, a perilled stranger, where

The human broker made his home.

For crime was virtue: Gown and Sword

And Law their threefold sanction gave,

And to the quarry of the slave

Went hawking with our symbol-bird.

On the oppressor's side was power;

And yet I knew that every wrong,

However old, however strong,

But waited God's avenging hour.

I knew that truth would crush the lie,--

Somehow, sometime, the end would be;

Yet scarcely dared I hope to see

The triumph with my mortal eye.

But now I see it! In the sun

A free flag floats from yonder dome,

And at the nation's hearth and home

The justice long delayed is done.

Not as we hoped, in calm of prayer,

The message of deliverance comes,

But heralded by roll of drums

On waves of battle-troubled air!--

'Midst sounds that madden and appall,

The song that Bethlehem's shepherds knew!--

The harp of David melting through

The demon-agonies of Saul!

Not as we hoped;--but what are we?

Above our broken dreams and plans

God lays, with wiser hand than man's,

The corner-stones of liberty.

I cavil not with Him: the voice

That freedom's blessed gospel tells

Is sweet to me as silver bells,

Rejoicing!--yea, I will rejoice!

Dear friends still toiling in the sun,--

Ye dearer ones who, gone before,

Are watching from the eternal shore

The slow work by your hands begun,--

Rejoice with me! The chastening rod

Blossoms with love; the furnace heat

Grows cool beneath His blessed feet

Whose form is as the Son of God!

Rejoice! Our Marah's bitter springs

Are sweetened; on our ground of grief

Rise day by day in strong relief

The prophecies of better things.

Rejoice in hope! The day and night

Are one with God, and one with them

Who see by faith the cloudy hem

Of Judgment fringed with Mercy's light!

PÈRE ANTOINE'S DATE-PALM.

A LEGEND OF NEW ORLEANS.

I.

MISS BADEAU.

It is useless to disguise the fact: Miss Badeau is a Rebel.

Mr. Beauregard's cannon had not done battering the walls of Sumter,

when Miss Badeau was packed up, labelled, and sent North, where she

has remained ever since in a sort of aromatic, rose-colored state of

rebellion.

She is not one of your blood-thirsty Rebels, you know; she has the good

sense to shrink with horror from the bare mention of those heathen who,

at Manassas and elsewhere, wreaked their unmanly spite on the bodies

of dead heroes: still she is a bitter little Rebel, with blonde hair,

superb eyelashes, and two brothers in the Confederate service,--if I may

be allowed to club the statements. When I look across the narrow strait

of our boarding-house table, and observe what a handsome wretch she

is, I begin to think that if Mr. Seward doesn't presently take her in

charge, _I_ shall.

The preceding paragraphs have little or nothing to do with what I am

going to relate: they merely illustrate how wildly a fellow will write,

when the eyelashes of a pretty woman get tangled with his pen. So I let

them stand,--as a warning.

My exordium should have taken this shape:--

"I hope and trust," remarked Miss Badeau, in that remarkably scathing

tone which she assumes in alluding to the U.S.V., "I hope and trust,

that, when your five hundred thousand, more or less, men capture my New

Orleans, they will have the good taste not to injure Père Antoine's

Date-Palm."

"Not a hair of its head shall be touched," I replied, without having the

faintest idea of what I was talking about.

"Ah! I hope not," she said.

There was a certain tenderness in her voice which struck me.

"Who is Père Antoine?" I ventured to ask. "And what is this tree that

seems to interest you so?"

"I will tell you."

Then Miss Badeau told me the following legend, which I think worth

writing down. If it should appear tame to the reader, it will be because

I haven't a black ribbed-silk dress, and a strip of point-lace around my

throat, like Miss Badeau; it will be because I haven't her eyes and lips

and music to tell it with, confound me!

II.

THE LEGEND.

Near the _levée_ (quay) and not far from the old French Cathedral, in

New Orleans, stands a fine date-palm, some thirty feet high, growing out

in the open air as sturdily as if its roots were sucking sap from their

native earth. Sir Charles Lyell, in his "Second Visit to the United

States," mentions this exotic:--"The tree is seventy or eighty years

old; for Père Antoine, a Roman Catholic priest, who died about twenty

years ago, told Mr. Bringier that he planted it himself, when he was

young. In his will he provided that they who succeeded to this lot of

ground should forfeit it, if they cut down the palm."

Wishing to learn something of Père Antoine's history, Sir Charles Lyell

made inquiries among the ancient Creole inhabitants of the _faubourg_.

That the old priest, in his last days, became very much emaciated, that

he walked about the streets like a mummy, that he gradually dried

up, and finally blew away, was the meagre result of the tourist's

investigations.

This is all that is generally known of Père Antoine. Miss Badeau's story

clothes these bare facts.

When Père Antoine was a very young man, he had a friend whom he loved as

he loved his eyes. Émile Jardin returned his passion, and the two, on

account of their friendship, became the marvel of the city where they

dwelt. One was never seen without the other; for they studied, walked,

ate, and slept together.

Antoine and Émile were preparing to enter the Church; indeed, they had

taken the preliminary steps, when a circumstance occurred which changed

the color of their lives.

A foreign lady, from some far-off island in the Pacific, had a few

months before moved into their neighborhood. The lady died suddenly,

leaving a girl of sixteen or seventeen entirely friendless and

unprovided for. The young men had been kind to the woman during her

illness, and at her death, melting with pity at the forlorn situation of

Anglice, the daughter, swore between themselves to love and watch over

her as if she were their sister.

Now Anglice had a wild, strange beauty, that made other women seem tame

beside her; and in the course of time the young men found themselves

regarding their ward not so much like brothers as at first. They

struggled with their destiny manfully, for the holy orders which they

were about to assume precluded the idea of love.

But every day taught them to be more fond of her. So they drifted on.

The weak like to temporize.

One night Émile Jardin and Anglice were not to be found. They had

flown,--but whither nobody knew, and nobody, save Antoine, cared.

It was a heavy blow to Antoine,--for he had half made up his mind to run

away with her himself.

A strip of paper slipped from a volume on Antoine's desk, and fluttered

to his feet.

"_Do not be angry_" said the bit of paper, piteously; "_forgive us, for

we love_."

Three years went by. Antoine had entered the Church, and was already

looked upon as a rising man; but his face was pale and his heart leaden,

for there was no sweetness in life for him.

Four years had elapsed, when a letter, covered with outlandish stamps,

was brought to the young priest,--a letter from Anglice. She was dying;

would he forgive her? Émile, the year previous, had fallen a victim to

the fever that raged on the island; and their child, little Anglice, was

likely to follow him. In pitiful terms she begged Antoine to take charge

of the child until she was old enough to enter a convent. The epistle

was finished by another hand, informing Antoine of Madame Jardin's

death; it also told him that Anglice had been placed on a vessel shortly

to leave the island for some Western port.

The letter was hardly read and wept over, when little Anglice arrived.

On beholding her, Antoine uttered a cry of joy and surprise,--she was so

like the woman he had worshipped.

As a man's tears are more pathetic than a woman's, so is his love more

intense,--not more enduring, or half so subtile, but intenser.

The passion that had been crowded down in his heart broke out and

lavished its richness on this child, who was to him, not only the

Anglice of years ago, but his friend Émile Jardin also.

Anglice possessed the wild, strange beauty of her mother,--the bending,

willowy form, the rich tint of skin, the large tropical eyes, that had

almost made Antoine's sacred robes a mockery to him.

For a month or two Anglice was wildly unhappy in her new home. She

talked continually of the bright country where she was born, the fruits

and flowers and blue skies. Antoine could not pacify her. By-and-by she

ceased to weep, and went about the cottage with a dreary, disconsolate

air that cut Antoine to the heart. Before the year ended, he noticed

that the ruddy tinge had fled from her cheek, that her eyes had grown

languid, and her slight figure more willowy than ever.

A physician was called. He could discover nothing wrong with the child,

except this fading and drooping. He failed to account for that. It was

some vague disease of the mind, he said, beyond his skill.

So Anglice faded day after day. She seldom left the room now. Antoine

could not shut out the fact that the child was passing away. He had

learned to love her so!

"Dear heart," he said once, "what is't ails thee?"

"Nothing, _mon père_"--for so she called him.

The winter passed, the balmy spring air had come, and Anglice seemed to

revive. In her little bamboo chair, on the porch, she swayed to and

fro in the fragrant breeze, with a peculiar undulating motion, like a

graceful tree.

At times something seemed to weigh upon her mind. Antoine noticed it,

and waited. At length she spoke.

"Near our house," said little Anglice, "near our house, on the island,

the palm-trees are waving under the blue sky. Oh, how beautiful! I seem

to lie beneath them all day long. I am very, very happy. I yearned for

them until I grew sick,--don't you think so, _mon père_?"

"_Mon Dieu_, yes!" exclaimed Antoine, suddenly. "Let us hasten to those

pleasant islands where the palms are waving."

Anglice smiled.

"I am going there, _mon père!_"

Ay, indeed. A week from that evening the wax candles burned at her feet

and forehead, lighting her on the journey.

All was over. Now was Antoine's heart empty. He had nothing to do but to

lay the blighted flower away.

Père Antoine made a shallow grave in his garden, and heaped the fresh

brown mould over his idol.

In the genial spring evenings the priest was seen sitting by the mound,

his finger closed in the unread prayer-book.

The summer broke on that sunny land; and in the cool morning twilight,

and after nightfall, Antoine lingered by the grave. He could never be

with it enough.

One morning he observed a delicate stem, with two curiously shaped

emerald leaves, springing up from the centre of the mound. At first he

merely noticed it casually; but at length the plant grew so tall, and

was so strangely unlike anything he had ever seen before, that he

examined it with care.

How straight and graceful and exquisite it was! When it swung to and fro

with the summer wind, in the twilight, it seemed to Antoine as if little

Anglice were standing there in the garden!

The days stole by, and Antoine tended the fragile shoot, wondering what

sort of blossom it would unfold, white, or scarlet, or golden. One

Sunday, a stranger, with a bronzed, weather-beaten face like a sailor's,

leaned over the garden-rail, and said to him,--

"What a fine young date-palm you have there, Sir!"

"_Mon Dieu!_" cried Père Antoine, "and is it a palm?"

"Yes, indeed," returned the man. "I had no idea the tree would flourish

in this climate."

"_Mon Dieu!_" was all the priest could say.

If Père Antoine loved the tree before, he worshipped it now. He watered

it, and nurtured it, and could have clasped it in his arms. Here were

Émile and Anglice and the child, all in one!

The years flew by, and the date-palm and the priest grew together,--only

one became vigorous and the other feeble. Père Antoine had long passed

the meridian of life. The tree was in its youth. It no longer stood in

an isolated garden; for homely brick and wooden houses had clustered

about Antoine's cottage. They looked down scowling on the humble

thatched roof. The city was edging up, trying to crowd him off his land.

But he clung to it, and wouldn't sell. Speculators piled gold on his

door-step, and he laughed at them. Sometimes he was hungry, but he

laughed none the less.

"Get thee behind me, Satan!" said the old priest's smile.

Père Antoine was very old now, scarcely able to walk; but he could sit

under the pliant, caressing leaves of his tree, and there he sat until

the grimmest of speculators came to him. But even in death Père Antoine

was faithful to his trust. The owner of that land loses it, if he harms

the date-tree.

And there it stands in the narrow, dingy street, a beautiful, dreamy

stranger, an exquisite foreign lady whose grace is a joy to the eye, the

incense of whose breath makes the air enamored. A precious boon is she

to the wretched city; and when loyal men again walk those streets, may

the hand wither that touches her ungently!

"Because it grew from the heart of little Anglice," said Miss Badeau,

tenderly.

* * * * *

"SOLID OPERATIONS IN VIRGINIA":

OR, 'T IS EIGHTY YEARS SINCE.

I have never had many personal interviews with Princes. Setting aside a

few with different Excellencies of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, I

never had but one such interview, which prolonged itself far enough to

deserve a place in these memoirs of our time. This was with a President

of the then United States,--with him who was, I fear, the Last of the

Virginians. At least, I know no one on the line of promotion just now

who seems to me likely to succeed him.

"Have ye travelled in Virginia, Mr. Larkin?" said the President to me.

I said I had not, but that I hoped to see the Valley of Virginia before

I went home. That is the name given, in those regions, to the district

west of the Blue Ridge. The President listened, but expressed himself

dissatisfied with my plan.

"Ah, Sah!" he said, "ye sh'd see Jeems River. Every American sh'd see

Jeems River. Ye'll not see the appearance of a large population,

to which ye're used in Massachusetts,--the--customs,--the

--arrangements,--the habits--of--our--laboring people--are

such--that--that--their residences--are--are--more distant--from the

highway than with you;--but--but--ye'll be greatly interested in

seeing Jeems River. We've not the cities to show that ye have in

Massachusetts,--but--there are great historical associations with Jeems

River."

I bowed assent,--and when the President spoke again with some

depreciation of their productions, I made up my mouth to say, in courtly

vein,

"Man is the nobler growth your realms supply,"

when I recollected that that remark was too literally true to be

complimentary to a State which made its chief business the growing of

men and women for a distant market. So I did what it is always wise to

do,--I said nothing. And the President, warming with his theme, said,--

"Yes, Sah, ye sh'd see Jeems River. There, at Jeemst'n, America first

gave a home to the European,--and hard by, at Yorkt'n, the tie with

Europe was sundered. There ye may see Williamsburg,--and our oldest

college. There ye may see the birthplaces of four Presidents,--and there

the capital of Virginia!"

With such, and other temptations, did he direct me on my journey.

I have been thinking how little the poor man foresaw that the time would

come when in the valley of "Jeems River" the traveller would see the

grave of the only President of the United States who ever in his old age

turned rebel to the country which had honored him. How little he foresaw

that other campaigns were impending, which would give more historical

interest to the valley than even Cornwallis's marchings and

countermarchings! how little he dreamed of Monitors and Merrimacks in

fierce _méleé_ before his own little Hampton! how little, while he sowed

the wind that winter, he looked forward to the whirlwind-reaping,--of

which, indeed, he lived to hear only the first fierce sigh!

This valley of "Jeems River," and the three other valleys which radiate

like the four fingers of an open hand, and send their waters down into

the great conduit of Chesapeake Bay, which is the palm to these four

fingers, are in this very month of April, when I write, to become the

great battle-field of the continent. How strangely history repeats

itself, that, after eighty-one years, we should be looking out on

the map the Rapid Ann and the Chickahominy, and Williamsburg

and Fredericksburg, just as our fathers did in 1781,--that the

grandchildren of the men who marched under Lafayette from Baltimore to

Richmond, by the forced march which saved that infant capital from the

enemy, should be marching now, with a more Fabian tread, to save the

same Richmond from worse enemies! Does the Comte de Paris trace the

footprints of the young Marquis-General, who afterwards, among other

things, made his grandfather King? How strange it all is! While I wait

to know where Fabius is hidden, and where those army-corps of hundreds

of thousands are, which seem to have sunk into the ground at Warrenton

the other day, you and I, Reader, will familiarize ourselves with the

geography a little, by brushing the dust off those old campaigns.

They began by mere predatory excursions, which occupied, for a few weeks

at a time, the English forces which could be detached from New York. "We

march up and down the country," said Cornwallis, not overmuch

pleased, "stealing tobacco." As early as 1779, on the 8th of May, the

Raisonnable, sixty-four, five smaller ships of the English navy, and a

number of privateers acting as convoy to a cloud of transports, entered

the Capes of the Chesapeake. The Raisonnable drew too much water to go

farther than Hampton Roads: they probably did not know the channel

as well as the Merrimack's pilots do. But the rest of them went up

Elizabeth River, as one Pawnee did afterwards,--and there, at Gosport,

found the State's navy-yard, as the Pawnee found a nation's. There was

a vessel of war, unfinished, of twenty-eight guns, and many smaller

vessels,--and they burned them all. How exactly it begins as the history

of another war begins! Different branches of this expedition destroyed

one hundred and thirty-seven vessels, and tobacco beyond account,--and

they were all snugly back in New York in twenty-four days after they

started.

It is the second campaign which is the most picturesque, varied, and

exciting of the campaigns of the American Revolution,--and which was

fought on ground which will have been made sacred by another campaign,

perhaps even before these words meet the reader's eye. The men engaged

in it were men who have left their mark. Cornwallis and Baron Steuben

share with each other the honor of inventing the present light-infantry

tactics of the world. Cornwallis. in Carolina, had seen the necessity of

divesting his troops of their impediments. Steuben had been doing the

same with the American line, ever since he began his instructions on the

29th of March, 1778. The discipline thus invented was carried back to

Europe by English and by French officers; and when the wars of the

French Revolution began, the rapid movement of the new light infantry

approved itself to military men of all the great warring nations, and

the old tactics of the heavy infantry of the last century died away in

face of the American improvement. Besides Cornwallis, and for a time

under him, here figured the traitor Arnold. Against them, besides

Steuben, were Wayne and Lafayette,--the last in his maiden campaign, in

which, indeed, he earned his military reputation, "never but once,"

says Tarleton, his enemy "committing himself during a very difficult

campaign." In the beginning, General Phillips, the same who had been

captured at Saratoga, had the chief command of the English army.

Lafayette notes grimly that General Phillips had commanded at Minden the

battery by which the Marquis de Lafayette, his father, was killed. He

makes this memorandum in mentioning the fact that one of his cannon-shot

passed through the room in which Phillips was dying in Petersburg. Such

were the prominent actors in the campaign. It is not till within a few

years that the full key to it has been given in the publication of some

additional letters of Lord Cornwall. Until that time, a part of his

movements were always shrouded in mystery.

In October, 1780, the English General Leslie entered Chesapeake Bay

again, and established himself for a while at Portsmouth, opposite

Norfolk. But Colonel Ferguson, with whom Leslie was to cooperate,

had been defeated at King's Mountain, and when Leslie learned of the

consequent change in Cornwallis's plans, he returned to New York on the

24th of November. His departure was regarded as a victory by General

Muhlenberg, and the Virginia militia, who were called out to meet him.

They had scarcely been disbanded, however, when a second expedition,

which had been intrusted to the traitor Arnold, arrived from New York in

James River. Baron Steuben, the Prussian officer, who had "brought the

foreign arts from far," was at this time in command, but with really

little or no army. Steuben was, at the best, an irritable person, and

his descriptions of the Virginia militia are probably tinged by his

indignation at constant failure. General Nelson, who was the Governor of

the State, behaved with spirit, but neither he nor Steuben could make

the militia stand against Arnold. They could not create a corps

of cavalry among the Virginia Cavaliers, and Arnold's expedition,

therefore, marched twenty-five miles and back without so much as a

shot being fired at them. He established himself at Portsmouth, where

Muhlenberg watched him, and he there waited a reinforcement.

Just at this juncture a little gleam of hope shot across the darkened

landscape, in the arrival of three French vessel's of war at the mouth

of James River. The American officers all hated Arnold with such

thorough hatred that they tried to persuade the French officers to shut

up Elizabeth River by sea, while they attacked him at Portsmouth from

the land; but the Frenchmen declined cooperation, and Steuben was always

left to boast of what he might have done. As he had but eight rounds

of ammunition a man for troops who had but just now failed him so

lamentably, we can scarcely suppose that Arnold was in much danger.

Washington, meanwhile, had persuaded the French Admiral, at Newport,

to send his whole fleet to act against Portsmouth; and by land he sent

Lafayette, with twelve hundred light infantry, to take command in

Virginia. Lafayette left Peekskill, feigned an attack upon Staten

Island in passing, marched rapidly by Philadelphia to the head of the

Chesapeake,--they all call it the "head of Elk,"--crowded his men on

such boats as he found there, and, like General Butler after him, went

down to Annapolis. At Annapolis, with some of his officers, he took

a little vessel, in which he ran down to Williamsburg to confer with

Steuben. He then crossed the James River, and reached the camp of

Muhlenberg near Suffolk on the 19th of March. The reader has only to

imagine General Burnside shutting up Norfolk on the south and west just

now, to conceive of Lafayette's position, as he supposed it to be, when,

on the 20th, he was told that the French fleet had arrived within the

Capes. But, alas! on the 23d, it proved that this was not the French

fleet, but the English, which had so far injured the French fleet in an

action that they had returned to Newport; so that it was Arbuthnot, and

not Destouches, whose fleet had arrived at Hampton Roads. Under their

protection the English General Phillips relieved Arnold with two

thousand more men; and it is at this moment that the active campaign of

1781 may be said to begin.

General Phillips immediately took command of the English army, for which

he had sufficient force of light transports, and proceeded up James

River. He landed first at Burrel's Ferry, opposite Williamsburg, into

which city, till lately the capital of the State, he marched unmolested.

His different marauding parties had entire success in their operations;

and it is to be observed that his command of the navigation was an

essential element of that success. "There is no fighting here," wrote

Lafayette, "unless you have a naval superiority, or an army mounted on

race-horses." Under almost all circumstances a corps embarked on boats

could be pushed along these rivers faster than an enemy marching on the

land. This remark, constantly verified then, will be much more important

in the campaign now pending, in which these streams will, of course,

be navigated by steam. It must be remembered, also, that the State of

Virginia was at this time the storehouse from which General Greene's

army in Carolina was supplied. To destroy the stores collected here,

and thus directly to break down the American army in the South, was Sir

Henry Clinton's object in sending out General Phillips. To protect these

stores and the lines of communication with the Southern army was the

object of the American generals. Had these designs been left unchanged,

however, I should not now be writing this history. Indeed, the whole

history of the United States would have had another beginning, and the

valley of the James River would have had as little critical interest,

in the close of the American Revolution, as have the valleys of the

Connecticut and the Penobscot. The important change came, when Lord

Cornwallis, at Wilmington, North Carolina, took the responsibility of

the dashing, but fatal plan by which he crossed North Carolina with his

own army, joined Phillips's army in Virginia, and with this large force,

with no considerable enemy opposed, was in a position to go anywhere or

to do anything unmolested. Cornwallis was an admirable officer, quite

the ablest the English employed in America. He was young, spirited, and

successful,--and, which was of much more importance in England, he had

plenty of friends at Court. He conceived the great insubordination,

therefore, of this great movement, which must compromise Sir Henry

Clinton's plans, although Sir Henry was his commander. He wrote to

the Secretary for the Colonies in London, and to General Phillips in

Virginia, that he was satisfied that a "serious attempt" on that State,

or "solid operations in Virginia," made the proper plan. So he abandoned

Carolina, to which he had been sent, to General Greene; and with the

idea that Sir Henry Clinton, his superior in command, ought to quit New

York and establish himself in Virginia, without waiting that officer's

views, he marched thither himself in such wise as to compel him to come.

In that movement the great game was really lost. And it is to that act

of insubordination, that, until this eventful April, 1862, the valley of

James River has owed its historical interest.

He wrote from North Carolina, directing General Phillips to join him in

Petersburg, Virginia; and thither Phillips called in his different corps

who were "stealing tobacco," and there he himself arrived, in a dying

condition, on the 9th of May. "I procured a post-chaise to convey him,"

says Arnold, his second in command. The town is familiar to travellers,

as being the end of the first railroad-link south of Richmond. They

still show the old house in which poor Phillips lay sick, while

Lafayette, from the other side of the river, cannonaded the town with

his light field-pieces. One of his balls entered the house, killed an

old negro-woman who was reviling the American troops, and passed through

the room where Phillips lay. "Will they not let me die in peace?" he

asked. Arnold was also in danger, one of the balls passing near him;

and, by his orders, Phillips and all the household were removed into the

cellar. General Phillips was afterwards taken to another house, where he

died on the 13th. It is in his memoranda of this affair at Petersburg

that Lafayette records the fact that his father died at Minden from one

of the shots of Phillips's batteries.

We left Lafayette at Williamsburg, which, my readers will remember, is

on the neck of land of which Fort Monroe forms the southeast corner: it

is about twenty-six miles northwest of that post, and ten miles west

of Yorktown. If they do not remember this, they had better learn it

now,--for, on this second of April, the appearances are that they will

need to know it before long. If any one of them does not care to look at

a map, he may take my figure which called Chesapeake Bay the palm of the

hand,--to which the James, York, Rappahannock, and Potomac Rivers are

the four fingers. Lay down on the page your right hand, upon its back,

with the fingers slightly apart. The thumb is a meridian which points

north. The forefinger is the Potomac as far as Washington. The middle

finger is the Rappahannock,--with Fredericksburg about the first joint.

The ring-finger is York River, with Williamsburg and Yorktown just above

and below the knuckle line. The little finger is the James River, as far

as Richmond. Fort Monroe is at the parting of the last two fingers. We

left Lafayette at Williamsburg, disappointed at the failure to entrap

Arnold. He returned at once to Annapolis by water, and transported his

troops back to the head of Chesapeake Bay,--expecting to return to New

York, now that his mission had failed. But Washington had learned,

meanwhile, that General Phillips had been sent from New York to

reinforce Arnold,--and so Lafayette met orders at the head of the

Chesapeake to return, take command in Virginia, and foil the English as

he might. Wayne, in Pennsylvania, was to join him with eight hundred of

the mutinous Pennsylvania line. Were they the grandfathers of the men

who deserted before Bull's Run? They retrieved themselves at James

Island afterwards,--as the Bull's Run Pennsylvanians did at Newbern the

other day. "How Lafayette or Wayne can march without money or credit,"

wrote Washington to Laurens, "is more than I can tell," But he did his

part, which was to command,--and they did theirs, which was to obey.

Lafayette did his part thus. His troops, twelve hundred light infantry,

the best soldiers in the world, he said at the end of the summer, had

left Peekskill for a short expedition only. They had no supplies for a

summer campaign, and seemed likely to desert him. Lafayette issued a

spirited order of the day, in which he took the tone of Henry V. before

the Battle of Agincourt, and offered a pass back to the North River to

any man who did not dare share with him the perils of the summer against

a superior force. He also hanged one deserter whom he caught after this

order, and pardoned another who was less to blame. By such varied means

he so far "encouraged the rest" that he wholly stopped desertion. He

crossed the Susquehanna on the 13th of April, was in Baltimore on the

18th, and it was here that the ladies gave him the ball where he said,

"My soldiers have no shirts." He borrowed two thousand guineas on his

own personal security, promising to pay at the end of two years, when

the French law would make him master of his estates. He bought

material with the money, made the Baltimore belles, who were not then

Secessionists, make the shirts, and started on his forced march again,

with his troops clothed and partly shod, on the 20th. He passed the

hills where Washington stands, unconscious of the city that was to be

there, and of the Long Bridge which shakes under McClellan's columns.

He halted to buy shoes in Alexandria, which he reached in two days. He

pressed on to Fredericksburg, and was at Richmond on the 29th. So that a

light column can march in nine days from Baltimore to Richmond, though

there be no railroad in working order.

This was the first march "Forward to Richmond" in history. For the

moment, it saved the city and its magazines from General Phillips, who

had reached Manchester, on the opposite side of James River. Phillips

retired down the river, hoping to decoy Lafayette after him, on that

neck of land, now, as then, a point so critical, between the James and

York Rivers,--and then to return by his vessels on the first change of

wind, get in Lafayette's rear, and shut him up there. But it was another

general who was to be shut up on that neck. Phillips was called south to

Petersburg, where, as we have seen, he died. "Will they not let me die

in peace?"

Cornwallis arrived at Petersburg with his Southern troops, including

Tarleton's horse, on the 20th of May. He then had nearly six thousand

men under his orders. Lafayette had about thirty-two hundred, of whom

only a few were cavalry, a volunteer body of Baltimore young gentlemen

being the most of them. The Virginia gentry had hesitated about giving

up their fine blood-horses to mount cavalry on. But Tarleton had

no hesitation in stealing them for his troopers, nor Simcoe, his

fellow-partisan, for his,--so that Cornwallis had the invaluable aid of

two bodies of cavalry thus admirably mounted, against an enemy almost

destitute. Both armies marched without tents, with the very lightest

baggage. It purely a light-infantry campaign, excepting the dashing

raids of Tarleton and Simcoe.

Lafayette felt his inferiority of force,--and as soon as Cornwallis

joined, crossed back over James River at Osborn's (say the bottom of

the little-finger nail on our extempore map). Cornwallis crossed at

Westover, also marked now on the maps as Ruffin's, some twenty miles

lower down the river. Lafayette felt the necessity of meeting Wayne, who

was supposed to be coming from Pennsylvania; he therefore retraced

his march of a few weeks before, followed by Cornwallis with his

infantry;--the cavalry had been on more distant service. Cornwallis

would have crushed Lafayette, if he had overtaken him; but Lafayette

knew this as well as we do,--marched nearly up to Fredericksburg

again,--protected it till its stores were removed,--and then, after

five days' march more, westward, met Wayne with his eight hundred

Pennsylvanians at Raccoon Ford (head of the middle finger on the

hand-map). The reader has, in just such way, marched a knight across the

chess-board to escort back a necessary pawn, to make desperate fight

against some Cornwallis of a castle. Cornwallis passed through Hanover

Court-House to Chesterfield Court-House, "stealing tobacco," in the

whole to the amount of two thousand hogsheads,--then, satisfying himself

that he could not prevent the junction of the knight and pawn, and that

Hunter's iron-works, at Fredericksburg, which he had threatened, were

not of so much import as the stores in the western part of the country,

he turned south and west again, and awaited Lafayette's movements,

threatening Albemarle County, just west of where we are beginning to get

acquainted with Gordonsville,--a place then uncreated. Cornwallis was

all along unwilling to engage in extensive operations till he should

hear from Sir Henry Clinton, whom he knew he had insulted and offended.

His detachments of horse had been sent, meanwhile, up the line of James

River above Richmond. Tarleton penetrated as far as Charlottesville,

marching seventy miles in twenty-four hours, hoping to take the

Legislature by surprise. The story is, that he would have succeeded, but

for his eagerness to get his breakfast on the last day. He had waited

long for it,--and finally asked, in some heat, where it was. Dr. Walker,

whose guest he had made himself, replied, that Tarleton's soldiers had

already taken two of the breakfasts which had been prepared for him that

morning, and suggested a guard for the security of the third.

While the third breakfast was being cooked, the legislators escaped.

Jefferson was among them. Tarleton took seven, however, who told him

that the country was tired of the war,--and that, if no treaty for a

loan were made with France that summer, Congress would negotiate with

England before winter. They were eighty-one years in advance of their

time! Tarleton returned down the Rivanna River to its junction with the

James, where he assisted Simcoe in driving out Baron Steuben, who with a

few militia was trying to protect some arms there. Poor Steuben had but

few to protect, nothing to protect them with, and lost them all. At this

point the cavalry rejoined the main army under Cornwallis.

In all these movements of both parties, the character of the "laboring

people," of which, as I have said, President Tyler spoke to me, was

illustrated. These people swarmed to Cornwallis with information, with

horses and supplies. They did not swell the ranks of the Virginia

militia. "He took away thirty thousand of our slaves," says Mr.

Jefferson. "Many of your negroes joined the enemy," says Lafayette

to Washington; "the news did not trouble me much, for that sort of

interests touch me very little." This is in the letter where he tells

the General how his agent, Lund Washington, had been disgracefully

treating with the invaders. This disposition of the "laboring people,"

away from the high-roads, indeed, as Mr. Tyler said, explains the

difference between Southern and Northern Revolutionary campaigns. The

English forces never marched a day's march inland in the Northern

States, excepting the three marches of two days or three, when they

came to Bennington, to Saratoga, and to Trenton,--three memorable

stopping-places. But in a country where the "laboring people" did not

bear arms, they went to and fro, for months, as they chose. The Southern

militia was small in numbers, and not trustworthy. The troops whom

Lafayette relied upon, "the best troops in the world, far superior, in

equal numbers, to the English," were his two thousand Northern men of

the Continental line. Lord Cornwallis reunited all his forces at Elk

Island, about forty miles above Richmond on James River. His own

head-quarters were at "Jefferson's Plantation." He proposed another

blow, on the stores collected in Old Albemarle Court-House, behind the

mountains; and on the 9th of June he ordered Tarleton to march thither

at daybreak, but recalled the order. He seems to have preferred waiting

till he could attack "the Marquis," as they all called Lafayette, to

advantage, to risking any considerable division in the mountains. And

as he lay, the road by which he supposed Lafayette must come down from

Raccoon Ford to protect Albemarle would expose him to a flank attack

as he passed the head of Byrd's River. It was at this time, that, in a

despatch which was intercepted, he wrote, "The boy cannot escape

me." Lafayette tells the story with great gusto. "The boy" found a

mountain-road which crossed farther west than that which he was expected

to march upon. It had been long disused, but he pressed through it,--and

at Burwell's Ordinary, in a neighborhood where our troops will find

villages with the promising names of Union Town and Everettsville, he

formed, on the 12th and 13th, in a strong position between Cornwallis

and the coveted magazines. Cornwallis affected to suppose that the

stores had been withdrawn; but, as he had given up Fredericksburg

that he might destroy these very stores, Lafayette had good reason to

congratulate himself that he had foiled him in the two special objects

of the campaign, and had reduced him to the business which he did not

like, of "stealing tobacco." For whatever reason, Cornwallis did not

press his enterprise. With a force so formidable and a leader so

enterprising before him, he did not care to entangle himself in the

passes of the Blue Ridge. We shall know from General Banks's column, by

the time this paper is printed, what are the facilities they afford for

cover to an enemy. Leaving the Albemarle stores, therefore, and the road

to Greene behind the mountains, he retraced his steps down the valley

of the James River, and, passing Richmond, descended as low as

Williamsburg, the point from which we have been tracing Lafayette's

movements.

Lafayette followed him with delight, not to say amazement. "The enemy is

so obliging as to withdraw before us," he writes,--and probably, to the

end of his life, he did not fully understand why Lord Cornwallis did so.

Their forces were numerically about equal, each commanding now rather

more than five thousand men. But of Lafayette's only fifty were cavalry,

a very important arm in that campaign, while Cornwallis had now eight

hundred men mounted on the blood horses of Virginia. It was not true, as

Lafayette thought possible, that the English exaggerated his force. It

appears from Tarleton's memoirs that they estimated it very precisely.

But we now know from Cornwallis's letters, that he had promised Clinton

to be at Williamsburg on the 26th of June, ready for any operations

he might then and there propose. He hoped that Clinton would largely

reinforce him, so that his favorite scheme of "solid operations in

Virginia" might be carried on. At all events, he had promised to have

his army at Williamsburg to join any force which Clinton might send to

him. To make this imagined junction, which never took place, he began

his retreat. Lafayette again offered him battle; but Cornwallis did

not accept the opportunity, and on the 25th of June he arrived at

Williamsburg. Lafayette was always one day's march behind him, and

encamped at last at Tyre's Plantation, one day beyond Williamsburg,

which may become famous again in a few days. Colonel Butler, of

Pennsylvania, with his riflemen, attacked Colonel Simcoe, of the English

corps of refugees, at the Fords of the Chickahominy, about six miles

west of Williamsburg. We shall be hearing of these fords again.

At Williamsburg poor Cornwallis met his fate. He had, perhaps, been

dreading the arrival of his despatches from Clinton, through all the

month he had been in Virginia. At last they came. Clinton was sorry he

was there, expressed his regret that Cornwallis did not favor his plan

for marching on Philadelphia, gave him _carte blanche_ for Baltimore or

Delaware,--but, instead of reinforcing him, asked for two thousand men,

if he could spare them. The letter is, on the whole, a manly letter,

from a superior to an inferior, who had social rank higher than himself,

and more of the confidence of their Government. It gives Cornwallis

great latitude; but it does not "abandon New York and bring our whole

force into Virginia," which was Cornwallis's pet plan.

His Lordship behaved ill,--and, in a pet, threw away the British empire

in America. He sulked, to speak simply. He took the sullen policy

of literal obedience to orders, though he knew he should "break his

owners." He marched at once, crossed James River at Jamestown, where

Lafayette attacked his rear,--and, if his Lordship had been in

fighting humor, would have got well beaten for his pains,--withdrew to

Portsmouth, and put on vessels the two thousand men asked for by Sir

Henry. Just then new despatches came from Clinton, who had received

later news, and who was always trying to humor this spoiled child. He

told him to keep all his men in Virginia, where he would take command

himself as soon as the hot season was over. The "solid operations" were

to begin. Very unstable they proved, even in the beginning!

Clinton ordered him to take post at Old Point Comfort,--where Fort

Monroe is. But the engineer officers reported that they could not

protect the fleet there against the French; and, to the delight of

Lafayette and of all good angels, Cornwallis selected Yorktown for his

summer position. Our neighborhood to it at Fort Monroe has made the

position again familiar.

When Lafayette heard that the troops had sailed up the

Chesapeake,--instead of to New York, which he had very correctly

supposed to be their destination,--he thought Cornwallis was going to

strike at Baltimore, and that he must "cut across" to Fredericksburg.

That way he marched with his light infantry. His amazement hardly

concealed itself when he found the enemy stopped at Yorktown. Back he

came to Williamsburg, and wrote to Washington,--"If a fleet should

arrive at this moment, our affairs will take a very fortunate turn."

This was on the 6th of August. On the 1st of September he could

write,--"From the bottom of my heart, my dear General, I felicitate you

on the arrival of the French fleet.... Thanks to you, my dear General,

I am in a charming situation, and I find myself at the head of a superb

corps." The Marquis of St. Simon joined him with three thousand French

infantry from the fleet,--and at Williamsburg they effectually kept

Cornwallis from escape by land, as the French fleet did by sea.

The only proposal which Cornwallis made to save his corps after this was

carefully considered, and, it is said, at one time determined on; but it

was finally rejected, in expectation of relief from Clinton. Just now

that we are beginning "solid operations in Virginia," and may have

occasion to move a hundred thousand men, more or less, up the long neck

of land between York and James Rivers, the passage is an interesting

one. Washington had not yet arrived. The English plan was to attack and

beat Lafayette and St. Simon before Washington joined them. The English

columns were to move from Yorktown so as to attack Williamsburg before

daybreak. "That time was deemed eligible," says Tarleton, "because the

ground near and in Williamsburg is cut by several ravines, and because

the British column, in advancing in the long and straight road through

the town, would not be so much exposed to the enemy's cannon under cover

of the night as during the day." Let the reader remember these defiles,

as he traces the march of another column from Fort Monroe through

Yorktown to Williamsburg, with some General Magruder falling back

before it, watching his chances to strike. Cornwallis gave up the plan,

however, and waited for the help from Clinton, which never came. On the

15th of September Washington and Rochambeau joined Lafayette; on the

18th of October Cornwallis capitulated, and for eighty years the

Virginian campaigns were over.

There is not one subdivision of them but is touched by the movements of

to-day. Everything is changed, indeed, except Virginia. But Raccoon Ford

and Bottom's Bridge are where they were then. The division which marches

on Gordonsville may send a party down the "Marquis's Road," as the

people still call the wood-road which Lafayette opened; and all the

battles of the next month,[A] in short, will be fought on the ground

familiar to the soldiers of eighty years ago.

[Footnote A: By "the next month" the writer meant May. It will be

observed that his article was finally prepared for the press on the

second of April. It has not since been changed. The references to

Williamsburg, the Chickahominy, and the "neck between the rivers" are

not "prophecies after the fact."]

SUNTHIN' IN THE PASTORAL LINE.

_To the Editors of the_ ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

Jaalam, 17th May, 1862.

Gentlemen,--At the special request of Mr. Biglow, I intended to inclose,

together with his own contribution, (into which, at my suggestion,

he has thrown a little more of pastoral sentiment than usual,) some

passages from my sermon on the day of the National Fast, from the text,

"Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them," _Heb_. xiii. 3.

But I have not leisure sufficient at present for the copying of them,

even were I altogether satisfied with the production as it stands. I

should prefer, I confess, to contribute the entire discourse to the

pages of your respectable miscellany, if it should be found acceptable

upon perusal, especially as I find the difficulty of selection of

greater magnitude than I had anticipated. What passes without challenge

in the fervour of oral delivery cannot always stand the colder criticism

of the closet. I am not so great an enemy of Eloquence as my friend Mr.

Biglow would appear to be from some passages in his contribution for

the current month. I would not, indeed, hastily suspect him of covertly

glancing at myself in his somewhat caustick animadversions, albeit some

of the phrases he girds at are not entire strangers to my lips. I am a

more hearty admirer of the Puritans than seems now to be the fashion,

and believe, that, if they Hebraized a little too much in their speech,

they showed remarkable practical sagacity as statesmen and founders. But

such phenomena as Puritanism are the results rather of great religious

than merely social convulsions, and do not long survive them. So soon as

an earnest conviction has cooled into a phrase, its work is over, and

the best that can be done with it is to bury it. _Ite, missa est_. I

am inclined to agree with Mr. Biglow that we cannot settle the great

political questions which are now presenting themselves to the nation by

the opinions of Jeremiah or Ezekiel as to the wants and duties of the

Jews in their time, nor do I believe that an entire community with their

feelings and views would be practicable or even agreeable at the present

day. At the same time I could wish that their habit of subordinating

the actual to the moral, the flesh to the spirit, and this world to the

other were more common. They had found out, at least, the great military

secret that soul weighs more than body.--But I am suddenly called to a

sick-bed in the household of a valued parishioner.

With esteem and respect. Your ob't serv't HOMER WILBUR.

Once git a smell o' musk into a draw

An' it clings hold like precerdents in law:

Your gran'ma'am put it there,--when, goodness knows,--

To jes' this-worldify her Sunday-clo'es;

But the old chist wun't sarve her gran'son's wife,

(For, 'thout new funnitoor, wut good in life?)

An' so ole clawfoot, from the precinks dread

O' the spare-chamber, slinks into the shed,

Where, dim with dust, it fust or last subsides

To holdin' seeds an' fifty things besides;

But better days stick fast in heart an' husk,

An' all you keep in't gits a scent o' musk.

Jes' so with poets: wut they've airly read

Gits kind o' worked into their heart an' head,

So's 't they can't seem to write but jest on sheers

With furrin countries or played-out ideers,

Nor hev a feelin', ef it doosn't smack

O' wut some critter chose to feel 'way back:

This makes 'em talk o' daisies, larks, an' things,

Ez though we 'd nothin' here that blows an' sings,--

(Why, I'd give more for one live bobolink

Than a square mile o' larks in printer's ink,)--

This makes 'em think our fust o' May is May,

Which 't ain't, for all the almanicks can say.

O little city-gals, don't never go it

Blind on the word o' noospaper or poet!

They 're apt to puff, an' May-day seldom looks

Up in the country ez it doos in books;

They 're no more like than hornets'-nests an' hives,

Or printed sarmons be to holy lives.

I, with my trouses perched on cow-hide boots,

Tuggin' my foundered feet out by the roots,

Hev seen ye come to fling on April's hearse

Your muslin nosegays from the milliner's,

Puzzlin' to find dry ground your queen to choose,

An' dance your throats sore in morocker shoes:

I've seen ye an' felt proud, thet, come wut would,

Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.

Pleasure doos make us Yankees kind o' winch,

Ez though 't wuz sunthin' paid for by the inch;

But yit we du contrive to worry thru,

Ef Dooty tells us thet the thing's to du,

An' kerry a hollerday, ef we set out,

Ez stiddily ez though 't wuz a redoubt.

I, country-born an' bred, know where to find

Some blooms thet make the season suit the mind,

An' seem to metch the doubtin' bluebird's notes,--

Half-vent'rin' liverworts in furry coats,

Bloodroots, whose rolled-up leaves ef you oncurl,

Each on 'em's cradle to a baby-pearl,--

But these are jes' Spring's pickets; sure ez sin,

The rebble frosts 'll try to drive 'em in;

For half our May's so awfully like Mayn't,

'T would rile a Shaker or an evrige saint;

Though I own up I like our back'ard springs

Thet kind o' haggle with their greens an' things,

An' when you 'most give up, without more words

Toss the fields full o' blossoms, leaves, an' birds:

Thet's Northun natur', slow an' apt to doubt,

But when it _doos_ git stirred, ther's no gin-out!

Fust come the blackbirds clatt'rin' in tall trees,

An' settlin' things in windy Congresses,--

Queer politicians, though, for I'll be skinned,

Ef all on 'em don't head aginst the wind.

'Fore long the trees begin to show belief,--

The maple crimsons to a coral-reef,

Then saffern swarms swing off from all the willers

So plump they look like yaller caterpillars,

Then gray hossches'nuts leetle hands unfold

Softer 'n a baby's be at three days old:

This is the robin's almanick; he knows

Thet arter this ther' 's only blossom-snows;

So, choosin' out a handy crotch an' spouse,

He goes to plast'rin' his adobe house.

Then seems to come a hitch,--things lag behind,

Till some fine mornin' Spring makes up her mind,

An' ez, when snow-swelled rivers cresh their dams

Heaped-up with ice thet dovetails in an' jams,

A leak comes spirtin' thru some pin-hole cleft,

Grows stronger, fercer, tears out right an' left,

Then all the waters bow themselves an' come,

Suddin, in one gret slope o' shedderin' foam,

Jes' so our Spring gits everythin' in tune

An' gives one leap from April into June:

Then all comes crowdin' in; afore you think,

The oak-buds mist the side-hill woods with pink,

The catbird in the laylock-bush is loud,

The orchards turn to heaps o' rosy cloud,

In ellum-shrouds the flashin' hangbird clings

An' for the summer vy'ge his hammock slings,

All down the loose-walled lanes in archin' bowers

The barb'ry droops its strings o' golden flowers,

Whose shrinkin' hearts the school-gals love to try

With pins,--they 'll worry yourn so, boys, bimeby!

But I don't love your cat'logue style,--do you?--

Ez ef to sell all Natur' by vendoo;

One word with blood in 't's twice ez good ez two:

'Nuff sed, June's bridesman, poet o' the year,

Gladness on wings, the bobolink, is here;

Half-hid in tip-top apple-blooms he swings,

Or climbs aginst the breeze with quiverin' wings,

Or, givin' way to 't in a mock despair,

Runs down, a brook o' laughter, thru the air.

I ollus feel the sap start in my veins

In spring, with curus heats an' prickly pains,

Thet drive me, when I git a chance, to walk

Off by myself to hev a privit talk

With a queer critter thet can't seem to 'gree

Along o' me like most folks,--Mister Me.

Ther' 's times when I'm unsoshle ez a stone,

An' sort o' suffocate to be alone,--

I'm crowded jes' to think thet folks are nigh,

An' can't bear nothin' closer than the sky;

Now the wind's full ez shifty in the mind

Ez wut it is ou'-doors, ef I ain't blind,

An' sometimes, in the fairest sou'west weather,

My innard vane pints east for weeks together,

My natur' gits all goose-flesh, an' my sins

Come drizzlin' on my conscience sharp ez pins:

Wal, et sech times I jes' slip out o' sight

An' take it out in a fair stan'-up fight

With the one cuss I can't lay on the shelf,

The crook'dest stick in all the heap,--Myself.

'T wuz so las' Sabbath arter meetin'-time:

Findin' my feelins wouldn't noways rhyme

With nobody's, but off the hendle flew

An' took things from an east-wind pint o' view,

I started off to lose me in the hills

Where the pines be, up back o' 'Siah's Mills:

Pines, ef you're blue, are the best friends I know,

They mope an' sigh an' sheer your feelins so,--

They hesh the ground beneath so, tu, I swan,

You half-forgit you 'we gut a body on.

Ther's a small school'us' there where four roads meet,

The door-steps hollered out by little feet,

An' side-posts carved with names whose owners grew

To gret men, some on 'em, an' deacons, tu;

'T ain't used no longer, coz the town hez gut

A high-school, where they teach the Lord knows wut:

Three-story larnin' 's pop'lar now; I guess

We thriv' ez wal on jes' two stories less,

For it strikes me ther' 's sech a thing ez sinnin'

By overloadin' children's underpitmin':

Wal, here it wuz I larned my A B C,

An' it's a kind o' favorite spot with me.

We 're curus critters: Now ain't jes' the minute

Thet ever fits us easy while we 're in it;

Long ez 't wuz futur', 't would be perfect bliss,--

Soon ez it's past, _thet_ time's wuth ten o' this;

An' yit there ain't a man thet need be told

Thet Now's the only bird lays eggs o' gold.

A knee-high lad, I used to plot an' plan

An' think 't wuz life's cap-sheaf to be a man;

Now, gittin' gray, there's nothin' I enjoy

Like dreamin' back along into a boy:

So the ole school'us' is a place I choose

Afore all others, ef I want to muse;

I set down where I used to set, an' git

My boyhood back, an' better things with it,--

Faith, Hope, an' sunthin', ef it isn't Cherrity,

It's want o' guile, an' thet's ez gret a rerrity.

Now, 'fore I knowed, thet Sabbath arternoon

Thet I sot out to tramp myself in tune,

I found me in the school'us' on my seat,

Drummin' the march to No-wheres with my feet.

Thinkin' o' nothin', I've heerd ole folks say,

Is a hard kind o' dooty in its way:

It's thinkin' everythin' you ever knew,

Or ever hearn, to make your feelins blue.

I sot there tryin' thet on for a spell:

I thought o' the Rebellion, then o' Hell,

Which some folks tell ye now is jest a metterfor

(A the'ry, p'raps, it wun't _feel_ none the better for);

I thought o' Reconstruction, wut we 'd win

Patchin' our patent self-blow-up agin;

I thought ef tins 'ere milkin' o' the wits,

So much, a month, warn't givin' Natur' fits,--

Ef folks warn't druv, findin' their own milk fail,

To work the cow thet hez an iron tail,

An' ef idees 'thout ripenin' in the pan

Would send up cream to humor ary man:

From this to thet I let my worryin' creep,

Till finally I must ha' fell asleep.

Our lives in sleep are some like streams thet glide

'Twixt flesh an' sperrit boundin' on each side,

Where both shores' shadders kind o' mix an' mingle

In sunthin' thet ain't jes' like either single;

An' when you cast off' moorins from To-day,

An' down towards To-morrer drift away,

The imiges thet tengle on the stream

Make a new upside-down'ard world o' dream:

Sometimes they seem like sunrise-streaks an' warnins

O' wut 'll be in Heaven on Sabbath-mornins,

An', mixed right in ez ef jest out o' spite,

Sunthin' thet says your supper ain't gone right.

I'm gret on dreams, an' often, when I wake,

I've lived so much it makes my mem'ry ache,

An' can't skurce take a cat-nap in my cheer

'Thout hevin' 'em, some good, some bad, all queer.

Now I wuz settin' where I 'd ben, it seemed,

An' ain't sure yit whether I r'ally dreamed,

Nor, ef I did, how long I might ha' slep',

When I hearn some un stompin' up the step,

An' lookin' round, ef two an' two make four,

I see a Pilgrim Father in the door.

He wore a steeple-hat, tall boots, an' spurs

With rowels to 'em big ez ches'nut-burrs,

An' his gret sword behind him sloped away

Long 'z a man's speech thet dunno wut to say.--

"Ef your name's Biglow, an' your given-name

Hosee," sez he, "it's arter you I came;

I'm your gret-gran'ther multiplied by three."--

"My _wut_?" sez I.--"Your gret-gret-gret," sez he:

"You wouldn't ha' never ben here but for me.

Two hunderd an' three year ago this May

The ship I come in sailed up Boston Bay;

I 'd ben a cunnle in our Civil War,--

But wut on airth hev _you_ gut up one for?

I'm told you write in public prints: ef true,

It's nateral you should know a thing or two."--

"Thet air's an argymunt I can't endorse,--

'T would prove, coz you wear spurs, you kep' a horse:

For brains," sez I, "wutever you may think,

Ain't boun' to cash the draft o' pen-an'-ink,--

Though mos' folks write ez ef they hoped jes' quickenin'

The churn would argoo skim-milk into thickenin';

But skim-milk ain't a thing to change its view

O' usefleness, no more 'n a smoky flue.

But du pray tell me, 'fore we furder go,

How in all Natur' did you come to know

'Bout our affairs," sez I, "in Kingdom-Come?"--

"Wal, I worked round at sperrit-rappin' some,

In hopes o' larnin' wut wuz goin' on,"

Sez he, "but mejums lie so like all-split

Thet I concluded it wuz best to quit.

But, come now, ef you wun't confess to knowin',

You 've some conjecturs how the thing's a-goin'."--

"Gran'ther," sez I, "a vane warn't never known

Nor asked to hev a jedgment of its own;

An' yit, ef 't ain't gut rusty in the jints,

It 'a safe to trust its say on certin pints:

It knows the wind's opinions to a T,

An' the wind settles wut the weather 'll be-"--

"I never thought a scion of our stock

Could grow the wood to make a weathercock;

When I wuz younger 'n you, skurce more 'n a shaver,

No airthly wind," sez he, "could make me waver!"

(Ez he said this, he clinched his jaw an' forehead,

Hitchin' his belt to bring his sword-hilt forrard.)--

"Jes' so it wuz with me," sez I, "I swow,

When _I_ wuz younger 'n wut you see me now,--

Nothin', from Adam's fall to Huldy's bonnet,

Thet I warn't full-cocked with my jedgement on it;

But now I'm gittin' on in life, I find

It's a sight harder to make up my mind,--

Nor I don't often try tu, when events

Will du it for me free of all expense.

The moral question's ollus plain enough,--

It's jes' the human-natur' side thet's tough;

Wut's best to think mayn't puzzle me nor you,--.

The pinch comes in decidin' wut to _du_;

Ef you _read_ History, all runs smooth ez grease,

Coz there the men ain't nothin more 'n idees,--

But come to _make_ it, ez we must to-day,

Th' idees hev arms an' legs an' stop the way:

It's easy fixin' things in facts an' figgers,--

They can't resist, nor warn't brought up with niggers;

But come to try your the'ry on,--why, then

Your facts an' figgers change to ign'ant men

Actin' ez ugly"----"Smite 'em hip an' thigh!"

Sez gran'ther, "an' let every man-child die!

Oh for three weeks o' Crommle an' the Lord!

O Israel, to your tents an' grind the sword!"--

"Thet kind o' thing worked wal in ole Judee,

But yon forgit how long It's ben A.D.;

You think thet's ellerkence,--I call it shoddy,

A thing," sez I, "wun't cover sonl nor body;

I like the plain all-wool o' common-sense,

Thet warms ye now, an' will a twelvemonth hence.

_You_ took to follerin' where the Prophets beckoned,

An', fust you knowed on, back come Charles the Second;

Now wut I want's to hev all _we_ gain stick,

An' not to start Millennium too quick;

We hain't to punish only, but to keep,

An' the cure's gut to go a cent'ry deep."--

"Wal, milk-an'-water ain't a good cement,"

Sez he, "an' so you 'll find it in th' event;

Ef reshness venters sunthin', shilly-shally

Loses ez often wut's ten times the vally.

Thet exe of ourn, when Charles's neck gut split,

Opened a gap thet ain't bridged over yit:

Slav'ry's your Charles, the Lord hez gin the exe,"--

"Our Charles," sez I, "hez gut eight million necks.

The hardest question ain't the black man's right,--

The trouble is to'mancipate the white;

One's chained in body an' can be sot free,--

The other's chained in soul to an idee:

It's a long job, but we shall worry thru it;

Ef bag'nets fail, the spellin'-book must do it."--

"Hosee," sez he, "I think you 're goin' to fail:

The rettlesnake ain't dangerous in the tail;

This 'ere rebellion's nothin' but the rettle,--

You 'll stomp on thet an' think you 've won the bettle;

It's Slavery thet's the fangs an' thinkin' head,

An' ef you want selvation, cresh it dead,--

An' crash it suddin, or you 'll larn by waitin'

Thet Chance wun't stop to listen to debatin'!"--

"God's truth!" sez I,--"an' ef _I_ held the club,

An' knowed jes' where to strike,--but there's the rub!"--

"Strike soon," sez he, "or you 'll be deadly ailin',--

Folks thet's afeared to fail are sure o' failin';

God hates your sneakin' creturs thet believe

He 'II settle things they run away an' leave!"

He brought his foot down fercely, ez he spoke,

An' give me sech a startle thet I woke.