to be a partisan. To husband, parents, and children there could be
no more devoted adherent. Her conscience, developed by introspective
and subjective pondering, has for her own actions abnormal size and
activity. It is always alert, always busy, always prodding, and not
infrequently sickened by its congested activity. Duty to those about
her, and industry for the same beneficiaries, are watchwords of its
strength; and to fail in a mote’s weight is to gain condemnation of
two severest sorts--her own and the community’s. The opinion of the
community in which she lives is her second almighty power.
In marriage she often exemplifies that saying of Euripides which
Stobæus has preserved among the lavender-scented leaves of his
Florilegium--“A sympathetic wife is a man’s best possession.” She
has mental sympathy--a result of her tense nervous organization, her
altruism in domestic life, her strong love, and her sense of duty,
justice, and right.
In body she belongs to a people which has spent its physical force and
depleted its vitality. She is slight. There is lack of adipose tissue,
reserve force, throughout her frame. Her lungs are apt to be weak,
waist normal, and hips undersized.
She is awkward in movement. Her climate has not allowed her relaxation,
and the ease and curve of motion that more enervating air imparts.
This is seen even in public. In walking she holds her elbows set in an
angle, and sometimes she steps out in the tilt of the Cantabrigian man.
In this is perhaps an unconscious imitation, a sympathetic copying, of
an admirable norm; but it is graceless in petticoats. As she steps she
knocks her skirt with her knees, and gives you the impression that her
leg is crooked, that she does not lock her knee-joint. More often she
toes in than out.
She has a marvellously delicate, brilliant, fine-grained skin. It is
innocent of powder and purely natural. No beer in past generations has
entered its making, and no port; also, little flesh. In New England it
could not be said, as a London writer has coarsely put it, that a woman
may be looked upon as an aggregate of so many beefsteaks.
Her eyes have a liquid purity and preternatural brightness; she is the
child of γλαυχῶπις Athena, rather than of βοῶπις Hera, Pronuba, and
ministress to women of more luxuriant flesh. The brown of her hair
inclines to the ash shades.
Her features would in passport wording be called “regular.” The
expression of her face when she lives in more prosperous communities,
where salaries are and an assured future, is a stereotyped smile. In
more uncertain life and less fortunate surroundings, her countenance
shows a weariness of spirit and a homesickness for heaven that make
your soul ache.
Her mind is too self-conscious on the one hand, and too set on lofty
duties on the other, to allow much of coquetterie, or flirting, or a
femininely accented camaraderie with men--such as the more elemental
women of Chicago, Cincinnati, San Francisco, and New York enjoy.
She is farthest possible from the luxuriant beauty of St. Louis who
declared, “You bet! black-jack-diamond kind of a time!” when asked if
she had enjoyed her social dash in Newport. This New England woman
would, forsooth, take no dash in Aurovulgus. But falling by chance
among vulgarities and iniquities, she guards against the defilement of
her lips, for she loves a pure and clean usage of our facile English
speech.
The old phase of the New England woman is passing. It is the hour for
some poet to voice her threnody. Social conditions under which she
developed are almost obliterated. She is already outnumbered in her own
home by women of foreign blood, an ampler physique, a totally different
religious conception, a far different conduct; and a less exalted
ideal of life. Intermixtures will follow and racial lines gradually
fade. In the end she will not be. Her passing is due to the unnumbered
husbandless and the physical attenuation of the married--attenuation
resulting from their spare and meagre diet, and, it is also claimed,
from the excessive household labor of their mothers. More profoundly
causative--in fact, inciting the above conditions--was the distorted
morality and debilitating religion impressed upon her sensitive spirit.
Mayhap in this present decay some Mœra is punishing that awful crime
of self-sufficing ecclesiasticism. Her unproductivity--no matter from
what reason, whether from physical necessity or a spirit-searching
flight from the wrath of God--has been her death.
A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED
... ἐπὶ χθονὶ πουλυβοτείρη
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης ποίησε δικαιότερον καὶ ἄρειον,
ἀνδρῶν ἡρώων θεῖον γένος, ...
τοῖς δὲ δίχ’ ἀνθρώπων βίοτον καὶ ἤθε’ ὀπάσσας
Ζεὺς Κρονίδης κατένασσε πατὴρ ἐς πείρατα γαίης·
--χαὶ τοὶ μὲν ναίουσιν ἀκηδέα θυμὸν ἔχοντες
--ἐν μαχάρων νήσοισι παῤ Ὠχεανὸν βαθυδίνην,
--ὄλβιοι ἡρωες· τοῖσιν μελιηδέα καρπὸν
--τρςὶ ἔτεος θάλλοντα φέρει ζείδωρος ἄρουρα.
HESIOD
Under bloudie Diocletian ... a great number of Christians which were
assembled togither to heare the word of life ... were slaine by the
wicked pagans at Lichfield, whereof ... as you would say, The field of
dead corpses.
HOLINSHED
A NEW ENGLAND ABODE OF THE BLESSED
Upon the broad level of one of our Litchfield hills is--if we accept
ancient legend--a veritable Island of the Blessed. There heroes fallen
after strong fight enjoy rest forever.
The domination of unyielding law in the puny affairs of men--the
unfathomableness of Mœra, the lot no man can escape--comes upon one
afresh upon this hill-top. What clay we are in the hands of fate!
“ἅπαντα τíχτει χθὼν πάλιν τε λαμβáνει,” cried Euripides--“all things
the earth puts forth and takes again.”
But why should the efforts of men to build a human hive have here been
wiped away--here where all nature is wholesome and in seeming unison
with regulated human life? The air sparkles buoyantly up to your very
eyes--and almost intoxicates you with its life and joy. Through its
day-translucence crows cut their measured flight and brisker birds
flitter, and when the young moon shines out of a warm west elegiac
whippoorwills cry to the patient night.
Neither volcanic ashes nor flood, whirlwind nor earthquake--mere decay
has here nullified men’s efforts for congregated life and work. The
soil of the hill, porous and sandy, is of moderate fertility. Native
oaks and chestnuts, slender birches and fragrant hemlocks, with
undergrowths of coral-flowering laurel, clothe its slopes. Over its
sandstone ledges brooks of soft water treble minor airs--before they
go loitering among succulent grasses and spearmint and other thirsty
brothers of the distant meadows.
Nearly two hundred years ago pioneers of a Roundhead, independent
type--the type which led William of Orange across the Channel for
preservation of that liberty which Englishmen for hundreds of years
had spoken of as “antient”--such men broke this sod, till then
untouched by axe or plough. They made clearings, and grouped their
hand-hewn houses just where in cool mornings of summer they could see
the mists roll up from their hill-locked pond to meet the rosy day;
just where, when the sun sank behind the distant New York mountains,
they could catch within their windows his last shaft of gold.
Here they laid their hearths and dwelt in primitive comfort. Their
summers were unspeakably beautiful--and hard-working. Their autumns
indescribably brilliant, hill-side and valley uniting to form a
radiance God’s hand alone could hold. Their winters were of deep snows
and cold winds and much cutting and burning of wood. The first voice
of their virid spring came in the bird-calls of early March, when snow
melted and sap mounted, and sugar maples ran syrup; when ploughs were
sharpened, and steaming and patient oxen rested their sinews through
the long, pious Sabbath.
Wandering over this village site, now of fenced-in fields, you
find here and there a hearth and a few cobbles piled above it. The
chimney-shaft has long since disappeared. You happen upon stone curbs,
and look down to the dark waters of wells. You come upon bushes of
old-fashioned, curled-petal, pink-sweet roses and snowy phlox, and upon
tiger lilies flaunting odalisque faces before simple sweetbrier, and
upon many another garden plant which “a handsome woman that had a fine
hand”--as Izaak Walton said of her who made the trout fly--once set as
border to her path. Possibly the very hand that planted these pinks
held a bunch of their sweetness after it had grown waxen and cold. The
pinks themselves are now choked by the pushing grass.
And along this line of gooseberry-bushes we trace a path from house to
barn. Here was the fireplace. The square of small boulders yonder marks
the barn foundation. Along this path the house-father bore at sunrise
and sunset his pails of foaming milk. Under that elm spreading between
living-room and barn little children of the family built pebble huts,
in these rude confines cradling dolls which the mother had made from
linen of her own weave, or the father whittled when snow had crusted
the earth and made vain all his hauling and digging.
Those winters held genial hours. Nuts from the woods and cider from
the orchard stood on the board near by. Home-grown wood blazed in the
chimney; home-grown chestnuts, hidden in the ashes by busy children,
popped to expectant hands; house-mothers sat with knitting and
spinning, and the father and farm-men mended fittings and burnished
tools for the spring work. Outside the stars glittered through a clear
sky and the soundless earth below lay muffled in sleep.
Over yonder across the road was the village post-office, and not far
away were stores of merchant supplies. But of these houses no vestige
now remains. Where the post-house stood the earth is matted with
ground-pine and gleaming with scarlet berries of the wintergreen. The
wiping-out is as complete as that of the thousand trading-booths,
long since turned to clay, of old Greek Mycenæ, or of the stalls of
the ancient trading-folk dwelling between Jaffa and Jerusalem where
Tell-ej-Jezari now lies.
The church of white clap-boards which these villagers used for praise
and prayer--not a small temple--still abides. Many of the snowy houses
of old New England worship pierce their luminous ether with graceful
spires. But this meeting-house lifts a square, central bell-tower
which now leans on one side as if weary with long standing. The old
bell which summoned its people to their pews still hangs behind green
blinds--a not unmusical town-crier. But use, life, good works have
departed with those whom it exhorted to church duty, and in sympathy
with all the human endeavor it once knew, but now fordone, in these
days it never rings blithely, it can only be made to toll. Possibly
it can only be made to toll because of the settling of its supporting
tower. But the fact remains; and who knows if some wounded spirit
may not be dwelling within its brazen curves, sick at heart with its
passing and ineffective years?
Not far from the church, up a swell of the land, lies the
burying-ground--a sunny spot. Pines here and there, also hemlocks and
trees which stand bare after the fall of leaves. But all is bright and
open, not a hideous stone-quarry such as in our day vanity or untaught
taste makes of resting-places of our dead. Gay-colored mushrooms waste
their luxurious gaudiness between the trees, and steadfast myrtle, with
an added depth to its green from the air’s clarity, binds the narrow
mounds with ever-lengthening cords.
But whether they are purple with the violets of May or with Michaelmas
daisies, there is rest over all these mounds--“über allen Gipfeln ist
Ruh’.” Daily gossip and sympathy these neighbors had. The man of this
grave was he who passed many times a day up and down the path by the
gooseberry-bushes and bore the foaming milk. He is as voiceless now as
the flies that buzzed about his shining pail. And the widow who dwelt
across the road--she of the sad eyes who sat always at her loom, for
her youthful husband was of those who never came back from the massacre
of Fort William Henry--she to whom this man hauled a sled of wood
for every two he brought to his own door, to whom his family carried
elderberry wine, cider, and home mince-meat on Thanksgiving--she,
too, is voiceless even of thanks, her body lying over yonder, now
in complete rest--no loom, no treadle, no thumping, no whirring of
spinning-wheel, no narrow pinching and poverty, her soul of heroic
endurance joined with her long separate soldier soul of action.
The pathos of their lives and the warmth of their humanity!--however
coated with New England austerity. Many touching stories these little
headstones tell--as this:
“To the memory of Mrs. Abigail, Consort of Mr. Joseph Merrill,
who died May 3rd, 1767, in the 52 year of her age.”
A consort in royal dignity and poetry is a sharer of one’s lot. Mr.
Joseph Merrill had no acquaintance with the swagger and pretension
of courts, and he knew no poetry save his hill-side, his villagers,
and the mighty songs of the Bible. He was a plain, simple, Yankee
husbandman, round-shouldered from carrying heavy burdens, coarse-handed
from much tilling of the earth and use of horse and cattle. While he
listened to sermons in the white church down the slope, his eyes were
often heavy for need of morning sleep; and many a Sunday his back and
knees ached from lack of rest as he stood beside the sharer of his
fortunes in prayer. Yet his simple memorial warms the human heart one
hundred and thirty-eight years after his “consort” had for the last
time folded her housewifely hands.
“Of sa great faith and charitie,
With mutuall love and amitie:
That I wat an mair heavenly life,
Was never betweene man and wife.”
It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an encomium
of Charles Lamb’s. “Though bred a Presbyterian,” says Lamb of Joseph
Paice, “and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his
time.”
In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest, the
Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of the world
were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend--and Franklin whose memorable
examination before the House of Commons was then circulating as a news
pamphlet. The social gossip of the day--as Lady Sarah Lennox’s wit
recounts--had no more recognition of the villagers than George the
Fourth.
But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the Litchfield
Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human exercise, and
their “well-lined braine” was reasoning upon the Declaratory Act that
“Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.”
Another stone a few paces away has quite another story:
“Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, who
died April 2, 1745, in y^e 71 year of his age
as you are so was we
as we are you must be”
The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the
stone-cutter’s; and peradventure it was in the following way that the
rhymes--already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey died--came to
be upon his headstone.
The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and
fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey. Money-earning
opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by in the pioneering
of the Litchfield Hills, and only after scrupulous saving had the
Kelsey family the cost of the headstone at last in hand. It was then
that they met to consider an epitaph.
Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and to
open the way and clear his memory he scratched the date of death upon
a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.
“Friend Stephen’s death,” he began, “calleth to mind a verse often
sculptured in the old church-yard in Leicestershire, a verse satisfying
the soul with the vanity of this life, and turning our eyes to the
call from God which is to come. It toucheth not the vexations of the
world which it were vain to deny are ever present. You carry it in your
memory mayhap, Mistress Remembrance?” the stone-master interrupting
himself asked, suddenly appealing to a sister of Master Kelsey.
Mistress Remembrance, an elderly spinster whose lover having in their
youth taken the great journey to New York, and crossed the Devil’s
Stepping-Stones--which before the memory of man some netherworld force
laid an entry of Manhattan Island--had never again returned to the
Litchfield Hills--Mistress Remembrance recalled the verses, and also
her brother, Master Stephen’s, sonorous repetition of them.
In this way it came about that the mourning family determined they
should be engraven. And there the lines stand to-day in the hills’
beautiful air--far more than a century since the hour when Mistress
Remembrance and the stone-cutter joined the celestial choir in which
Master Stephen was that very evening singing.
But another headstone--
“With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked”--
quite outdoes Master Kelsey’s in strange English phrase. It reads:
“Michel son of John Spencer
died Jan ye 24^{th} 1756 in y^e 10^{th} year of his age.
Death Conquers All
Both young and Old
Tho’ ne’er so wise
Discreet and Bold
In helth and Strength
this youth did Die
in a moment without one Cry.”
And still another perpetuates the record of the same family:
In Memory of
Mr John Spencer Who
Died June y^{e} 24^{th}
1780 in the 70^{th}
Year of his Age
In Memory of Submit
Spencer Daughter of Mr
John and Mrs Mary
Spencer Who Died
Nov^{br} y^{e} 21^{th} 1755 in y^{e}
1^{st} Year of her Age
Oh Cruel Death to fill this
Narrow space In yonder
House Made a vast emty place
Was the child called “Submit” because born a woman! Or did the parents
embody in the name their own spiritual history of resignation to the
eternal powers?--“to fill this narrow space, in yonder house made a
vast empty place.”
Farther up the slope of this God’s Acre a shaft standing high in the
soft light mourns the hazards of our passage through the world.
In Memory of Mr.
Jeduthun Goodwin who
Died Feb 13^{th} 1809 Aged
40 Years
Also Mrs. Eunice his
Wife who died August 6^{th}
1802 Aged 33 Years
Dangers stand thick
through all the Ground
To Push us to the Tomb
And fierce diseases
Wait around
To hurry Mortals home
Every village has its tragedy, alas! and that recounted in this
following inscription is at least one faithful record of terrifying
disaster. Again it seems at variance with the moral order of the world
that these quiet fields should witness the terror this tiny memorial
hints at. The stone is quite out of plumb and moss-covered, but
underneath the lichen it reads:
“Phebe, wife of Ezekiel Markham Died Jyly 14,
1806 Ae 49
Also their 3 Sons Bela, Ciba, and Brainad was
burnt to Death in Oct 1793”
“In the midst of life we are dead”
The mother lived nearly thirteen years after. There is no neighboring
record of the father. Perhaps the two migrated after the fearful
holocaust, and he only returned to place his wife’s body beside the
disfigured remains of her little ungrown men. Bela, Ciba, and Brainard
rested lonesomely doubtless those thirteen waiting years, and many
a night must their little ghosts have sat among the windflowers and
hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst the drifted needles of the pines
in the clear moonlight of summer, athirst for the mother’s soul of
comfort and courage.
Again in this intaglio “spelt by th’ unlettered Muse” rises the
question of the stone-cutter’s knowledge of his mother tongue. The
church of the dead villagers still abides. But nowhere are seen the
remains of a school-house. Descendants of the cutter of Master Kelsey’s
headstone haply had many orders.
The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their
pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel all
the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the oozing
spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of days ago.
Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a strange sense of
waiting. And above is the silence of the sky.
With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of
the early village--undisturbed as they were by any world call, and
gifted with a fervid and patient faith--must daily have grown in
consciousness of a homely Presence ever reaching under their mortality
the Everlasting Arm.
This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these
graves--that some good, some divine is impendent--that the soul of the
world is outstretching a kindred hand.
In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal
moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to human
vision--the good that is mighty and never grows gray,--μέγας ἐν τούτοις
θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει.
The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests of
these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal--their graves in the
church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life beyond--that
their output of lives and years of struggle bore no more lasting local
fruit, however their seed may now be scattered to the upbuilding of
our South and West, the conversion of China, and our ordering of the
Philippines.
And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they--such men and
women as they--still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in all
institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality, surely! If
such men and women had been less severe, less honest, less gifted for
conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with an enthusiasm for
justice, less clear in their vision of the eternal moralities, less
simple and direct, less worthy inheritors of the great idea of liberty
which inflamed generations of their ancestors, it is not possible that
we should be here to-day doing our work to keep what they won and
carry their winnings further. Their unswerving independence in thought
and action and their conviction that the finger of God pointed their
way--their theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading--made
possible the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay
spent.
So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills--what with the
decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence of the
spiritual--there is a resting-place of the Blessed--an Island of the
Blessed as the old Greeks used to say--an abode of heroes fallen after
strong fighting and enjoying rest forever.
UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY
He is the half part of a blessed man
Left to be finished by such a she;
And she a fair divided excellence,
Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.
SHAKESPEARE
If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities
demanded in a plaything or handmaid--if he recognise in her the
existence of an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his
own, he must, by plainest logic, admit that life to express itself in
all its spontaneous forms of activity.
GEORGE ELIOT
Hard the task: your prison-chamber
Widens not for lifted latch
Till the giant thews and sinews
Meet their Godlike overmatch.
GEORGE MEREDITH
UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY
“I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation
of the Florilegium of Stobæus. The sentiment was not new with
Euripides--unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod with
his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos, who in
outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the degradation of
the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely sang “two days on
which a woman gives a man most pleasure--the day he marries her and the
day he buries her.”
And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant laughter-lover,
the titanic juggler with the heavens above and earth and men
below--Aristophanes who flouted the women of Athens in his
“Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.”
Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole great
narrative, and had avoided the mention of women and their part in the
history he relates.
“Woman is a curse!” cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before, when
they told the story of Eve--
“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe.”