[The schoolmistress came down with a rose in her hair,—a fresh June rose.
She has been walking early; she has brought back two others,—one on each
cheek.
I told her so, in some such pretty phrase as I could muster for the
occasion. Those two blush-roses I just spoke of turned into a couple of
damasks. I suppose all this went through my mind, for this was what I
went on to say:—]
I love the damask rose best of all. The flowers our mothers and sisters
used to love and cherish, those which grow beneath our eaves and by our
doorstep, are the ones we always love best. If the Houyhnhnms should
ever catch me, and, finding me particularly vicious and unmanageable,
send a man-tamer to Rareyfy me, I’ll tell you what drugs he would have to
take and how he would have to use them. Imagine yourself reading a
number of the Houyhnhnm Gazette, giving an account of such an experiment.
“MAN-TAMING EXTRAORDINARY.
“THE soft-hoofed semi-quadruped recently captured was subjected to
the art of our distinguished man-tamer in presence of a numerous
assembly. The animal was led in by two stout ponies, closely
confined by straps to prevent his sudden and dangerous tricks of
shoulder-hitting and foot-striking. His countenance expressed the
utmost degree of ferocity and cunning.
“The operator took a handful of _budding lilac-leaves_, and crushing
them slightly between his hoofs, so as to bring out their peculiar
fragrance, fastened them to the end of a long pole and held them
towards the creature. Its expression changed in an instant,—it drew
in their fragrance eagerly, and attempted to seize them with its soft
split hoofs. Having thus quieted his suspicious subject, the
operator proceeded to tie a _blue hyacinth_ to the end of the pole
and held it out towards the wild animal. The effect was magical.
Its eyes filled as if with raindrops, and its lips trembled as it
pressed them to the flower. After this it was perfectly quiet, and
brought a measure of corn to the man-tamer, without showing the least
disposition to strike with the feet or hit from the shoulder.”
That will do for the Houyhnhnm Gazette.—Do you ever wonder why poets talk
so much about flowers? Did you ever hear of a poet who did not talk
about them? Don’t you think a poem, which, for the sake of being
original, should leave them out, would be like those verses where the
letter _a_ or _e_ or some other is omitted? No,—they will bloom over and
over again in poems as in the summer fields, to the end of time, always
old and always new. Why should we be more shy of repeating ourselves
than the spring be tired of blossoms or the night of stars? Look at
Nature. She never wearies of saying over her floral pater-noster. In
the crevices of Cyclopean walls,—in the dust where men lie, dust also,—on
the mounds that bury huge cities, the wreck of Nineveh and the
Babel-heap,—still that same sweet prayer and benediction. The Amen! of
Nature is always a flower.
Are you tired of my trivial personalities,—those splashes and streaks of
sentiment, sometimes perhaps of sentimentality, which you may see when I
show you my heart’s corolla as if it were a tulip? Pray, do not give
yourself the trouble to fancy me an idiot whose conceit it is to treat
himself as an exceptional being. It is because you are just like me that
I talk and know that you will listen. We are all splashed and streaked
with sentiments,—not with precisely the same tints, or in exactly the
same patterns, but by the same hand and from the same palette.
I don’t believe any of you happen to have just the same passion for the
blue hyacinth which I have,—very certainly not for the crushed
lilac-leaf-buds; many of you do not know how sweet they are. You love
the smell of the sweet-fern and the bayberry-leaves, I don’t doubt; but I
hardly think that the last bewitches you with young memories as it does
me. For the same reason I come back to damask roses, after having raised
a good many of the rarer varieties. I like to go to operas and concerts,
but there are queer little old homely sounds that are better than music
to me. However, I suppose it’s foolish to tell such things.
—It is pleasant to be foolish at the right time,—said the
divinity-student;—saying it, however, in one of the dead languages, which
I think are unpopular for summer-reading, and therefore do not bear
quotation as such.
Well, now,—said I,—suppose a good, clean, wholesome-looking countryman’s
cart stops opposite my door.—Do I want any huckleberries?—If I do not,
there are those that do. Thereupon my soft-voiced handmaid bears out a
large tin pan, and then the wholesome countryman, heaping the
peck-measure, spreads his broad hands around its lower arc to confine the
wild and frisky berries, and so they run nimbly along the narrowing
channel until they tumble rustling down in a black cascade and tinkle on
the resounding metal beneath.—I won’t say that this rushing huckleberry
hail-storm has not more music for me than the “Anvil Chorus.”
—I wonder how my great trees are coming on this summer.
—Where are your great trees, Sir?—said the divinity-student.
Oh, all round about New England. I call all trees mine that I have put
my wedding-ring on, and I have as many tree-wives as Brigham Young has
human ones.
—One set’s as green as the other,—exclaimed a boarder, who has never been
identified.
They’re all Bloomers,—said the young fellow called John.
[I should have rebuked this trifling with language, if our landlady’s
daughter had not asked me just then what I meant by putting my
wedding-ring on a tree.]
Why, measuring it with my thirty-foot tape, my dear,—said I,—I have worn
a tape almost out on the rough barks of our old New England elms and
other big trees.—Don’t you want to hear me talk trees a little now? That
is one of my specialities.
[So they all agreed that they should like to hear me talk about trees.]
I want you to understand, in the first place, that I have a most intense,
passionate fondness for trees in general, and have had several romantic
attachments to certain trees in particular. Now, if you expect me to
hold forth in a “scientific” way about my tree-loves,—to talk, for
instance, of the Ulmus Americana, and describe the ciliated edges of its
samara, and all that,—you are an anserine individual, and I must refer
you to a dull friend who will discourse to you of such matters. What
should you think of a lover who should describe the idol of his heart in
the language of science, thus: Class, Mammalia; Order, Primates; Genus,
Homo; Species, Europeus; Variety, Brown; Individual, Ann Eliza; Dental
Formula
i(2—2 / 2—2) c(1—1 / 1—1) p(2—2 / 2—2) m(3—3/3—3’)
and so on?
No, my friends, I shall speak of trees as we see them, love them, adore
them in the fields, where they are alive, holding their green sun-shades
over our heads, talking to us with their hundred thousand whispering
tongues, looking down on us with that sweet meekness which belongs to
huge, but limited organisms,—which one sees in the brown eyes of oxen,
but most in the patient posture, the outstretched arms, and the
heavy-drooping robes of these vast beings endowed with life, but not with
soul,—which outgrow us and outlive us, but stand helpless,—poor
things!—while Nature dresses and undresses them, like so many full-sized,
but under-witted children.
Did you ever read old Daddy Gilpin? Slowest of men, even of English men;
yet delicious in his slowness, as is the light of a sleepy eye in woman.
I always supposed “Dr. Syntax” was written to make fun of him. I have a
whole set of his works, and am very proud of it, with its gray paper, and
open type, and long ff, and orange-juice landscapes. The _Père_ Gilpin
had the kind of science I like in the study of Nature,—a little less
observation than White of Selborne, but a little more poetry.—Just think
of applying the Linnæan system to an elm! Who cares how many stamens or
pistils that little brown flower, which comes out before the leaf, may
have to classify it by? What we want is the meaning, the character, the
expression of a tree, as a kind and as an individual.
There is a mother-idea in each particular kind of tree, which, if well
marked, is probably embodied in the poetry of every language. Take the
oak, for instance, and we find it always standing as a type of strength
and endurance. I wonder if you ever thought of the single mark of
supremacy which distinguishes this tree from all our other forest-trees?
All the rest of them shirk the work of resisting gravity; the oak alone
defies it. It chooses the horizontal direction for its limbs, so that
their whole weight may tell,—and then stretches them out fifty or sixty
feet, so that the strain may be mighty enough to be worth resisting. You
will find, that, in passing from the extreme downward droop of the
branches of the weeping-willow to the extreme upward inclination of those
of the poplar, they sweep nearly half a circle. At 90° the oak stops
short; to slant upward another degree would mark infirmity of purpose; to
bend downwards, weakness of organization. The American elm betrays
something of both; yet sometimes, as we shall see, puts on a certain
resemblance to its sturdier neighbor.
It won’t do to be exclusive in our taste about trees. There is hardly
one of them which has not peculiar beauties in some fitting place for it.
I remember a tall poplar of monumental proportions and aspect, a vast
pillar of glossy green, placed on the summit of a lofty hill, and a
beacon to all the country round. A native of that region saw fit to
build his house very near it, and, having a fancy that it might blow down
some time or other, and exterminate himself and any incidental relatives
who might be “stopping” or “tarrying” with him,—also laboring under the
delusion that human life is under all circumstances to be preferred to
vegetable existence,—had the great poplar cut down. It is so easy to
say, “It is only a poplar!” and so much harder to replace its living cone
than to build a granite obelisk!
I must tell you about some of my tree-wives. I was at one period of my
life much devoted to the young lady-population of Rhode Island, a small,
but delightful State in the neighborhood of Pawtucket. The number of
inhabitants being not very large, I had leisure, during my visits to the
Providence Plantations, to inspect the face of the country in the
intervals of more fascinating studies of physiognomy. I heard some talk
of a great elm a short distance from the locality just mentioned. “Let
us see the great elm,”—I said, and proceeded to find it,—knowing that it
was on a certain farm in a place called Johnston, if I remember rightly.
I shall never forget my ride and my introduction to the great Johnston
elm.
I always tremble for a celebrated tree when I approach it for the first
time. Provincialism has no _scale_ of excellence in man or vegetable; it
never knows a first-rate article of either kind when it has it, and is
constantly taking second and third rate ones for Nature’s best. I have
often fancied the tree was afraid of me, and that a sort of shiver came
over it as over a betrothed maiden when she first stands before the
unknown to whom she has been plighted. Before the measuring-tape the
proudest tree of them all quails and shrinks into itself. All those
stories of four or five men stretching their arms around it and not
touching each other’s fingers, if one’s pacing the shadow at noon and
making it so many hundred feet, die upon its leafy lips in the presence
of the awful ribbon which has strangled so many false pretensions.
As I rode along the pleasant way, watching eagerly for the object of my
journey, the rounded tops of the elms rose from time to time at the
road-side. Wherever one looked taller and fuller than the rest, I asked
myself,—“Is this it?” But as I drew nearer, they grew smaller,—or it
proved, perhaps, that two standing in a line had looked like one, and so
deceived me. At last, all at once, when I was not thinking of it,—I
declare to you it makes my flesh creep when I think of it now,—all at
once I saw a great, green cloud swelling in the horizon, so vast, so
symmetrical, of such Olympian majesty and imperial supremacy among the
lesser forest-growths, that my heart stopped short, then jumped at my
ribs as a hunter springs at a five-barred gate, and I felt all through
me, without need of uttering the words,—“This is it!”
You will find this tree described, with many others, in the excellent
Report upon the Trees and Shrubs of Massachusetts. The author has given
my friend the Professor credit for some of his measurements, but measured
this tree himself, carefully. It is a grand elm for size of trunk,
spread of limbs, and muscular development,—one of the first, perhaps the
first, of the first class of New England elms.
The largest actual girth I have ever found at five feet from the ground
is in the great elm lying a stone’s throw or two north of the main road
(if my points of compass are right) in Springfield. But this has much
the appearance of having been formed by the union of two trunks growing
side by side.
The West-Springfield elm and one upon Northampton meadows, belong also to
the first class of trees.
There is a noble old wreck of an elm at Hatfield, which used to spread
its claws out over a circumference of thirty-five feet or more before
they covered the foot of its bole up with earth. This is the American
elm most like an oak of any I have ever seen.
The Sheffield elm is equally remarkable for size and perfection of form.
I have seen nothing that comes near it in Berkshire County, and few to
compare with it anywhere. I am not sure that I remember any other
first-class elms in New England, but there may be many.
—What makes a first-class elm?—Why, size, in the first place, and
chiefly. Anything over twenty feet of clear girth, five feet above the
ground, and with a spread of branches a hundred feet across, may claim
that title, according to my scale. All of them, with the questionable
exception of the Springfield tree above referred to, stop, so far as my
experience goes, at about twenty-two or twenty-three feet of girth and a
hundred and twenty of spread.
Elms of the second class, generally ranging from fourteen to eighteen
feet, are comparatively common. The queen of them all is that glorious
tree near one of the churches in Springfield. Beautiful and stately she
is beyond all praise. The “great tree” on Boston Common comes in the
second rank, as does the one at Cohasset, which used to have, and
probably has still, a head as round as an apple-tree, and that at
Newburyport, with scores of others which might be mentioned. These last
two have perhaps been over-celebrated. Both, however, are pleasing
vegetables. The poor old Pittsfield elm lives on its past reputation. A
wig of false leaves is indispensable to make it presentable.
[I don’t doubt there may be some monster-elm or other, vegetating green,
but inglorious, in some remote New England village, which only wants a
sacred singer to make it celebrated. Send us your
measurements,—(certified by the postmaster, to avoid possible
imposition,)—circumference five feet from soil, length of line from
bough-end to bough-end, and we will see what can be done for you.]
—I wish somebody would get us up the following work:—
SYLVA NOVANGLICA.
Photographs of New England Elms and other Trees, taken upon the Same
Scale of Magnitude. With Letter-Press Descriptions, by a
Distinguished Literary Gentleman. Boston — — & Co. 185..
The same camera should be used,—so far as possible,—at a fixed distance.
Our friend, who has given us so many interesting figures in his “Trees of
America,” must not think this Prospectus invades his province; a dozen
portraits, with lively descriptions, would be a pretty complement to his
large work, which, so far as published, I find excellent. If my plan
were carried out, and another series of a dozen English trees
photographed on the same scale the comparison would be charming.
It has always been a favorite idea of mine to bring the life of the Old
and the New World face to face, by an accurate comparison of their
various types of organization. We should begin with man, of course;
institute a large and exact comparison between the development of _la
pianta umana_, as Alfieri called it, in different sections of each
country, in the different callings, at different ages, estimating height,
weigh, force by the dynamometer and the spirometer, and finishing off
with a series of typical photographs, giving the principal national
physiognomies. Mr. Hutchinson has given us some excellent English data
to begin with.
Then I would follow this up by contrasting the various parallel forms of
life in the two continents. Our naturalists have often referred to this
incidentally or expressly; but the _animus_ of Nature in the two half
globes of the planet is so momentous a point of interest to our race,
that it should be made a subject of express and elaborate study. Go out
with me into that walk which we call _the Mall_, and look at the English
and American elms. The American elm is tall, graceful, slender-sprayed,
and drooping as if from languor. The English elm is compact, robust,
holds its branches up, and carries its leaves for weeks longer than our
own native tree.
Is this typical of the creative force on the two sides of the ocean, or
not? Nothing but a careful comparison through the whole realm of life
can answer this question.
There is a parallelism without identity in the animal and vegetable life
of the two continents, which favors the task of comparison in an
extraordinary manner. Just as we have two trees alike in many ways, yet
not the same, both elms, yet easily distinguishable, just so we have a
complete flora and a fauna, which, parting from the same ideal, embody it
with various modifications. Inventive power is the only quality of which
the Creative Intelligence seems to be economical; just as with our
largest human minds, that is the divinest of faculties, and the one that
most exhausts the mind which exercises it. As the same patterns have
very commonly been followed, we can see which is worked out in the
largest spirit, and determine the exact limitations under which the
Creator places the movement of life in all its manifestations in either
locality. We should find ourselves in a very false position, if it
should prove that Anglo-Saxons can’t live here, but die out, if not kept
up by fresh supplies, as Dr. Knox and other more or less wise persons
have maintained. It may turn out the other way, as I have heard one of
our literary celebrities argue,—and though I took the other side, I liked
his best,—that the American is the Englishman reinforced.
—Will you walk out and look at those elms with me after breakfast?—I said
to the schoolmistress.
[I am not going to tell lies about it, and say that she blushed,—as I
suppose she ought to have done, at such a tremendous piece of gallantry
as that was for our boarding-house. On the contrary, she turned a little
pale,—but smiled brightly and said,—Yes, with pleasure, but she must walk
towards her school.—She went for her bonnet.—The old gentleman opposite
followed her with his eyes, and said he wished he was a young fellow.
Presently she came down, looking very pretty in her half-mourning bonnet,
and carrying a school-book in her hand.]
MY FIRST WALK WITH THE SCHOOLMISTRESS.
This is the shortest way,—she said, as we came to a corner.—Then we won’t
take it,—said I.—The schoolmistress laughed a little, and said she was
ten minutes early, so she could go round.
We walked under Mr. Paddock’s row of English elms. The gray squirrels
were out looking for their breakfasts, and one of them came toward us in
light, soft, intermittent leaps, until he was close to the rail of the
burial-ground. He was on a grave with a broad blue-slate-stone at its
head, and a shrub growing on it. The stone said this was the grave of a
young man who was the son of an Honorable gentleman, and who died a
hundred years ago and more.—Oh, yes, _died_,—with a small triangular mark
in one breast, and another smaller opposite, in his back, where another
young man’s rapier had slid through his body; and so he lay down out
there on the Common, and was found cold the next morning, with the
night-dews and the death-dews mingled on his forehead.
Let us have one look at poor Benjamin’s grave,—said I.—His bones lie
where his body was laid so long ago, and where the stone says they
lie,—which is more than can be said of most of the tenants of this and
several other burial-grounds.
[The most accursed act of Vandalism ever committed within my knowledge
was the uprooting of the ancient gravestones in three at least of our
city burialgrounds, and one at least just outside the city, and planting
them in rows to suit the taste for symmetry of the perpetrators. Many
years ago, when this disgraceful process was going on under my eyes, I
addressed an indignant remonstrance to a leading journal. I suppose it
was deficient in literary elegance, or too warm in its language; for no
notice was taken of it, and the hyena-horror was allowed to complete
itself in the face of daylight. I have never got over it. The bones of
my own ancestors, being entombed, lie beneath their own tablet; but the
upright stones have been shuffled about like chessmen, and nothing short
of the Day of Judgment will tell whose dust lies beneath any of those
records, meant by affection to mark one small spot as sacred to some
cherished memory. Shame! shame! shame!—that is all I can say. It was on
public thoroughfares, under the eye of authority, that this infamy was
enacted. The red Indians would have known better; the selectmen of an
African kraal-village would have had more respect for their ancestors. I
should like to see the gravestones which have been disturbed all removed,
and the ground levelled, leaving the flat tombstones; epitaphs were never
famous for truth, but the old reproach of “Here _lies_” never had such a
wholesale illustration as in these outraged burial-places, where the
stone does lie above, and the bones do not lie beneath.]
Stop before we turn away, and breathe a woman’s sigh over poor Benjamin’s
dust. Love killed him, I think. Twenty years old, and out there
fighting another young fellow on the Common, in the cool of that old July
evening;—yes, there must have been love at the bottom of it.
The schoolmistress dropped a rosebud she had in her hand, through the
rails, upon the grave of Benjamin Woodbridge. That was all her comment
upon what I told her.—How women love Love! said I;—but she did not speak.
We came opposite the head of a place or court running eastward from the
main street.—Look down there,—I said,—My friend the Professor lived in
that house at the left hand, next the further corner, for years and
years. He died out of it, the other day.—Died?—said the
schoolmistress.—Certainly,—said I.—We die out of houses, just as we die
out of our bodies. A commercial smash kills a hundred men’s houses for
them, as a railroad crash kills their mortal frames and drives out the
immortal tenants. Men sicken of houses until at last they quit them, as
the soul leaves its body when it is tired of its infirmities. The body
has been called “the house we live in”; the house is quite as much the
body we live in. Shall I tell you some things the Professor said the
other day?—Do!—said the schoolmistress.
A man’s body,—said the Professor,—is whatever is occupied by his will and
his sensibility. The small room down there, where I wrote those papers
you remember reading, was much more a portion of my body than a
paralytic’s senseless and motionless arm or leg is of his.
The soul of a man has a series of concentric envelopes round it, like the
core of an onion, or the innermost of a nest of boxes. First, he has his
natural garment of flesh and blood. Then, his artificial integuments,
with their true skin of solid stuffs, their cuticle of lighter tissues,
and their variously-tinted pigments. Thirdly, his domicile, be it a
single chamber or a stately mansion. And then, the whole visible world,
in which Time buttons him up as in a loose outside wrapper.
You shall observe,—the Professor said,—for, like Mr. John Hunter and
other great men, he brings in that _shall_ with great effect
sometimes,—you shall observe that a man’s clothing or series of envelopes
does after a certain time mould itself upon his individual nature. We
know this of our hats, and are always reminded of it when we happen to
put them on wrong side foremost. We soon find that the beaver is a
hollow cast of the skull, with all its irregular bumps and depressions.
Just so all that clothes a man, even to the blue sky which caps his
head,—a little loosely,—shapes itself to fit each particular being
beneath it. Farmers, sailors, astronomers, poets, lovers, condemned
criminals, all find it different, according to the eyes with which they
severally look.
But our houses shape themselves palpably on our inner and outer natures.
See a householder breaking up and you will be sure of it. There is a
shell-fish which builds all manner of smaller shells into the walls of
its own. A house is never a home until we have crusted it with the
spoils of a hundred lives besides those of our own past. See what these
are and you can tell what the occupant is.
I had no idea,—said the Professor,—until I pulled up my domestic
establishment the other day, what an enormous quantity of roots I had
been making during the years I was planted there. Why, there wasn’t a
nook or a corner that some fibre had not worked its way into; and when I
gave the last wrench, each of them seemed to shriek like a mandrake, as
it broke its hold and came away.
There is nothing that happens, you know, which must not inevitably, and
which does not actually, photograph itself in every conceivable aspect
and in all dimensions. The infinite galleries of the Past await but one
brief process and all their pictures will be called out and fixed
forever. We had a curious illustration of the great fact on a very
humble scale. When a certain bookcase, long standing in one place, for
which it was built, was removed, there was the exact image on the wall of
the whole, and of many of its portions. But in the midst of this picture
was another,—the precise outline of a map which had hung on the wall
before the bookcase was built. We had all forgotten everything about the
map until we saw its photograph on the wall. Then we remembered it, as
some day or other we may remember a sin which has been built over and
covered up, when this lower universe is pulled away from before the wall
of Infinity, where the wrong-doing stands self-recorded.
The Professor lived in that house a long time,—not twenty years, but
pretty near it. When he entered that door, two shadows glided over the
threshold; five lingered in the doorway when he passed through it for the
last time,—and one of the shadows was claimed by its owner to be longer
than his own. What changes he saw in that quiet place! Death rained
through every roof but his; children came into life, grew to maturity,
wedded, faded away, threw themselves away; the whole drama of life was
played in that stock-company’s theatre of a dozen houses, one of which
was his, and no deep sorrow or severe calamity ever entered his dwelling.
Peace be to those walls, forever,—the Professor said,—for the many
pleasant years he has passed within them!
The Professor has a friend, now living at a distance, who has been with
him in many of his changes of place, and who follows him in imagination
with tender interest wherever he goes.—In that little court, where he
lived in gay loneliness so long,—
—in his autumnal sojourn by the Connecticut, where it comes loitering
down from its mountain fastnesses like a great lord, swallowing up the
small proprietary rivulets very quietly as it goes, until it gets proud
and swollen and wantons in huge luxurious oxbows about the fair
Northampton meadows, and at last overflows the oldest inhabitant’s memory
in profligate freshets at Hartford and all along its lower shores,—up in
that caravansary on the banks of the stream where Ledyard launched his
log canoe, and the jovial old Colonel used to lead the Commencement
processions,—where blue Ascutney looked down from the far distance, and
the hills of Beulah, as the Professor always called them, rolled up the
opposite horizon in soft climbing masses, so suggestive of the Pilgrim’s
Heavenward Path that he used to look through his old “Dollond” to see if
the Shining Ones were not within range of sight,—sweet visions, sweetest
in those Sunday walks which carried them by the peaceful common, through
the solemn village lying in cataleptic stillness under the shadow of the
rod of Moses, to the terminus of their harmless stroll,—the patulous
fage, in the Professor’s classic dialect,—the spreading beech, in more
familiar phrase,—[stop and breathe here a moment, for the sentence is not
done yet, and we have another long journey before us,]—
—and again once more up among those other hills that shut in the
amber-flowing Housatonic,—dark stream, but clear, like the lucid orbs
that shine beneath the lids of auburn-haired, sherry-wine-eyed
demi-blondes,—in the home overlooking the winding stream and the smooth,
flat meadow; looked down upon by wild hills, where the tracks of bears
and catamounts may yet sometimes be seen upon the winter snow; facing the
twin summits which rise in the far North, the highest waves of the great
land-storm in all this billowy region,—suggestive to mad fancies of the
breasts of a half-buried Titaness, stretched out by a stray thunderbolt,
and hastily hidden away beneath the leaves of the forest,—in that home
where seven blessed summers were passed, which stand in memory like the
seven golden candlesticks in the beatific vision of the holy dreamer,—
—in that modest dwelling we were just looking at, not glorious, yet not
unlovely in the youth of its drab and mahogany,—full of great and little
boys’ playthings from top to bottom,—in all these summer or winter nests
he was always at home and always welcome.
This long articulated sigh of reminiscences,—this calenture which shows
me the maple-shadowed plains of Berkshire and the mountain-circled green
of Grafton beneath the salt waves which come feeling their way along the
wall at my feet, restless and soft-touching as blind men’s busy
fingers,—is for that friend of mine who looks into the waters of the
Patapsco and sees beneath them the same visions which paint themselves
for me in the green depths of the Charles.
—Did I talk all this off to the schoolmistress?—Why, no,—of course not.
I have been talking with you, the reader, for the last ten minutes. You
don’t think I should expect any woman to listen to such a sentence as
that long one, without giving her a chance to put in a word?
—What did I say to the schoolmistress?—Permit me one moment. I don’t
doubt your delicacy and good-breeding; but in this particular case, as I
was allowed the privilege of walking alone with a very interesting young
woman, you must allow me to remark, in the classic version of a familiar
phrase, used by our Master Benjamin Franklin, it is _nullum tui negotii_.
When the schoolmistress and I reached the school-room door, the damask
roses I spoke of were so much heightened in color by exercise that I felt
sure it would be useful to her to take a stroll like this every morning,
and made up my mind I would ask her to let me join her again.
EXTRACT FROM MY PRIVATE JOURNAL.
(_To be burned unread_.)
I am afraid I have been a fool; for I have told as much of myself to this
young person as if she were of that ripe and discreet age which invites
confidence and expansive utterance. I have been low-spirited and
listless, lately,—it is coffee, I think,—(I observe that which is bought
_ready-ground_ never affects the head,)—and I notice that I tell my
secrets too easily when I am downhearted.
There are inscriptions on our hearts, which, like that on Dighton Rock,
are never to be seen except at dead-low tide.
There is a woman’s footstep on the sand at the side of my deepest
ocean-buried inscription!
—Oh, no, no, no! a thousand times, no!—Yet what is this which has been
shaping itself in my soul?—Is it a thought?—is it a dream?—is it a
_passion_?—Then I know what comes next.
—The Asylum stands on a bright and breezy hill; those glazed corridors
are pleasant to walk in, in bad weather. But there are iron bars to all
the windows. When it is fair, some of us can stroll outside that very
high fence. But I never see much life in those groups I sometimes
meet;—and then the careful man watches them so closely! How I remember
that sad company I used to pass on fine mornings, when I was a
schoolboy!—B., with his arms full of yellow weeds,—ore from the gold
mines which he discovered long before we heard of California,—Y., born to
millions, crazed by too much plum-cake, (the boys said,) dogged,
explosive,—made a Polyphemus of my weak-eyed schoolmaster, by a vicious
flirt with a stick,—(the multi-millonnaires sent him a trifle, it was
said, to buy another eye with; but boys are jealous of rich folks, and I
don’t doubt the good people made him easy for life,)—how I remember them
all!
I recollect, as all do, the story of the Hall of Eblis, in “Vathek,” and
how each shape, as it lifted its hand from its breast, showed its
heart,—a burning coal. The real Hall of Eblis stands on yonder summit.
Go there on the next visiting-day, and ask that figure crouched in the
corner, huddled up like those Indian mummies and skeletons found buried
in the sitting posture, to lift its hand,—look upon its heart, and
behold, not fire, but ashes.—No, I must not think of such an ending!
Dying would be a much more gentlemanly way of meeting the difficulty.
Make a will and leave her a house or two and some stocks, and other
little financial conveniences, to take away her necessity for keeping
school.—I wonder what nice young man’s feet would be in my French
slippers before six months were over! Well, what then? If a man really
loves a woman, of course he wouldn’t marry her for the world, if he were
not quite sure that he was the best person she could by any possibility
marry.
—It is odd enough to read over what I have just been writing.—It is the
merest fancy that ever was in the world. I shall never be married. She
will; and if she is as pleasant as she has been so far, I will give her a
silver tea-set, and go and take tea with her and her husband, sometimes.
No coffee, I hope, though,—it depresses me sadly. I feel very
miserably;—they must have been grinding it at home.—Another morning walk
will be good for me, and I don’t doubt the schoolmistress will be glad of
a little fresh air before school.
* * * * *
—The throbbing flushes of the poetical intermittent have been coming over
me from time to time of late. Did you ever see that electrical
experiment which consists in passing a flash through letters of gold-leaf
in a darkened room, whereupon some name or legend springs out of the
darkness in characters of fire?
There are songs all written out in my soul, which I could read, if the
flash might pass through them,—but the fire must come down from heaven.
Ah! but what if the stormy _nimbus_ of youthful passion has blown by, and
one asks for lightning from the ragged _cirrus_ of dissolving
aspirations, or the silvered _cumulus_ of sluggish satiety? I will call
on her whom the dead poets believed in, whom living ones no longer
worship,—the immortal maid, who, name her what you will,—Goddess, Muse,
Spirit of Beauty,—sits by the pillow of every youthful poet, and bends
over his pale forehead until her tresses lie upon his cheek and rain
their gold into his dreams.
MUSA.
O my lost Beauty!—hast thou folded quite
Thy wings of morning light
Beyond those iron gates
Where Life crowds hurrying to the haggard Fates,
And Age upon his mound of ashes waits
To chill our fiery dreams,
Hot from the heart of youth plunged in his icy streams?
Leave me not fading in these weeds of care,
Whose flowers are silvered hair!—
Have I not loved thee long,
Though my young lips have often done thee wrong
And vexed thy heaven-tuned ear with careless song?
Ah, wilt thou yet return,
Bearing thy rose-hued torch, and bid thine altar burn?
Come to me!—I will flood thy silent shine
With my soul’s sacred wine,
And heap thy marble floors
As the wild spice-trees waste their fragrant stores
In leafy islands walled with madrepores
And lapped in Orient seas,
When all their feathery palm toss, plume-like, in the breeze.
Come to me!—thou shalt feed on honied words,
Sweeter than song of birds;—
No wailing bulbul’s throat,
No melting dulcimer’s melodious note,
When o’er the midnight wave its murmurs float,
Thy ravished sense might soothe
With flow so liquid-soft, with strain so velvet-smooth.
Thou shalt be decked with jewels, like a queen,
Sought in those bowers of green
Where loop the clustered vines
And the close-clinging dulcamara twines,—
Pure pearls of Maydew where the moonlight shines,
And Summer’s fruited gems,
And coral pendants shorn from Autumn’s berried stems.
Sit by me drifting on the sleepy waves,—
Or stretched by grass-grown graves,
Whose gray, high-shouldered stones,
Carved with old names Life’s time-worn roll disowns,
Lean, lichen-spotted, o’er the crumbled bones
Still slumbering where they lay
While the sad Pilgrim watched to scare the wolf away.
Spread o’er my couch thy visionary wing!
Still let me dream and sing,—
Dream of that winding shore
Where scarlet cardinals bloom,—for me no more,—
The stream with heaven beneath its liquid floor,
And clustering nenuphars
Sprinkling its mirrored blue like golden-chaliced stars!
Come while their balms the linden-blossoms shed!—
Come while the rose is red,—
While blue-eyed Summer smiles
On the green ripples round you sunken piles
Washed by the moon-wave warm from Indian isles,
And on the sultry air
The chestnuts spread their palms like holy men in prayer!
Oh, for thy burning lips to fire my brain
With thrills of wild sweet pain!—
On life’s autumnal blast,
Like shrivelled leaves, youth’s, passion-flowers are cast,—
Once loving thee, we love thee to the last!—
Behold thy new-decked shrine,
And hear once more the voice that breathed “Forever thine!”