In Ireland, the Christian Brothers maintain the most purely spiritual

character, and the most complete independence of the state. But here,

alas! a different tendency peeped out. The alliance of a Jesuit Church

with the Empire, and the subserviency of education to their common

objects, were typified by the presence of the _sous-prefet_ and the

_maire_ in their gold-laced coats of office, who arrived escorted by a

guard of soldiers with fixed bayonets. The harangue of the reverend head

of the establishment was highly political, and amply merited by its

recommendations of the duty of obedience to authority the eulogy of the

_sous-prefet_ on "the good direction" which the brotherhood were giving

to the studies of youth. There is no garrison at Avranches. But all the

soldiers in the place seemed to have been collected to give a military

character to the scene. Other incentives of military aspiration were not

wanting; and the boy who delivered the allocution told us, amidst loud

applause, that he and his companions were being brought up to be, "not

only good Christians, but, in case of need, good soldiers."

In France under the Empire a military character is studiously given to

every act of public, and almost of social life. There you see

everywhere the pomp of war in the midst of peace, as in America you saw

everywhere peace in the midst of civil war. The images of war and

conquest are constantly kept before the eyes of a people naturally full

of military vanity, and now, by the decay alike of religious and

political faith, almost entirely bereft of all other aspirations. There

is at the same time a vast standing army, which is not occupied, as the

army of the Roman Empire was, in defending the frontiers, nor, as the

Austrian army is, in holding down disaffected provinces, and which is

full of the memory of the Napoleonic conquests, and longs again to

overrun and pillage Europe in the name of "glory." There is no

restraining influence either of morality or of religion to keep the war

spirit in check. The French priesthood are as ready as any priests of

Jupiter or Baal to bless national aggression, if by so doing they can

gain political power. In what can all this end? In what but a European

war? The children in the schools of the Christian Brothers are no doubt

faithfully taught the precepts of a religion of peace; but there is a

teaching of a different kind before their eyes, which, it is to be

feared, they more easily imbibe and less easily forget.

It was amusing, on this and other occasions, to see the state which

surrounds the subordinate officials of the Empire. I had found the head

of the American Republic and all its armaments without any insignia of

dignity, without a guard or attendants, in a common office room. And

here was a _sous-prefet_ parading the streets in solemn state, in a

gilded coat, and with a line of bayonets glittering on either hand.

From Avranches it is a pleasant walk (by the country road) to the

village of Ducie, where there is good fishing, a nice little village

inn, and a deserted chateau in the Louis Quatorze style, and of

sumptuous dimensions, which, if it was ever completely finished, is now

in a state of great dilapidation. No doubt it shared the fate of its

fellows, when the Revolution proclaimed "peace to the cottage, war to

the castle." The peasantry almost everywhere rose, like galley-slaves

whose chains had been suddenly struck off, and gutted the chateaux, the

strongholds of feudal extortion and injustice. How violent and sweeping

have been the revolutions of this people compared with those of the

stronger and more self-controlled race! In England, the Tudor mansions,

and not unfrequently even the feudal castles, are still tenanted by the

heirs, or by those who have peacefully purchased from the heirs, of

their ancient lords; and the insensible gradations by which the feudal

guard-room has softened down into the modern drawing-room, and the

feudal moat into the flower-garden, are emblematic of the continuous and

comparatively tranquil progress of English history. In France, how

different! Scarcely eighty years have passed since the Chateau de

Montgomeri was proud and gay; since the village idlers gathered here to

see its lord, and his little provincial court, assemble along those

mouldering balustrades, and ride through the now deserted gates. But to

the grandchildren of those villagers the chateau is a strange,

mysterious relic of the times before the flood. A group of peasants

tried in vain, when I asked them, to recollect the name of its former

proprietors. One of them said that it had been inhabited by a great

lord, who shod his horses with shoes of gold,--much the sort of tale

that an Irish peasant tells you about the primeval monuments of his

country. The mansions of France before the Revolution belong as

completely to the past as the tombs of the Pharaohs. The old aristocracy

and the old dynasty are no longer hated or regretted. Their names excite

no emotion whatever in the French peasant's heart. They are wiped out of

the memory of the nation, and their place knows them no more. In the

midst of their shows and their pleasures and their shallow philosophies,

they could not read the handwriting on the wall, and therefore they are

blotted out of existence. They went on marrying and giving in marriage;

this chateau, perhaps, was still being enlarged and embellished, when

the flood came upon them and destroyed them all. The science of politics

is the science of regulating progress and avoiding revolutions.

The hostess of the Lion d'Or is about to transfer her establishment to

an inn of greater pretensions, to which, aware that the old chateau is

an object of interest to visitors, she means to give the name of the

Hotel de Montgomeri. On the wall of her _cafe_ is a coarse medallion

bust taken from a room in the chateau. She did not know whom it

represented; and I dare say it was only my fancy that made me think I

recognized a rude effigy of the once adored features of Marie

Antoinette.

The plates at the Lion d'Or were adorned with humorous devices. On one

was a satire on the hypocritical rapacity of perfidious Albion. Two

English soldiers were standing with their swords hidden behind their

backs, and trying to coax back to them some Indians who were running

away in the distance. "Come to us, dear little Indians; you know we are

your best friends!" Suppose "Arabs" or "Mexicans" had been substituted

for "Indians." To a Frenchman, our conquests in India are rapine; his

own conquests in Algeria or Mexico are the extension of civilization by

the "holy bayonets" (I forget whether the phrase is Michelet's or

Quinet's) of the chosen people. Justice gives the same name (no matter

which) to both.

At Ducie a handsome new church had just been built,--mainly, I was told,

by the munificence of two maiden ladies. The congregation at vespers was

large and apparently devout; and here the number of the men was in fair

proportion to that of the women. In the churches of the cities, though

the power of the clergy has everywhere increased of late, you see

scarcely one man to a hundred women.

On the road, a shower drove me for refuge into the house of a peasant,

who received me with the usual kindliness of the French peasantry, and,

when the shower was over, walked two or three miles with me on my way.

The condition of these present proprietors is a subject of great

interest to English economists, especially as we are evidently on the

eve of a great controversy--perhaps a great struggle--respecting the law

of succession to landed property in our own country. Not that any

English economist would go so far as to advocate the French system of

compulsory subdivision, which owes its existence in great measure to the

policy of the first Napoleon,--who took care, with the instinct of a

true despot, to secure the solitary power of the throne against the

growth of an independent class of wealthy proprietors. All that English

economists contemplate is the abolition of primogeniture and entail. I

must not found any conclusion on observations so partial and cursory as

those which I was able to make; but I suspect that the French peasant is

better off than the English laborer. He is not better housed, clothed,

or fed; perhaps not so well housed, clothed, or fed. He eats black

bread, which the English peasant would reject, and clumps about in

wooden shoes, which the English laborer would regard with horror; but

this, according to statements which I have heard, and am inclined to

trust, arises, generally speaking, not so much from indigence as from

self-denying frugality, pushed to an extreme. The French peasant is the

possessor of property, and has a passion, almost a mania, for

acquisition. He saves money and subscribes to government loans, which

are judiciously brought out in very small shares, so as to draw forth

his little hoard, and thus bind him as a creditor to the interest of the

Empire. The cottage of the peasant which I entered on my way to Ducie

was very mean and comfortless, and the food which his hospitality

offered me was of the coarsest kind. But he had a valuable mare and

foal; his yard was full of poultry; and his orchard showed, for a bad

season, a fair crop of apples. There are some large estates, the result

frequently of great fortunes made in trade. Not far from the place

where the high-born lords of the Chateau de Montgomeri once reigned, a

chocolate-merchant had bought broad lands, and built himself a princely

mansion. I should have thought that the great proprietors would have

crushed the small; but I was assured that the two systems went on very

well side by side. But this is a matter for exact inquiry, not for

casual remark. The population in France is stationary, or nearly so,

while that of England increases rapidly; and this is an important

element in the question, and itself raises questions of a difficult,

perhaps of a disagreeable kind.

The cares of proprietorship must necessarily interfere with the

lightness of heart once proverbially characteristic of the French

peasant. Still, he appears to a stranger cheerful, ready to chat, and at

least as inquisitive as to the stranger's history and objects as

Americans are commonly believed to be. It would be a happy thing if the

Irish peasant's lightness of heart, pleasant as it often is, could be

interfered with in the same way. There is a certain gayety which springs

from mere recklessness, and is sister to despair.

They are hard economical problems that we have to solve in this Old

World, and terribly complicated by social and political entanglements;

and there is no boundless West, with bread for all who want it, to

assist us in the solution.

From Avranches you visit Mont St. Michel,--not without difficulty, for

you have to drive along over sands which are never dry, and over which

the tide--its advance can be seen even from the distant height of

Avranches--rushes in with the speed of a race-horse. But you are well

repaid. Mont St. Michel is one of the most astonishing and beautiful

monuments of the Catholic and feudal age. Its fortifications, and the

halls, church, and cloisters of the chivalrous and monastic fraternities

of which it was the seat, rise like an efflorescence from the solitary

cone of granite, surrounded at low tide by the vast flat of sand, at

high tide by the sea. Gothic architecture, to which we are apt to attach

the notion of a sort of infantine unconsciousness, here seems

consciously to revel and disport itself in its power, and to exult in

investing the sea-girt rock with the playful elegance of a Cellini vase.

It is a real _jeu d'esprit_ of mediaeval art. The cloisters are a model

of airy grace, enhanced by contrast with the massiveness of the fortress

and the wildness of the scene. A strange life the monks must have led in

their narrow boundaries. But they had the visits of the knights to

relieve their dulness; and probably they were rude natures, not liable

to the unhappiness which such seclusion would produce in men of

cultivated sensibilities and active minds. Both monks and knights are

gone long ago. But there are still six priests on the rock. I asked what

they did. "Ils prient le bon Dieu."

In feudal times this sea-girt fortress was almost impregnable. Two

ancient cannon lying at its gate show that the conqueror of Agincourt

thundered against it in vain. Its weak point was want of water: it had

none but the rain-water collected in a great cistern. In these days it

could not hold out an hour against a single gun-boat.

It is a pleasant drive from Avranches to Vire; and Vire itself is a

pleasant place,--a quiet little town, placed high, in bracing air, and

with beautiful walks round it. The comfortable, though unpretending,

little Hotel de St. Pierre stands outside the town, and commands a fine

view. While I was at Vire, the _fete_ day of the Emperor was

celebrated--with profound apathy. Not a dozen houses responded to the

_prefet's_ invitation to illuminate. There being no troops in the town,

and a military show being indispensable, there was a review of the

firemen in military uniforms; a single brass cannon pestered us with its

noise all the morning; the "veterans" of the Napoleonic army (every

surviving drummer-boy of the army of 1815 goes by that name) were

dismally paraded about, and the firemen practised with their muskets,

very awkwardly, at a mark which was so placed among the trees that they

could hardly see it.

Why has not the government the sense to let these people alone? After

all their revolutions and convulsions, they have sunk into perfect

political indifference, and literally care not a straw whether they are

governed by Napoleon, Nero, or Nebuchadnezzar. To be always appealing to

them with Bonapartist demonstrations and manifestoes, is to awaken

political sentiments, in them, and so to create a danger which does not

exist.

If Louis Napoleon is in any peril, it is not from the republican or

constitutional party, but from his own lavish expenditure, which begins

to irritate the people. They are careless of their rights as freemen,

but they are fond, and growing daily fonder, of money; and they do not

like to be heavily taxed, and to hear at the same time that the Emperor

is wasting on his personal expenses and those of his relatives and

courtiers some six millions of dollars a year. Regard for economy is the

only profession which distinguishes the addresses of the so-called

opposition candidates from those of their competitors. I asked a good

many people what they thought of the Mexican expedition. Not one of them

objected to its injustice, but they all objected to its cost, "Cela

mangera beaucoup d'argent," was the invariable reply. And in this point

of view the government has committed what it would think much worse than

any crime,--a very damaging blunder.

It does not appear that the Orleans family have any hold on the mind of

the French people. When I mentioned their name, it seemed to produce no

emotion, one way or the other. But if the marshals and grandees, who

have hold of the wires of administration at the point where they are

centralized, chose to make Napoleon III abdicate, (as they made Napoleon

I. abdicate at Fontainebleau,) and to set up a king of the House of

Orleans in his place, they could probably do it; and they might choose

to do it, if, by such blunders as the Mexican expedition, he seemed to

be placing their personal interests in jeopardy.

Stopping to breakfast at Conde, on the way from Vire to Falaise, I fell

in with the only Frenchman, with a single exception, who showed any

interest in the affairs of America. Generally speaking, I was told, and

found by experience, that profound apathy prevailed upon the subject.

This gentleman, on learning that I had recently been in America, entered

eagerly into conversation on the subject. But his inquiries were only

about the prospects of cotton; and all I could tell him on that point

was, that, if the growth of cotton was profitable, the Yankee would

certainly make it grow.

The castle of Falaise is the reputed birthplace of the Conqueror. They

even pretend to show you the room in which he was born. The existing

castle, however, is of considerably later date. It is even doubtful,

according to the best antiquaries, whether there were any stone castles

at the date of his birth, or only earthworks with palisades. There is,

however, one genuine monument of that time. You look down from the

castle on the tanneries in the glen below, and see the women washing

their clothes in the stream, as in the days when Robert the Devil wooed

the tanner's daughter. Robert, however, must have had diabolically good

eyes to choose a mistress at such a distance.

Annexed to the castle is Talbot's Tower,--a beautiful piece of feudal

architecture, and a monument of a later episode in that long train of

miserable wars between England and France, of which the Conqueror's

cruel rapacity may be regarded as the spring; for the English conquests

were an inverted copy and counterpart of his. But the Conqueror's

crimes, like those of Napoleon I., were on the grandiose scale, and

therefore they impose, like those of Napoleon, on the slavishness of

mankind; while the petty bandit, though endowed perhaps with the same

powers of destruction and only lacking the ampler sphere, is buried

under the gallows. The equestrian statue of William in the public place

at Falaise prances, it has been remarked, close to the spot where rest

the ashes of Walter and Biona, Count and Countess of Pontoise, poisoned,

if contemporary accounts are true, by the same ambition which launched

havoc and misery on a whole nation. They and the Conqueror were rival

claimants to the sovereignty of Maine. They supped with the Conqueror

one evening at Falaise, and next morning William was the sole claimant.

The Norman, like the Corsican, was an assassin as well as a conqueror.

I must leave it to architects to describe the architectural glories of

Caen. But I had no idea that the Norman style, in England grand only

from its massiveness, could soar to such a height of beauty as it has

attained in the Church of St. Stephen and the Abbaye aux Dames. I

afterwards did homage again to its powers when standing before the

august ruin of Jumieges. There is something peculiarly delightful in the

freshness of early art, whether Greek or mediaeval, and whether in

architecture or in poetry,--when you see the mind first beginning to

feel its power over the material, and to make it the vehicle of thought.

There is something, too, in all human works, which makes the early hope

more charming than the fulfilment.

St. Stephen is the church of the Conqueror, as the Abbaye aux Dames is

that of his Queen. There he lies buried. Every one knows the story of

Ascelin demanding the price of the ground in which William was going to

be buried, and which the tyrant had taken from him by force; and how, at

last, the corpse of the Conqueror was thrust, amidst a scene of horror

and loathing, into its grave. But _Rex Invictissimus_ is the inscription

on his tomb.

The spire of St. Pierre is very graceful; the body of the church, in the

latest and most debased style of Gothic architecture, stands signally

contrasted with St. Stephen,--St. Stephen the simple vigor of the prime,

St. Pierre the florid weakness of the decay.

Caen is a large city, and, of course, full of soldiers, who are as

completely the dominant caste in France now, as the old _noblesse_ were

before the Revolution. To this the French have come after their long

train of sanguinary revolutions,--after all their visions of a perfect

social state,--after all their promises of a new era of happiness to

mankind. "A light and cruel people," Coleridge calls them. And how

lightly they turned from regenerating to pillaging and oppressing the

world! They have great intellectual gifts, and still greater social

graces; but, in the political sphere, they have no real regard for

freedom, and will gladly lay their liberties at the feet of any master

who will enable them to domineer over other nations. Napoleon I. is more

than their hero: he is their God. Many of them, the soldiery especially,

have no other object of worship. I saw in a shop-window a print of

Napoleon I., Napoleon II., and the Prince Imperial, all in military

uniform and surrounded by the emblems of war. It was entitled, "The

Past, the Present, and the Future of France." Military ambition has been

the Past of France, is her Present, and seems too likely to be her

Future. In some directions, she has promoted civilization; but,

politically speaking, she has done, and probably will long continue to

do, more harm than good to mankind.

I may say with truth, that, having seen America, and brought away an

assured faith in human liberty and progress, I looked with far more

serenity than I should otherwise have done on the Zouaves, swaggering,

in the insolence of triumphant force, over the neglected ashes of Turgot

and Mirabeau. I felt as though, strong as the yoke of these janizaries

and their master looked, I had the death-warrant of imperialism in my

pocket. There is a Power which made the world for other ends than these,

and which will not suffer its ends to give way even to those of the

Bonapartes. But to all appearances there will be a terrible struggle in

Europe,--a struggle to which the old "wars of the mercenaries" were a

trifling affair,--before the nations can be redeemed from subjection to

these armed hordes and the masters whom they obey.

From Caen I visited Bayeux,--a sleepy, ecclesiastical town with a

glorious cathedral, which, however, shows by a huge crack in the tower

that even such edifices know decay. Gems of the Norman style are

scattered all round Caen and Bayeux; and one of the finest is the little

church of St. Loup, in the environs of Bayeux.

I found that the old French office-book had been completely banished

from the French churches by the Jesuit and Ultramontane party, and the

Roman (though much inferior, Roman Catholics tell me, as a composition)

everywhere thrust into its place. The people in some places

recalcitrated violently; but the Jesuits and Ultramontanes triumphed.

The old Gallican spirit of independence is extinct in the French Church,

and its extinction is not greatly to be deplored; for it tended not to a

real independence, but to the substitution of a royal for an

ecclesiastical Pope. Louis XIV. was quite as great a spiritual tyrant as

any Hildebrand or Innocent, and his tyranny was, if anything, more

degrading to the soul. In fact, the Ultramontane French Church, resting

for support on Rome, may be regarded by the friends of liberty, with a

qualified complacency, as a check, though a miserable one, on the

absolute dominion of physical force embodied in the Emperor.

The Bayeux tapestry, representing the expedition of William the

Conqueror, is curious and valuable as an historical monument, though it

cannot be proved to be contemporary. As a work of art it is singularly

spiritless, and devoid of merit of any kind. One of the fancy figures on

the border reveals the indelicacy of the ladies (a queen, perhaps, and

her handmaidens) who wrought it in a way which would be startling to any

one who had taken the manners and morals of the age of chivalry on

trust.

The heat drove me from Caen before I had "done" all the antiquities and

curiosities prescribed by the guidebook. Migrating to Lisieux, I found

myself in such pleasant quarters that I was tempted to settle there for

some days. The town is almost an unbroken assemblage of the quaintest

and most picturesque old houses. There are whole streets without any

taint of modern architecture to disturb the perfect image of the past.

Two magnificent churches, one of them formerly a cathedral, rise over

the whole; and there is a very pretty public garden, with its terraces,

pastures, and green alleys. A public garden is the invariable appendage

of a city in France, as it ought to be everywhere. We do not do half

enough in England for the innocent amusement of the people.

At Lisieux we had a public _fete_. It is evidently a part of the

business of the _sous-prefets_ to get up these things as antidotes to

political aspiration. _Panem et circenses_ is the policy of the French,

as it was of the Roman Caesars. For two or three days beforehand, the

people were engaged in planting little fir-trees in the street before

their doors, and decorating them and the houses, with little tricolor

flags. Larger flags (of which this little quiet town produced a truly

formidable number) were hung out from all the houses. As the weather was

very dry, the population was at work keeping the fir-trees alive with

squirts. The _fete_ consisted of a horse and cattle show, in which the

Norman horses made a very good display; the inevitable military review,

which, Lisieux being as happily free from soldiery as Vire, was here,

too, performed by the firemen; the band of a regiment of the line, which

had been announced as a magnificent addition to the festivities, by a

special proclamation of the _sous-prefet_; balloons not of the common

shape, but in the shape of dogs, pigs, and grotesque human figures, a

gentleman and lady waltzing, etc., which must have rather puzzled any

scientific observer whose telescope was at that moment directed to the

sky; and, to crown all, fireworks (the noise of which, a French

gentleman remarked to me, the people loved, as reminding them of

musketry) and an illumination. The illumination--all the little trees

before the houses, as well as the houses themselves and the green arches

thrown across the streets, being covered with lamps--was an extremely

pretty sight. The outline of the old houses, and the windings and

declivities of the old streets, wonderfully favored the effect. But the

French are peerless in these things. The childish delight of the people

was pleasant to see. Why cannot they be satisfied with their _fetes_,

and with the undisputed empire of cookery and dress, instead of making

themselves a scourge to the world, and keeping all Europe in disquietude

and under arms?

The Emperor is trying to inoculate his subjects with a taste for English

sports, but with rather doubtful success. He tries to make them play at

cricket, but they do not much like the swift bowling. There was a

caricature in the Charivari of a Frenchman standing up to his wicket

with an implement which the artist intended for a bat, but which was

more like a pavior's rammer, in his hand. A friend was asking him

whether he had a wife, children, any tie to life. "None." "Then you may

begin." In a window at Lisieux there was a print of a fox-hunt, with the

master of the hounds dismounting to despatch the fox with a gun! At Vire

there was a print of a horse-race, with the horses in a cantering

attitude, and a large dog running and barking by their side. I have seen

something equally funny of the same kind in America, but I need not say

what or where. I never witnessed a French horse-race, but I am told that

they enjoy it _moult tristement_, as they say we English enjoy all our

amusements.

Close to Lisieux is the fashionable watering-place of Trouville, a place

without any charms that I could see, puffed into celebrity by Alexander

Dumas. The Duke de Morny invested in building there a good deal of the

money which he made by the _coup d'etat_. Life at a French

watering-place seems to be as close an imitation of life at Paris as

French ingenuity can produce under the adverse circumstances of the

case. Nothing but the religion of fashion can compel these people

periodically to leave the capital for the sea. The mode of bathing is

rather singular. I found that the Americans did not, as is commonly

believed in England, put trousers on the legs of their pianos, but I

believe you are more particular than we are; and therefore, perhaps, you

would be still more surprised than we are at seeing a gentleman wrapped

in a sheet stalk before the eyes of all the promenaders over the sands

to the sea, and there throw off the sheet, and at his leisure get into

the water. At the risk of exposing my English prudishness, I ventured to

remark to a French acquaintance that the fashion was _un peu libre_. I

found, rather to my astonishment, that he thought so too.

At Val Richer, near Lisieux, is the pleasant country-house of M. Guizot.

There, surrounded by his children and his grandchildren, a pretty

patriarchal picture, the veteran statesman and historian reposes after

the prodigious labors and tragic vicissitudes of his life. I say he

reposes; but his pen is as active as ever, only that he has turned from

politics and history to the more enduring and consoling topic of

religion. He has just given us a volume on Christianity; he is about to

give us one on the state of religion in France. It will be deeply

interesting. In the revival of religion lies the only hope of

regeneration for the French nation. And whence is that revival to come?

From the official priesthood, and the jesuitical influences depicted in

_Le Maudit_? Or from the Protestant Church of France, itself full of

dissensions and turmoils, in which M. Guizot himself has been recently

involved? Or from the school of Natural Theologians represented by

Jules Simon? We shall see, when M. Guizot's work appears. It is from his

religious character as well as from his attachment to constitutional

liberty, I imagine, that M. Guizot has, unlike the mass of his

countrymen, watched the American struggle with ardent interest, and

cordially rejoiced in the triumph of the Union and of freedom.

There are of course very different opinions as to this eminent man's

career; and there are parts of his conduct of which no Liberal can

approve. But I have always thought that a tranquil and happy old age is

a proof, as well as a reward, of a good life; and if this be the case,

M. Guizot's life, though not free from faults, must on the whole have

been good.

His resistance to reform is commonly regarded as having led to the fall

of the constitutional monarchy. I should attribute that catastrophe much

more to the prevalence of the military spirit, which the peaceful policy

of Louis Philippe disappointed, and to which even the conquest of

Algeria failed (as its authors deserved) to give a sufficient vent. The

reign of Louis Philippe was essentially an attempt to found a civil in

place of a military government in France, which was foiled by the

passions excited by the presence of a large standing army and the recent

memory of the Napoleonic wars. The translation of the body of Napoleon

from St. Helena to Paris was the greatest mistake committed by the king

and his advisers. It was the self-humiliation of the government of peace

before the Genius of War.

At Lisieux, as at Caen, and afterwards at Rouen, I saw on the Sunday a

great church full of women, with scarcely a score of men. And what

wonder? Close to where I sat was the altar of Our Lady of La Salette,

offering to the adoration of the people the most coarse and revolting of

impostures. And in the course of the service, an image of the Virgin,

from which the taste of a Greek Pagan would have recoiled, was borne

round the aisles in procession, manifestly the favorite object of

worship in a church nominally devoted to the worship of God. An educated

man in France, even one of the best character and naturally religious,

would almost as soon think of entering a temple of Jupiter as a church.

Religion in Roman Catholic countries being thus left, so far as the

educated classes are concerned, to the priests and women, its recent

developments have been inspired exclusively by priestly ambition and

female imagination. The infallibility of the Pope and the worship of the

Virgin have made, and are still making, tremendous strides. The

Romanizing party in the Episcopal Church of England are left panting

behind, in their vain efforts to keep up with the superstitions of Rome.

From Lisieux my road lay by Pont-Audemer in its beautiful valley to

Caudebec on the Seine; then along the Seine,--here most pleasant,--by

the towers of Jumieges, the masterpiece, even in its ruins, of the grand

Norman style, and the great Norman Church of St. George de Boscherville,

to Rouen.

Everybody knows Rouen and its sights,--the Cathedral, the Church of St.

Ouen, the magnificent view of the city from St. Catherine's

Hill,--magnificent still, though much marred by the tall chimneys and

their smoke. St. Ouen is undoubtedly the perfection of Gothic art.

Unlike most of the cathedrals, it is built all in the same style and on

one plan, complete in every part, admirable in all its proportions, and

faultless in its details. But there is something disappointing in

perfection. The less perfect cathedrals suggest more to the imagination

than is realized in St. Ouen.

In the Museum is a portion of the heart of Richard Coeur-de-Lion. The

Crusader king loved the Normans, and bequeathed his heart to them. He

did not bequeath it to Imperial France. With all his faults, he was an

illustrious soldier of Christendom; and he deserves to rest, not within

the pale of this sensualist and atheist Empire, but in some land where

the spirit of religious enterprise is not yet dead.

In the outskirts is St. Gervais, the church of the monastery to which

William the Conqueror was carried, out of the noise and the feverish air

of the great city, to die, and which witnessed the strange struggle, in

his last moments, between his rapacious passions and his late-awakened

remorse. So insecure was the state of society, that, when he whose iron

hand had preserved order among his feudal nobles had expired, those

about him fled to their strongholds in expectation of a general anarchy.

Government was still only personal: law had not yet been enthroned in

the minds of men. Even the personal attendants of the Conqueror

abandoned his corpse,--a singular illustration of the theory, cherished

by lovers of the past, that the relations of master and servant were

more affectionate, and of a higher kind, in the days of chivalry than

they are in ours.

Among the workingmen of Rouen, there probably lurks a good deal of

republicanism, akin to that which exists among the workingmen of Paris.

Unfortunately it is of a kind which, though capable of spasmodic

attempts to revolutionize society by force, is little capable of

sustained constitutional effect, and which alarms and arrays against it,

not only despots, but moderate friends of liberty and progress. The

outward appearances, however, at Rouen are all in favor of the Zouave

and the Priest; and of the dominion of these two powers in France, if

they can abstain from quarrelling with each other, it is difficult to

foresee the end.

I have spoken bitterly of the French Empire. It has not only crushed the

liberties of France, but it is the keystone and the focus of the system

of military despotism in Europe. Bismarck, O'Donnell, and all the rest

who rule by sabre-sway, are its pupils. It is intensely

propagandist,--feeling, like slavery, that it cannot endure the

contagious neighborhood of freedom. It has to a terrible extent

corrupted even English politics, and inspired our oligarchical party

with ideas of violence quite foreign to the temper of English Tories in

former days. It is killing not only all moral aspirations, but almost

all moral culture in France, and leaving nothing but the passion for

military glory, the thirst of money, and the love of pleasure. It is

reducing all education to a centralized machine, the wires of which are

moved by a bureau at Paris; and we shall see the effects of this on

French intellect in the next generation, "Ils ont tue la jeunesse," were

the bitter words of an eminent and chivalrous Frenchman to the author of

this article. Commerce is no doubt flourishing, and money is being made

by the commercial classes, at present, under the Empire; but the highest

industry is intimately connected with the moral and intellectual

energies of a nation; and if these perish, it will in time perish too.

I have no means of knowing whether the morality of the court and the

upper classes at Paris is what it is commonly reported to be; though,

assuredly, if the performances of Therese are truly described to us,

strange things must go on in the highest circles. Historical experience

would be at fault, if a military despotism, with a political religion,

did not produce moral effects in Paris somewhat analogous to those which

it produced in Rome. The fashionable literature of the Empire, which can

scarcely fail to reflect pretty accurately the moral state of the

fashionable world, is not merely loose in principle, (as literature

might possibly be in a period of transition between a narrower and an

ampler moral code,) but utterly vile and loathsome; it seeks the

materials of sensation novels from the charnel-house as well as from the

brothel.

At Dieppe, my last point, I visited that very picturesque as well as

memorable ruin, the Chateau d'Arques. It is a monument of the great

victory gained near it by the Huguenots under Henri IV. over the League.

This and the other Huguenot victories, alas! proved bootless; and it is

melancholy to visit the fields where they were won. By a series of

calamities, the party was in the end erased from history; and scarcely a

trace of its existence remains in the religious or political condition

of Roman Catholic and Imperial France. It has left some noble names, and

the memory of some noble deeds, which no doubt work upon national

character to a certain extent; but this is all.

There was nothing in the fashionable watering-place of Dieppe to tempt

my stay; and I turned from the Chateau d'Arques to embark for the land

where, in spite of our political reaction and the efforts of the

priest-party in our Church, the principles for which the field of Arques

was fought and won have still a home.

AUNT JUDY.

A soft white bosom, kissed by lips and fondled by fingers pure as

itself!

Back through the tender twilight of my one dim dream of a sinless

childhood I catch that accusing glimpse of my mother--and myself. And as

I stand here on this shapeless cairn of remorses, which, after forty

years, I have piled upon my butchered and buried promise, that child

turns from "the cup of his life and couch of his rest," to look upon me

wondering, pitying.

My mother died when I was scarce five years old; and save the blurred

beauty of that reproachful phantom,--caught and lost, caught and lost,

by the unfaithful eyes of a graceless spirit,--she is as though she

never had been. But in her place she left me a vicarious mother,--old,

foolish, doting, black,--the youngest, loveliest, wisest, fairest lady I

have ever known,--young with the youth of the immortal heart, lovely

with the loveliness of the gleaning Ruth, wise with the wisdom of the

most blessed among mothers when she "pondered all those things in her

heart," and fair with the fairness of her who goeth her way forth by the

footsteps of the flock, and feedeth her kids beside the shepherds'

tents,--black, but comely.

"Aunt Judy,"--Judith was her company name,--as the oldest of my uncles

and aunts, and other boys' grandfathers and grandmothers, and all the

rest of us children, delighted to call her,--was pure negro; not

grafted, scandalous mulatto, nor muddled, niggerish "gingerbread," but

downright, unmixed, old-fashioned blackamoor. Her father and mother were

genuine importations from the coast of Africa, snatched from some

cannibal's calaboose,--where else they might have been butchered to make

a Dahomeyan holiday,--and set up in a country gentleman's kitchen in

Maryland, where they and their Christian progeny helped to make many a

happy Christmas.

Of this antique Ethiopian couple I remember nothing,--they died long

before I was born,--nor have I gathered any notable _ana_ concerning

them. Only of the father, I learned from my darling old nurse that he

was one hundred and four years old when the Almighty Emancipator set him

free; and from my father, and the brothers and sisters of my mother,

that he possessed in a remarkable degree those simple, childlike

virtues, characteristic of the original domesticated African, which his

daughters Judith and Rachel so richly inherited.

Aunt Judy was one of many slaves set free by my grandfather's will,

partly in reward of faithful service, partly from an impulse of

conscientiousness; for our fine old Maryland gentleman was that social

and political phenomenon, a slaveholder with a practical scruple. Not

that he doubted the moral wholesomeness of the "institution," which, in

his theory, was patriarchal and protective, and in his practice

eminently beneficent;--if he were living this day, I doubt not he would

be found among its most earnest and confident champions;--but he did not

believe in holding human beings in bondage "on principle," as it were,

and for the mere sake of bondage. The patriarchal element was, he

thought, an essential in the moral right of the system, and _that_ no

longer necessary, the system became wrong. Therefore, so soon as it

became clear to him that he (so peculiarly had God blessed him) could

protect, advise, relieve his servants as effectually, they being free,

as if their persons and their poor little goods, their labor and almost

their lives, were at his disposal, he set them at liberty without asking

the advice, or caring for the opinion, of any man; and by the same

instrument which gave them the right to work, think, live, and die for

themselves, he imposed upon his children a solemn responsibility for

their well-being, in the future as in the past,--the honorable care of

seeing to it that their wants were judiciously provided for, their

training virtuous, their instruction useful, their employers just, their

families united, and their homes happy. Those who were already of age

went forth free at once; the minors received their "papers" on their

twenty-first birthday. And thus it was that, when I was born, Aunt Judy

was as much freer than her "boy" is now, as simple, natural wants are

freer than impatient, artificial appetites.

But that was the beginning and the end of Aunt Judy's freedom. For all

the change it wrought in her feelings and her ways toward us, or in ours

toward her, she might as well have remained the slave and the baby she

was born; the old relations, so natural and gentle, of affection and

faithful service on her side, of affection and grateful care on ours, no

mere legal forms could alter: no papers could disturb their

peacefulness, no privileges impair their confidence. Indeed, that same

freedom--or at least her personal interest in it--was matter of

magnificent contempt to both nurse and child; she understood it too well

to pet it, I understood it too little to be jealous of it. It was only

by asking her that you could discover that Aunt Judy was free; it was

only by being asked that she could recollect it. For her, freedom meant

the right to "go where she pleased"; but her love knew no _where_ but my

father's roof and her darling's crib, nor anything so wrong as that

right. For us, her freedom meant our freedom, the right to send her away

when we chose; but our love knew no such _when_ in all the shameful

possibilities of time, nor anything in all the cruel conspiracies of

ingratitude so wrong as that right. Could we entreat her to leave us, or

to return from following after us, when each of our hearts had spoken

and said, "The Lord do so to me, and more also, if aught but death part

thee and me"? So she and I have gone on together ever since, and shall

go on, until we come to the Bethlehem of love at rest. What though she

had been there before we started, and were there now? To the saints and

their eternal spaceless spirits there are nor days, nor miles, nor

starting-points, nor resting-places, nor journey's ends.

From my earliest remembered observation, when I first began to "take

notice," as nurses say of vague babies, with pinafore comparison and

judgment, Aunt Judy was an old woman; I knew that, because she had

explained to me why I had not wrinkles like hers, and why she could not

read her precious Bible without spectacles, as I could, and why my back

was not bent too, and how if I lived I would grow so. From such

instructions I derived a blurred, bewildering notion that from me to

her, suffering an Aunt-Judy change, was a long, slow, wearisome process

of puckering and dimming and stiffening. But when she told me how she

had carried my mother in her arms, as she had carried me, and had made

the proud discovery of her first tooth, as, piously exploring among my

tender gums with her little finger, she had found mine, I stared at the

Pacific of her possible nursings, in a wild surmise, silent upon a peak

of wonder. "Well, then, Auntie," I asked, "do you think you're much more

than a thousand?"

She was not noticeably little as a woman, but wonderfully little as a

bundle, to contain so many great virtues,--rather below the medium

stature, slender, and bent with age, rather than with burdens; for she

had had no heartless master to lay heavy packs upon her. Her face, far

from unpleasing in its lines, was lovely in its blended expression of

intelligence, modesty, the sweetest guilelessness, an almost heroic

truthfulness, devoted fidelity, a dove-like tranquillity of mind, and

that abiding, reposeful trust in God which is equal to all trials, and

can never be taken by surprise. Her voice was soft and soothing, her

motions singularly free from clumsiness or fretfulness, her manners so

beautifully blended of unaffected humility, patience, and self-respect

as to command, in cheerful reciprocity, the deference they tendered; in

which respect she was a severe ordeal to the sham gentlemen and ladies

who had the honor to be presented to her,--the slightest trace of

snobbery betraying itself at once to the sensitive test-paper of Aunt

Judy's true politeness. Her ways were ways of pleasantness, and all her

paths were peace. Faith, hope, and charity were met in her dusky,

shrunken bosom,--more at home there, perhaps, than in a finer dwelling.

A sneering philosophy was never yet challenged to contemplate a piety

more complete than that which made this venerable "nigger" a lady on

earth, and a saint in heaven; but on her knees she found it, and on her

knees she held it fast,--watching, praying, trembling.

"When she sat, her head was, prayer-like, bending;

When she rose, it rose not any more.

Faster seemed her true heart grave-ward tending

Than her tired feet, weak and travel-sore."

She was, indeed, a living prayer, a lying-down and rising-up, a

going-out and coming-in prayer,--a loving, longing, working, waiting

prayer,--a black and wrinkled, bent and tottering incense and

aspiration. With her to labor was literally to worship; she washed

dishes with confession, ironed shirts with supplication, and dusted

furniture with thanksgiving,--morning, evening, noon, and night,

praising God. From resting-place to resting-place, over tedious

stretches of task, she prayed her way,

"And ever, at each period,

She stopped and sang, 'Praise God!'"

like Browning's Theocrite. And, as if answering Blaise, the listening

monk, when he said,

"Well done!

I doubt not thou art heard, my son:

As well as if thy voice to-day

Were praising God the Pope's great way,"

her longing was,

"Would God that I

Might praise him _some_ great way and die."

Many a time have I, bursting boisterously into my little bedroom in

quest of top or ball, checked myself, with a feeling more akin to

superstition than to reverence, on finding Aunt Judy on her knees beside

the pretty cot she had just made up so snugly and tenderly for me,

pouring her ever-brimming heart out in clear, refreshing springs of

prayer. Led by these still waters, she rested there from the heat and

burden of life, as the camel by wells in the desert. On such occasions I

always knew that my dear old nurse had just finished making a bed or

sweeping a room, and had sunk down to rest in a prayer, as a fagged

drudge on a stool. If you ever gloried--and what gentleman has not?--in

Gregg's brave old hymn, beginning

"Jesus, and shall it ever be,

A mortal man ashamed of thee?"

you would ask for no more intrepid illustration of its loyal spirit than

the figure of Aunt Judy on her knees at the foot of my father's bed,

where he often found her in the act,--turning her face for an instant,

but without offering to rise, from her Divine Master to the mild

fellow-servant in whom she affectionately recognized an earthly master,

and asking, with a manner far less embarrassed than his own, "Was you

lookin' for your gloves, sir? They's on de bureau,--and your umbrell's

behind de door";--and then placidly turning back again to that Master

whom most of us white slaves of the Devil think we have honored enough

when we have printed His title with a capital M.

"My Master, shall I speak? O that to Thee

My Servant were a little so

As flesh may be!

That these two words might creep and grow

To some degree of spiciness to Thee!"

But the hour of my Aunt-Judyness most sacred and inspiring to me,

weirdly filling my imagination with solemn reaches beyond my childish

ken, was at the close of the day, when--I having been undressed, with

many a cradle lecture and many a blessing, many an admonition and

endearment, line upon line and precept upon precept, here a text and

there a pious rhyme, between the buttons and the strings, and having

said my awful "Now I lay me," lest "I should die before I wake," and

been tucked in with careful fondling fingers, the party of the first

part honorably contracting to "shut his eyes and go straight to sleep,"

provided the party of the second part would remain at the bedside till

the last heavy-lingering wink was winked,--that image of her Maker

carved in ebony took up her part in creation's pausing chorus, and

poured her little human praise into the echoing ear of God in such a

burst of triumphant humility, of exulting hope and trust, and

all-embracing charity and love,--wherein master and mistress and

fellow-servant, friend and stranger, the kind and the cruel, the just

and the unjust, the believer and the scoffer, had each his welcome place

and was called by his name,--as only Ruth could have said or Isaiah

sung. As for me, I only lay there with closed eyes, very still, lest I

should offend the angels, for I knew the room was full of them,--as for

me, I only write here with a faltering heart, lest I should offend those

prayers, for I know heaven is full of them, and I know that for every

time my name arose to the throne of God on that beatified handmaid's

hopes and cries, I have been forgiven seventy times seven.

And so Aunt Judy prayed and praised, sitting upon the landing to rest

herself, as she descended from the garret side-wise, the same foot

always advanced, as is the way of weak old folks in coming down stairs;

and so she prayed and praised between the splitting spells of her forty

years' asthmatic cough, rocking backward and forward, with her hands

upon her knees. And sometimes she preached to me, the ironing-table

being her pulpit; for oh! she was an excellent divine, that had the

Bible at her fingers' ends, and many a moving sermon did she deliver,

"how God doth make his enemies his friends." And sometimes she baptized

me, the bath-tub being her Jordan, in the name of duty, love, and

patience. In truth, Aunt Judy took as much prophylactic pains with my

soul as if it had been tainted with a congenital sulphuric diathesis;

and if I had sunk under a complication of profane disorders, no

postmortem statement of my spiritual pathology would have been complete

and exact which failed to take note of her stringent preventive

measures.

Now be it known, that Aunt Judy's piety was in no respect of the

niggerish kind; when I say "colored," I mean one thing, respectfully;

and when I say "niggerish," I mean another, disgustedly. I am not

responsible for the distinction: it is a true "cullud" nomenclature, and

very significant; our fellow-citizens of African descent themselves

employ it, nicely and wisely; and when they call each other "nigger" the

familiar term of opprobrium is applied with all the malice of a sting,

and resented with all the sensitiveness of a raw. So when I say that my

Auntie's piety was not of the niggerish kind, even Zoe, "The Octoroon,"

or any other woman or man in whose veins courses the blood of Ham four

times diluted, knows that I mean it was not that glory-hallelujah

variety of cunning or delusion, compounded of laziness and catalepsy,

which is popular among the shouting, shirt-tearing sects of plantation

darkies, who "git relijin" and fits twelve times a year. To all such

she used to say, "'T ain't de real grace, honey,--'t ain't de sure

glory,--you hollers too loud. When you gits de Dove in your heart, and

de Lamb on your bosom, you'll feel as ef you was in dat stable at

Bethlehem and de Blessed Virgin had lent you de sleepin' Baby to hold."

She would not have shrunk from lifting up her voice and crying aloud in

the market-place, if thereby she might turn one smart butcher from the

error of his _weighs_; but for steady talking to the Lord, she preferred

my bedside or the back-stairs.

But in those days the kitchen was my paradise, by her transmuted. As a

child, and not less now than then, I had a consuming longing for

snuggery; my one fair, clear idea of the consummate golden fruit of the

spirit's sweet content was a cosey place to get away to. In my longing I

purred with the cat rolled up in her furry ball on the rug by the fire,

making a high-post bedstead of a chair; in my longing I stole with

furtive rats to their mysterious cave-nests in the wall. So do I

now,--the more for that I lost, so long ago, my dear kitchen, my

Aunt-Judyness,--my home.

"I behold it everywhere,

On the earth, and in the air,

But it never comes again."

At this moment I feel the dresser in the corner, gleaming with the

cook's refulgent pride of polished tins; I am sensible of that pulpit

ironing-table--alas! the flat-iron on its ring is as cold as the hand

that erst so deftly guided it. I bask before the old-fashioned

hospitable fireplace, capacious and embracing, and jolly with its

old-fashioned hickory blaze, and the fat old-fashioned kettle hung upon

the old-fashioned crane, swinging and singing of old-fashioned abundance

and good cheer. I behold the Madras turban, the white neckerchief

crossed over the bosom, the clumsy steel-bowed spectacles, the check

apron, and the old-fashioned love that is forever new. But they never

come again.

That kitchen was my hospital and my school,--as much better than the

whole round of select academies and classical institutes that my father

tried, and that tried me, as check aprons and love are more inculcating

than canes and quarterly bills; and however it may be with my head, my

heart never has forgotten the lessons I learned there. Thither, on the

nipping nights of winter, brought I my small fingers and toes, numbed

and aching with snow-balling and skating, to be tenderly rubbed before

the fire, or fondly folded in the motherly apron. Thither brought I an

extensive and various assortment of splinters and fresh cuts; thither my

impervious nose, to be lubricated with goose-grease, or my swollen angry

tonsils ("waxen kernels," Aunt Judy called them), to be mollified with

volatile liniment.

It was here that my own free mind, uncompelled by pedagogues and

unallured by prizes, first achieved a whole chapter in the Bible. Cook

and laundress and chambermaid were out for the evening; the table had

been cleared and covered with the fresh white cloth; and I, perched on

Aunt Judy's lap at the end next the fireplace, glided featly over the

short words, plunged pluckily through the long, (braced, as it were,

against the superior education and the spectacles behind me,) of the

first chapter of the Gospel according to St. John, from the Word that

was in the beginning, to the Hereafter of the glorified Son of man.

After which so large performance for so small a boy, we re-refreshed

ourselves with that cheerful hymn, in which Dr. Watts lyrically disposes

of the questions,

"And must this body die,

This mortal frame decay?

And must these active limbs of mine

Lie mouldering in the clay?"

For so infantile a heart, my darling old mammy had a wonderful lack of

active imagination, even in her religion; for there all was real and

actual to her. Her pleasures of memory and her pleasures of hope were

alike founded upon fact. Christ was as personal to her as her own

rheumatic frame, and heaven as positive as her kitchen. "Blessed are

they that have not seen, and yet have believed";--but for her, to

believe and to see were one. So whatever imagination she may by nature

have possessed seemed to have dwindled for lack of exercise: it was long

since she had had any use for it. She had no folk-lore, no faculty of

story-telling,--only a veracious legend or two of our family, which she

invariably related with an affidavit-like scrupulousness of

circumstance. I cannot recollect that she ever once beguiled me with a

mere nurse's tale. So when at that kitchen-table we read "The Pilgrim's

Progress" together, we presented a curious entertainment for the student

of intellectual processes,--nurse and child arriving by diverse

arguments of imagination at the same result of reality;--she knowing

that Sin was a burden, because she had borne it; I, because I had seen

it in the picture strapped to Christian's back;--she, that Despair was a

giant, because he had often appalled her soul within her; I, because in

a dream he had made me scream last night;--she, that Death was a river,

because so many of her dear ones had gone over, and because on her clear

days she could see the other shore; I, because, as I lay with my young

cheek against her old heart, I could hear the beating of its waves.

Blessed indeed is the mother who is admitted to the sanctuary of her

darling's secrets with the freedom with which Aunt Judy penetrated (was

invited rather, with parted lips and sparkling eyes) to mine,--into

whose sympathetic ear are poured, in all the dream-borne melody of the

first songs of the heart, in all "the tender thought, the speechless

pain" of its first violets, his earliest confessions, aspirations,

loves, wrongs, troubles, triumphs. Well do I remember that day when,

trembling, ghastly, faint, I fell in tears upon her neck, and poured

into her bosom and basin the spasmodic story of My First Cigar! Well do

I remember that night, when, bursting from the evening party in the

parlor, and the thick red married lady in the thin blue tarletan, and

all my raptures and my anguish, I flung myself into Aunt Judy's arms and

acknowledged the soft corn of My First Love, raving at the fatal

sandy-whiskered gulf that yawned between me and Mine thick blue Own One

in the thin red tarletan!

Well do I remember--though I was only seven times one--the panting

exultation with which I flung into her lap the cheap colored print of

the Tower of Babel (showing the hurly-burly of French bricklayers and

Irish hod-carriers, and the grand row generally) that I had just won at

school by correctly committing to memory, and publicly reciting, the

whole of

"Almighty God, thy piercing eye

Strikes through the shades of night," etc.

My first prize! The Tower of Babel fell untimely into the wash-tub, but

she dried it on her warm bosom; and I have never forgotten that All our

secret actions lie All open to His sight; though I have never seen the

verses (they were in Comly's Spelling-Book) from that day to this.

In those days we had a youth of talent in the family,--a sort of

sophomorical boil, that the soap and sugar of indiscriminate adulation

had drawn to a head of conceit. This youth bestowed a great deal of

attention on a certain young woman of a classical turn of mind, who once

had a longing to attend a fancy-ball as a sibyl. About the same time

Sophomore missed the first volume of his Potter's "Antiquities of

Greece"; and, having searched for it in vain, made up his mind that I

had presented it as a keepsake, together with a lock of my hair and a

cent's worth of pea-nut taffy, to the head girl of the infant class at

my Sunday school. So Sophomore, being in morals a pedant and in

intellect a bully, accused me of appropriating the book, and offered me

a dollar if I would restore it to him. With swelling heart and quivering

lip I carried the wanton insult--my first great wrong--straight to Aunt

Judy, who, in her mild way, resented it as a personal outrage to her own

feelings, and tried to soothe and console me by assuring me that "it

would all rub out when it got dry." Three years later, as I was passing

the sibyl's house one morning, her mother met me at the door and handed

me an odd volume of Potter's "Antiquities of Greece," which she had just

discovered in some out-of-the-way corner, where it had been mislaid, and

which she desired me to hand to Sophomore with the sibyl's compliments,

thanks, regrets, and several other delicacies of the season. But I

handed it first to Aunt Judy, who gloried boisterously in my first

triumph. Sophomore patronized me magnificently with apologies; but if

the wrong never gets any drier than Aunt Judy's joyful eyes were then,

it never will rub out.

So heartily disgusted was I with this classical episode that I conceived

the original and desperate project of running away and going to sea. At

that time I enjoyed the proud privilege of a personal acquaintance with

the Siamese Twins, and was the envied holder of a season ticket to the

Museum, where they exhibited their attractive duplicity. It was an

essential part of my preparations to procure from the amiable Chang-Eng

a letter of introduction to their ingenious mother, who, I was told, was

in the duck-fishing line at Bangkok. Of course, I confided my plan to

Aunt Judy; and, although she opposed it with extra prayers of peculiar

length and strength, and finally succeeded in dissuading me from it, I

am by no means certain that she would not have connived at my flight,

rather than betray my confidence or consent to my punishment.

Those were the days of the _Morus multicaulis_ mania, and I embarked

with spirit in the silk-worm business. The original capital upon which I

erected the enterprise was furnished from the surplus of Aunt Judy's

wages. It was in the first silk dress that should come of all those

moths and eggs and wriggling spinners and cocoons that she invested with

such sanguine cheerfulness; and although she never got her money back in

that form,--owing to the unfortunate exhaustion of my mulberry-leaves

and the refusal of my worms to spin silk from tea, which, they being of

pure Chinese stock, I thought very unreasonable,--she conceived that she

reaped abundant returns in her share of my happy enthusiasm, while it

lasted; and when I wept over the famine-stricken forms of my operatives,

she said, "Never mind, honey; dey was an awful litter anyhow, and I

spec' dey was only de or'nary caterpillar poor trash, after all, else

dey 'd a-kep' goin' on dat tea; fur 't was de rale high-price Chany

kind, sure 's ye 'r born."

It was a striking oddness in the dear old soul, that, whilst in her

hours of familiar ease she indulged in the homely lingo of her tribe, in

her "company talk" she displayed a graver propriety of language, and in

her prayers was always fluent, forcible, and correct.

The watchful tenderness with which I loved my gentle, childlike father

was the most interesting of the many secrets that my heart shared only

with Aunt Judy's. When I was twelve years old, he fell into a touching

despondency, caused by certain reverses in his business and the

unremitting anxieties consequent upon them. So intense and sensitive was

my magnetic sympathy with him, that I contracted the same sadness, in a

form so aggravated and morbid that the despondency, in me, became

despair, and the anxiety horror. The cruel fancy took possession of my

mind, installed there by my treacherously imaginative temperament, that

some awful calamity was about to befall my dear father; that he,

patient, submissive Christian that he was, even meditated suicide; and

that shape of fear so shook my soul with terror in the daytime, so

filled my dreams with horror in the night, that, as if it were not

myself, I turn back to pity the poor child now, and wonder that he did

not go mad.

Does he know the truth now up in Heaven, the beloved old man? Surely;

for the beloved old woman, who alone knew it on earth, is she not there?

He knows now how his selfish, wilful, school-hating scamp, of whom only

he and Aunt Judy ever boded any good, stole away from his playmates and

his games, every afternoon when school was dismissed, and with that

baleful phantom before him, and that doleful cry in his ears, flew

through the bustle and clatter of the wharves to where his father's

warehouse was, two miles away; and, dodging like a thief among crates

and boxes, bales and casks, and choking down the appeal of his lonely,

shame-faced terror, watched that door with all the eager, tenacious,

panting fidelity of a dog, until the merchant came forth on his way

homeward for the night. And how the scamp followed, dodging, watching,

trembling, unconsciously moaning, unconsciously sobbing, seeing no form

but his, hearing no sound but his footfall, keeping cunningly between

that form and the dock, lest it should suddenly dart, through the drays

and the moored vessels and plunge into the river, as the scamp had seen

it do in his dreams. And how, at the end of that walk through the Valley

of the Shadow of Death, when we reached our own door, and the

simple-hearted, good old man passed in, as ignorant of my following as

he was innocent of the monstrous purpose I imputed to him, I lingered

some minutes at the gate to ease with a sluice of tears my pent-up fears

and pains; and then burst into the yard, whistling, whooping, prancing,

swinging my satchel, without feeling or manners,--a shameless, heartless

brat and nuisance. And how, when the day, with all its secret sighs and

sobs, was over, and he and I retired to the same bed, I prayed to our

Father in heaven (muffling my very thoughts in the bed-clothes lest he

should hear them) to keep my earthly father safe for me from all the

formless dangers of the darkness; and how, when at the first gray streak

of dawn the spectre shook me, and I awoke, I held my heart and my

breathing still, to listen for his breathing, and thanked God when he

groaned in his sleep; and how, when his shaving-water was brought and he

stood before the glass, baring his throat, I crept close behind him,

still watching, gasping,--now pretending to hum a tune, now pressing my

hand upon my mouth lest I should shriek in my helpless suspense; and

how, when he drew the razor from its sheath--Well! I am forty years old

now, and I have been pursued since then by so many and such torturing

shapes of desperation and dismay as should refresh the heart of my

stupidest enemy with an emotion of relenting; but I would consent to

weep, groan, rave them all over again, beginning where that haunted

child left off, rather than begin where he began, though my spectres

should forever vanish with his.

Aunt Judy trembled and watched with me, and, accepting my phantom as if

it were a reasonable fear, hid away her share of the sacred secret in

her heart, and helped me to cover up mine with a disguise of

carelessness, lest any foolish or brutal mockery should find it out.

My darling had but few superstitions: her spiritually informed

intelligence rose superior to vulgar signs and dreams, and saw through

the little warnings and wonders of darker and less pure minds with a

science of its own, which she called Gospel light. Still, there was here

a sign and there a legend that she clung to for old acquaintance' sake,

rather than by reason of any credulity in her strong enough to take the

place of faith. But these constituted the peculiar poetry of her

personality, the fireside balladry and folk-lore of her Aunt-Judyness;

and I could no more mock them than I could mock the good fairy in her,

that changed all my floggings to feathers,--no sooner tear away their

comfortable homeliness to jeer at their honored absurdity, than I could

snatch off her dear familiar turban to mock the silver reverence of her

"wool." Ah! I wish you could have heard her tell me that I must pass

through fourteen years of trouble,--seven on account of the big old

mirror in the parlor that I, lying on the sofa beneath it, kicked clear

off its hook and into the middle of the floor,--and seven for that very

looking-glass which my father used to shave by, and which I, sparring

at my image in it, to amuse my little brother, knocked into smithareens

with my fractious fist. Why, man, it was not only awful, it all came

true.

Aunt Judy, like most of those antiques, the old-fashioned house-servants

of the South,--coachmen and waiters, nurses and lady's maids,--was a

towering aristocrat: she believed in blood, and was a connoisseur in

pedigrees. Her family pride was lofty, vast, and imposing, and embraced

in the scope of its sympathy whoever could boast of a family Bible

containing a well-filled record of births, marriages, and deaths,--a

dear dead-and-gone inheritance of family portraits, lace, trinkets, and

silver spoons,--a family vault in an Orthodox burial-ground,--and above

all, one or two venerable family servants, just to show "dese mushroom

folks, wid der high-minded notions, how diff'ent things was in ole

missus's time!" Measured by this standard, if you had the misfortune to

be a nobody, Aunt Judy, as a lady, might patronize you, as a Christian,

would cheerfully advise and assist you; but to the exclusive privilege

of what she superbly styled family-arities, you must in vain aspire.

_Our_ family, in the broadest sense of that word, was a large one,--by

blood and marriage a numerous connection; and when Aunt Judy said,

"So-and-so b'longs to our family," she included every man, woman, and

child who could produce the genuine patent of our nobility, and

especially all who had ever worn our livery, from my great-grandfather's

tremendous coachman to the slipshod young gal that "nussed" our last new

cousin's last new baby. Sometimes one of these cousins--quite

telescopic, so distant was the relationship--would come to dine with us.

Then Aunt Judy, in gorgeous turban, immaculate neckerchief, and lively

satisfaction, would be served up in state, our _piece de resistance_.

The guest would compliment her with sympathetic inquiries about the

state of her health, which was always "only tol'able," or "ra-a-ther

poorly," or it "did 'pear as ef she could shuffle round a leetle yit,

praise de Master! But she was a-gettin' older and shacklier every day;

her cough was awful tryin' sometimes, and it 'peared as ef she warn't of

much account, nohow. But de Lord's will be done; when He wanted her, she

reckined He'd call. And how does you find yourself, Miss? And how does

your ma git along wid de servants now? You know she always was a great

hand to be pertickler, Miss; we hadn't sich another young lady in our

family, to be pertickler, as your ma, Miss,--'specially 'bout de

pleetin' and clare-starchin'."

I have to accuse myself of habitually shocking her aristocratic

sensibilities by profanely ignoring, in favor of the society of dirty

little plebeians, the relations to whom the sacred charm of a common

ancestry should have drawn me. "Make haste, honey," she used to say;

"wash yer face and hands, and pull up yer stockin's, and tie yer shoes,

and bresh de sand out of yer hair, and blow yer nose, and go into de

parlor, and shake hands wid yer Cousin Jorjana." But I would not. "O

bother, Auntie! who's my Cousin Georgiana?" "Why, honey, don't you know?

Miss Arabella Jane--dat's your dear dead-an'-gone grandma's second

cousin--had seven childern by her first husband,--he was a

Patterson,--and nine by her second,--_he_ was a McKim,--and five--but

'tain't no use, honey; you don't 'pear to take no int'res' in yer own

kith and kin, no more dan or'nary white trash. I 'spec' you don't know

de diff'ence, dis minnit, 'twixt yer poor old Aunt Judy and any

no-account poor-house nigger." And so my Cousin Georgiana, of whom I had

never heard before, remains a myth to me, one of Aunt Judy's Mrs.

Harrises, to this day. It was wonderful what an exact descriptive list

of them she could call at a moment's notice; and for keeping the run of

their names and numbers, she was as good as an enrolling officer or a

directory man. "Our family" could boast of many Pharisees, as well as

blush for many prodigals; but her sympathies were wholly with the

latter; and for these she was eternally killing fatted calves, in

spite of angry elder brothers and the whole sect of whited

sepulchres, who forgive exactly four hundred and ninety times by the

multiplication-table, and compass sea and land to make one hypocrite. If

she had had a fold of her own, all her sheep would have been black.

One day in January, 1849, I called to see Aunt Judy for the last time.

Superannuated, and rapidly failing, she had been installed by my father

in a comfortable room in the house of a sort of cousin of hers, a worthy

and "well-to-do" woman of color, where she might be cheered by the

visits of the more respectable people of her own class,--darkies of

substantial character and of the first families, among whom she was

esteemed as a mother in Israel. Thither either my father or one or two

of his children came every day, to watch her declining health, to

administer to her comfort, and to wait upon her with those offices of

respect to which she had earned her right by three quarters of a century

of humble, patient love and faithful service. My chest was packed, and

on the morrow I must sail for the ends of the earth; but she knew

nothing of that. All that afternoon we talked together as we had never

talked before; and many an injury that my indignant tears had kept fresh

and sticky was "dried" in the warmth of her earnest, anxious

peace-making, and "rubbed out" then and there. No page of my inditing

could be pure enough to record it all; but is it not written in the Book

of Life, among the regrets and the forgivenesses, the confessions and

the consolations and the hopes?

The last word I ever uttered to Aunt Judy was a careful, loving, pious

lie. She said, "Won't you come ag'in to-morrow, son, and see de poor ole

woman?" And I replied, "O yes, Auntie!"--though I well knew that, even

as I spoke, I was looking into the wise truth of those patient, tender

eyes for the last time in this world. The sun was going down as we

parted,--that sun has never risen again for me.

In June, 1850, on board a steamboat in the Sacramento River, I received

the very Bible I had first learned to read in, sitting on her lap by the

kitchen fire,--in the beginning was the Word. She was dead; and, dying,

she had sent it me, with her blessing,--at the end was the Word.

In August, 1852, that Bible was tossed ashore from a wreck in an Indian

river, and by angels delivered at a mission school in the jungle, where

other heathens beside myself have doubtless learned from it the Word

that was, and is, and ever shall be. On the inside of the cover, sitting

on her lap by the kitchen fire, I had written, with appropriate

"pot-hooks and hangers," AUNT JUDY.

Such her quiet consummation and renown!

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER FOR 1866.

VII.

BODILY RELIGION: A SERMON ON GOOD HEALTH.

One of our recent writers has said, that "good health is physical

religion"; and it is a saying worthy to be printed in golden letters.

But good health being physical religion, it fully shares that

indifference with which the human race regards things confessedly the

most important. The neglect of the soul is the trite theme of all

religious teachers; and, next to their souls, there is nothing that

people neglect so much as their bodies. Every person ought to be

perfectly healthy, just as everybody ought to be perfectly religious;

but, in point of fact, the greater part of mankind are so far from

perfect moral or physical religion that they cannot even form a

conception of the blessing beyond them.

The mass of good, well-meaning Christians are not yet advanced enough to

guess at the change which a perfect fidelity to Christ's spirit and

precepts would produce in them. And the majority of people who call

themselves well, because they are not, at present, upon any particular

doctor's list, are not within sight of what perfect health would be.

That fulness of life, that vigorous tone, and that elastic cheerfulness,

which make the mere fact of existence a luxury, that suppleness which

carries one like a well-built boat over every wave of unfavorable

chance,--these are attributes of the perfect health seldom enjoyed. We

see them in young children, in animals, and now and then, but rarely, in

some adult human being, who has preserved intact the religion of the

body through all opposing influences. Perfect health supposes not a

state of mere quiescence, but of positive enjoyment in living. See that

little fellow, as his nurse turns him out in the morning, fresh from his

bath, his hair newly curled, and his cheeks polished like apples. Every

step is a spring or a dance; he runs, he laughs, he shouts, his face

breaks into a thousand dimpling smiles at a word. His breakfast of plain

bread and milk is swallowed with an eager and incredible delight,--it is

_so good_, that he stops to laugh or thump the table now and then in

expression of his ecstasy. All day long he runs and frisks and plays;

and when at night the little head seeks the pillow, down go the

eye-curtains, and sleep comes without a dream. In the morning his first

note is a laugh and a crow, as he sits up in his crib and tries to pull

papa's eyes open with his fat fingers. He is an embodied joy,--he is

sunshine and music and laughter for all the house. With what a

magnificent generosity does the Author of life endow a little mortal

pilgrim in giving him at the outset of his career such a body as this!

How miserable it is to look forward twenty years, when the same child,

now grown a man, wakes in the morning with a dull, heavy head, the

consequence of smoking and studying till twelve or one the night before;

when he rises languidly to a late breakfast, and turns from this, and

tries that,--wants a devilled bone, or a cutlet with Worcestershire

sauce, to make eating possible; and then, with slow and plodding step,

finds his way to his office and his books. Verily the shades of the

prison-house gather round the growing boy; for, surely, no one will deny

that life often begins with health little less perfect than that of the

angels.

But the man who habitually wakes sodden, headachy, and a little stupid,

and who needs a cup of strong coffee and various stimulating condiments

to coax his bodily system into something like fair working order, does

not suppose he is out of health. He says, "Very well, I thank you," to

your inquiries,--merely because he has entirely forgotten what good

health is. He is well, not because of any particular pleasure in

physical existence, but well simply because he is not a subject for

prescriptions. Yet there is no store of vitality, no buoyancy, no

superabundant vigor, to resist the strain and pressure to which life

puts him. A checked perspiration, a draught of air ill-timed, a crisis

of perplexing business or care, and he is down with a bilious attack, or

an influenza, and subject to doctors' orders for an indefinite period.

And if the case be so with men, how is it with women? How many women

have at maturity the keen appetite, the joyous love of life and motion,

the elasticity and sense of physical delight in existence, that little

children have? How many have any superabundance of vitality with which

to meet the wear and strain of life? And yet they call themselves well.

But is it possible, in maturity, to have the joyful fulness of the life

of childhood? Experience has shown that the delicious freshness of this

dawning hour may be preserved even to mid-day, and may be brought back

and restored after it has been for years a stranger. Nature, though a

severe disciplinarian, is still, in many respects, most patient and easy

to be entreated, and meets any repentant movement of her prodigal

children with wonderful condescension. Take Bulwer's account of the

first few weeks of his sojourn at Malvern, and you will read, in very

elegant English, the story of an experience of pleasure which has

surprised and delighted many a patient at a water-cure. The return to

the great primitive elements of health--water, air, and simple food,

with a regular system of exercise--has brought to many a jaded, weary,

worn-down human being the elastic spirits, the simple, eager appetite,

the sound sleep, of a little child. Hence, the rude huts and chalets of

the peasant Priessnitz were crowded with battered dukes and princesses,

and notables of every degree, who came from the hot, enervating luxury

which had drained them of existence to find a keener pleasure in

peasants' bread under peasants' roofs than in soft raiment and palaces.

No arts of French cookery can possibly make anything taste so well to a

feeble and palled appetite as plain brown bread and milk taste to a

hungry water-cure patient, fresh from bath and exercise.

If the water-cure had done nothing more than establish the fact that the

glow and joyousness of early life are things which maybe restored after

having been once wasted, it would have done a good work. For if Nature

is so forgiving to those who have once lost or have squandered her

treasures, what may not be hoped for us if we can learn the art of never

losing the first health of childhood? And though with us, who have

passed to maturity, it may be too late for the blessing, cannot

something be done for the children who are yet to come after us?

Why is the first health of childhood lost? Is it not the answer, that

childhood is the only period of life in which bodily health is made a

prominent object? Take our pretty boy, with cheeks like apples, who

started in life with a hop, skip, and dance,--to whom laughter was like

breathing, and who was enraptured with plain bread and milk,--how did he

grow into the man who wakes so languid and dull, who wants strong coffee

and Worcestershire sauce to make his breakfast go down? When and where

did he drop the invaluable talisman that once made everything look

brighter and taste better to him, however rude and simple, than now do

the most elaborate combinations? What is the boy's history? Why, for the

first seven years of his life his body is made of some account. It is

watched, cared for, dieted, disciplined, fed with fresh air, and left to

grow and develop like a thrifty plant. But from the time school

education begins, the body is steadily ignored, and left to take care of

itself.

The boy is made to sit six hours a day in a close, hot room, breathing

impure air, putting the brain and the nervous system upon a constant

strain, while the muscular system is repressed to an unnatural quiet.

During the six hours, perhaps twenty minutes are allowed for all that

play of the muscles which, up to this time, has been the constant habit

of his life. After this he is sent home with books, slate, and lessons

to occupy an hour or two more in preparing for the next day. In the

whole of this time there is no kind of effort to train the physical

system by appropriate exercise. Something of the sort was attempted

years ago in the infant schools, but soon given up; and now, from the

time study first begins, the muscles are ignored in all primary schools.

One of the first results is the loss of that animal vigor which formerly

made the boy love motion for its own sake. Even in his leisure hours he

no longer leaps and runs as he used to; he learns to sit still, and by

and by sitting and lounging come to be the habit, and vigorous motion

the exception, for most of the hours of the day. The education thus

begun goes on from primary to high school, from high school to college,

from college through professional studies of law, medicine, or theology,

with this steady contempt for the body, with no provision for its

culture, training, or development, but rather a direct and evident

provision for its deterioration and decay.

The want of suitable ventilation in school-rooms, recitation-rooms,

lecture-rooms, offices, court-rooms, conference-rooms, and vestries,

where young students of law, medicine, and theology acquire their

earlier practice, is something simply appalling. Of itself it would

answer for men the question, why so many thousand glad, active children

come to a middle life without joy,--a life whose best estate is a sort

of slow, plodding endurance. The despite and hatred which most men seem

to feel for God's gift of fresh air, and their resolution to breathe as

little of it as possible, could only come from a long course of

education, in which they have been accustomed to live without it. Let

any one notice the conduct of our American people travelling in railroad

cars. We will suppose that about half of them are what might be called

well-educated people, who have learned in books, or otherwise, that the

air breathed from the lungs is laden with impurities,--that it is

noxious and poisonous; and yet, travel with these people half a day, and

you would suppose from their actions that they considered the external

air as a poison created expressly to injure them, and that the only

course of safety lay in keeping the cars hermetically sealed, and

breathing over and over the vapor from each others' lungs. If a person

in despair at the intolerable foulness raises a window, what frowns from

all the neighboring seats, especially from great rough-coated men, who

always seem the first to be apprehensive! The request to "put down that

window" is almost sure to follow a moment or two of fresh air. In vain

have rows of ventilators been put in the tops of some of the cars, for

conductors and passengers are both of one mind, that these ventilators

are inlets of danger, and must be kept carefully closed.

Railroad travelling in America is systematically, and one would think

carefully, arranged so as to violate every possible law of health. The

old rule to keep the head cool and the feet warm is precisely reversed.

A red-hot stove heats the upper stratum of air to oppression, while a

stream of cold air is constantly circulating about the lower

extremities. The most indigestible and unhealthy substances conceivable

are generally sold in the cars or at way-stations for the confusion and

distress of the stomach. Rarely can a traveller obtain so innocent a

thing as a plain good sandwich of bread and meat, while pie, cake,

doughnuts, and all other culinary atrocities, are almost forced upon him

at every stopping-place. In France, England, and Germany the railroad

cars are perfectly ventilated; the feet are kept warm by flat cases

filled with hot water and covered with carpet, and answering the double

purpose of warming the feet and diffusing an agreeable temperature

through the car, without burning away the vitality of the air; while the

arrangements at the refreshment-rooms provide for the passenger as

wholesome and well-served a meal of healthy, nutritious food as could be

obtained in any home circle.

What are we to infer concerning the home habits of a nation of men who

so resignedly allow their bodies to be poisoned and maltreated in

travelling over such an extent of territory as is covered by our

railroad lines? Does it not show that foul air and improper food are too

much matters of course to excite attention? As a writer in "The Nation"

has lately remarked, it is simply and only because the American nation

like to have unventilated cars, and to be fed on pie and coffee at

stopping-places, that nothing better is known to our travellers; if

there were, any marked dislike of such a state of things on the part of

the people, it would not exist. We have wealth enough, and enterprise

enough, and ingenuity enough, in our American nation, to compass with

wonderful rapidity any end that really seems to us desirable. An army

was improvised when an army was wanted,--and an army more perfectly

equipped, more bountifully fed, than so great a body of men ever was

before. Hospitals, Sanitary Commissions, and Christian Commissions all

arose out of the simple conviction of the American people that they must

arise. If the American people were equally convinced that foul air was a

poison,--that to have cold feet and hot heads was to invite an attack of

illness,--that maple-sugar, pop-corn, peppermint candy, pie, doughnuts,

and peanuts are not diet for reasonable beings,--they would have

railroad accommodations very different from those now in existence.

We have spoken of the foul air of court-rooms. What better illustration

could be given of the utter contempt with which the laws of bodily

health are treated, than the condition of these places? Our lawyers are

our highly educated men. They have been through high-school and college

training, they have learned the properties of oxygen, nitrogen, and

carbonic-acid gas, and have seen a mouse die under an exhausted

receiver, and of course they know that foul, unventilated rooms are bad

for the health; and yet generation after generation of men so taught and

trained will spend the greater part of their lives in rooms notorious

for their close and impure air, without so much as an attempt to remedy

the evil. A well-ventilated court-room is a four-leaved clover among

court-rooms. Young men are constantly losing their health at the bar:

lung diseases, dyspepsia, follow them up, gradually sapping their

vitality. Some of the brightest ornaments of the profession have

actually fallen dead as they stood pleading,--victims of the fearful

pressure of poisonous and heated air upon the excited brain. The deaths

of Salmon P. Chase of Portland, uncle of our present Chief Justice, and

of Ezekiel Webster, the brother of our great statesman, are memorable

examples of the calamitous effects of the errors dwelt upon; and yet,

strange to say, nothing efficient is done to mend these errors, and give

the body an equal chance with the mind in the pressure of the world's

affairs.

But churches, lecture-rooms, and vestries, and all buildings devoted

especially to the good of the soul, are equally witness of the mind's

disdain of the body's needs, and the body's consequent revenge upon the

soul. In how many of these places has the question of a thorough

provision of fresh air been even considered? People would never think of

bringing a thousand persons into a desert place, and keeping them there,

without making preparations to feed them. Bread and butter, potatoes and

meat, must plainly be found for them; but a thousand human beings are

put into a building to remain a given number of hours, and no one asks

the question whether means exist for giving each one the quantum of

fresh air needed for his circulation, and these thousand victims will

consent to be slowly poisoned, gasping, sweating, getting red in the

face, with confused and sleepy brains, while a minister with a yet

redder face and a more oppressed brain struggles and wrestles, through

the hot, seething vapors, to make clear to them the mysteries of faith.

How many churches are there that for six or eight months in the year are

never ventilated at all, except by the accidental opening of doors? The

foul air generated by one congregation is locked up by the sexton for

the use of the next assembly; and so gathers and gathers from week to

week, and month to month, while devout persons upbraid themselves, and

are ready to tear their hair, because they always feel stupid and sleepy

in church. The proper ventilation of their churches and vestries would

remove that spiritual deadness of which their prayers and hymns

complain. A man hoeing his corn out on a breezy hillside is bright and

alert, his mind works clearly, and he feels interested in religion, and

thinks of many a thing that might be said at the prayer-meeting at

night. But at night, when he sits down in a little room where the air

reeks with the vapor of his neighbor's breath and the smoke of kerosene

lamps, he finds himself suddenly dull and drowsy,--without emotion,

without thought, without feeling,--and he rises and reproaches himself

for this state of things. He calls upon his soul and all that is within

him to bless the Lord; but the indignant body, abused, insulted,

ignored, takes the soul by the throat, and says, "If you won't let _me_

have a good time, neither shall you." Revivals of religion, with

ministers and with those people whose moral organization leads them to

take most interest in them, often end in periods of bodily ill-health

and depression. But is there any need of this? Suppose that a revival of

religion required, as a formula, that all the members of a given

congregation should daily take a minute dose of arsenic in concert,--we

should not be surprised after a while to hear of various ill effects

therefrom; and, as vestries and lecture-rooms are now arranged, a daily

prayer-meeting is often nothing more nor less than a number of persons

spending half an hour a day breathing poison from each other's lungs.

There is not only no need of this, but, on the contrary, a good supply

of pure air would make the daily prayer-meeting far more enjoyable. The

body, if allowed the slightest degree of fair play, so far from being a

contumacious infidel and opposer, becomes a very fair Christian helper,

and, instead of throttling the soul, gives it wings to rise to celestial

regions.

This branch of our subject we will quit with one significant anecdote. A

certain rural church was somewhat famous for its picturesque Gothic

architecture, and equally famous for its sleepy atmosphere, the rules of

Gothic symmetry requiring very small windows, which could be only

partially opened. Everybody was affected alike in this church: minister

and people complained that it was like the enchanted ground in the

Pilgrim's Progress. Do what they would, sleep was ever at their elbows;

the blue, red, and green of the painted windows melted into a rainbow

dimness of hazy confusion; and ere they were aware, they were off on a

cloud to the land of dreams.

An energetic sister in the church suggested the inquiry, whether it was

ever ventilated, and discovered that it was regularly locked up at the

close of service, and remained so till opened for the next week. She

suggested the inquiry, whether giving the church a thorough airing on

Saturday would not improve the Sunday services; but nobody acted on her

suggestion. Finally, she borrowed the sexton's key one Saturday night,

and went into the church and opened all the windows herself, and let

them remain so for the night. The next day everybody remarked the

improved comfort of the church, and wondered what had produced the

change. Nevertheless, when it was discovered, it was not deemed a matter

of enough importance to call for an order on the sexton to perpetuate

the improvement.

The ventilation of private dwellings in this country is such as might be

expected from that entire indifference to the laws of health manifested

in public establishments. Let a person travel in private conveyance up

through the valley of the Connecticut, and stop for a night at the

taverns which he will usually find at the end of each day's stage. The

bed-chamber into which he will be ushered will be the concentration of

all forms of bad air. The house is redolent of the vegetables in the

cellar,--cabbages, turnips, and potatoes; and this fragrance is confined

and retained by the custom of closing the window-blinds and dropping the

inside curtains, so that neither air nor sunshine enters in to purify.

Add to this the strong odor of a new feather-bed and pillows, and you

have a combination of perfumes most appalling to a delicate sense. Yet

travellers take possession of these rooms, sleep in them all night

without raising the window or opening the blinds, and leave them to be

shut up for other travellers.

The spare chamber of many dwellings seems to be an hermetically closed

box, opened only twice a year, for spring and fall cleaning; but for the

rest of the time closed to the sun and the air of heaven. Thrifty

country housekeepers often adopt the custom of making their beds on the

instant after they are left, without airing the sheets and mattresses;

and a bed so made gradually becomes permeated with the insensible

emanations of the human body, so as to be a steady corrupter of the

atmosphere.

In the winter, the windows are calked and listed, the throat of the

chimney built up with a tight brick wall, and a close stove is

introduced to help burn out the vitality of the air. In a sitting-room

like this, from five to ten persons will spend about eight months of the

year, with no other ventilation than that gained by the casual opening

and shutting of doors. Is it any wonder that consumption every year

sweeps away its thousands?--that people are suffering constant chronic

ailments,--neuralgia, nervous dyspepsia, and all the host of indefinite

bad feelings that rob life of sweetness and flower and bloom?

A recent writer raises the inquiry, whether the community would not gain

in health by the demolition of all dwelling-houses. That is, he suggests

the question, whether the evils from foul air are not so great and so

constant, that they countervail the advantages of shelter. Consumptive

patients far gone have been known to be cured by long journeys, which

have required them to be day and night in the open air. Sleep under the

open heaven, even though the person be exposed to the various accidents

of weather, has often proved a miraculous restorer after everything else

had failed. But surely, if simple fresh air is so healing and preserving

a thing, some means might be found to keep the air in a house just as

pure and vigorous as it is outside.

An article in the May number of "Harpers' Magazine" presents drawings of

a very simple arrangement by which any house can be made thoroughly

self-ventilating. Ventilation, as this article shows, consists in two

things,--a perfect and certain expulsion from the dwelling of all foul

air breathed from the lungs or arising from any other cause, and the

constant supply of pure air.

One source of foul air cannot be too much guarded against,--we mean

imperfect gas-pipes. A want of thoroughness in execution is the sin of

our American artisans, and very few gas-fixtures are so thoroughly made

that more or less gas does not escape and mingle with the air of the

dwelling. There are parlors where plants cannot be made to live, because

the gas kills them; and yet their occupants do not seem to reflect that

an air in which a plant cannot live must be dangerous for a human being.

The very clemency and long-suffering of Nature to those who persistently

violate her laws is one great cause why men are, physically speaking,

such sinners as they are. If foul air poisoned at once and completely,

we should have well-ventilated houses, whatever else we failed to have.

But because people can go on for weeks, months, and years, breathing

poisons, and slowly and imperceptibly lowering the tone of their vital

powers, and yet be what they call "pretty well, I thank you," sermons on

ventilation and fresh air go by them as an idle song. "I don't see but

we are well enough, and we never took much pains about these things.

There's air enough gets into houses, of course. What with doors opening

and windows occasionally lifted, the air of houses is generally good

enough";--and so the matter is dismissed.

One of Heaven's great hygienic teachers is now abroad in the world,

giving lessons on health to the children of men. The cholera is like the

angel whom God threatened to send as leader to the rebellious

Israelites. "Beware of him, obey his voice, and provoke him not; for he

will not pardon your transgressions." The advent of this fearful

messenger seems really to be made necessary by the contempt with which

men treat the physical laws of their being. What else could have

purified the dark places of New York? What a wiping-up and reforming and

cleansing is going before him through the country! At last we find that

Nature is in earnest, and that her laws cannot be always ignored with

impunity. Poisoned air is recognized at last as an evil,--even although

the poison cannot be weighed, measured, or tasted; and if all the

precautions that men are now willing to take could be made perpetual,

the alarm would be a blessing to the world.

Like the principles of spiritual religion, the principles of physical

religion are few and easy to be understood. An old medical apothegm

personifies the hygienic forces as the Doctors Air, Diet, Exercise, and

Quiet; and these four will be found, on reflection, to cover the whole

ground of what is required to preserve human health. A human being whose

lungs have always been nourished by pure air, whose stomach has been fed

only by appropriate food, whose muscles have been systematically trained

by appropriate exercises, and whose mind is kept tranquil by faith in

God and a good conscience, has _perfect physical religion_. There is a

line where physical religion must necessarily overlap spiritual religion

and rest upon it. No human being can be assured of perfect health,

through all the strain and wear and tear of such cares and such

perplexities as life brings, without the rest of _faith in God_. An

unsubmissive, unconfiding, unresigned soul will make vain the best

hygienic treatment; and, on the contrary, the most saintly religious

resolution and purpose maybe defeated and vitiated by an habitual

ignorance and disregard of the laws of the physical system.

_Perfect_ spiritual religion cannot exist without perfect physical

religion. Every flaw and defect in the bodily system is just so much

taken from the spiritual vitality: we are commanded to glorify God, not

simply in our spirits, but in our _bodies_ and spirits. The only example

of perfect manhood the world ever saw impresses us more than anything

else by an atmosphere of perfect healthiness. There is a calmness, a

steadiness, in the character of Jesus, a naturalness in his evolution of

the sublimest truths under the strain of the most absorbing and intense

excitement, that could commonly from the _one_ perfectly trained and

developed body, bearing as a pure and sacred shrine the One Perfect

Spirit. Jesus of Nazareth, journeying on foot from city to city, always

calm yet always fervent, always steady yet glowing with a white heat of

sacred enthusiasm, able to walk and teach all day and afterwards to

continue in prayer all night, with unshaken nerves, sedately patient,

serenely reticent, perfectly self-controlled, walked the earth, the only

man that perfectly glorified God in his body no less than in his spirit.

It is worthy of remark, that in choosing his disciples he chose plain

men from the laboring classes, who had lived the most obediently to the

simple, unperverted laws of nature. He chose men of good and pure

bodies,--simple, natural, childlike, healthy men,--and baptized their

souls with the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

The hygienic bearings of the New Testament have never been sufficiently

understood. The basis of them lies in the solemn declaration, that our

bodies are to be temples of the Holy Spirit, and that all abuse of them

is of the nature of sacrilege. Reverence for the physical system, as the

outward shrine and temple of the spiritual, is the peculiarity of the

Christian religion. The doctrine of the resurrection of the body, and

its physical immortality, sets the last crown of honor upon it. That

bodily system which God declared worthy to be gathered back from the

dust of the grave, and re-created, as the soul's immortal companion,

must necessarily be dear and precious in the eyes of its Creator. The

one passage in the New Testament in which it is spoken of disparagingly

is where Paul contrasts it with the brighter glory of what is to

come,--"He shall change our _vile_ bodies, that they may be fashioned

like his glorious body." From this passage has come abundance of

reviling of the physical system. Memoirs of good men are full of abuse

of it, as the clog, the load, the burden, the chain. It is spoken of as

pollution, as corruption,--in short, one would think that the Creator

had imitated the cruelty of some Oriental despots who have been known to

chain a festering corpse to a living body. Accordingly, the memoirs of

these pious men are also mournful records of slow suicide, wrought by

the persistent neglect of the most necessary and important laws of the

bodily system; and the body, outraged and down-trodden, has turned

traitor to the soul, and played the adversary with fearful power. Who

can tell the countless temptations to evil which flow in from a

neglected, disordered, deranged nervous system,--temptations to anger,

to irritability, to selfishness, to every kind of sin of appetite and

passion? No wonder that the poor soul longs for the hour of release from

such a companion.

But that human body which God declares expressly was made to be the

temple of the Holy Spirit, which he considers worthy to be perpetuated

by a resurrection and an immortal existence, cannot be intended to be a

clog and a hindrance to spiritual advancement. A perfect body, working

in perfect tune and time, would open glimpses of happiness to the soul

approaching the joys we hope for in heaven. It is only through the

images of things which our _bodily_ senses have taught us, that we can

form any conception of that future bliss; and the more perfect these

senses, the more perfect our conceptions must be.

The conclusion of the whole matter, and the practical application of

this sermon, is:--First, that all men set themselves to form the idea of

what perfect health is, and resolve to realize it for themselves and

their children. Second, that with a view to this they study the religion

of the body, in such simple and popular treatises as those of George

Combe, Dr. Dio Lewis, and others, and with simple and honest hearts

practise what they there learn. Third, that the training of the bodily

system should form a regular part of our common-school education,--every

common school being provided with a well-instructed teacher of

gymnastics; and the growth and development of each pupil's body being as

much noticed and marked as is now the growth of his mind. The same

course should be continued and enlarged in colleges and female

seminaries, which should have professors of hygiene appointed to give

thorough instruction concerning the laws of health.

And when this is all done, we may hope that crooked spines, pimpled

faces, sallow complexions, stooping shoulders, and all other signs

indicating an undeveloped physical vitality, will, in the course of a

few generations, disappear from the earth, and men will have bodies

which will glorify God, their great Architect.

The soul of man has got as far as it can without the body. Religion

herself stops and looks back, waiting for the body to overtake her. The

soul's great enemy and hindrance can be made her best friend and most

powerful help; and it is high time that this era were begun. We old

sinners, who have lived carelessly, and almost spent our day of grace,

may not gain much of its good; but the children,--shall there not be a

more perfect day for them? Shall there not come a day when the little

child, whom Christ set forth to his disciples as the type of the

greatest in the kingdom of heaven, shall be the type no less of our

physical than our spiritual advancement,--when men and women shall

arise, keeping through long and happy lives the simple, unperverted

appetites, the joyous freshness of spirit, the keen delight in mere

existence, the dreamless sleep and happy waking of early childhood?

GRIFFITH GAUNT; OR, JEALOUSY.