CHAPTER I.

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THE

ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

_A Magazine of Literature, Science, Art, and Politics._

VOL. XVI.--NOVEMBER, 1865.--NO. XCVII.

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1865, by TICKNOR AND

FIELDS, in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of

Massachusetts.

Transcriber's Note: Minor typos have been corrected and footnotes moved

to the end of the article. Headings in large tables converted to letters

with a legend.

WHY THE PUTKAMMER CASTLE WAS DESTROYED.

There is a test of truth in popular creeds and in human opinions

generally which is prominently put forward by Herbert Spencer, and has

been more or less distinctly stated by other writers, long before our

time,--a very searching and trustworthy test.

It is, in substance, this:--Whatever doctrine or opinion has received,

throughout a long succession of centuries, the common assent of mankind,

may be properly set down as being, if not absolutely true in its usually

received form, yet founded on truth, and having, at least, a great,

undeniable verity that underlies it.

If, however, there be conflicting details as to any doctrine, varying in

form according to the sect or the nation that entertains it, then the

test is to be received as affirming the grand underlying truth, but not

as proving any of the conflicting varieties of investment in which

particular sects or nations may have chosen to clothe it.

Thus of the world's belief in the reality of another life, and in the

doctrine of future reward and punishment.

In some form or other, such a faith has existed in every age and among

almost every people. Charon and his boat might be the means of

conveyance. Or the believer, dying in battle for the creed of the

Faithful, might expect to wake up in a celestial harem peopled with

Houris. Or the belief might embody the matchless horrors painted by

Dante; his dolorous city with the terrible inscription over its

entrance-gate: "_Lasciate ogni speranza, voi ch'entrate_."

Again, the conception might be of a long unconscious interval after

death, succeeded at last by a resuscitation; or it might be of another

world, the supplement and immediate continuation of this, into which

Death, herald, not destroyer, ushers us even while human friends are yet

closing our eyes and composing our limbs. It might be of the Paradise in

which, on the very day of the crucifixion, the penitent thief was to

meet the Saviour of mankind; or it might be of that Heaven, yet increate

or unpeopled, seen by some in long, distant perspective, shadowed forth

in such lines as these:--

"That man, when laid in lonesome grave,

Shall sleep in Death's dark gloom,

Until the eternal morning wake

The slumbers of the tomb."

Yet again, the idea may be of a Future of which the denizens shall be,

on some Great Day, tried as before an earthly court, doomed as by an

earthly tribunal, and sentence pronounced against them by a presiding

God, who, of his own omnipotent will, decides to inflict upon sinners

condign punishment, in measure far beyond all earthly severity,--torment

in quenchless flames, with no drop of water to cool the parched tongue,

for ever and ever.

In other words, we may conceive, as to human destiny in another world,

either of punishments optional and arbitrary, growing out of the

indignation of an offended Judge who hates and requites sin, or of

punishments natural and inherent, growing out of the very nature of sin

itself, as _delirium tremens_ requites a long career of intemperance. We

may conceive of punishments which are the awards of judicial vengeance;

or we may believe in those only which are the inevitable results of

eternal and immutable law, a necessary sequence in the next life to the

bad passions and evil deeds of this.

Those who incline to this latter aspect of the Great Future, as the

scene of reward or punishment supervening in the natural order of

things, may chance to find interest, beyond mere curiosity, in the

following strange narrative.

* * * * *

There is not, perhaps, a country more rife in legends of haunted houses

than Germany. No province but has its store of them. Many, drawn by

tradition from the obscurity of the past, have lost, if they ever

possessed, any claim to be regarded except as apocryphal. But others, of

a recent date and better attested, cannot be disposed of in so summary a

manner.

In furnishing a specimen of this latter class, I depart from a rule

which I think it well to observe in regard to original narratives of

character so marvellous: to record such, namely, only when they can be

procured direct from the lips of the witnesses themselves. This comes to

me at second hand. I had no opportunity of cross-questioning the actors

in the scenes narrated. Yet I had the story from a gentleman of high

respectability: the principal Secretary of the ---- Legation at Naples:

and his sources of information were direct and authentic.

* * * * *

In the southeastern portion of Pomerania, at no great distance from the

frontier of the province of West Prussia, and in the vicinity of the

small town of Bütow, there stood, not many years since, an ancient

château. It was the ancestral residence of an old Pomeranian family of

baronial rank; and the narrative of its destruction, with the causes

which led thereto, is curious and remarkable.

Its former owner, the Baron von Putkammer, after leading a wild and

dissolute life, had expired within its walls. For years previously, many

a mysterious story, fraught with dark hints of seduction and

infanticide, had been whispered over the surrounding country; and when

at last death arrested the Baron's profligate career, some reported that

he had been strangled in requital of outrage committed,--others, that

the Devil had taken home his own, as they had long expected.

His estate went to a relative of the same name, who granted the

enjoyment of it to his eldest son, heir to the title. This young man,

after a time, arrived to take possession. He found in the château the

administrator of the deceased Baron's estate.

It was late, the first night, before he went to bed. Yet he was scarcely

undressed, when he heard, through the stillness of the night, the

approach of a carriage, at first rolling over the sharp gravel of the

avenue, then entering the paved court-yard. This was succeeded by the

noise of the front door opening, and the distinct sound of steps on the

principal staircase.

Young Putkammer, surprised at this unseasonable visit, yet supposing it

some friend who had been benighted, hastily donned his dressing-gown,

and, with light in hand, stepped to the landing. Nothing to be seen

there! But he heard behind him the opening of a door leading into the

principal gallery of the château,--a long hall which for some time had

been out of use. It had been employed by the former owner of the castle

as a banqueting-room, was hung with old family portraits, and, as the

young man had noticed during the day, was so completely incumbered with

furniture, which had been temporarily stored there, that no one could

pass through it.

He returned in great surprise, which was much increased when he found

the door of the gallery in question closed and locked. He listened, and

heard quite distinctly, within the room, the noise of plates and dishes

and the clatter of knives and forks. To this, after a time, succeeded

the sound of shuffling cards and the rattle of money, as if thrown on

the table in the course of the game.

More and more astonished, he awoke his servant, and bade him listen at

the door and tell him what he heard. The terrified valet reported the

same sounds that had reached his master's ears, Thereupon the latter

told him to arouse the administrator and request his presence.

When this gentleman appeared, the young nobleman eagerly asked if he

could furnish any explanation of this strange disturbance.

"I was unwilling," said he, in reply, "to anticipate what you now

witness, lest you might imagine I had some interested motive to prevent

your coming hither. We are all familiar with these sounds. They occur

every night at about the same hour. And we have sought in vain any

natural explanation of their constant recurrence."

"Have you the key of the gallery?"

"Here it is."

The door was unlocked and thrown open. Silence and darkness! And when

the lights were introduced, not an object to be seen through the gloom,

but the old furniture confusedly piled up over the floor.

They closed and locked the door. Again the same sounds commenced: the

clatter of dishes, the noise of revelling, the clink of the gamblers'

gold. A second time they opened the door, this time quickly and

suddenly; and a second time the sounds instantly ceased, and the hall,

untenanted except by the silent portraits on its walls, appeared before

them, the same still and gloomy lumber-room as before.

Baffled for the time, young Putkammer dismissed his attendants and

retired to his chamber. Erelong he heard the door of the gallery open,

the heavy footsteps sound on the stairway, the front door creak on its

hinges,--and then the roll of the carriage, first over the stone

pavement, then along the gravelled avenue, till the sounds gradually

died away in the distance.

The next night he was ready dressed and prepared with lights. When,

about the same hour, the noise of the approaching carriage was heard, he

had the lights immediately carried to the top of the stairway, and he

himself half descended the stairs. Up the stairs and past his very side

came the footsteps; but neither living being nor spectral form could his

eyes perceive.

The same noises in the old banqueting-hall. The same fruitless attempts

to witness the revel, or to get at the secret, if any, of the

imposition.

The young man was brave and devoid of superstition. Yet, in spite of

himself, these mysterious sounds, renewed night after night, irritated

his nerves, and preyed upon his quiet. He thought to break through the

spell by inviting a party of living guests. They came, to the number of

thirty or forty; but not for their presence did the invisible revellers

intermit their nocturnal visit. All heard the approach of the carriage,

the steps ascending the staircase, the sounds of revelry in the hall.

And all, when the opened door disclosed, as wont, but darkness and

silence, turned away with a shudder,--and to the subsequent invitation

of their host to favor him again with their company replied by some

shallow apology, which he perfectly understood.

Thus deserted by his friends, and subjected, night after night, to the

same ghastly annoyance, the young man found his health beginning to

suffer, and decided to endure it no longer.

Returning to his father, he informed him that he would receive with

gratitude the rents of the property, but only on condition that he was

not required to reside in its haunted château.

The father, ridiculing what he termed his son's superstitious weakness,

declared that he would himself take up his residence there for a time,

assured that he could not fail to discover the true cause of the sounds

that had driven off its former occupants.

But the result belied his expectations. Like his son, he never could

_see_ anything. But the selfsame sounds nightly assailed his ears. He

caused the hall to be cleared out and occupied daily. So long as it was

lighted, and there was any one within it, no sounds were heard; and by

thus occupying it all night, the disturbance could be averted. But as

often as it was closed or left in darkness, the invisible revel

recommenced at the wonted hour, preceded by the same preliminaries,

terminating in the same manner.

Nothing was left untried to penetrate the mystery, and to detect the

trick, if to trickery the disturbances were due. But every effort to

obtain an explanation of the phenomena utterly failed. And the father,

like the son, after a few weeks' struggle against the nightly annoyance,

found his nervous system unable to cope with this constant strain upon

it, and left the château, determined never again to enter its walls.

The next expedient was to rent it to those whom the fame of its ghostly

reputation had not reached. But this was unavailing, except for a brief

season. No tenant would remain beyond a week or ten days. This plan,

therefore, was abandoned in despair; the principal rooms were closed;

and the building remained for years untenanted, except by one or two

unwilling dependants.

Finally the proprietor, deeming all change hopeless, and finding that

the keeping up of the château was a mere useless expense, resolved to

destroy it. The dead had fairly driven out the living. He had it pulled

down; and a few low, ruined walls alone remained to mark the place where

it stood.

Still, even within these deserted ruins, the same sounds of nightly

revelry were declared to have been heard by those who were bold enough

to approach them at the midnight hour. When this was reported to the

proprietor, he determined, if possible, to outroot this last remnant of

disturbance. Accordingly, he caused to be erected, out of the remaining

materials of the château and on the spot where it had stood, a small

chapel, now to be found there, a mute witness of the story I have here

told.

The chapel was completed and consecrated in the year 1844. Even while

the rites attending its consecration were in progress, strange and

unwonted noises disturbed the congregation; but from that time on they

ceased; and the chapel has since been entirely free from any such.

A relative of the proprietor, a young officer in the Prussian army, was

present at the consecration, himself witnessed the noises in question,

and had previously heard, from the parties themselves, all the former

occurrences. He it was who related the circumstances to my informant,

the Baron von P----, a gentleman of a grave and earnest character, whose

manner, in repeating them to me, evinced sincerity and conviction. But

it is not merely upon his authority that the details of the narrative

rest. They are, it would seem, of public notoriety in Pomerania; and

hundreds of persons in the neighborhood, as my informant declared, can

yet be found to testify, from personal observation, to the general

accuracy of the above narration.[A]

The most salient point in this story is the practical and business part

of it,--the actual pulling down of the château, as a last resort, to get

rid of the disturbance. Mere fancy is not wont to lead to such a result

as that. The owner of a piece of valuable property is not likely to

destroy it for imaginary cause. Interest is a marvellous quickener of

the wits, and may be supposed to have left no stone unturned, before

assenting to such a sacrifice.

I inquired of the gentleman to whom I am indebted for the above

narrative if there were no skeptical surmises in regard to the origin of

the disturbance. He replied, that he had heard but one,--namely, that

the administrator of the deceased Baron's estate might, from motives of

interest and to have the field to himself, have resorted to a trick to

scare the owners from the premises.

It is beyond a doubt that such devices have been successfully employed

ere now for similar purpose. An example may be found in the story of the

monks of St. Bruno, and the shrewd device they employed to obtain from

King Louis the Saint the grant of one of his ancestral palaces. It was

in this wise.

Having heard his confessor speak in high terms of the goodness and

learning of the monks of St. Bruno, the King expressed a desire to found

a community of them near Paris. Bernard de la Tour, the superior, sent

six of the brethren; and Louis assigned to them, as residence, a

handsome dwelling in the village of Chantilly. It so happened, that from

their windows they had a fine view of the old palace of Vauvert,

originally erected for a royal residence by King Robert, but which had

been deserted for years. The worthy monks, oblivious of the Tenth

Commandment, may have thought the place would suit them; but ashamed,

probably, to make a formal demand of it from the King, they seem to have

set their wits to work to procure it by stratagem.

At all events, the palace of Vauvert, which had never labored under any

imputation against its character until they became its neighbors, began

almost immediately afterwards to acquire a bad name. Frightful shrieks

were heard to proceed thence at night. Blue, red, and green lights were

seen to glimmer from its casements, and then suddenly disappear. The

clanking of chains succeeded, together with the howlings of persons as

in great pain. Then a ghastly spectre, in pea-green, with long, white

beard and serpent's tail, appeared at the principal windows, shaking his

fist at the passers-by. This went on for months.

The King, to whom all these wonders were duly reported, deplored the

scandal, and sent commissioners to look into the affair. To these the

six monks of Chantilly, indignant that the Devil should play such pranks

before their very faces, suggested, that, if they could but have the

palace as a residence, they would undertake speedily to cure it of all

ghostly intrusion. A deed, with the royal sign-manual, conveyed Vauvert

to the monks of St Bruno. It bears the date of 1259. From that time all

disturbances ceased,--the green ghost, according to the creed of the

pious, being laid to rest forever under the waters of the Red Sea.[B]

Some will surmise that the story of the castle of Putkammer is but a

modified version of that of the palace of Vauvert. It may be so. One who

was not on the spot, to witness the phenomena and personally to verify

all the details, cannot rationally deny the possibility of such an

hypothesis. Yet I find little parallel between the cases, and

difficulties, apparently insuperable, in the way of accepting such a

solution of the mystery.

The French palace was deserted, and nothing was easier than to play off

there, unchallenged, such commonplace tricks as the showing of colored

lights, the clanking of chains, shrieks, groans, and a howling spectre

with beard and tail,--all in accordance with the prejudices of that

age; nor do we read that any one was bold enough to penetrate, during

the night, into the scene of the disturbance; nor had the King's

commissioners any personal motive to urge a thorough research; nor had a

pious sovereign, the owner of a dozen palaces, any strong inducement to

refuse the cession of one of these, already untenanted and useless, to

certain holy men, the objects of his veneration.

Very different, in every respect, is the affair of the Pomeranian

castle. It is a narrative of the skeptical nineteenth century, that sets

down all ghost-stories as nursery-tales. The owner, and his son, the

future possessor, each at separate times and for weeks, reside in the

castle, and occupy themselves in repeated attempts to discover whether

they have been imposed on. The selfsame trick, if trick it was, is

repeated night after night, without variation. The roll of the

approaching carriage-wheels, first along the gravelled avenue, then over

the paved court-yard, while no carriage was visible,--how were such

sounds to be imitated? The fall of footsteps, unaccompanied by aught in

bodily form, up the lighted stairway, and past the very side of the bold

youth who stepped down to meet them,--what human device could

successfully simulate these? The sound of the opening gallery-door and

the noises of the midnight orgies, with full opportunity to examine

every nook and corner of the scene whence, to every ear, the same

identical indications came,--how, in producing and reproducing these,

could trickery, time after time, escape detection? Both father and son,

it is evident, had their suspicions aroused; and both, as evidently,

were men of courage, not to be blinded by superstitious panic. Is it a

probable thing that they would destroy an old and valued family mansion,

without having exhausted every conceivable expedient to detect

imposture?

Nor was this imposture, if as such we are to regard it, conducted in

approved form, after the orthodox fashion. It assumed a shape contrary

to all usually received ideas. No spectre clanking its chains; no lights

burning blue; no groans of the tormented; no ordinary getting-up of a

ghostly disturbance. But a mere succession of sounds, indicating, if we

are to receive and interpret them literally, the periodical return from

the world of spirits of some of its tenants, restless and unblest. Was

this the machinery a mystifier was likely to select?

Such are the difficulties which attend the hypothesis of a concerted

plan of deception. They will be overlooked by those who have made up

their minds that communications between this world and the next are

impossible, and who will content themselves with pronouncing, that,

though they cannot detect the mode of the imposture, yet imposture of

some kind or other it plainly must have been.

And such skeptics will very properly remind us of other difficulties in

the way of accepting as a reality the alleged phenomena. What have the

spirits of the departed to do with conveyances resembling those of

earthly structure? Are there incorporeal carriages and horses? Can grave

men admit such fancies as these?[C] Or is all this, even if genuine,

only symbolical,--sounds without objective counterpart? Then what

becomes of the positive character of this narrative, as a lesson, as a

warning to us? The whole degenerates into an acted parable. It fades

into the idle pageantry of a dream. Thus we lose ourselves in shadowy

conjecture.

But, none the less, the facts, if facts they be, remain to be dealt

with. And if at last we concede the ultramundane origin of these

manifestations, whether as objective reality or only as truth-teaching

allegory, what a field is opened to our speculations regarding the

realms of spirit and the possible punishments there in store for those

who, by degrading their natures in this world, may have rendered

themselves unfit for happiness in the next,--and who, perhaps, still

attracted to earth by the debasing excesses they once mistook for

pleasure, may be doomed, in the phantom repetition of their sins, to

detect their naked reality, to have stamped on their consciousness the

vileness of these without the brutal gratifications that veiled it, the

essence of vice shorn of its sensual halo, the grossness without the

glitter: if so, a terrible expiation!

I beg it may not be imagined, that, because I see grave difficulties in

the way of regarding this case as one of imposture, I therefore set it

up as proof of a novel theory regarding future punishments. A structure

so great cannot be erected on foundation so slender. I but furnish it as

a chance contribution towards the probabilities of ultramundane

intercourse,--as material for thought,--as one of those hints which

future facts may render valueless, but which, on the other hand, other

observed phenomena may possibly serve to work out and corroborate and

explain.

FOOTNOTES:

[A] I find in my journal the following:--"_August 17, 1857._ Read over

to the Baron von P---- the Putkammer narrative; and he assented to its

accuracy in every particular."

[B] This story is given in Garinet's _Histoire de la Magie en France_,

p. 75.

[C] Yet in a recent case, occurring in England, and authenticated in the

strongest manner, the "sound of carriages driving in the park when none

were there" is one of the incidents given on the authority of the lady

who had witnessed the disturbances, and who furnishes a detailed account

of them. See "Facts and Fantasies," a sequel to "Lights and Sounds, the

Mystery of the Day," by Henry Spicer, London, 1853, pp. 76-101.

THE RHYME OF THE MASTER'S MATE.

FORT HENRY.

None who saw it can forget

How they went into the fight,

Four abreast,--

Thereby was the foe perplexed,--

With the Essex on the right,

That is nearest to the Fort,

And the Cincinnati next,

The St. Louis on her left,

All so gallant and so deft,

And the brave Carondelet.

Boom, boom, from every bow!

(They'll have to answer that!)

From the Rebel bastions, now,

There's a flash.

Cool, keep cool, boys, don't be rash!

Mind your eyes, as the old Boss said;

Keep together and go ahead,--

Not too high and not too low,

Fire slow!

Paff!

Now we have it from the Fort,

And the Rebels all a-crowing;

While the devils'-echoes laugh,

With a loonish thunder-lowing,

After every gun's report:

'Tisn't bird-shot they are throwing,--

'Tisn't chaff!

Ping! Ping!

If you've ever seen the thing

That can fly without a wing

Swifter than the Thunder's bird,

Lightning-clenching, lightning-spurred,--

If you've ever heard it sing,

You will understand the word,

And look out;

For, beyond a mortal doubt,

It can sting!

Thump!

'D y' ever hear anything like it?

Sounded very much like a ten-strike,--it

Appears they're after a spare!

Bet it made the old Boss jump,

Or at any rate awfully screw up his brows,--

Hit the pilot-house,

And he's up there,--

Must 'a' been a hundred-pounder,--

Had the twang of a conical ball,--

Would 'a' gone plumb through a ten-foot wall.

Isn't the old _Cinc._ a trump?

They meant that for a damper!

Square it off with an eighty shell

And a fifteen-second fuse,

(With all the latest news!)--

Pretty well done, boys, pretty well!

Guess that'll be apt to tell

'Em all about where it came from,

And where it's a-going to,

What it took its name from,

And all it's a-knowing to!

See 'em scamper!

The Conestoga, the Tyler,

And the Lexington, you know,

Are in line a half a mile, or

A little less, below,--

Just this side of the Panther

(Little woody island),

They've their orders----Oh,

But, after all, how _can_ their

Wooden-heads keep silent?

Wonder 'f it don't make 'em feel bad,

Even if they ain't all _steel_-clad,

At being slighted so!

'Tisn't so bad a day,

Although it's a little cloudy,--

Or rather, as one might say,

_Smoky_, perhaps,--

A little hazy, a little dubious,

A little too sulphury to be salubrious.

D' ye mind those thunder-claps?

Do you feel now and then the least little bit

Of an incipient earthquake fit,

Accompanied with awful raps?

But give 'em gowdy, give 'em gowdy,

And it'll soon clear away!

Old Boss ain't to be balked.--

All this, you know,

Was only the way (or nearly so)

The boys talked,

And felt and thought,

(And acted, too,)

The harder they fought

And the hotter it grew.--

But there was a Hand at the reel

That nobody saw,--

Old Hickory there at every keel,

In every timber, from stem to stern,--

A _something_ in every crank and wheel,

That made 'em answer their turn;

And everywhere,

On earth and water, in fire and air,

As it were to see it all well done,

The Wraith of the murdered Law,--

Old John Brown at every gun!

But the Fort was all in a roar:

No use to talk, they had the range,--

Which wasn't strange,

Guess they'd tried it before,--

And the pounding was not soft,

But might well appall

The boldest heart.

Cool and calm,

Trumpet in hand,

Up in the cock-loft,

Where 't was the hottest of all,

Our brave old Commodore

Took his stand,

And played his part,

Humming over some old psalm!

Tut! did ye hear the hiss and scream

Of that hot steam?

It's the Essex that's struck,--

She never had any luck:

Ah, 'twas a wicked shot,

And, whether they know it or not,

It doesn't give us joy!

Thorough an open port it flew,

As with some special permit to destroy;

And first, for sport,

Struck the soul from that beautiful boy;

Then through the bulkhead lunged,

And into the boiler plunged,

Scalding the whole crew!

We know that the brave must fall,--

But that was a sight to see:

Twenty-three,

All in an instant scalded and scathed,

All at once in the white shroud swathed!

A low moan came from the deck

Of the drifting wreck,--

And that was all.

How the traitors'll boast,

As soon as they come to see her

All adrift and aghast!--

Hark! d' ye hear? d' ye hear?

D' ye hear 'em shout?

They see it already, no doubt.

We shall have to count her out,--

That white breath was her last,--

She has given up the ghost!

What does the old Boss think?

Will he shrink?

Will he waver or falter now?--

A little shadow flits over his brow,

For the sharp pang in his heart,--

Flits over--and is gone,--

And a light looms up in his old gray eye,

Whether you see it or not,

That is like a sudden dawn

In a stormy sky!

What does he _think_?

What will he _do_?--

Well! he don't say!

But I'll tell you what,

You can bet your life,

As you would your knife,

And your wife, too,

He'll do

(And put 'em up at once!)--

He'll run these boats right up to their guns,

And take that Fort, or sink!

But, oh--oh, it was hot!

So thick and fast the solid shot

Upon our iron armor played,

It kept, like thunder, a kind of time--

Devil's tattoo or gallopade--

That, like an awful, awful rhyme,

Rang in the ear;

And they sent us cheer after cheer.

But the boys had been to _school_,

And _their_ guns were not cool;

For they knew what Cause they served,

And not a man of 'em swerved!

But on, right on, they swept,

And from every grim bow-port

Their nutmegs and shell-barks leaped

Into the jaws of the Fort!

And (to give her, perhaps, a chance to breathe)

Knocked out some of her big, black teeth!

And (to raise a better crop, no doubt,

Than was ever raised there before)

Ploughed her up into awful creases,

Inside and out!--

For now they were up and doing the chore

At only four hundred yards,

And the death-dealing shreds and shards

Of our shell were tearing 'em all to pieces!

Hurrah for the brave old Flag!

To triumph see her ride!--

Ha, ha! they dodge and duck,--

The Snake's expiring!

Their gunners run and hide,--

By heaven, they've struck!

Down comes the rattlesnake rag

By the run,--

Stop the firing!

The work is done!--

Anyhow, she'll do for batter!--

You see now, Butternuts, you were plucky;

But that ain't "what's the matter,"--

Not by a long shot!

No, no,--no! I'll tell you what--

And you mustn't take it at all amiss--

I'll tell you what the _matter_ is:

'Tain't because you were born unlucky,

(Bear in mind,)

Nor that you've good eyes and we are blind,--

Nothing of the kind,--

But it's something else, if it isn't more:

The reason--pardon!--you had to cotton

Was simply this: Your _Cause_ was rotten,--

Rotten to the very core:

That's what's the matter!

But you ought to 'a' heard our water-dogs yelp!--

Just an hour and fifteen minutes!--

(Twitter away, you English linnets!)

Horizontal and perpendicular,

Fair and square, without any help,--

That is, any in particular,--

The old ferry wash-tubs of the West,

With some new-fashioned _hoops_, for a little test,

And a few old _pounders_ from--Kingdom Come,

And nothing for suds but the "Nawth'n scum,"

Made these "gen'l'men" turn as white

As a head o' hair in a single night!

Cleaned their army completely out,

(We're going to give _that_ another wipe!)

On the double-quick, by the shortest route,--

Wrung their stronghold from their gripe,--

Brought their garrison right to taw,

And made 'em get down to the "higher law"!

So that when Grant and his boys came up,

(There's places enough for a man to die!)

Swearing that we had "spoiled" their "sport,"

With a quiet twinkle in his eye,

Old Boss asked 'em to come in and sup,

And set 'em to _house-keeping_ in the Fort!--

But all the old fellow could say or do,

They'd still keep a-going it: "Bully for _you_!"

"Bully" for Grant and for Foote!--

E'en if the voice must tremble,--

And "bully" for all who helped 'em to do 't!

Bully for Porter and Stemble!

For Paulding and for Walke,--

For Phelps, for Gwin, and for Shirk!--

But what's the use to talk?

They were all of 'em up to the work!

Bully for each brave tub

That bore the Union Blue!

And for every mother's son

Of every gallant crew,

Whatever his color or name,

Who, when it came to the rub,

Shall be found to have been _game_!

* * * * *

Such was the Rhyme of the Master's Mate,

Just as they found it in the locker,

With this at the foot:--

"It's getting late,

And I hear a pretty loud Knock at the knocker!

Captain, if I should chance to fall,

Try to send me home. Good bye!" That's all,--

Excepting the date, the name, and rank:--

"Feb. 12th, '62, ---- ----,

Master's Mate."

All next day a great black Cloud

Hung over the land from coast to coast;

And the next, the Knocking was "pretty loud,"--

With a sudden Eclipse, as it were, of the sun,--

And the earth, all day, quaked--"Donelson!"

But the next was the deadliest day of all,

And the Master's Mate was not at Call!

Yet nobody seemed to wonder why,--

There was something, perhaps, the Master knew

Far better than we, for his Mate to do,--

And the Day went down with a bloody sky!

But when the long, long Night was past,

And our Eagle, sweeping the traitor's crag,

Circled to victory up the dome,

The great Reveille was heard at last!--

They wrapped the Mate in his country's flag,

And sent him in glory home!

THE VISIBLE AND INVISIBLE IN LIBRARIES.

A visible library is a goodly sight. We do not underrate the external

value of books, when we say it is the invisible which forms their chief

charm. Sometimes rather too much is said about "tall copies," and

"large-paper copies," and "first editions," the binding, paper, type,

and all the rest of the outside attraction, or the fancy price, which go

to make up the collector's trade. The books themselves feel a little

degraded, when this sort of conversation is carried on in their

presence: some of them know well enough that occasionally they fall into

hands which think more "of the coat than of the man who is under it." We

must, however, be honest enough to confess that we are ourself a

bibliomaniac, and few possessions are more valued than an old

manuscript, written on vellum some five hundred years ago, of which we

cannot read one word. Nor do we prize less the modern extreme of

external attraction,--volumes exquisitely printed and adorned, bound by

Rivière, in full tree-marbled calf, with delicate tooling on the back,

which looks as if the frost-work from the window-pane on a cold January

morning had been transmuted into gold, and laid on the leather. Ah,

these are sights fit for the gods!

Nevertheless, we come back to our starting-point, that what is unseen

forms the real value of the library. The type, the paper, the binding,

the age, are all visible; but the soul that conceived it, the mind that

arranged it, the hand that wrote it, the associations which cling to it,

are the invisible links in a long chain of thought, effort, and history,

which make the book what it is.

In wandering through the great libraries of Europe, how often has this

truth been impressed upon the mind!--such a library as that in the old

city of Nuremberg, housed in what was once a monastery, and looking so

ancient, quaint, and black-lettered, visibly and invisibly, that, if the

old monk in the legend who slipped over a thousand years while the

little bird sang to him in the wood, and was thereby taught, what he

could not understand in the written Word, that a thousand years in

God's sight are but as a day,--if that old monk had walked out of the

Nuremberg monastery and now walked back again, he might almost take up

the selfsame manuscript he had laid down a thousand years ago.

What invisible heads have ached, and hands become weary, over those

vellum volumes, with their bright initial letters! What hearts have

throbbed over the early printed book! How triumphantly was the first

copy, now worm-eaten and forgotten, contemplated by the author! How was

that invisible world which surrounded him to be stirred by that new

book!

We remember looking into one of the cell-like alcoves arranged for

students in a college library at Oxford, and watching a fellow of the

college (a type of scholars, grown old among books, rarely found in our

busy land) crooning over a strange black-letter folio, and laughing to

himself with a sort of invisible chuckle. The unseen in that volume was

revealed to us through that laugh of the old bookworm, and quite unseen

we partook of his amusement. Another alcove was vacant; a crabbed

manuscript, just laid down by the writer, was on the desk. He was

invisible; but the watchful guardian at the head of the room saw us

peering in, and warned us with a loud voice not to enter. Safely might

we have been permitted to do so, for we could hardly have deciphered at

a glance all the wisdom that lurked in the open page; yet that hidden

meaning, invisible to us, was of real value to the unseen writer.

There are many incidents connected with the visible and invisible of

libraries existing in the great houses of England, which could point a

moral in sketches of this subject. One, concerning a pamphlet found at

Woburn Abbey, has a peculiar interest.

Lord William Russell, eldest son of Francis, fourth Earl of Bedford,

after completing his education at Oxford, and travelling abroad for two

years, returned home in the winter of 1634. Young, handsome,

accomplished, and the eldest son of the House of Russell, the

fashionable world of London marked him as a prize in the matrimonial

speculations of the times, and was quite in a flutter to know which of

the reigning beauties, would captivate the young Lord Russell. Lady

Elizabeth Cecil, Lady Dorothy Sidney, Lady Anne Carr were the rival

belles upon whom the eyes of the world were fixed. It was with no small

consternation that the Earl of Bedford soon found that the affections of

his son had been attracted by Lady Anne Carr, the daughter of the Earl

and Countess of Somerset, more widely known as Robert Carr and Lady

Essex. The Earl of Bedford had taken a prominent part in the Countess's

trial, and participated in the general abhorrence of her character. In

vain his son pleaded the innocence of the daughter, who, early separated

from her parents, knew nothing of their history or their crimes. The

Earl of Bedford shrunk with a feeling of all but insurmountable aversion

to such an alliance; and not until the king interceded for the youthful

lovers, did the father yield a reluctant consent, and their marriage was

celebrated. The undisturbed happiness and harmony in which the parties

lived reconciled the Earl to the connection; he became much attached to

his beautiful daughter-in-law; and in the sweetness and domestic purity

of her character he could sometimes forget her parents. Lady Anne's life

passed quietly in the discharge of the duties of a wife and mother, and

of those which devolved upon her when her husband became fifth Earl of

Bedford in 1641. In 1683, their eldest son, Lord William Russell, died

on the scaffold.

"There is a life in the principles of freedom," says the historian of

the House of Russell, "which the axe of the executioner does not, for it

cannot, touch." This great thought must have strengthened the souls of

the parents under so terrible a trial. The mother's health, however,

sunk under the blow, which, in the sympathy of her celebrated

daughter-in-law, the heroic Lady Rachel Russell, she endeavored to

sustain. One day, seeking, perhaps, some book to cheer her thoughts,

Lady Bedford entered the library, and in an anteroom seldom visited

chanced to take a pamphlet from the shelves. She opened its pages, and

read there, for the first time, the record of her mother's guilt. The

visible in that page rent aside the invisible veil which those who loved

Lady Bedford had silently woven over her whole life, as a shield from a

terrible truth. She was found by her attendants senseless, with the

fatal book open in her hand. The revelations of the past, the sorrows of

the present, were too much for her to bear, and she died. Lady Rachel

Russell, writing from Woburn Abbey at the time, states her conviction

that Lady Bedford's reason would not have sustained the shock received

from the contents of the pamphlet, even had her physical powers rallied.

Turning aside one moment from our subject, we stand in awe before the

striking contrast presented by the characters of two women, each so

closely linked with Lady Bedford's life,--the one who heard her first

breath, and the other who received her last sigh. If Lady Somerset

causes us to shrink with horror from the depth of depravity of which

woman's nature is capable, let us thank God that in Lady Rachel Russell

we have a witness of the purity, self-sacrifice, and holiness a true

woman's soul can attain.

In the library at Wilton House, the seat of the Sidneys, we were shown a

lock of Queen Elizabeth's hair, hidden for more than a hundred years in

one of the books. A day came when some member of the family took down an

old volume to see what treasures of wisdom lurked therein. "She builded

better than she knew," for between the leaves lay folded a paper which

contained a faded lock of the once proud Queen Bess. How it came there,

and by whose hand it was placed in the book, is one of the invisible

things of the library, but the writing within the paper authenticated

the relic beyond doubt; and it is now shown as one of the visible

treasures of the library of Wilton House.

Magdalen College, Cambridge, contains the Pepysian Library,--placed

there by the will of Pepys, under stringent conditions, in default of

whose fulfilment the bequest falls to Trinity. One of the fellows of

Magdalen is always obliged to mount guard over visitors to the library.

Such an escort being provided, we ascended the stairs, and found

ourselves in the presence of the bookcases which once adorned Pepys's

house in London, containing the "three thousand bookes" of which he was

so proud. The bookcases are handsome, with small mirrors let into them,

in which, doubtless, Mrs. Pepys often surveyed the effect of those

"newegownes" which pleased her husband's vanity so well, although he

rather reluctantly paid the cost. There, too, is the original manuscript

of that entertaining Diary, wherein Pepys daguerrotyped the age in which

he lived, and himself with all his sense and nonsense. That Diary would

have remained one of the invisible treasures of libraries, for it was

written in a cipher of his own invention, but, by a very curious chance,

the key to that cipher was unintentionally betrayed through comparison

with another paper, and the journal was brought to light, and many

things made visible which the writer dreamed not of confiding to future

ages. Pepys was an indefatigable, and, we cannot but half suspect, an

unscrupulous collector. Volumes of autographs, great scrap-books filled

with prints, tickets, invitations, ballads, let us into the visible and

invisible of the reign of Charles II. A manuscript music-book, elegantly

bound, and labelled, "Songs altered to suit my Voice," carried us back

to the days when, after going to the play in the afternoon, Pepys and

some of his companions "came back to my house and had musique."

Pepys certainly never meant to be one of the invisible things in his own

library, for every book contains an engraving from his own portrait.

Should he ever come back to look after the possessions he so much

valued, he can surely be at no loss to find the likeness of the form he

once wore. If a spirit can retain any human vanity and self-importance,

his must certainly be unpleasantly surprised that the great collection

looks small in these days, and attracts but little attention. To

antiquaries and lovers of the odd and curious it must ever be valuable;

but the obligation of having a fellow of Magdalen at one's elbow much

interferes with that quiet, cozy "mousing" so dear to the soul of a

bibliomaniac. We heartily wished that we could have made an appointment

with the shade of old Pepys, and, returning to the library in the

stillness of midnight, have found him ready to show off his collections.

That would have been, indeed, the visible and the invisible of the

Pepysian Library. The Cambridge men of to-day are too busy about their

own affairs to look much into Pepys's collections, which remain quietly

ensconced under the guardianship of Old Magdalen, one of the visible

links between the seen and unseen in libraries.

Nestled quietly in an old Elizabethan house, among the great trees at

Wotton, is the library of John Evelyn. Belonging to the same age as that

of Pepys, but collected by a man of widely different tastes and

character, there is much outwardly to charm as well as to elevate the

mind in the influences shed around it. Here are tall copies and folios

of grave works, classic and historical, the solid literary food of a man

who kept his soul pure amid a corrupt age, books as harmonious with the

reflective mind of Evelyn as were the grand old woods of Wotton with the

refined tastes of the author of "Sylva." Here is preserved the original

manuscript of Evelyn's Journal, the paper yellow with the mellow tints

of two hundred autumns, yet the thought as fresh as if written

yesterday. Near the manuscript is seen the prayer-book which Charles I.

held in his hand when he mounted the scaffold at Whitehall. There is

much of the visible and invisible in that quaint old library at Wotton.

The internal treasures of Christian faith opened a wide field for the

outward decoration of religious books. "The Hours" (meaning devotional

hours) of kings and queens are magnificent specimens of chirography,

showing also the skill of artists in the earliest centuries. The art of

preparing these volumes was divided into two branches: that of the

_Miniatori_, or illuminators, who furnished the paintings, the borders,

and arabesques, and also laid on the gold; and that of the _Miniatori

calligrafi_, who wrote the whole of the book, and drew the initial

letters of blue and red with their fanciful ornaments. Many of the great

libraries of Europe contain these splendid manuscripts, and although but

one page is open to the passing visitor, which he sees "through a glass

darkly," yet that page is written over and illuminated with associations

and memories. Could a glance reveal thoughts which have looked out of

eyes bending over these pages, when they were held in the hand of their

first owner, what messages from the invisible would be received! Some of

these rare and regal possessions have gone a little astray, and wandered

about in the wilderness of the world, as is confirmed by an anecdote we

recently received from good authority. A magnificent volume, illustrated

by views of French châteaux of the Middle Ages, presented to a princess

of the House of Bourbon, was known to have existed. This manuscript had

disappeared, and for more than a hundred years it could not be traced.

The Duc d'Aumale, son of Louis Philippe, while in Genoa, was informed

(by a person who called upon him for that purpose) that there was for

sale in that city a valuable illuminated manuscript, and, as the Duke

was known to be a collector of rare books, it would be shown to him. He

accordingly followed his informant to an obscure part of the city, and

into an old house, where the manuscript was produced. What was his

astonishment, when he beheld before him the lost Bourbon manuscript, so

long sought for in vain! He immediately became its purchaser; and

whatever secret history belongs to the volume, connected with the time

when it was invisible, it is now one of the most treasured realities in

the magnificent library at Orleans House.

In the illuminated pages of many of these old manuscripts there lurks

much more, doubtless, than meets the eye. Thus, that famous poem of the

Middle Ages, the "Romance of the Rose," has passed for a mere fanciful

allegory, or love-story. Splendidly illuminated copies of this Romance

are well known. The British Museum possesses one, which Dibdin calls

"the cream of the Harleian Collection": it is in folio, and replete with

embellishments. He also mentions another copy, at that time belonging to

Mr. North, the frontispiece of which represents Francis I. surrounded by

his courtiers, receiving a copy from the author. Only the visible of the

illuminated volume was probably opened to the eyes of Francis, or even

of Dibdin. A later student pronounces the Romance to be a complete

specimen of Hermetic Philosophy, concealing great truths under its

allegory,--the Rose being the symbol of philosophic gold.

Such is the view taken of this Romance by our distinguished

fellow-countryman, Major-General Hitchcock, who found time, in the

interval between two wars, to collect and study three hundred volumes of

Hermetic Philosophy, coming forth therefrom as a champion in defence of

a much misunderstood class. This ingenious work, entitled "Alchemy and

the Alchemists," published in 1857, was written to prove that the

alchemists were not foolish seekers for sordid gold, nor vain believers

in the elixir of life, but philosophers of deep thought and high aims,

who, in days when a man dared not say his soul was his own, veiled in

mystic language, perfectly understood by each other, theological and

philosophical truths, theories, and discoveries, which would have

brought them to the stake or the rack, had they been produced openly.

"Man was the subject of alchemy, and the object of the art was the

perfection, or at least the improvement, of man." These were the _real_

Hermetic Philosophers. After them came men who, not knowing the meaning

of the symbolic language which concealed the spiritual truths, took the

written word in a literal sense, and went to work with crucibles and

retorts, seeking the philosopher's stone and the elixir of life, not

knowing, indeed, the Scripture, that "the letter killeth, but the spirit

maketh alive."

Such a theory as that advanced in "Alchemy and the Alchemists" opens a

new chapter in the visible and invisible of a library of Hermetic

Philosophy.

The most ancient specimens of calligraphy extant are probably the

Terence of the fourth century and the Virgil of the fifth century, in

the Vatican Library. Alas for those who have no open sesame to that

collection! We shall never forget our disappointment upon entering the

Vatican. We could not gaze even on the mouldy vellum or faded leather of

old bindings, and saw nothing but stupid modern painted cases, bodies

quite unworthy of the souls they hid. Gladly would we have laid aside

our theory concerning unseen treasures, and looked that great collection

face to face.

"The taste for the external decoration of manuscripts," says Labarte,

(whose interesting "Hand-Book on the Arts of the Middle Ages" has been

admirably translated by Mrs. Palliser,) "already existed among the

ancients. Marcus Varro called forth the praises of Cicero for having

traced in his book the portraits of more than seven hundred celebrated

persons; Seneca, in his treatise 'De Tranquillitate Animi,' speaks of

books ornamented with figures; and Martial addresses his thanks to

Stertinius, who had placed his portrait in his library."

These ancient works of Art have vanished, none have survived the stormy

passage of ages, yet this casual mention of them carries us into the

otherwise invisible past. We see the seven hundred portraits in Marcus

Varro's book, and walk into the library of Stertinius to give our

opinion of the portrait of Martial.

"The miniatures of manuscripts were long considered," says Labarte,

"only as ornaments. Montfaucon was the first to recognize their

usefulness as historical documents. To possess manuscripts of the Middle

Ages with miniatures is in fact to possess a gallery of contemporaneous

pictures."

The most beautiful specimen of ancient illuminated manuscript we have

seen in this country belongs to the Honorable Charles Sumner. It is a

missal of the fifteenth century, of finest quality. Several of the

miniatures might well be claimed as the work of Van Eyck. The

frontispiece consists of the portrait of the lady for whose devotions

the book was prepared. She kneels before the Madonna, while her patron

saint stands beside her. Beneath this celestial vision is the heraldic

shield of the lady's family, thus throwing in a glimpse of visible

worldly grandeur. The borders and arabesques of this manuscript are

equal in execution to the miniatures, and the missal is one of rare

beauty.

Can we forbear alluding to that other treasure of Senator Sumner's

collection,--the Album which belonged to Camillus Cordoyn, who, more

than two centuries ago, entertained guests at his house as they

journeyed into Italy? One of these, Thomas Wentworth, afterwards Lord

Strafford, then a young man gayly travelling about the world, wrote his

name in the volume, little thinking of the block and the axe which were

to illustrate the closing chapter of his book of life. The immortal

Milton, on his return from Italy, was the guest of the same nobleman.

What would we not give for a look into that house at Geneva, and see

this little volume laid before the visitor! The glorious eyes of John

Milton looked over its pages, and perhaps he listened to the story of

some of the distinguished personages, now all forgotten, whose names and

heraldic shields are there. Then he turned to a blank leaf, and wrote

two lines from his own "Comus,"--

"If Virtue feeble were,

Heaven itself would stoop to her."

He signed his name on that 20th of June, 1639, and the host took back

the book. And now, more than two hundred years after, that page is held

as priceless in this great republic beyond the sea.

We should speak gratefully of the externals of books, because for two

long years our oculist did not allow us to open them. We dared not go

farther than their titles, yet even these were talismans which revealed

wide regions, and carried us from Indus to the Pole. We went with Arthur

Penrhyn Stanley to the Holy Land, discovered Nineveh with Layard,

explored Art treasures with Mrs. Jameson, plunged among icebergs with

Parry. A volume of Belzoni bore us not only to pyramids and mummies in

Egypt, but away to a strange old hall "in Padua, beyond the sea."

Cabalistic paintings cover the walls, misty with age; lurking in one

corner of the vast apartment is a gigantic wooden horse, that figured at

some public festival four hundred years ago, and now pauses, ready to

prance out of the mouldy past into the affrighted present; opposite

stand two Egyptian statues, cat-headed human figures, resting their

hands on their stone knees. These were gifts from Belzoni to his native

city of Padua; and his handsome head in the Eastern turban, turned into

white marble, stands above the entrance-door.

Coming back from the Paduan hall, so weird and ghostly, we glance along

the shelves at a long row of volumes which bear De Quincey's name, and

we need not open a page to feel the mysterious spell of the opium-eater.

Like one of those strange dreams of his seems a remembrance which comes

back to us with his name. A quaint, tall house in the old part of

Edinburgh has admitted us into a quiet apartment, where, as the twilight

is creeping in through the windows, a small gray man receives us, with

graceful and tender courtesy. He converses with a felicity of language

like that of his printed pages, but in a voice so sweet, so low, so

exquisitely modulated, that the magical tone vibrates on the ear like

music. It was De Quincey, who held us entranced until darkness gathered

around us, then bade us farewell, his kind words lingering on the air,

as, with a flickering candle in his hand, he flitted up the winding

stair, and vanished away.

Another volume bears the name of William Wordsworth, and beneath his

autograph he writes that it was purchased at Bath from a

circulating-library. It is that strange journal of the Margravine of

Bareith, sister of Frederic the Great, a sad story of those who dwell in

kings' houses; but we think only of Wordsworth, and of the viewless

history of the book carried by the poet from circulating in Bath to

quiet rural Rydal Mount, and now having wandered over to New England.

A dainty volume near by bears the autograph of Rogers, and though the

association is not so purely imaginative, perhaps, as a poet should call

up, yet it always brings to our mind the breakfasts at his house, of

which many of our friends have partaken, and related divers stories

concerning those morning refections. They are invisible feasts to us,

for we never even picked up the crumbs from them, except at second hand;

yet this elegant little book knew all about them, and heard what was

said before, and also behind--the table-cloth.

Singular experiences connected with books are sometimes known to their

owners, quite invisible to others. In yonder corner are two volumes.

Book-collectors know that they are rare, and the uninitiated think they

contain queer old wood-cuts. To us that corner is haunted; an invisible

lady hovers about those volumes. Once upon a time an order was given for

those books, but the answer came back from over the sea, that they were

not to be had, or to be had only at rare intervals on the breaking up of

a library. To our no small surprise, very soon after this quietus had

been given to bibliomaniacal hopes, the books in question appeared

before us in excellent condition. We could hardly suppose that any one

had been benevolent enough to break up a library on purpose to oblige

us, and we waited to hear a very odd story.

Soon after the letter had been sent, announcing the ill success of our

commission, the writer of it was in a bookshop in London, when a lady

entered and desired an interview with the master. After some private

conversation, the lady returned to her carriage and drove away. The

bookseller remarked to his friend, that the lady had brought with her

some books, which she desired to part with. Our informant asked to see

them, and, lo! the very volumes for which in our behalf he had searched

in vain: he immediately secured the prize, which was forwarded by the

next steamer.

Can any one ask why the figure of the lady who brought those books to us

three thousand miles over the sea "haunts us like a shadow"? We see her

ascend her invisible carriage, we go with her to her invisible home, we

meet her viewless husband;--here we shudder, but we recover ourselves;

we are convinced that he could not have been a book-collector, or she

had not dared such a deed. Then we puzzle ourselves about her unseen

motives for selling the books. Had she gambled? Had she bet on the

losing horse at the Derby? Had she bought an expensive bonnet? Or was it

the impulse of some strong benevolent purpose? Why _did_ she sell those

books? Since she did thus part with them, we thank her, and are content

that by very strange combinations of circumstances, blending the visible

and invisible together, those books, viewless in her library, are now

apparent in our own.

Here is another volume which has also something mystical about it in its

visible and invisible effect. It is a copy of Dibdin's "Bibliomania,"

which belonged to Dawson Turner. A note in his handwriting states that

the tools required for the binding were used exclusively for Lord

Spencer, and that a view of Strawberry Hill will be found on its edges.

Gilt edges, however, are all that meet the eye; but turned by a skilful

hand to the right light, the gilding vanishes, and a picture of

Strawberry Hill appears, painted with velvety softness. Such a nice

bibliomaniacal fancy must have delighted Dibdin; and as he was at one

time librarian at Althorpe, he doubtless was the medium of bestowing

this charm upon the binding of his own work for his friend.

The invisible in libraries has ever seemed to us linked with those who

have written or read the books. If souls are allowed to return to their

earthly haunts, a library would surely be the place to meet them. For

this reason we have cherished a firm belief in the apparition which the

distinguished librarian of the Astor Library beheld, and never desire to

hear any commonplace explanations concerning it; and on visiting the

Astor collection, we were more desirous to see the spot where the

reading phantom appeared than all the rest of the building. Who shall

say that authors and students do not come back to the books which

contain their invisible souls, or spirits like themselves? Without

venturing to invoke the sceptred sovereigns of literature, or to call up

the shades of the prophets and sibyls of elder time, yet at midnight

what a circle might come forth and visit the library! Scott and Burns

and Byron, Burke and Fox and Sheridan, all in one evening; clever,

pretty Mrs. Thrale comes bringing Fanny Burney to meet Jane Austen and

Maria Edgeworth; Horace Walpole, patronizing Gray, Rogers, Wordsworth,

Coleridge, Keats, and Charles Lamb,--what a social club that would be!

Ah, the librarian of the Astor is more fortunate than we; these spirits

are all invisible, and we catch not even at midnight the rustle of the

leaf they turn or the passing murmur of their voices. Yet within the

library, ever ready to meet us, their souls still linger; and when we

open the visible book which enshrines it, we find the hidden spirit.

A number of gentlemen once went together to a friend's house. While they

awaited his entrance, one of the party, being a lover of books,

naturally turned to the shelves of the library. Without any particular

attraction to the title, he chanced to take down one of the volumes. As

he opened it, a sealed letter fell from between the leaves on the floor.

He took it up, and, to his no small astonishment, perceived that it was

addressed to himself.

He called the attention of his companions to this strange circumstance.

As it could be no breach of decorum to break the seal of a letter

addressed to one's self, he did so. The surprise was increased by

finding a bank-note within. The letter came from a well-known gentleman,

and bore the date of a year past. When the owner of the house entered,

he found his guests in quite a tumult of surprise and puzzle. At first

he was quite as much at a loss as themselves to account for this

discovery. It was, however, remembered by the gentleman to whom the

letter was addressed, that about a year before he had applied to the

writer for aid in some charity, but, having many demands of the same

kind to supply, he declined. Afterwards, as it appeared, he regretted

having done so, and had accordingly inclosed the money. Probably, soon

after, he met the gentleman in whose book it was found, (with whom he

was on intimate terms,) and asked him to give the letter as addressed.

The receiver brought it home, laid it on his table, and forgot it. The

book lying open, it may be that the letter slipped between the leaves

and the volume was returned to the shelf. And there it had waited for

more than a year, holding the invisible letter quite safe, until the

person to whom it was addressed took down, for the first time in his

life, a volume from those shelves, and received into his own hand the

communication intended for him. No one can wonder that the invisible in

libraries has a strong hold on the faith of our friend.

Although few may be so fortunate as to find bank-notes in letters

addressed to themselves between the leaves of books in libraries, yet

we all have felt the sensation of discoverers of hidden treasures. After

carelessly looking at a volume which has stood on the shelves for years,

we open it and find within thoughts which appeal to our deepest

experiences, high incentives to our nobler energies, deep sympathy in

our sorrows, sustaining words to help us on with our life-work. How

differently do we ever after regard the visible of that book! The

invisible has been revealed to us, and we almost wonder whether, if we

had looked into it two or three years before, we should have found there

what now we prize so much. Perhaps not; for after different experiences

in life come different revelations from books. The pages which a few

years ago we might have glanced over with indifference now speak to us

as if uttering the emotions of our own souls.

Sometimes it is a work of fiction which, we open for the first time, the

title of which has been familiar to our eyes. Out of it invisible

spirits walk. We are introduced to charming people who never existed,

and yet who become our daily companions. We go with them through many

trials, we rejoice with them, we know all their secrets, and share with

them many of our own. Is it possible, that, shut up between those

covers, long unknown, all these existed which have since made life

brighter and better to us?

In Sterling's "Onyx Ring," Walsingham, the poet, takes down a volume

from Sir Charles Harcourt's library, and reads a charming romance,

apparently from its pages. A lady of the company afterwards turned to

the same book, which proved to be a work of Jeremy Bentham's, and

searched in vain for the graceful narrative. Walsingham smiled at her

perplexity, and said, "Those only find who know where to look."

The invisible world of thought, and the invisible representation of it

in books, have known many changes since Cicero looked at the volume

which Marcus Varro had illustrated; and from an earlier civilization

than Cicero's comes the exclamation of the soul-wearied Job, "Oh that

mine adversary had written a book!" Solomon also exclaims, "Of making

many books there is no end." He dreamed not of the extent to which the

manufacture would be carried in these days. On the other hand, how

little we know of the literary world existing in the days of Job or

Solomon! and may we not be led by these exclamations to suspect not only

a large supply of books, but even the existence of an Arabian Review or

a Dead-Sea Magazine?

The increase of wealth, and the restless activity of intellect in the

new world which surrounds us, lead naturally to the accumulation of

libraries, both public and private. In our daily walks we often pass

dwellings which we know hold literary treasures. Sometimes the beauties

of Nature can be combined with those of Art, even in a city, around the

library. We recall one from the windows of which we look forth, not on

crowded streets, but on the wide river as it bends to the sea. Behind

the distant hills the heavens are resplendent with the autumnal hues of

sunset, the water is aglow with reflected glories, while swooping and

sailing over the waves come the white sea-gulls. It is a leaf from the

illuminated prayer-missal for all eyes and hearts. The literary

treasures of that friend's library have been elsewhere described, some

of them gifts from wise men, earnest women, world-worshipped poets,

bearing on their leaves the signatures of their authors' friendship.

Other treasures are there, visible and invisible, among which we would

fain linger, but we must pass on. We enter another library, once filled

with rare and costly works, which taught of the wonderful structure of

plants, from the hyssop on the wall to the cedar of Lebanon. Gone now

are these volumes, and vanished, too, is their collector, whose wide and

generous culture was veiled by the curtain of modesty and quietness. His

collections he bestowed upon a public institution, where the wonders of

God's universe will be a subject of study for all coming time. These he

gave, and then went peacefully away from our sight to learn yet wider

and grander lessons at the feet of that Teacher who, when he was on

earth, bade his followers "consider the lilies of the field." Is not

that library as real to us as when the books filled its shelves, and we

were welcomed by the gentle voice of its master?

The crowds which form the living stream that surges through Washington

Street and eddies around the Old South Church seldom, perhaps, pause to

think of that edifice as one of the links uniting the memorable past of

our country's history with the momentous present. Still less do they who

raise their eyes to the tower to learn the hour of the day imagine that

there is an invisible library connected with the familiar form of the

belfry. Yet a romance of literary and historic interest encircles it. At

the time of the Revolution, Dr. Prince was pastor of the Old South

Church, and in the tower he kept his historical treasures along with the

New England Library. Among these volumes were Governor Bradford's

letter-book and the manuscript of his "History of the Plantation of

Plymouth." During the siege of Boston, the British turned the Old South

into a riding-school, and the troopers had free scope to do what

mischief they pleased. After the evacuation of the town the library was

found in a disordered condition, and the valued manuscripts of Bradford

were missing. Some time after, a person observed that the article he had

bought from a grocer in Halifax was wrapped in paper written over in a

peculiar hand. He deciphered enough to make him earnest to obtain what

remained of the manuscript in the grocer's possession. It proved to be

fragments of the missing letter-book of Governor Bradford. Years passed

on until 1856, when the attention of an historical writer was attracted

by a quotation, in a note to an English work, from "a manuscript history

of the Plantation of Plymouth, in the Fulham Library." As the extract

contained passages not found in any part of that history known in

America, it immediately occurred to those interested that this might be

the missing volume from the Prince Library. A correspondence was

thereupon opened with the Bishop of London. The handwriting of Bradford

being authenticated, as well as that of Dr. Prince, which was found in a

memorandum, dated "June 28th, showing how he obtained it from Major John

Bradford," there could no longer remain a doubt that this was indeed the

lost historical treasure. Part of the manuscripts of Bradford had been

carried by the British soldiers to Halifax, and sold at last as

waste-paper to a grocer; and the rest, after some history unknown,

reached England and found protection under the care of the Bishop of

London. A copy of this manuscript is now in the possession of the Boston

Historical Society.

In the rooms of that society is preserved the Dowse Library. A rare

collection of books, formed by a man daily engaged in the mechanic craft

of a leather-dresser, is a singular illustration of the visible and

invisible of libraries. We recall past days in Cambridge, when, beneath

the sign of a white wooden sheep, we entered the unpretending house

which contained not only the leather-dresser's shop, but a small gallery

of pictures and this valuable library. We remember, also, with grateful

interest, the modest, but manly, welcome of the master of both the

mechanic craft and the treasures of art and literature, and how quietly

he would give us a few words about his books. The Dowse Library we visit

is always _there_, and although much is visible in the beautiful room

where the bequest of the owner has been fittingly enshrined, yet its

distinctive charm is invisible.

The City Library of Boston has one feature entirely new in the visible

of a great public collection. A large portion of the books, under

certain regulations, are circulated among the inhabitants of the city,

and thousands avail themselves of this privilege. Here, then, is opened

a great fountain of knowledge in the midst of a wide population: all may

come, without money and without price. The visible pages of learning,

wisdom, science, truth, imagination, ingenious theory, or deep

conviction lie open not only to the eyes, but to the hearts and homes of

a great people. It is like the overflowing Nile, carrying sweet waters

to irrigate many waste places, and clothing the dry dust of common life

with the flowers, the fruit, and the sustaining grain, springing from

invisible seeds cast by unseen hands into the wide field of the world.

"If," says Lord Bacon, "the invention of ships was thought so noble,

which carrieth riches and commodities from place to place, how much more

are letters to be magnified, which, as ships, pass through the vast seas

of time, and make ages so distant to participate of the wisdom,

illuminations, and inventions, the one of the other!"

NOTE.--Since these pages were written, one who knew how to

prize the visible and invisible of books has passed away. The

silent library of George Livermore speaks eloquently of him.

That collection, gathered with a love which increased as years

advanced, includes ancient copies of the Bible of rarest

values. His life was a book, written over with good deeds and

pure thoughts, illuminated by holy aspirations. That volume is

closed, but the spirit which rendered it precious is not

withdrawn; living in many hearts, it will continue to be a

cherished presence in the world, the home, and the library.

LETTER TO A YOUNG HOUSEKEEPER.

You know, dear M., it is said that in times of bankruptcy men go home to

get acquainted with their wives; perhaps it should be added that wives

then go to get introduced to their kitchens. But your sensible letter is

an omen, little friend, that to you and H. this does not apply. You will

not wait for poverty to teach you economy, but will learn economy to

ward off poverty. So herewith I send a few of the culinary notes of the

last two years; but neither of us is to be taken for a bankrupt's wife,

for all that. It is simply recognizing that you are alone in new duties,

and that cookery is an art which may not be gained even from that

fountain of knowledge, named by the Apostle Paul as one's husband. The

successes of the art no one knows better than he; but of the processes

he will be found sublimely ignorant. There are but two points in which

you can defer to him,--punch and lobster-salad. These, like swearing and

smoking, are strictly masculine accomplishments.

If you had the thrifty maiden aunt kept in reserve by most families for

an emergency, you would kindly offer her a home at your house for a

while. But since you have not, I will be as disagreeable to you as she.

So turn your glowing Spanish eyes toward me, instead of looking demurely

about, as people do when they are having old letters read to them.

Byron said he hated to see a woman eat; and there is a class of

housekeepers who certainly return the compliment upon men. These

ethereal beings are forever sighing for life with appetite left out.

Like Lord Dundreary's lady-love, they are "_so_ delicate," unless caught

in the pantry hastily devouring onions and beefsteak. To be hungry is so

vulgar! One should live by nothing grosser than inhalation, and should

never have an appetite greater than that of a healthy bumble-bee. But,

thanks to the robust, latter-day theory, that the best saints have the

best bodies, this puerile class is diminishing. For who can doubt that

the senses are entitled to their full blossom? Gustation was meant to be

delightful; and cooking is certainly half as good as tasting. At times

one may have longed for the old Roman custom of two meals a day, and

going to bed at chicken-time, bringing the hour of roast near the hour

of roost; but this was probably in families where there were three

repasts, with lunch all the way between, and an incessant buying of

cookies from the baker, lest the children should go hungry. After this

surfeit one pardons a recoil. Or, in an enervating day of July, one may

have longed to dine upon humming-bird, with rose-leaves for dessert. But

these are exceptional times; the abiding hope is, that we shall continue

to eat, drink, and be merry. For the practical is in the imperative. It

is cumulative, and reinforces itself,--a real John Brown power that is

always marching on, and we must march beside it with patient, cheery

hearts. Is it strange that even the moss-covered Carlisle town, of which

the Last Minstrel sang, and where the Scottish Mary tarried in her

flight from the cousin queen, is now chiefly remarkable for its

cotton-factory and biscuit-bakery?

Indeed, the enthusiasm over biscuits has its place, as well as that over

books; and it is not always that there is as much genuine joy in a novel

as one may get out of bread-making. This is quite too scientific and

interesting to be left to a domestic. It is really among the most

exciting experiments. Try it every week for two years, and it seems just

as new an enterprise as at the beginning,--but a thousand times more

successful, we observe. Working up the light drifts of flour, leaving

them at night a heavy pat and nothing more,--waking to find a dish

flowing-full of snowy foam. The first thing on rising one's self is, to

see if the dough be risen, too; and that is always sure to be early, for

every batch of bread sets an alarm in one's brain. After breakfast one

will be as expectant as if going to a ball in lieu of a baking. Then to

see the difference a little more or less flour will make, and out of

what quantity comes perfection! To feminine vision, more precious than

"apples of gold in pictures of silver" are loaves of bread in dishes of

tin. If one were ever penurious, might it not be of these handsome

loaves of hers? The little housewife will be very gentle to the

persecuted man of Scripture who was so reluctant to get up at midnight

and give away his bread. She will even be charitable to the stingy

merchant scorned by Saadi, of whom it was written, that, "if, instead of

his loaf of bread, the orb of the sun had been in his wallet, nobody had

seen daylight in the world till the Day of Judgment."

Dr. Kane says, he knows how bread can be raised in three hours without

salt, saleratus, or shortening,--knows, but sha'n't tell. This must be

another mystery of the Arctic regions. Certainly that bread could not

have been raised in the sun. But how one quantity was managed the Doctor

is free to say. He kneaded a whole barrel of flour in a pickled-cabbage

cask, and baked it at once by firing several volumes of the "Penny

Cyclopædia of Useful Knowledge."

After compliments, however, to come in with the cash down of the

practical, here is a veritable bread-making recipe, well-tested and

voted superior. Take a quart of milk; heat one third and scald with it a

half-pint of flour; if skimmed milk, use a small piece of butter. When

the batter is cool, add the remainder of the milk, a teacup of

hop-yeast, a half-tablespoon of salt, with flour to make it quite stiff.

Knead it on the board till it is very fine and smooth; raise over night.

It will make two small loaves and a half-dozen biscuits.

This recipe ought to give good bread week in and week out, so saving you

from the frequent calamity of soda-biscuits. These may be used for

dumplings, or as a sudden extempore, but do not let them be habitual.

True, you will occasionally meet people who say that they can eat these,

when raised ones are fatal. But some persons find cheese good for

dyspepsia, many advocate ice-cream, others can eat only beans, while

some are cured by popped corn. Yet these articles are not likely to

become staples of diet. They would hardly answer a normal appetite; and

any stomach that can steadily withstand the searchingness of soda and

tartaric acid seems ready to go out to pasture and eat the fences.

Chemists will say, if bread must be improvised, use soda and muriatic

acid. These combined in precise proportions are supposed to evaporate in

the baking, and leave common salt. But this acid is such furious stuff!

It will come to you from the druggists in a bottle marked "Poison," and

it is not pleasant to put into one's mouth a substance that will burn a

hole in her apron. It is too much of the Roland for an Oliver,--You eat

me and I will eat you. For it is quite difficult to perfectly combine

the acid and alkali, and then the bread is streaked with muriatic fire;

then one might easily take into the system a thousand streaks a year,

and then one would become a fire-eater.

But probably the greatest of all bread wonders are the unleavened Graham

cakes. These are worth a special mail and large postage to tell of. I

was about to beg that you surprise H. with them at your next breakfast.

But no, he won't like them; besides, according to the theory of "Woman

and her Era," they're a deal too good for men, they are fit only for

women and angels. So just salt and scald some Graham meal into a dough

as soft as can be and be handled. Roll it an inch thick, cutting in

diamonds, which place on a tin sheet and thrust into the hottest of

ovens. (Note this last direction, or the diamonds will be flat leather.)

Strange to say, they will rise, and keep rising, till in ten minutes you

take them out quite puffed. One would never guess them innocent of

yeast. An inch thick is the rule; but there is nothing like an

adventurous courage. It is at once suggested, if they are so good at an

inch, will they not be twice as good at two inches. And certainly they

are. The meal will not be outwitted. It is the liveliest and most

buoyant material. Its lightness keeps up with the utmost experiment.

Finally, it may be turned into a massive loaf, and with a brisk heat it

will refuse to be depressed.

The morning when were produced these charming little miracles remains a

red-letter day in our household. Who ever tasted anything, save a nut,

half so sweet, or who ever anything so pure? We ate, lingered, and

revelled in them, thus becoming epicures at once. It seemed as if all

our lives we had been seeking something really _recherché_, and had just

found it. They were as great a revelation to the palate as Bettine or

Thoreau might be to the mind. Now all was _couleur de rose_. Here was

found, if not the philosopher's stone, the philosopher's bread, that

should turn everything into health. Henceforth the strong heroes

celebrated by Emerson, who "at rich men's tables eat but bread and

pulse," might sit at ours, arising refreshed and glorified. And was not

this also coming very near Nature? but two removes from the field, wheat

cracked, then ground. (I have since come a degree nearer on cracked

wheat at a water-cure!) It sounded altogether wholesome and primitive. I

hastened with a sample to my best friend. She, too, tasted, exulted, and

passed on the tidings to others. Now, indeed, was the golden age in

dawn. Already we saw a community purified and rejuvenated. Before our

philosopher-cakes sin and bad blood would disappear, and already the

crowns of grateful generations were pressing on our brows. But something

went wrong with all the cooks. Either they didn't scald the meal or they

didn't heat the oven,--what in one hand was light beaten gold in another

became lead. For a while it seemed that I could not go to my friend's

without meeting some one who cast scorn on our reformation cakes. All

tried them and failed; so sin remains in the world.

But now hope plumes itself anew. You at least will attempt the little

wheatens. You have a deft hand, and will succeed. The buoyancy of the

meal revives in my blood. Now the world rights itself again, and once

more we are all bounding sunward.

But to be honest. For a few weeks I and the radical cakes were as

satisfied as young lovers, but soon came temptations to progress from

the primitive,--first to add a little sugar. But I vetoed as resolutely

as Andrew Jackson himself, thus putting up the bars between the

wheat-field and cane-field, or probably by this time I should have been

pouring in spice, eggs, and milk, and at last should have committed the

crime of doing just as other people do.

If you would confess it, you have probably found in your new

captain-general a susceptibility not only to your charms, but to those

of good cooking. Always count these among the young wife's fascinations.

Remember how Miss Bremer's Fannie, of "The Neighbors," in a matrimonial

quarrel with her Bear, conquered him with fresh-baked patties aimed at

his mouth. But be not too conciliatory,--especially towards coffee. If

you could be hard-hearted enough to win H. from this bilious beverage,

would it not be worth the perils? Entertain him for a few mornings so

brilliantly that he won't know what he is drinking, then----But I'll

tell you how we will cheat him admirably; and it isn't very cruel

either, for merely to gratify the taste make-believes are as good as

realities. First, every one knows Taraxacum or dandelion; invalids know

crust-coffee, and many with indignation know burnt peas. Also Miss

Beecher, whose estimable cook-book you certainly must get, mentions that

ochra seeds or gumbo cannot be told from Java; an army correspondent has

since reported coffee made at the South from oker seeds, doubtless the

same; another found in use the sweet potato, roasted, and flavored with

coffee; while a friend has just described the most enticing beverage

made from chickory,--the root being stripped and dried under the stove.

This is said to be so rich that sometimes it has to be diluted with a

trifle of coffee. And still further, there is simple rye, which is

cheaper found than either. Jeff. Davis drank it for four years and wrote

all _her_ grand proclamations out of it. But probably the wholesomer

article is wheat coffee. I have lately prepared some by boiling a cup of

well-scorched wheat-bran in a pint of water; and although I don't quite

know how good coffee tastes, no doubt this was very like the true Java.

It poured clear and rich as wine. Now try this in full strength with

your spouse, being very witty when he drinks. And as the mornings pass,

oh, weaken it more and more. That is, cheat him pleasantly at first,

then worse and worse, till he is glad to take milk or pure water with

you. Conspiracies are usually contemptible; but this is one of the very

"best water," you see.

Perhaps we who never drink coffee can hardly understand the affection

its votaries have for it. To their minds, water seems to be given only

for steeping that delicious mud. Said one extravagant Madame Follet,

"When I see a coffee-pot, 'tis exactly the same as if I saw an angel

from heaven." And the Biloxi people, whom General Butler surprised of a

morning, were found to be in a very tragic state. One boy exclaimed,

"Oh, give me just a handful of coffee, master, an' I'll give you

'lasses, sugar, anything!" while a strong man ejaculated, "My God, we're

short of everything! I haven't tasted tea or coffee for four

months!"--as grievous as if he hadn't seen a human face for a year.

According to the "Herald" correspondent, the chief reason that the South

rejoices in peace is that "Now we'll be able to get some real

coffee!"--perhaps, he adds, in the next breath inquiring, "What are you

going to do with our niggers?"

No, we could not, with Ward Beecher, "bless the man who discovered the

immortal berry." Nor could we, with De Quincey, apostrophize to a

certain other excitant, "O just, subtle, and mighty opium! thou boldest

the keys of Paradise!" Yet one must concede the possible uses of a

stimulant. Coffee has been priceless to our army, on its cold, wet

marches; and benedictions should be ordered in the churches, if need be,

to the man who made it into that wondrous pemmican, so that the coffee

of a regiment may be carried in a few tin cans. Then, too, it seems good

for men who go driving up and down the world on stage-coaches and

locomotives; but for stay-at-home, counting-house mortals, is it not a

mere delicious superfluity? Quite as much of one as a cigar, I think.

But henceforth, when Rio is high, drink rye. If one must have either,

better the simulant than the stimulant.

Among other things, you have doubtless discovered that one admirable

breakfast dish is eggs. If you serve them in the shell, it is quite

worth while to follow the English way, keeping them close covered for

ten minutes in very hot water without boiling. The yolks are thus left

running, and the whites are beautifully jellied. These are convenient to

get when relations arrive at night, and there is no meat in the house.

Relations always expect meat for breakfast.

In fact, it is just at this point that one's genius is to come in,--when

a nice meal must be gotten at short notice, and the larder is empty.

None but the woman of resources can do it; and she knows her realm is as

full of strategies as was ever the Department of the Potomac. Under her

hand, when there was supposed to be nothing for breakfast, I have seen

bits of meat snatched from cold soup, and wrought up into the most

savory morsels,--one would never guess that the goodness was all boiled

out of them; while a cup of yesterday's griddle-cake batter went

suddenly into the oven, and came out a breakfast-cake finer than

waffles.

One who had the knack of the heroine Fleda, in "Queechy," would be

friendly to omelets, and tell of them too. But you must be self-reliant,

and put them on the list of experiments. It will probably be some time

before you come to that refinement of egg-eating which Mrs. Stowe found

at the mansion of the Duke of Sutherland, where she was honored with

lunch. Her sylvan spirit was somewhat startled, when a servant brought

five little speckled plover eggs, all lying in the nest just as taken

from the tree. How they were cooked is unknown; but one would certainly

need a recipe to eat them by.

But an American woman can outdo the Duchess of Sutherland. She will find

an egg daintier than the plover's, and not stir from her own door; for

awhile since, some one, fumbling among the secrets of Nature,

discovered, not that stones were sermons, but that snow was eggs, and

straight made a cook-book to tell it, as we will do on discovering that

rain is milk. Of course all things have their limitations; and these new

eggs are not just the article for custards, will not do to poach for

breakfast, or would hardly keep in brine; but they may be used in any

compound that requires lightness without richness. Even our grandmothers

made snow pancakes; but, in the present age, to be distinguished is to

be venturesome, and in this experiment one need not stop short of

veritable loaf-cake. The volatile element in snow makes two table-spoons

of it equal to one egg; therefore to a small loaf I should allow ten

table-spoons. Cooks always put in as many eggs as they can afford, you

know.

Thus, when snow falls every day for four months, as it does in New

England, eggs get exceedingly cheap in the prudent household. Then one

can smile to think how she circumvents the grocer, and pray the clouds

to lay a good nestful every week.

A friend the other day improvised a list of edibles headed, "Poisonous

_P_s,"--pastry, pickles, pork, and preserves. She was pleased to leave

out puddings, and hereto we shall say, Amen. Not that one is to indorse

such odiously rich ones as cocoa-nut, suet, and English plum; but,

bating these, there are enough both nice and wholesome to change the

dessert every day for a fortnight, at least. At another time I may give

you some recipes, with various items by this writing omitted.

Pastry the physiologists have been shaking their heads about for some

time,--especially as many persons use soda with the lard, not being

aware that they are making soft soap. This sort of paste one often sees

in the country. But it is easy to omit the soap. On the next

bread-making day, simply reserve a piece of the well-raised dough, and

roll in butter. This gives a palatable and harmless crust. I have also

experimented with a shortening of hot, fine-mashed potato and milk,

which, if it may not be recommended to an epicure, is really better than

it sounds, And does it not sound better than Dr. Trall's proposal of

sweet oil? Will not some of these ways satisfy our ardent reformers and

physiologists? But about chicken-pie, remember the tradition, that,

unless the top crust is punctured, it will make one very ill. (Who knows

but this was the secret of the National Hotel sickness?) At least, it is

truer than some other traditions, such as that eating burnt crusts will

make the cheeks red, or that fried turnip will make the hair curl.

Pickles do not seem so good that they must be eaten, nor so bad that

they must not be. But with them comes evermore the vision that Trollope

has prepared of all our smart little five-year-old men and women perched

at hotel-tables, pale-faced and sedate, with waiters behind their

chairs, and ordering chowders and chops with an inevitable "Please don't

forget the pickles."

Preserves, aside from the recent luxury of canned fruit, have the

happiest substitutes, if we will take what the seasons bring to our

hands. Not a month in the year is left wholly barren of these relishes

for the tea-table. There are berries all the summer, apples and

cranberries in the winter, when, just as the last russet disappears, and

with it every one's appetite, up springs the pungent and luxuriant

rhubarb. Somewhat curious is it concerning this last article. Forty

years ago it was such a pure experiment in England, that a Mr. Myatt,

who took seven bundles of it to London, succeeded in selling but three.

Still he persisted in keeping it before the people, although he seemed

only to lose rhubarb and to gain ridicule, being designated as the man

who sold "physic pies."

And besides our own zone, with its fruits fresh or dried, there are the

abounding tropics always at the door: Pine-apples, which, if

unwholesome, are yet charmingly convenient to help a luckless

housekeeper, and which, by the way, made a better _entrée_ in London

than pie-plant, being so popular that their salesmen floated flags from

the top of their stalls; bananas, those foreign muskmelons of spring;

oranges, gilding every street-corner; dates, which do not go meanly with

bread and butter, though one is a little fearful of finding a whole

straw bed therein; and prunes, which, if soaked several hours and stewed

slowly, are luscious enough for a prince.

But pork it appears to be the common impression that man cannot do

without. Certainly he must have partaken somewhat of its nature to make

him so greedy; and there would seem to be animals enough on land and

sea, without devouring the swine. If pork be important anywhere, it is

so in the old Puritan dish of baked beans; yet those who have tasted

baked beans prepared with fine rich beef instead have voted them quite

sumptuous, and possibly rich enough for people who live at restaurants.

But so long as fish, bird, and fowl remain, and men even eat turtles and

frogs,--so long as sheep do not die of wolves, nor cattle of the county

commissioners,--may not the pig be left to his wallowing in the mire?

Thus much for the poisonous _p_s. We do not place among them that

popular plant, the potato, though it has the blood of the nightshade in

its veins. But these may be made moderately poisonous by putting them

into soup. Once taste clear potato-water, and you will not aspire to

drink a strong broth from it. And even potatoes one may eat at a dozen

tables, and not find nicely served at any. With domestics generally they

figure as the article that in cooking takes care of itself,--the

convenient vegetable, that may be thrown into the kettle, and taken up

when nothing else needs to be. In the end they are either half done and

hard, or when done, being left soaking, are watery and soggy; whereas

they should be pared, kept boiling in salted water till they break, then

drained and shaken over the coals till powdery dry. They need tossing

up with as light a hand as an omelet, you see. If they are not of the

nicest variety, they should be mashed with milk, butter, and salt, and

placed in the oven to brown. This is a kind of medication which usually

makes the poorest article quite palatable, and is resorted to in the

early summer, when potatoes are become decidedly an "aged _p_." I was

once amused to hear a man complaining of a certain potato, because it

was "too dry." It is doubtful what he would do in Maine, the land of the

famous Jackson whites, which boil to a creamy powder. One must be

grateful that our Massachusetts Dovers cannot be dampened by this

original potato-taster. He probably would like juicy potatoes and mealy

oranges.

But of course none can have studied diet and its varied effects on

various persons, without seeing it to be impossible to make up two lists

of dishes, one of which shall be voted hurtful and the other harmless.

Nor does the healthfulness of food seem to consist wholly in its

simplicity, according to old Grahamite theories. There is probably some

truth in the saying of Hippocrates, "Whatever pleases the palate

nourishes"; but one cannot fail to recognize the wisdom of M. Soyer,

that prince of the _cuisine_, who maintains that the digestibility of

food depends, not on the number of articles used in its manufacture, but

in their proper combination. Says M. Soyer, "I would wager that I could

give a first-class indigestion to the greatest _gourmet_, even while

using the most _recherché_ provisions, without his being able to detect

any fault in the preparation of the dishes of which he had

partaken,--and this simply by improperly classifying the condiments used

in the preparation." This gives a hint of the nicety of the culinary

art, the genius required to practise it, and the fine physical effects

that hinge upon it. It is no wonder that Vatel committed suicide before

the great banquet which he had prepared for his master, the Prince of

Condé, because he feared it was to fail. It is certainly enough to alarm

ordinary amateurs,--and such are the most of us; for, while Americans

place all due stress upon the table, they neglect to emphasize the

_cuisine_. Instead of this _nonchalance_, we have yet to discover that

cookery belongs to the fine arts; that it is exhaustive alike of

chemistry and physiology, and touches upon laws as sure as those which

mingle the atmospheric elements, hourly adjusting them to man's nicest

needs. And we should count it among the best of the progressive plans of

our country, if to the new Industrial College under subscription at

Worcester were to be added an elaborate culinary department, with the

most accomplished professor that could be obtained. Perhaps, as M. Soyer

was philanthropic enough to go to the Crimea, and teach the English to

make hospital soup, he would even come here and give our nation a

glimpse of those marvellous morsels that have made Paris the envy of

epicures the world over.

And if there is a proper harmony to be attained in the combining of

various ingredients, making every perfect dish a poem, there is no less

harmony in combining the various dishes for a repast, making a poem in

every perfect meal. For every leading dish has its kindred and

antagonistic ones: as, at dinner, one would not serve cauliflower with

fricasseed chicken, nor turnips with boiled salmon, nor, at tea,

currants with cream-toast, nor currants with custard. But this is

something that cannot be fully taught or learned. It is almost wholly at

the mercy of one's instinct, and may be ruled by a tact as delicate as

that which conducts a drawing-room.

But we are quite curious to learn, M., if your excellent companion has

yet been away from home so long that you have had to go to market. And

can you wisely discern roasts, steaks, and fowl? Says one, "The way to

select fowl is first to select your butcher"; and away he swings out of

intelligence and responsibility with a magnificent air. A lady friend

has this charming fashion of frankness: "Now, Mr. ----, I don't know one

piece of meat from another, and shall expect you to give me the best";

thus throwing herself directly on her faith and fascinations. But these

might grow jejune, nor is it safe to trust the tender mercies of a

butcher. Better know what you want, and know if you get it. Therefore

you will study the anatomy of animals, as laid down in all modern

cook-books. But really it is a little perplexing. I confess I am near

concluding that every beef creature is a special creation; for one never

finds the same joint twice, and apparently the only things common to all

are tongue and liver.

Not long since, having a discussion at the market with an elderly

gentleman, he said something pleasant which must be written for the

husband of a young housekeeper. We agreed that a rump steak was of more

uniform richness than a sirloin, the best of the latter being only that

luscious strip underlying the bone. "But," added the kindly man, "I

always buy the sirloin, because I give that juicy scrap to my wife." It

is worth while, M., to be wedded to the thoughtful heart, who, after

forty years, yet wills to give one the single choice bit from the table.

Aside from the ordinary beef-routine, there is another dish which is

usually popular. Select a cheap, lean piece of beef, weighing two or

three pounds, put it on the stove in cold water soon after breakfast,

boiling gently. Half an hour before dinner add a small onion, a sliced

parsnip and carrot, a few bits of turnip, and a half-dozen dumplings.

When these are done, remove them; season and thicken, serving a dumpling

with meat and vegetables to each plate of stew. This may be rather

plebeian, but is certainly palatable,--unless there be choice company to

dine. We might call it Rainy-Day Stew.

But the toothsome time for beef-eaters was undoubtedly in the days of

pleuro-pneumonia. Then the frightened public fled from beef as from the

plague, and all the best cuts were left for the bold. One was tempted to

pray that such pleuro might last for the season, save that the

Commissioners were so costly, and the dear cattle were having an

unusually sanguinary Bull Run. I know what our vegetarian friend, Mr.

Alcott, will say; but he must indulge me in a very small mania, even if

it seem to him a kind of cannibalism; therefore, whatever rhapsodies are

left from bread and potato, let them all be given to good beef. While

the quarrel of round, rump, and sirloin goes on, this let us buy and eat

and reinforce ourselves. In it are poems, powers, and possessions

ineffable. Twenty-five cents a pound, and the strength of the gods in

one's veins! Broil it carefully and rare, then go and toss quoits with

Hercules. In this, ye disconsolate, behold lands, lovers, and virtues in

plenty. It fills and steadies the pulse, and plants the planet plump

under one's feet. "My friend, is he who makes me do what I can," says

the sage. Only beefsteak can come to the rescue. If one were going to a

martyr's fire, of this should he eat, lest he die, not sublimely, with a

fainting body. He would try this steak, and then that stake.

But there is one event that comes alike to all, and that is a holiday

dinner. Even the poor have their plum-pudding days, and all seem to

think that on a Christmas or Thanksgiving Nature suspends her laws and

lets one eat as much as he can. It is quite in the spirit of the

Scottish Lord Cockburn, who, ending a long walk, used to say, "We will

eat a profligate supper,--a supper without regard to discretion or

digestion." Or after the theory of one who ate whatever he pleased,

whenever he pleased, and as much as he pleased, saying, "Oh, if it makes

me sick, I can take medicine. What are the doctors for, if 'tisn't to

cure people?" He did not know how small hope can be gotten from the

doctors, and how those who know best get more and more courage to travel

into places where they are not. There must have been a poor chance for

the Egyptians, who, Herodotus says, had a physician for each part of the

body; so that the human frame would seem to have been a sort of

university, and each of the organs a vacant professorship. In case of

malady, every officer worked away on his own member without regard to

what his medical neighbors were doing. Michelet mentions a fish that has

the power of multiplying stomachs to the number of one hundred and

twenty. Fortunately that power is not man's. Think of dyspepsia with a

hundred and twenty stomachs, and a different doctor for each!

Do not imagine this a plea for the transcendental diet that drove Sydney

Smith to that pathetic sigh, "Ah, I wish they would allow me even the

wing of a roasted butterfly!" But perhaps it would not be amiss to

conjure up a terror-demon from these bodies of ours, so that we should

fear to violate laws with such merciless penalties,--should have none

but well-cooked food, at sensible and systematic hours. Is it strange

that little Miss Bremer, who thought herself of soundest digestion,

after three months of American night-dinners with oysters and preserve,

is at last seen to grasp Dr. Osgood with both hands, exclaiming, in

tears, "Oh, help me!" I want to save you from resembling the great

people of the world after the manner of Dr. Beattie, whose title to

genius was, "Have I not headaches like Pope, vertigo like Swift, gray

hairs like Homer? Do I not wear large shoes for fear of corns like

Virgil, and sometimes complain of sore eyes like Horace?"

Therefore I hope that your H. will make the counting-room conform to

regular mid-day dinner and early tea-time. And let us trust that it will

not have the same fatal result as with King Louis XII., who is said to

have died earlier from changing his dinner-hour in compliment to his

foreign bride.

One can hardly think of late suppers without turning quite away to those

ideal tea-takings of the Wordsworths at Grasmere. "Plain living and high

thinking," was the motto of the philosopher-poet, and that table was

never crowded with viands. One can well believe, that, as De Quincey

said, in the quiet walks after tea the face of the poet "grew solemn and

spiritual as any saint's." But he probably was thinking very high when

he drew a knife from the buttered toast and cut the leaves of a new book

just lent to him!

Quite sombre are the memories of Rydal Mount; but since we are really

alive, let us be lively. Behold me, then, dear M., well turbaned and

aproned, and know that this is our churning-day. You give one of your

gleeful little shrieks, perhaps; but yes, it is true; we live in the

city, take a pint of milk per day, and make butter.

And where is the churn? you suggest. Oh, I extemporize that. It is out

of the question to buy every convenient thing, or purse will run dry and

house overflow. Dr. Kane hints how few dishes it is possible to use; and

the plan is admirable; so one need not buy a churn, but make one out of

a bowl and spoon. Into the bowl goes the cream, into the cream the

spoon, and then I beat, beat, beat, not as one who beateth the air. This

often lasts for two hours or more; it might be said that the cream

remains in chrysalis, and refuses to butterfly! Indeed, there is no

reason why a small bowl of cream shouldn't be as refractory as a wooden

churnful. But when it "won't come," my distress is not at all

proportioned to the size of the bowl.

Still I beat, beat, beat, perspiringly, but resolutely, while it whisks

about, spattering over face, bib, and turban. At length there appear

within it greasy-looking flecks. These increase till the mass thickens,

beats solidly, separates from the milk, and declares itself butter. A

limited quantity, certainly, but I will none the less press it dry,

salt, and make it into cakes as large as a full-blown tea-rose. Each of

these I will stamp, lay on a dapper glass cup-plate, and at tea-time

several dear ones in various households will find these astonishing

little pats beside them. Think you not they are genuine love-pats?

This would be a pretty way to serve butter always, did it not remind one

of cheap hotels kept on the European plan, where those small, slushy,

yellow cakes come in with the rolls. A choicer way is to form it into

acorns or strawberries,--though I don't in the least know how it is

done,--placing them all together on a plate and serving one to each at

the table. This dainty way, however, would hardly make a bad article

good, and no one would crave a berry of ancient firkin butter. For, as

trivial a matter as it seems, this single condiment of food, one has

only to encounter it in a strong, cheesy state to feel it among the most

important things in the _cuisine_. Then one suddenly discovers that

butter is in everything. Eating becomes intolerable, living dwindles

into dyspepsia, and finally one is tempted to exclaim with a certain

epicure, "I wish I were under the sod! There's no lump butter in the

market!"

It is related of Apicius, who lived at Rome, that he ate very large

shrimps; but hearing that those of Greece were larger, he straightway

sailed for that coast without losing a day. He met a great storm and

much danger; but on arriving, the fishermen brought him of their best.

Apicius shook his head.

"Have you never any larger shrimps?"

"No, Seignior, never!"

At which, rubbing his hands with delight, he ordered the captain to sail

back at once, saying,--

"I have left some at home larger than these, and they will be spoiled,

if the wind is not in our favor."

We will not carry our dilletantism so far as this, nor let it carry us

so far; still we are glad not to be driven to the expedient of the

Syrians, whose only butter is the fat procured from the tails of their

sheep,--which is literally being reduced to extremities.

By the way, something quite remarkable occurred in my first churning. I

began with one cup of cream and ended with a cup of butter and a full

cup of buttermilk! This law of expansion is paralleled only by that of

contraction, as shown to the farmer who took a brimming pail of dinner

to the sty; and after the little pig had eaten it all, the farmer put

him into the pail, and had room for another half of a pig beside.

* * * * *

But, dear M., it is hardly two moons since the bridal trunks were taken

from our hall, and you went away with the friend. You have scarcely been

domesticated long enough to see that bright tins bake badly, and that

one must crucify her pride by allowing them to blacken; yet so soon do I

overwhelm you with culinary suggestions. I am distressed to remember

them. But you must forgive and smile me into peacefulness again. And be

not discouraged, little housewife! It may take years of attention to

excel in bread-making, some skill even for boiling potatoes, and

common-sense for everything; but stand steadily beside your servants,

and watch their processes patiently. Take notes, experiment, amend, and

if there be failure, discover the reason; then it need not happen again.

And despite the difficulties of the practical, you and H. will not

slight the ideal. Love the work you are doing and must do; but when it

is done, oh, train the rose-vines over your door!

THE PEACE AUTUMN.

Thank God for rest, where none molest,

And none can make afraid,--

For Peace that sits as Plenty's guest,

Beneath the homestead shade!

Bring pike and gun, the sword's red scourge,

The negro's broken chains,

And beat them at the blacksmith's forge

To ploughshares for our plains.

Alike henceforth our hills of snow,

And vales where cotton flowers;

All streams that flow, all winds that blow,

Are Freedom's motive-powers.

Henceforth to Labor's chivalry

Be knightly honors paid;

For nobler than the sword's shall be

The sickle's accolade.

Build up an altar to the Lord,

O grateful hearts of ours!

And shape it of the greenest sward

That ever drank the showers.

Lay all the bloom of gardens there,

And there the orchard fruits;

Bring golden grain from sun and air,

From earth her goodly roots.

There let our banners droop and flow,

The stars uprise and fall;

Our roll of martyrs, sad and slow,

Let sighing breezes call.

Their names let hands of horn and tan

And rough-shod feet applaud,

Who died to make the slave a man,

And link with toil reward.

There let the common heart keep time

To such an anthem sung,

As never swelled on poet's rhyme,

Or thrilled on singer's tongue.

Song of our burden and relief

Of peace and long annoy;

The passion of our mighty grief

And our exceeding joy!

A song of praise to Him who filled

The harvests sown in tears,

And gave each field a double yield

To feed our battle-years!

A song of faith that trusts the end

To match the good begun,

Nor doubts the power of Love to blend

The hearts of men as one!

DOCTOR JOHNS.

XXXVII.

Meantime Reuben was gaining, month by month, in a knowledge of the

world,--at least of such portion of it as came within the range of his

vision in New York. He imagined it, indeed, a very large portion, and

took airs upon himself in consequence. He thought with due commiseration

of the humble people of Ashfield. He wonders how he could have tolerated

so long their simple ways. The Eagle Tavern, with its creaking

sign-board, does not loom so largely as it once did upon the horizon of

his thought. That he should ever have trembled as a lad at walking up to

the little corner bar, in company with Phil! And as for Nat Boody, whose

stories he once listened to admiringly, what a scrubby personage he has

become in his eye! Fighting-dogs, indeed! "Scamp" would be nothing to

what he has seen a score of times in the city!

He has put Phil through some of the "sights": for that great lout of a

country lad (as Reuben could not help counting him, though he liked his

big, honest heart for all that) had found him out, when he came to New

York to take ship for the West Indies.

"I say, Phil," Reuben had said, as he marched his old schoolmate up

Broadway, "it's rather a touch beyond Ashfield, this, isn't it? How do

you think Old Boody's tavern and sign-board would look along here?"

And Phil laughed, quietly.

"I should like to see old Deacon Tourtelot," continued Reuben, "with

Huldy on his arm, sloping down Broadway. Wouldn't the old people stare?"

"I guess they would," Phil said, demurely.

"I wonder if they'd knock off at sundown Saturday night," continued

Reuben, mockingly.

And his tone somehow hurt Phil, who had the memories of the old home--a

very dear one to him--fresh upon him.

"And I suppose Miss Almiry keeps at her singing?"

"Yes," said Phil, straining a point in favor of his townswoman; "and I

think she sings pretty well."

"Pretty well! By Jove, Phil, you should have been at the Old Park night

before last; you would have heard what _I_ call singing. It would have

stirred up the old folks of Ashfield."

And Phil met it all very seriously. It seemed to him, in his honesty,

that Reuben was wantonly cutting asunder all the ties that once bound

him to the old home. It pained him, moreover, to think--as he did, with

a good deal of restiveness--that his blessed mother, and Rose perhaps,

and the old Squire, his father, were among the Ashfield people at whom

Reuben sneered so glibly. And when he parted with him upon the

dock,--for Reuben had gone down to see him off,--it was with a secret

conviction that their old friendship had come to an end, and that

thenceforth they two could have no sympathies in common.

But in this Phil was by no means wholly right. The talk of Reuben was,

after all, but the ebullition of a city conceit,--a conceit which is apt

to belong to all young men at some period of their novitiate in city

life. He was mainly anxious to impress upon Phil the great gain which he

had made in knowledge of the world in the last few years, and to astound

him with the great difference between his present standpoint and the old

one, when they were boys together on the benches of the Ashfield

meeting-house. We never make such gains, or apparent gains, at any

period of life, it is to be feared, without wishing to demonstrate their

magnitude to the slow coaches we have left behind.

And on the very night after Reuben had parted from Phil, when he came

late to his chamber, dazed with some new scene at the theatre, and his

brain flighty with a cup too much, it may well have happened, that, in

his fevered restlessness, as the clock near by chimed midnight, his

thoughts ran back to that other chamber where once sweet sleep always

greeted him,--to the overhanging boughs that rustled in the evening air

at the window,--to the shaded street that stretched away between the

silent houses,--to the song of the katydids, chattering their noisy

chorus,--to the golden noons when light feet tripped along the village

walks,--to the sunny smiles of Rose,--to the kindly entreaty of good

Mrs. Elderkin,--and more faintly, yet more tenderly, than elsewhere, to

a figure and face far remote, and so glorified by distance that they

seem almost divine, a figure and a face that are somehow associated with

the utterance of his first prayer,--and with the tender vision before

him, he mumbles the same prayer and falls asleep with it upon his lip.

Only on his lip, however,--and the next day, when he steals a half-hour

for a stroll upon Broadway with that dashing girl, Miss Sophie Bowrigg,

(she is really a stylish creature,) he has very little thought of the

dreamy sentiments of the night before, which seemed for the time to keep

his wilder vagaries in subjection, and to kindle aspirations toward a

better life. It is doubtful, even, if he did not indulge in an artful

compliment or two to the dashing Miss Sophie, the point of which lay in

a cleverly covered contrast of herself with the humdrum manners of the

fair ones of Ashfield. Yet, to tell truth, he is not wholly untouched by

certain little rallying, coquettish speeches of Miss Sophie in respect

to Adèle, who, in her open, girl-like way, has very likely told the full

story of Reuben's city attentions.

Reuben had, indeed, been piqued by the French girl's reception of his

patronage, and he had been fairly carried off his feet in view of her

easy adaptation to the ways of the city, and of her graceful carriage

under all the toilet equipments which had been lavished upon her, under

the advice of Mrs. Brindlock. A raw boy comes only by long aptitude into

the freedom of a worldly manner; but a girl--most of all a French girl,

in whom the instincts of her race are strong--leaps to such conquest in

a day. Of course he had intimated to Adèle no wonder at the change; but

he had thrust a stray glove of hers into his pocket, counting it only a

gallant theft; and there had been days when he had drawn out that little

relic of her visit from its hidden receptacle, and smoothed it upon his

table, and pressed it, very likely, to his lips, in the same way in

which youth of nineteen or twenty are used to treat such feminine tokens

of grace.

It was a dainty glove, to be sure. It conjured up her presence in its

most alluring aspect. The rustle of her silk, the glow of her cheek, the

coyness of her touch, whenever she had dropped that delicate hand on

his, came with the sight of it. He ventures, in a moment of gallant

exuberance, to purchase a half-dozen of the same number, of very

charming tints, (to his eye,) and sends them as a gift to Adèle,

saying,--

"I found your stray glove we had a search for in the carriage, but did

not tell of it. I hope these will fit."

"They fit nicely," said Adèle, writing back to him,--"so nicely, I may

be tempted to throw another old glove of mine some time in your way."

Miss Eliza Johns was of course delighted with this attention of

Reuben's, and made it the occasion of writing him a long letter, (and

her letters were very rare, by reason of the elaboration she counted

necessary,) in which she set forth the excellence of Adèle's character,

her "propriety of speech," her "lady-like deportment," her "cheerful

observance of duty," and her "eminent moral worth," in such terms as

stripped all romance from Reuben's recollection of her, and made him

more than half regret his gallant generosity.

The Doctor writes to him regularly once a fortnight; of which missives

Reuben reads as regularly the last third, containing, as it does

usually, a little home news or casual mention of Miss Rose Elderkin or

of the family circle. The other two thirds, mainly expostulatory, he

skips, only allowing his eye to glance over them, and catch such

scattered admonitions as these:--"Be steadfast in the truth.... Let your

light shine before men.... Be not tempted of the Devil; for if you

resist him, he will flee from you.... The wisdom of this world is

foolishness.... Trust not, my son, in any arm of flesh."

Ah, how much of such good advice had been twisted into tapers for the

lighting of Reuben's cigars! Not because it was absolutely scorned; not

because it was held in contempt, or its giver held in contempt; but

because there was so much of it. If the old gentleman had been in any

imminent bodily peril, it is certain that Reuben would have rushed far

and wide to aid him. It is certain that he loved him; it is certain that

he venerated him; and yet, and yet, (he said to himself,) "I do wish he

would keep this solemn stuff for his sermons. Who cares to read it? Who

cares to hear it, except on Sundays?"

Our good reader will exclaim,--A bad young man! And yet we think our

good readers--nay, our best of readers--have shirked godly counsel over

and over, with very much the same promptitude. We all grow so weary with

the iteration of even the best of truths! we all love youth so much! we

all love the world so much! we all trust to an arm of flesh so much!

Not for a moment did the Doctor believe that his recreant son pondered

wisely and deeply these successive epistles of his. He knew him too well

for that. But for him duty was always duty. "Here a little, and there a

little." It would have pained the old gentleman grievously to know the

full extent of the wickedness of his boy,--to have looked for a moment

into the haunts to which he was beguiled by his companions of the

city,--to have seen his flushed and swollen face after some of those

revels to which Reuben was a party. But the good Doctor was too ignorant

of the world to conceive, even, of larger latitude than an occasional

cigar or a stolen sight at the orgies of the theatre. And when Mr.

Brindlock wrote, as he took occasion to do about this period, regretting

the extravagance of Reuben and the bad associations into which he had

fallen, and urging the Doctor to impress upon him the advantages of

regularity and of promptitude, and to warn him that a very advantageous

business career which was opening upon him would be blighted by his

present habits, the poor gentleman was fairly taken aback.

That even this worldly gentleman, Mr. Brindlock, should take exception

to the courses of his son was a most startling fact. What admonition

could the Doctor add to those which he had addressed to his poor son

fortnightly for years past? Had he not warned him over and over that he

was standing upon slippery places? Had he not unfolded the terrors of

God's wrath upon sinners? Had he not set before him in "line upon line"

the awful truth that his immortal career was at stake? And should he

descend from this ground to plead with him upon the score of his

short-lived worldly career? What were all business prospects, however

they might wane, compared with that dreadful prospect which lies before

him who refuseth godly counsel and hardeneth his heart? Was it not a

fearful confirmation of Satan's reign upon earth, that peril to a

temporal career should serve for warning against criminal excesses, when

the soul's everlasting peril was urged vainly? The Doctor wrote to

Reuben with even more than his usual unction. But he could not bring

himself to warn his boy of the mere blight to his worldly career,--that

was so small a matter! Yet he laid before him in graver terms than he

had ever done before the weight of the judgment of an offended God, and

the fearful retribution that would certainly overtake the ungodly.

Reuben lighted his cigar with the letter, not unfeelingly, but

indifferently, and ventured even upon a blasphemous joke with his

companions.

"It ought to burn," he says, "There's plenty of brimstone in it!"

It would have crazed the minister of Ashfield to have heard the speech.

In his agony of mind he went to consult Squire Elderkin, and laid before

him the dire accounts he had heard.

"Ah, young men will be young men, Doctor. There's time for him to come

out right yet. It's the blood of the old Major; it must have vent."

As the Doctor recalled what he counted his father's godless death, he

shuddered. Presently he talked of summoning his boy home immediately.

"Well, Doctor," said the Squire, meditatively, "there are two sides to

that matter. There are great temptations in the city, to be sure; but if

God puts a man in the way of great temptations, I suppose He gives him

strength to resist them. Isn't that good theology?"

The parson nodded assent.

"We can always resist, if we will, Squire," said he.

"Very good, Doctor. Suppose, now, you bring your boy home; he'll fret

desperately under your long lectures, and with Miss Eliza, and perhaps

run off into deviltries that will make him worse than those of the city.

You must humor him a little, Doctor; touch his pride; there's a fine,

frank spirit at the bottom; give him a good word now and then."

"I know no word so good as prayer," said the Doctor, gravely.

"That's very well, Doctor, very well. Mrs. Elderkin gives him help that

way; and between you and me, Doctor, if any woman's prayers can call

down blessings, I think that little woman's can,"--and the Squire's eyes

fairly flashed with the dew that came into them.

"An estimable lady,--most estimable!" said the Doctor.

"Pray, if you will, Doctor; it's all right; and for my part, I'll drop

him a line, telling him the town feels an ownership in him, and hopes

he'll do us all credit. I think we can bring him out all right."

"Thank you,--thank you, Squire," said the Doctor, with an unusual

warmth.

And he wrought fervently in prayer that night; may-be, too, the hearty

invocation of that good woman, Mrs. Elderkin, joined with his in the

Celestial Presence; and if the kindly letter of the Squire did not rank

with the prayers, we may believe, without hardihood, that the recording

angel took note of it, and gave credit on the account current of human

charities.

XXXVIII.

Mr. Brindlock had, may-be, exaggerated somewhat the story of Reuben's

extravagances, but he was anxious that a word of caution should be

dropped in his ear from some other lips than his own. The allowance from

the Doctor, notwithstanding all the economies of Miss Eliza's frugal

administration, would have been, indeed, somewhat narrow, and could by

no means have kept Reuben upon his feet in the ambitious city-career

upon which he had entered. But Mr. Brindlock had taken a great fancy to

the lad, and, besides the stipend granted for his duties about the

counting-room, had given him certain shares in a few private ventures

which had resulted very prosperously,--so prosperously, indeed, that the

prudent merchant had determined to hold the full knowledge of the

success in reserve. The prospects of Reuben, however, he being the

favorite nephew of a well-established merchant, were regarded by the

most indifferent observers as extremely flattering; and Mr. Bowrigg was

not disposed to look unfavorably upon the young man's occasional

attentions to the dashing Sophie.

But the Brindlocks, though winking at a great deal which the Doctor

would have counted grievous sin, still were uneasy at the lad's growing

dissoluteness of habit. Would the prayers of the good people of Ashfield

help him?

It was some time in the month of September, of the same autumn in which

poor Adèle lay sick at the parsonage, that Reuben came in one night, at

twelve or thereabout, to his home at the Brindlocks', (living at this

time in the neighborhood of Washington Square,) with his head cruelly

battered, and altogether in a very piteous plight. Mrs. Brindlock,

terribly frightened,--in her woman's way,--was for summoning the Doctor

at once; but Reuben pleaded against it; he had been in a row, that was

all, and had caught a big knock or two. The truth was, he had been upon

one of his frolics with his old boon companions; and it so happened that

one had spoken sneeringly of the parson's son, in a way which to the

fiery young fellow seemed to cast ridicule upon the old gentleman. And

thereupon Reuben, though somewhat maudlin with wine, yet with the

generous spirit not wholly quenched in him, had entered upon a glowing

little speech in praise of the old gentleman and of his profession,--a

speech which, if it were garnished with here and there an objectionable

expletive, was very earnest and did him credit.

"Good for Reuben!" the party had cried out. "Get him a pulpit!"

"Hang me, if he wouldn't preach better now than the old man!" said one.

"And a deused sight livelier," said another.

"Hold your tongue, you blackguard!" burst out Reuben.

And from this the matter came very shortly to blows, in the course of

which poor Reuben was severely punished, though he must have hit some

hard blows, for he was wondrously active, and not a few boxing-lessons

had gone to make up the tale of his city accomplishments.

Howbeit, he was housed now, in view of his black eye, for many days, and

had ample time for reflection. In aid of this came a full sheet of

serious expostulations from the Doctor, and that letter of advice which

Squire Elderkin had promised, with a little warm-hearted postscript from

good Mrs. Elderkin,--so unlike to the carefully modulated letters of

Aunt Eliza! The Doctor's missive, very likely, did not impress him more

than the scores that had gone before it; but there was a practical tact,

and good-natured, common-sense homeliness, in the urgence of the Squire,

which engaged all Reuben's attention; and the words of the good woman,

his wife, were worth more than a sermon to him. "We all want," she

writes, "to think well of you, Reuben; we _do_ think well of you. Don't

disappoint us. I can't think of the cheery, bright face, that for so

many an evening shone amid our household, as anything but bright and

cheery now. We all pray for your well-being and happiness, Reuben; and I

_do_ hope you have not forgotten to pray for it yourself."

And with the memory of the kindly woman which this letter called up came

a pleasant vision of the winsome face of Rose, as she used to sit, with

downcast eyes, beside her mother in the old house of Ashfield,--of Rose,

as she used to lower upon him in their frolic, with those great hazel

eyes sparkling with indignation. And if the vision did not quicken any

lingering sentiment, it at the least gave a mellow tint to his

thought,--a mellowness which even the hardness of Aunt Eliza could not

wholly do away.

"I feel it my duty to write you, Reuben," she says, "and to inform you

how very much we have all been shocked and astonished by the accounts

which reach us of your continued indifference to religious duties, and

your reckless extravagance. Let me implore you to be frugal and

virtuous. If you learn to save now, the habit will be of very great

service when you come to take your stand on the arena of life. I am

aware that the temptations of a great city are almost innumerable; but I

need hardly inform you that you will greatly consult your own interests

and mitigate our harassment of feeling by practising a strict economy

with your funds, and by attending regularly at church. You will excuse

all errors in my writing, since I indite this by the sick-bed of Adèle."

Adèle, then, is sick; and upon that point alone in the Aunt's letter the

thought of Reuben fastens. Adèle is sick! He knows where she must be

lying,--in that little room at the parsonage looking out upon the

orchard; there are white hangings to the bed; careful steps go up and

down the stairway. There had never been much illness in the parson's

home, indeed, but certain early awful days Reuben just remembers; there

were white bed-curtains, (he recalls those,) and a face as white lying

beneath; the nurse, too, lifting a warning finger at him with a low

"hist!" the knocker tied over thickly with a great muffler of cloth,

lest the sound might come into the chamber; and then, awful stillness.

On a morning later, all the windows are suddenly thrown open, and

strange men bring a red coffin into the house, which, after a day or

two, goes out borne by different people, who tread uneasily and

awkwardly under the weight, but very softly; and after this a weary,

weary loneliness. All which drifting over the mind of Reuben, and

stirring his sensibilities with a quick rush of vague, boyish griefs,

induces a train of melancholy religious musings, which, if they do no

good, can hardly, it would seem, work harm. Under their influence,

indeed, (which lasted for several days,) he astonished his Aunt Mabel,

on the next Sunday, by declaring his intention to attend church.

It is not the ponderous Dr. Mowry, fortunately or unfortunately, that he

is called upon to listen to; but a younger man, of ripe age, indeed, but

full of fervor and earnestness, and with a piercing magnetic quality of

voice that electrifies from the beginning. And Reuben listens to his

reading of the hymn,

"Return, O wanderer! now return!"

with parted lips, and with an exaltation of feeling that is wholly

strange to him. With the prayer it seems to him that all the religious

influences to which he has ever been subject are slowly and surely

converging their forces upon his mind; and, rapt as he is in the

preacher's utterance, there come to him shadowy recollections of some

tender admonition addressed to him by dear womanly lips in boyhood,

which now, on a sudden, flames into the semblance of a Divine summons.

Then comes the sermon, from the text, "My son, give me thine heart."

There is no repulsive formality, no array of logical presentment to

arouse antagonism of thought, but only inglowing enthusiasm, that

transfuses the Scriptural appeal, and illuminates it with winning

illustration. Reuben sees that the evangelist feels in his inmost soul

what he utters; the thrill of his voice and the touching earnestness of

his manner declare it. It is as if our eager listener were, by every

successive appeal, placed in full _rapport_ with a great battery of

religious emotions, and at every touch were growing into fuller and

fuller entertainment of the truths which so fired and sublimed the

speaker's utterance.

Do we use too gross a figure to represent what many people would call

the influences of the Spirit? Heaven forgive us, if we do; but nothing

can more definitely describe the seemingly electrical influences which

were working upon the mind of Reuben, as he caught, ever and again,

breaking through the torrent of the speaker's language, the tender,

appealing refrain, _"My son, give me thine heart!"_

All thought of God the Avenger and of God the Judge, which had been so

linked with most of his boyish instructions, seemed now to melt away in

an aureole of golden light, through which he saw only God the Father!

And the first prayer he ever learned comes to his mind with a grace and

a meaning and a power that he never felt before.

"Whether we obey Him," (it is the preacher we quote,) "or distrust Him,

or revile Him, or forget Him, or struggle to ignore Him, always, always

He is our Father. And whatever we may do, however we may sin, however

recreant we may be to early faith or early teaching, however unmoved by

the voice of conscience,--which is smiting on your hearts, as it is on

mine to-day,--whatever we are, or whatever we may be, yet, ever while

life is in us, that great, serene voice of the All-Merciful is sounding

in our ears, 'My son, give me thine heart!' Ay, the flowers repeat it in

their bloom, the birds in their summer carol, the rejoicing brooks, and

the seasons in their courses, all, all repeat it, 'My son, give me thine

heart!'

"Oh, my hearers, this is real, this is true! It is our Father who says

it; and we, unworthy ministers of His word and messengers to declare His

beneficence, repeat it for Him, 'My son, give me thine heart!' Not to

crush, not to spurn, not for a toy. The great God asks your hearts

because He wishes your gratitude and your love. Do you believe He asks

it? Yes, you do. Do you believe He asks it idly? No, you do not. What,

then, does this appeal mean? It means, that God is love,--that you are

His children,--straying, outcast, wretched, may-be, but still His

children,--and by the abounding love which is in Him, He asks your love

in return. Will you give it?"

And Reuben says to himself, yet almost audibly, "I will."

The sermon was altogether such a one as to act with prodigious force

upon so emotional a nature as that of Reuben. Yet we dare say there were

gray-haired men in the church, and sallow-faced young men, who nodded

their heads wisely and coolly, as they went out, and said, "An eloquent

sermon, quite; but not much argument in it." As if all men were to plod

to heaven on the vertebræ of an inexorable logic, and not--God

willing--to be rapt away thitherward by the clinging force of a glowing

and confiding heart! Alas, how the intellect droops in its attempt to

measure or comprehend the infinite! How the heart leaps and grows large

in its reach toward the altitude of Boundless Love, if only it be buoyed

with faith!

"Is this religion?" Reuben asked himself, as he went out of the church,

with his pride all subdued. And the very atmosphere seemed to wear a new

glory, and a new lien of brotherhood to tie him to every creature he met

upon the thronged streets. All the time, too, was sounding in his ears

(as if he had yielded full assent) the mellow and grateful cadence of

the hymn,

"Return, O wanderer! now return!"

XXXIX.

Reuben wrote to the Doctor, under the influence of this new glow of

feeling, in a way that at once amazed and delighted the good old

gentleman. And yet there were ill-defined, but very decided, terrors and

doubts in his delight Dr. Johns, by nature as well as by education, was

disposed to look distrustfully upon any sudden conviction of duty which

had its spring in any extraordinary exaltation of feeling, rather than

in that full intellectual seizure of the Divine Word, which it seemed to

him could come only after a determined wrestling with those dogmas that

to his mind were the aptest and compactest expression of the truth

toward which we must agonize. The day of Pentecost showed a great

miracle, indeed; but was not the day of miracles past?

The Doctor, however, did not allow his entertainment of a secret fear to

color in any way his letters of earnest gratulation to his son. If God

has miraculously snatched him from the ways that lead to destruction,

(such was his thought,) let us rejoice.

"Be steadfast, my dear Reuben," he writes. "You have now a cross to

bear. Do not dishonor its holy character; do not faint upon the way. Our

beloved Adèle, as you have been told, is trembling upon the verge of the

grave. May God in His mercy spare her, until, at least, she gain some

more fitting sense of the great mission of His Son, and of the divine

scheme of atonement! I fear greatly that she has but loose ideas upon

these all-important subjects. It pains me beyond belief to find her

indifferent to the godly counsels of your pious aunt, which she does not

fail to urge upon her, 'in season and out of season'; and she has shown

a tenacity in guarding that wretched relic of her early life, the rosary

and crucifix, which, I fear, augurs the worst. Pray for her, my son;

pray that all the vanities and idolatries of this world may be swept

from her thoughts."

And Reuben, still living in that roseate atmosphere of religious

meditation, is shocked by this story of the danger of Adèle. Is he not

himself in some measure accountable? In those days when they raced

through the Catechism together, did he never provoke her mocking smiles

by his sneers at the ponderous language? Did he not tempt her to some

mischievous sally of mirth, on many a day when they were kneeling in

couple about the family altar?

And in the flush of his exalted feeling he writes her how bitterly he

deplores all this, and, borrowing his language from the sermons he now

listens to with greed, he urges Adèle "to plant her feet upon the Rock

of Ages, to eschew all vanities, and to trust to those blessed promises

which were given from the foundation of the world."

Indeed, there is a fervor in his feeling which pushes him into such

extravagances of expression as the Doctor would have found it necessary

to qualify, if Adèle, poor child, had not been by far too weak for their

comprehension.

The Brindlocks were, of course, utterly amazed at this new aspect in the

character of their pet young nephew from the country. Mr. Brindlock

said, consolingly, to his wife, when the truth became only too apparent,

"My dear, it's atmospheric, I think. It's a 'revival' season; there was

such a one, I remember, in my young days."

(Mrs. Brindlock laughed at this quite merrily.)

"To be sure there was, my dear, and I was really quite deeply affected.

Reuben will come out all right; we shall see him settling down soon to

good merchant habits again."

But the _animus_ of the new tendency was far stronger than Brindlock had

supposed; and within a month Reuben had come to a quiet rupture with his

city patron. The smack of worldliness was too strong for him. He felt

that he must go back to his old home, and place himself again under the

instructions of the father whose counsels he had once so spurned.

"You don't say you mean to become a parson?" said Mr. Brindlock, more

than ever astounded.

"It is very likely," said Reuben; "or possibly a missionary."

"Well, Reuben, if you must, you must. But I don't see things in that

light. However, my boy, we'll keep our little private ventures astir;

you may need them some day."

And so they parted; and Reuben went home to Ashfield, taking an

affectionate leave of his Aunt Mabel, who had been over-kind to him, and

praying in his heart that that good, but exceedingly worldly woman,

might some day look on serious things as he looked on them.

He had thought in his wild days, that, when he should go back to

Ashfield for any lengthened stay, (for thus far his visits had been few

and flying ones,) he should considerably astonish the old people there

by his air and city cultivation. It is quite possible that he had laid

by certain flaming cravats which he thought would have a killing effect

in the country church, and anticipated a very handsome triumph by the

easy swagger with which he would greet old Deacon Tourtelot and ask

after the health of Miss Almira. But the hope of all such triumphs was

now dropped utterly. Such things clearly belonged to the lusts of the

eye and the pride of life. He even left behind him some of the most

flashy articles of his attire, with the request to Aunt Mabel that she

would bestow them upon some needy person, or, in default of this, make

them over to the Missionary Society for distribution among the

heathen,--a purpose for which some of them, by reason of their brilliant

colors, were certainly most admirably adapted. Under his changed view of

life, it appeared to Reuben that every unnecessary indulgence, whether

of dress or food, was a sin. With the glowing enthusiasm of youth, he

put such beautiful construction upon the rules of Christian faith as

would hardly survive the rough every-day wear of the world. Even the

stiff dignity of Dr. Mowry he was inclined to count only an accidental

incrustation of manner, beneath which the heart of the parson was all

aglow with the tenderest benevolence. We hope he may have been right in

this; it is certain, that, if he could carry forward the same loving

charity to the end of his days, he would have won the best third of the

elements of a Christian career, without respect to dogmas.

So Reuben goes back to Ashfield with a very modest and quiet bearing. He

is to look with other eyes now upon the life there, and to judge how far

it will sustain his new-found religious sympathies. All meet him kindly.

Old Squire Elderkin, who chances to be the first to greet him as he

alights from the coach, shakes him warmly by the hand, and taps him

patronizingly upon the shoulder.

"Welcome home again, Reuben! Well, well, they thought you were given

over to bad courses; but it's all right now, I hear; quite upon the

other tack, eh, Reuben? That's well, my good fellow, that's well."

And Reuben thanked him, thinking perhaps how odd it was that this

worldly old gentleman, of whom he had thought, since his late revulsion

of feeling, with a good deal of quiet pity, should commend what was so

foreign to his own habit. There were, then, some streaks of good-natured

worldliness which tallied with Christian duty. The serene, kindly look

of Mrs. Elderkin was in itself the tenderest welcome; and it was an

ennobling thought to Reuben, that he had at last placed himself (or

fancied he had) upon the same moral plane with that good woman. As for

Rose, the joyous, frolicsome, charming Rose, whom he had thought at one

time to electrify by his elegant city accomplishments,--was not even the

graceful Rose a veteran in the Christian army in which he had but now

enlisted? Why, then, should she show timidity and shyness at this

meeting with him? Yet her little fingers had a quick tremor in them as

she took his hand, and a swift change of color (he knew it of old) ran

over her face like a rosy cloud.

"It is delightful to think that Reuben is safe at last," said Mrs.

Elderkin, after he had gone.

"Yes, mamma," said Rose.

"It must be a great delight to them all at the parsonage."

"I suppose so, mamma. I wish Phil were here," said Rose again, in a

plaintive little tone.

"I wish he were, my child; it might have a good influence upon him: and

poor Adèle, too; she must surely listen to Reuben, he is so earnest and

impassioned. Don't you think so, Rose?"

Rose is working with nervous rapidity.

"But, my child," says the mother; "are you not sewing that breadth upon

the wrong side?"

True enough, upon the wrong side,--so many weary stitches to undo!

Miss Eliza had shown a well-considered approval of Reuben's change of

opinions; but this had not forbidden a certain reserve of worldly regret

that he should give up so promising a business career. She had half

hinted as much to the Doctor.

"I do not see, brother," she had said, "that his piety will involve the

abandonment of mercantile life."

"His piety," said the Doctor, "if it be of the right stamp, will involve

an obedience to conscience."

And there the discussion had rested. The spinster received Reuben with

much warmth, in which her stately proprieties of manner, however, were

never for one moment forgotten.

Adèle, who was now fortunately in a fair way of recovery, but who was

still very weak, and who looked charmingly in her white chamber-dress

with its simple black belt, received him with a tender-heartedness of

manner which he had never met in her before. The letter of Reuben had

been given her, and, with all its rawness of appeal, had somehow touched

her religious sentiment in a way it had never been touched before. He

had put so much of his youthful enthusiasm into his language, it showed

such an elasticity of hope and joy, as impressed her very strangely. It

made the formal homilies of Miss Eliza seem more harsh than ever. She

had listened, in those fatiguing and terrible days of illness, to psalms

long drawn out, and wearily; but here was some wild bird that chanted a

glorious carol in her ear,--a carol that seemed touched with Heaven's

own joy. And under its influence--exaggerated as it was by extreme

youthful emotion--she seemed to see the celestial gates of jasper and

pearl swing open before her, and the beckonings of the great crowd of

celestial inhabitants to enter and enjoy.

For a long time she had been hovering (how nearly she did not know) upon

the confines of the other world; but with a vague sense that its

mysteries might open upon her in any hour, she had, in her sane

intervals, ranked together the promises and penalties that had been set

before her by the good Doctor: now worrying her spirit, as it confronted

some awful catechismal dogma, that it sought vainly to solve; and then,

from sheer weakness and disappointment, seizing upon the symbol of the

cross, (of which the effigy was always near at hand,) and by a kiss and

a tear seeking to ally her fainting heart with the mystic company of the

elect who would find admission to the joys of paradise. But the dogmas

were vain, because she could not grapple them to her heart; the cross

was vain, because it was an empty symbol; the kisses and the tears left

her groping blindly for the key that would surely unlock for her the

wealth of the celestial kingdom. In this attitude of mind, wearied by

struggle and by fantasies, came to her the letter of Reuben,--the joyous

outburst of a pioneer who had found the way. She never once doubted that

the good Doctor had found it, too,--but so long ago, and by so hard a

road, that she despaired of following in his steps. But Reuben had

leaped to the conquest, and carried a blithe heart with him. Surely,

then, there must be a joy in believing.

"I thank you very much for your letter, Reuben," said Adèle, and she

looked eagerly into his face for traces of that triumph which so

glittered throughout his letter.

And she did not look in vain; for, whether it were from the warm,

electric touch of those white, thin fingers of hers, or the eager

welcome in her eyes, or from more sacred cause, a great joy shone in his

face,--a joy that from thenceforward they began to share in common. At

last--at last, a bright illumination was spread over the dreary

teachings of these last years. Not a doubt, not a penalty, not a mystic,

blind utterance of the Catechism, but the glowing enthusiasm of Reuben

invested it with cheery promise, or covered it with the wonderful

glamour of his hope. Between these two young hearts--the one, till then,

all doubt and weariness, and the other, just now, all impassioned

exuberance--there came a grafting, by virtue of which the religious

sentiment, in Adèle shot away from all the severities around her into an

atmosphere of peace and joy.

The Doctor saw it, and wondered at the abounding mercies of God. The

spinster saw it, and rejoiced at the welding of this new link in the

chain of her purposes. The village people all saw it, and said among

themselves, "If he has won her from the iniquities of the world, he can

win her for a wife, if he will."

And the echoes of such speeches come, as they needs must, to the ear of

Rose, without surprising her, so much do they seem the echo of her own

thought; and if her heart may droop a little under it, she conceals it

bravely, and abates no jot in her abounding love for Adèle.

"I wish Phil were here," she says in the privacy of her home.

"So do I, darling," says the mother, and looks at her with a tender

inquisitiveness that makes the sweet girl flinch, and affect for a

moment a noisy gayety, which is not in her heart.

Rose! Rose! are you not taking wrong stitches again?

RODOLPHE TÖPFFER,

THE GENEVESE CARICATURIST.

In 1842 there appeared in New York a little _brochure_ with scarcely any

letter-press, which contained many pages of the most humorous and

spirited sketches. Its title told the whole story, namely:--

_"The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck: wherein are duly set forth the

Crosses, Chagrins, Calamities, Checks, Chills, Changes, and

Circumgyrations by which his Courtship was attended. Showing also the

Issue of his Suit, and his Espousal to his Ladye-Love."_

Thousands laughed themselves to tears, when looking at these grotesque,

yet lifelike pictures; but scarcely one knew the name of their author,

M. Rodolphe Töpffer, of Geneva, Switzerland.

Long before Mr. Oldbuck made his appearance in America, he had been the

means of uniting in fast friendship the great poetic giant of Germany,

Goethe, and the modest Genevese caricaturist. The least of M. Töpffer's

merit, however, was his ability to handle the pencil. As a humoristic,

satiric, pathetic, and æsthetic writer, he is unique in the French

language. His wonderful genius was so pliable, that, while he excelled

in the power of catching the warmest glow of Nature in those exquisite

descriptions with which his writings are filled, and while, with

picture-words, he could reproduce all the tender beauty of a sunset in

the Alps, or the soft, singing gurgle of the mountain-brook, no one

better than he could also portray every subtile shade and feature of the

human mind. He excelled in analyzing character. His mental perception

was sympathetic and ready. His mind-eye was so keen and so piercing,

that nothing could escape its searching glance. The most insignificant

attitude of the heart was not only seen, but at once noted down and

studied by him; and in its delicately skilful dissection, Töpffer

comprehended the whole of the individual. Hence his universality. In

manner of thought, and in style, his writings have traits which remind

one of Sterne, Addison, Charles Lamb, Montaigne, Xavier de Maistre, (the

author of the famous "Voyage autour de ma Chambre,") and our own

Hawthorne.

It is just twenty-three years ago, that Xavier de Maistre, being

besieged by publishers for another of his charming stories, answered,

"Before all, take Töpffer, not me." Previously to this, a Swiss

gentleman, while visiting Weimar, introduced to Goethe the comic series

already referred to, which Töpffer had merely thrown off in his hours of

leisure. Goethe at once sent over the Alps for "Mr. Jabot," "Mr.

Pencil," "Mr. Crépin," and "Dr. Festus"; and, in the "Kunst und

Alterthum," the great poet expressed to his admiring circle of friends

his full appreciation, of the unequalled ability and charming humor of

Töpffer. He went still farther; for, in his favorite literary journal,

he drew the attention of all Germany to the merit of the Genevese

author.

In 1839, M. de Sainte-Beuve introduced, with the highest eulogium, M.

Töpffer to the wide and fastidious world of French letters. Thus did the

greatest genius of Germany, the most celebrated modern romancer of

Northern Italy, and one of the first writers of France stand godfathers

to M. Töpffer. Their judgment did not misguide them; for, though Töpffer

was not a _littérateur_ by profession, his few volumes stand out in

French literature like those gigantic Alpine summits whose snow-white

purity is never dimmed by cloud-shadows.

But I anticipate. Personal recollections become more interesting in

proportion to the distance of time which intervenes between us and the

death of the loved and admired. Violets are not gathered on a fresh-made

grave; and the soil of Memory must have been moistened with tears,

before we can expect it to yield its most cherished flowers.

As some of our author's works, "Les Nouvelles Génevoises," and "Les

Voyages en Zig-Zag," have attracted considerable attention in the United

States, a sketch of his life and a mention of his various writings will

be acceptable to American readers.

I was but a child when the name of Töpffer already had for me a

significance and a meaning which no other possessed. I had a feeling of

deepest regard and veneration for him, as I would meet him in the narrow

streets of Geneva, or in some of the shaded walks, which clasp, like

loving arms of Beauty, that bright little city of Central Europe. His

tall, commanding figure gave him an air of dignity and patrician

distinction; which latter was his by right. When he looked at you from

under the shadow of his broad-brimmed hat, you felt in that gaze there

was power,--a something which dropped from his eye into your very heart,

and made its home there.

But allow me to make a _détour_, and call attention to that city where

Töpffer was born, and where society had such an influence upon his

creative mind.

No spot in all Europe has more intrinsic importance than Switzerland.

Perched, as it is, amid inaccessible summits of intellectual and of

geographical elevation, it remains the magnetic centre, towards which,

from every part of the world, the sympathies of people most naturally

converge. And Geneva--the proud, miniature Republic--is to-day what she

has been for three long centuries, the Mecca of Switzerland, a luminous

altar of freedom of thought and of intellectual independence, from which

bold opinions have sprung and radiated, and around which every son of

Liberty has rallied. The Republic of Geneva stands alone in her

celebrity. So small a country that one morning's drive embraces the

whole of its territory, it can yet boast of a nationality so deeply

rooted, and of an individuality so strongly marked, that no foreign

invasion and no foreign contact have ever been able to impair them.

It is impossible, even for the most superficial reader of history, to

overlook that great array of names which made the last years of the

eighteenth century so illustrious in Europe. Among them it is equally

impossible not to recognize those which Geneva so proudly furnished.

Theology, Natural Science, Philology, Morals, Intellectual Philosophy,

and Belles-Lettres,--all these branches are admirably represented, and

bend down with their luxuriant weight of fruit. The native land of such

men as Bonnet, De Saussure, De Candolle, Calandrini, Hubert, Rousseau,

Sismondi, Necker, has nothing to covet from other countries. Still

Geneva became the foster-mother of many great men. Calvin she took from

his own Picardy. Theodore Agrippa d'Aubigné, the grandfather of Madame

de Maintenon, and ancestor of Merle d'Aubigné, the truest friend of

Henry IV., Geneva honored as if her own son. Voltaire so loved Geneva

that there he had a residence as well as at Ferney, and sang with

enthusiasm of blue Lake Leman, "Mon lac est le premier." Madame de Staël

was born of Swiss parents in Paris, but her childhood and many of her

mature years were spent in charming Coppet, where the waters of the lake

lave the shores within the boundary of the Canton of Geneva. Sismondi

was a native of Geneva, and under the influence of Madame de Staël, and

inspired by his visits to Italy, resolved to devote himself to the past

glories of the land of his ancestors. It was in the city of Geneva that

he first delivered those lectures on "The Literature of Southern

Europe," which, in book-form, are so well known to every civilized

nation. Benjamin Constant, another Genevese, was a kindred spirit, who

shared with Madame de Staël a delightful and profitable intimacy.

Dumont; (so highly eulogized by Lord Macaulay,) the friend of Mirabeau

and of Jeremy Bentham, was also of Geneva. De Candolle and his son gave

to science their arduous labors. De la Rive in Chemistry, Pictet in

Electrology, and Merle d'Aubigné in History, Gaussen and Malan in

Theology, and many others, not unknown to fame, might be mentioned as

continuing the list of distinguished names that testify to the

intellectual supremacy of Geneva.

Here, in our own day, what sons of Fame have gone to linger near a

society so congenial! Byron tells us that his life was purer at Geneva

than that which he led elsewhere. Here, amidst the scenes consecrated by

Milton nearly two centuries before, Shelley delighted to dream away his

summer hours. He loved to go forth on the pellucid surface of "clear,

placid Leman," there to drink in the soft beauties of the shores, or to

gaze upon the distant sublimities of Mont Blanc. Here Sir Humphry Davy

came, after his Southern tour, and "laid him down to die." Wordsworth

found here the graces of his Westmoreland home wedded to a grandeur

which realized the loftiest conception of his mind. At Geneva, to-day,

is found that noble son of France and devoted friend of America, the

Count Agénor de Gasparin.

Here, too, have members of the royal and noble houses of Europe come to

be wooed by those waters whose "crystal face" Byron calls

"The mirror where the stars and mountains view

The stillness of their aspect."

The late Charles Albert, the hero King of Sardinia, was educated at

Geneva. More than once did the future benefactor and monarch of Northern

Italy stray along the road to Lausanne, or float in his little shallop

on the side of Bellevue, whence he could look upon that prettiest of

summer residences, Pregny, and at night could listen to the trills of

the nightingales, which sing with a tenderness peculiar to the Valley of

Geneva. At Pregny lived Josephine, whose Imperial spouse had driven away

from Sardinia the members of the House of Savoy. But Time is a wonderful

magician, and to-day near beautiful Pregny the nephew of Europe's great

conqueror and conquered and the grand-daughter of Charles Albert have

their own villa. The favorite residence of the late Grand Duchess

Constantine of Russia was La Boissière, in the Canton of Geneva, and on

the road to Chamouny, not far from the house of Sismondi. The late

Duchess de Broglie, the daughter of Madame de Staël, lived during the

winter in the street St. Antoine; near where M. Töpffer had his house,

and in the summer at Coppet. Not far from her, at Genthod, resided that

gentle daughter of America, the Baroness Rumpf, still remembered in New

York as the daughter of John Jacob Astor. The Duchess de Broglie and the

Baroness Rumpf are rare instances of the truest Christian womanhood in

exalted stations.--But a whole magazine article would not suffice to

give a list of the great, the noble, and the gifted who have sojourned

for a time in the city of Geneva.

Yet, if Geneva has borrowed some of the great of other countries, she

has amply repaid the debt. She sent her Casaubon to the court of James

I. of England, to be the defender of the faith. Later, she lent to

England her De Lolme, who added to his distinguished political acumen

such affluent philological knowledge, that he wrote one of the best

works ever written on the British Constitution in the English and the

French languages. She lent to Russia Le Fort, the famous general and

admiral, the counsellor of Peter the Great, the originator of the

Russian navy, and the founder of that army out of which grew the forces

that defeated Charles XII. at Pultowa. During the tempestuous days which

signalized the downfall of a monarchy, and while France was rent asunder

by the mad upheavings of an infuriated populace, Necker was called to

the head of the finances. After five years of indefatigable probity, and

when his services had enlisted the profound gratitude of the doomed

king, he was compelled to quit Paris. Recalled again, and again

dismissed, his final departure was the signal for a general outbreak,

which resulted in the taking of the Bastille and the overthrow of the

House of Capet. Albert Gallatin she gave to the United States. How

curious it is to trace the life of this son of Geneva! Graduating with

honors at his native university, he came to America in 1780, was

commander of a small fort at Machias while Maine was still

Massachusetts, was teacher in Harvard University, filled high places

under the government of Pennsylvania; elected Senator to Congress from

that State, (but vacating his seat because his residence had not been

sufficiently long to qualify him,) Secretary of the Treasury under

Jefferson, Envoy Extraordinary to sign the Treaty of Ghent, and for

seven years Minister Plenipotentiary to France. He was offered the

Secretaryship of State by Madison, a place in the Cabinet by Monroe, and

was selected by the dominant party as a candidate for the second office

in the gift of the American people. All of these last three proffered

honors he refused, and passed the remainder of his long life in the

genial pursuits of literature.

If Geneva has been the fireside of learning and of belles-lettres, it

has not been less the home of the fine arts. Petitot, the celebrated

painter on enamel, has handsomely paid his share to the

_chefs-d'oeuvres_ of the seventeenth century. While enjoying the

capricious favors of Charles I. at Whitehall, where he had his lodgings,

he worked on some of those perfect portraits which to-day have their

place in the Louvre, and which for ages must remain the triumphs of

minutely finished, expressive Art. Nor is the little Republic poor in

contemporaneous artistic talent. Pradier was born and grew up in

presence of Mont Blanc, whose sublime grandeur may well inspire the

dreams of the sculptor and ennoble him. Calame, Diday, and Hubert in

landscape painting, and Hornung in historical painting, (widely known by

his "Death of John Calvin,") are all sons of Geneva. Thalberg, the

musician, is a native of Geneva.

The habitual companionship of master minds must necessarily exert an

immediate and irresistible influence upon the rapid growth of thoughts

and ideas in the young. And it is not to be wondered at that those who

from their earliest infancy have had the readiest access to such a

companionship, and who have most fully imbibed that influence, retain

through the after-years of life a strength and a boldness of originality

essentially opposed to the hesitating timidity of less favored

individuals. In a society like that of Geneva, where family traditions

are jealously cherished as a part of the national history, and where

every family has its importance and its well-defined place, the memory

of distinguished men cannot perish, but is handed down from father to

son, as a portion of the state patrimony. Every little boy, as he plays

in the street, feels that he has reason to be proud that he is a

Genevese. It was with such sentiments and under such auspices that

Töpffer glided through the years of childhood. He drank deep at the

fountain of inspiration unawares, and manhood found him ready to follow

those who beckoned to him from the pages of history.

Rodolphe Töpffer was born at Geneva on the seventeenth day of February,

1799. As his name indicates, he was of German descent; but his family

had resided so many years in French Switzerland that he could no longer

be claimed by the land of Schiller and Goethe, though it was said that

one of his most distinctive literary characteristics was like that of

Mozart in music,--that he blended the deep, warm feeling of Germany with

the light and elegant graces of Southern Europe.

Americans who have visited the public Gallery of Art, known in Geneva as

the Musée Rath, will perhaps recall a small, but very spirited,

winter-scene, painted in oil, and which bears the name of Töpffer. This

picture is by the father of Rodolphe. M. Töpffer _le père_ was the first

of that long list of Swiss painters who became devoted students of

Nature. The names of Calame, Diday, (Calame's master,) and Hubert are

now known throughout the world; and that of Calame stands among the

first in the rank of eminent living landscape painters. They are worthy

successors of the father of Rodolphe Töpffer, who was peculiarly happy

in rendering the mountain-scenes of Savoy, and in portraying those

picturesque and attractive episodes of peasant-life entitled "The

Village Wedding," "The Fair in Winter," etc., etc.

There are but few incidents to record of Töpffer _fils_. It is in his

writings mostly that he is to be found. Elsewhere he is only passing by;

but _there_ he dwells and shines in full radiance. His life was so

quietly modest, so tranquil and far removed from the tumultuous

preoccupations which belong to a fashionable society, it was so simple

and pure, that the biographer is at a loss to find any striking event

that may give it an outward coloring. When only a child, as he so

charmingly tells us in his inimitable pages of the "Presbytère," he

devoured books, all sorts of books,--indeed, all the books he could get

hold of in his uncle's well-stocked library. And many an hour of his

sunny boyhood did he pass at the window in the house where he was born,

gazing dreamily at the mullions, arches, and fretted work of the old

Cathedral, or at the distant flight of the swallows, while in his mind

he dwelt upon some brilliant _saillie_ of Montaigne or Rabelais. His

marked fondness for sketching showed itself in numerous and picturesque

outlines, all of which bore the unmistakable stamp of talent, and

foretold in the exuberance of the boy-fancy what the man would be.

Happily for him, happily for us who are allowed to gather up the crumbs

of art and authorship which fell from his ample store, Töpffer enjoyed

the very best and most propitious advantages which in any country can

bless childhood. He was born in the lap of a society daintily

intellectual and fastidiously cultivated. His very first impressions

were those of refinement. His very first steps were directed towards

culture. There was no arid waste around him, and he had not to cut his

way through the newly broken furrows of a young civilization. He was

taken by the hand of Genius at the very outset of his career, and was

never allowed to falter; for in the successive creations of his pencil

and of his pen there is the same fulness of imagination, the same

delicacy of observation, the same exquisite perfection of analysis. He

seems to have understood so well the power of his mind, that he never

ventured beyond his depth, but sustained himself through all his years

of authorship with the same grace and elegance.

And nowhere could he have better artistic encouragement and emulation

than in his native city. We do not remember who said that "in Geneva

every child is born an artist," but the statement would bear

investigation. Talent as well as taste for drawing and painting is

almost universal, and belongs as well to the poor as to the rich. It

may not be well known that De Candolle, the celebrated and untiring

Genevese botanist, made use, in a course of lectures, of a valuable

collection of tropical American plants, intrusted to his care by a

Spanish botanist. Unfortunately, the herbarium was needed by its owner

sooner than expected, and Professor De Candolle was requested to send it

back. This he stated to his audience, with many a regret for so

irreparable a loss. But some of the ladies present at once offered to

copy the whole collection in one week, This was done. The drawings,

"filling thirteen folio volumes, and amounting in number to eight

hundred and sixty, were accurately executed by one hundred and fourteen

women-artists in the time specified." In most cases the principal parts

of the plants alone were colored; the rest was only pencilled with great

accuracy. Where is the other city of the same size in which such a

number of amateur lady-artists could be found? One of these very

drawings, having been accidentally dropped in the street, was picked up

by a little girl ten years old, and was returned to De Candolle, copied

by the child; and it is no blemish to the collection.

The son of an artist, Töpffer found his own career ready made, and

stepped into it with all the instincts of his Art-loving nature. His few

early paintings are full of promise. But the young artist was not

destined to distinguish himself in his chosen career. A disease of the

eyes compelled him to give up his favorite pursuit. His brush, still

warm from the passionate ardor with which it had been grasped, was

broken and thrown away. Töpffer lamented all his life long the privation

that was thus forced upon him. Art, as a profession, was closed against

his eager ambition; yet he loved Art, and lived for it. Happily for him,

he was still in the complete possession of all his hopes and illusions.

Happily for him, he was young; and, without being discouraged by his

great disappointment, he turned the bent of his mind study-ward. Töpffer

became a close student of human nature. He took to analyzing it

instinctively, as the bird takes to the air. He was more than a dreamer,

though the charming dreams which we have from him make us half regret,

perhaps, that he did something else besides dreaming. He says, in his

story, "La Bibliothèque de mon Oncle,"--"The man who does not enjoy

dreaming his time away is but an automaton, who travels from life to

death like a locomotive rushing from Manchester to Liverpool. A whole

summer spent in this listless manner does not seem _de trop_ in a

refined education. It is even probable that one such summer would not

prove enough to produce a great man. Socrates dreamed his time away for

years. Rousseau did the same till he was forty years old; La

Fontaine--his whole life. And what a charming mode of working is that

science of losing time!"

But, either dreaming or working, Töpffer knew well what he was capable

of; and without impatience, without restlessness, he awaited the future,

consoling himself with the sentiment he expresses so well in the

following sentence:--"What can be said of those beardless poets who dare

to sing at that age, when, if they were true poets, they would not have

too much in their whole being with which to _feel_, and to inhale

silently, those perfumes which later only they may know how to diffuse

in their verse? There are precocious mathematicians; but precocious

poets--_never_."

Töpffer was right. Life is the true poet. Its teachings drop in tears,

and the heart receives them kneeling, and is in no hurry to babble to

the world all their silent beauty.

If Töpffer studied, it was not alone. He had devoted himself to the

serious task of education. His pupils, mostly the sons of wealthy

Englishmen and Russians, together with a few lads from France, Italy,

and America, served only to widen his family circle. His relation to

them was charming. As an authority, he used the most winning persuasion.

He respected the mental individuality even of a child, and would use

his admirable tact in kindly encouraging every indication of talent,

which, from want of a sufficient self-reliance or of a timely care, was

hiding itself. Year after year, in vacation-time, Töpffer left the

city with his thirty or forty young companions, and with them he

travelled on foot through the mountains and around the lakes of

Switzerland,--sometimes pushing in the track of Agassiz over glacier

billows, sometimes wandering far down upon the fertile plains of

Lombardy and Venetia. These were always most delightful excursions, when

the ordinary halt became a common enjoyment, not only from the

fun-loving spirit of the master, but also for the promise of future

illustrations. After the return home, during the long winter evenings,

Töpffer took either his pen or his pencil, and, with his pupils,

re-gathered from their memoranda and drawings their summer impressions

and adventures. Then he made his paper laugh with the spirited and

piquant sketches which all know who have peeped into the "Voyages en

Zig-Zag." Thus his fireside amusements have become those of the world.

The "Voyages en Zig-Zag," before his death, were already classic in

France. The richest luxury of type, paper, and illustration has not been

spared, and edition after edition is scattered in Europe from the Neva

to the Tagus. In the "Voyages" we find the most correct delineation, in

words and sketches, of the peculiarities and glories of Alp-land. The

exquisite French of this work has never yet found a translator.

His early style had something so fresh and so quaint that it can be

accounted for only by going to the books which Töpffer studied. His _dii

majores_ were Montaigne and Amyot, and Paul Louis Courier, a learned

Hellenistic scholar, as well as vivacious writer of the French

Revolution and of the first Empire. For Montaigne Töpffer cherished the

highest admiration. In his "Reflections and Short Disquisitions upon

Art," (_Réflexions et Menus Propos_,) he thus tersely sums up the

excellency of the French philosopher:--"Thinker full of probity and

grace; philosopher so much the greater by that which he said he did not

know than by that which he thought he knew." In our own language,

Shakspeare was his favorite author. M. de Sainte-Beuve says, "Töpffer

was sworn to Shakspeare," and adds that the works of Hogarth first

taught the Genevese writer to appreciate Shakspeare, Richardson, and

Fielding.

Besides possessing the ability to convey instruction to others, Töpffer

was a fine classical scholar. With two other literary gentlemen, he

published some excellent editions of the Greek classics, which he

enriched with notes. All these qualifications marked him as the man for

a still higher position. Accordingly, in 1832, when only thirty-three,

he was appointed Professor of Belles-Lettres in the College of Geneva.

At the same time, while discharging faithfully his duties in the

College, he conducted, aided by tutors, his little _pension_, now so

well known by the "Voyages en Zig-Zag."

It was in the midst of these various occupations that Töpffer took his

recreation in contributing to the literary periodicals of Geneva

superior essays on Art, and many of those charming stories which to-day

delight us in the collection entitled "Les Nouvelles Génevoises." He

also wrote for political journals. But what made him first known outside

those communities where the French tongue is spoken were his humoristic

sketches. They were not thrown off from his fertile and genial hand for

gain or for renown. From childhood, under the influence of artistic

example at home, and of his admiration of Hogarth, he had acquired a

remarkable skill in graphically delineating whatever his close

observation of men prompted. Like Hogarth, his artist-wit, his fun, and

his moral teachings took the shape of series. These were handed around

the circle of his intimate friends; yet he had thoughts only of his own

amusement and of that of his companions, and did not contemplate

offering them to the public. It was at the urgency of Goethe that he

gave them to the world.

In 1842, as we stated before, "M. Vieux Bois" (Mr. Oldbuck) appeared in

the United States; and the following year, 1843, "M. Cryptogame," under

the name of "Bachelor Butterfly," (by no means so amusing or so full of

hits for America as some other sketches,) delighted the Transatlantic

reader.

Visitors to Geneva had their attention drawn to the "Voyages en Zig-Zag"

as soon as it was published; and in 1841 "Les Nouvelles Génevoises" took

the literary and artistic world of Paris by surprise. These simple

graphic stories gained the hearts of thousands. French tourists and

French artists sought the basin of Lake Leman, the wild passes of the

Vallée de Trient, the Lac de Gers, the Col d'Anterne, and the Deux

Scheidegg, wooed thither by the picturesque pages of Töpffer. The

"Presbytère," a fresh story in the epistolary form, not long after

crossed the Jura, and amidst the artificial, heated literature of Paris,

appeared as reviving as a bracing morning in the Alps.

In this modest way M. Töpffer was unconsciously building up his European

reputation. The warp of his talent is the richest of humor blended with

woman-like sensibility and tenderness. Fanciful, but never exaggerated,

he stands before us an amiable philosopher, whose heart is large enough

to comprehend and to pity the frailties of human nature, yet whose

spotless purity serves as a beacon--light on the wreck-strewn shore of

human passions. He has not the exaltation nor the ardent vehemence of

Rousseau, neither has he the sentimental morbidity of Xavier de Maistre.

On the contrary, he is always true and always simple, and he remains

within the bounds of emotion which the family circle allows. This must

be accounted for by the peaceful life which he led, (a life so different

from that of his French literary brothers,) as well as by the beneficial

influence of the society in which he resided. That society, though

cultivated and liberal, has, in contrast with that of France, remained

pure. It retains as its birthright a certain nameless innocence, unknown

in the polished French circles a few leagues beyond. M. de Sainte-Beuve

wonders at this, and asks,--"Is it that man is kept pure and good by the

magnificent beauties in which Nature rocks him there from his babyhood?

Is it that the heart becomes awed in presence of that sublime calm of

Nature, and, before he is aware of it, the passions have transformed

themselves into a religious adoration?"

But the true source of the Genevese author's purity was apart from,

though deeply influenced by Nature. He was a man of principle and of

religious faith. Töpffer had but to gaze into his own heart to find all

the sweet, the graceful, and the fresh poetry of his country. His

untiring and patient observation of Nature is the secret of his power as

a writer. He disdained nothing, for nothing seemed too small for him.

Nature, in none of its phases, could appear insignificant to his fertile

and mellow soul. When he could not soar in the high regions of

contemplative philosophy, he stooped as low as the little child whose

rosy cheek he patted, and who then became to him a teacher and a study.

An insect crawling on a leaf,--a bit of grass bringing the joy of its

short life around the stones of the pavement,--a cloud floating over the

meadows,--a murmur of voices in the air,--the wings of a butterfly, or

the thundering of the storm above the lake,--all and everything was the

domain where his genial disposition reaped so plentiful a harvest of

rare graces and smiles.

When Töpffer abandoned his brushes for his pen, it seems that the vision

of his mind became intensified, and he began to study man as minutely as

he had studied Nature. He became a moral portrait-painter, in the same

way as his illustrious townsmen, Calame and Diday, were landscape

painters. To analyze and to describe became the occupation he most

delighted in; and the more minute the analysis and the more subtile the

description, the more also was he pleased with it.

Töpffer's writings are eminently moral. There are few works in French

literature in which the moral aspiration is so alive and the worship of

duty so eloquently advocated. In reading them one feels that the writer

did not step beyond his own sentiments, that he did not borrow

convictions, that he did not affect the austerity of a stolen creed. He

writes as he feels, and he feels rightly,--never forgetting to remain

indulgent, even when he appears most unbendingly severe. Then to it all

he adds an inexhaustible cheerfulness. His mind wears no dark-colored

glasses; it is strong and healthy enough to bear the dazzling effulgence

of the sun. Töpffer was a joyous man. If he so rapidly seized the

ridiculous, it was through his love of fun; but while he laughed at

others, so kind and genial was he ever that he made others join and

laugh with him also.

We said that his genius was universal. He is eminently so in his

artistic creations. Take, for instance, his unique comic sketches and

compare them with those of other leading caricaturists. Our impression

must be that none are like his. Leech, Doyle, and Gavarni have attained

a reputation which the world acknowledged long ago, and which no one

would dare dispute; yet they differ entirely from the Genevese

caricaturist. "Oldbuck" (_M. Vieux Bois_) is as universal as music or

Shakspeare, and belongs to no one country in particular. All of Leech's

pretty women, his "Mr. Briggs" and his "Frederick Augustus," with his

"_Haw_" and other swell words and airs, are all unmistakably English.

They could have been born on no other soil than England. It requires an

Englishman, or an American familiar with English fashions and foibles,

to appreciate them. The German, the Frenchman, the Spaniard, the

Italian, or the Russian, could no more understand them without a

previous initiation, or study and experience of English manners, than

they could speak English without long application and practice. The same

may be said of Richard Doyle's famous "Foreign Tour of Messrs. Brown,

Jones, and Robinson." Here we have an irresistible series of sketches,

depicting what the famous trio saw, what they said, and what they did,

in Belgium, Switzerland, and Italy. The interest of that work lies in an

intense expression of English nationality, carried everywhere by the

three Englishmen. Their mishaps and adventures are exactly such as every

American has witnessed a thousand times, when some of his cousins from

the fast-anchored isle have visited him. Gavarni, though freer with his

pencil than either Doyle or Leech, is still as much of a Parisian as

Albert Smith was a Londoner. Every one of his spirited sketches is

intensely French, and, above all, Parisian. To a person who knew nothing

of Paris, who had never been in Paris, and who was not somewhat _au

fait_ with the gay and triste, the splendid and squalid, the brilliant

and unequal society there, these sketches would be meaningless. Again,

Gavarni's pictures are not series. He does not develop his heroes and

heroines. He does not make us feel for them in their mishaps. We do not

laugh _with_ them, as we would with friends or acquaintances, but we

laugh _at_ them. We do not once recognize _ourselves_ in them. His

portraits stand before us, but we gaze at them as we would at some

half-civilized creatures, with curiosity more than with mirth; and while

we admire and acknowledge the truthfulness of the sketch, we do not

desire to have any familiarity or contact with the individuals

represented. Furthermore, Gavarni is more limited than Doyle, by making

the "Sweep," the "Rag-Picker," the "Grisette," tell his or her own

story; and what each one says is necessary to the comprehension of the

person before you. But very different is Töpffer. He possesses, with the

funny conception of Leech and Doyle, a freer pictorial conception than

either, and holds a pencil that is more at command than Gavarni's. In

his single outlines, often of the rudest kind, there is the very

rollicking of freedom, the exact hitting of traits and character. He

dashes down his creation with the quickness of thought, and with as

much confidence that Messrs. Oldbuck, Crépin, and Jabot will leap into

the very existence he wishes them to assume, as Giotto had, when, with a

single sweep of his arm, he drew his magic circle. It may be objected,

that the comparison between the two Englishmen and the two Continentals

is hardly equal. Doyle and Leech lost, doubtless, much of their freedom

by drawing with hard pencils upon box for the wood-engraver. Töpffer and

Gavarni swept the soft, yielding crayon over the lithographer's stone,

and hence we have the very conception of the artists in their sketches.

The whole Continent roared over "M. Vieux Bois," then England began to

laugh, and finally America. Yet "M. Vieux Bois" was only the portrait of

a foolish old bachelor in love. Though born in Geneva, he was neither

Swiss nor French, neither English nor American; he was simply human. He

exemplifies Töpffer's universality.

I have already mentioned the "Nouvelles Génevoises," the "Voyages en

Zig-Zag," and the "Presbytère." But it is not possible to quote from

them. Before pages so lively and so picturesquely effective, one feels

embarrassed in selecting any particular portion, lest another should be

left unnoticed,--like the child, who, being told that he may help

himself to choice flowers, feels afraid that he will not take those he

most wants, and, in his hesitation, dares not so much as untie the

bouquet. The reader must choose for himself. He can accompany the

amiable philosopher in his summer excursions, take the Alpine-stock, and

with him visit the mountain solitudes, or linger around the blue

lakes--those air-hung forget-me-nots--which gem the highest valleys of

Switzerland.

His remaining works, published in book-form, are "Rosa et Gertrude," and

the "Réflexions et Menus Propos d'un Peintre Génevois, ou Essai sur le

Beau dans les Arts."

"Rosa et Gertrude," given to the public a short time before his death,

is considered by some as holding the first place in Töpffer's works of

imagination. It is a touching story of two orphan girls, deeply attached

to each other, one of whom, deceived and maltreated by the world,

receives that kind and Christian charity "which thinketh no evil" from

M. Bernier, the good old clergyman, who is the guardian of Rosa and

Gertrude, as well as the narrator of their simple history. In this book

Töpffer has abandoned the humoristic, his ordinary vein in his short

stones, and in taking up the more serious mode of treating his

characters has succeeded so well that Albert Aubert of Paris, in his

criticism, says, "In 'Rosa and Gertrude' M. Töpffer has surpassed

himself"; and yet it is not so characteristic as his other writings.

However, that one of M. Töpffer's works which, it seems to me, is

destined to live longest in the future, is his "Réflexions et Menus

Propos," etc.,--"Reflections and Short Disquisitions on Art." Here are

the results of twelve years' meditations on Art, by one who _felt_ Art

in his inmost soul, and who understood its practice as well as its

theory. In this work we find a Ruskin without dogmatism, uncertainty, or

man-worship. If Töpffer had written several volumes on his favorite

subject, we should not find him, in each succeeding tome, taking back

what he had said in the first. He studied, reflected, rewrote, and then

waited patiently for years before he committed his mature judgment to

the perpetuity of print. Long before Ruskin's first volume appeared,

Töpffer's "Réflexions et Menus Propos" had commanded the admiration of

the best writers and artists of the Continent. As an æsthetic and

philosophic work, it is of the highest value. Pearls of thought and

beauty are dropped on every side. It is relieved by fanciful episodes;

and yet the whole book starts from and plays around a stick of India

ink! It is not merely a volume in which the professional artist can gain

great advantage, but one by which the general reader is fascinated as

well as instructed. The former may discern its scope and its importance

in the felicity with which Töpffer illustrates the true aim of Art, as

being the expression, the idealization, and not the rigid copy of

Nature. He maintains that Nature should be the only teacher, and that we

are to be wedded to no man's mannerism.

It is to be hoped that some day the "Réflexions et Menus Propos" may be

rendered into English by one fully acquainted, not only with French, but

with the philosophic and the æsthetic writings of France. If the late

Bayle St. John (whose knowledge of the French language and manner of

thought was so thorough) had possessed the finished style of the author

of "Six Months in Italy," he would have been the very man to have

introduced M. Töpffer's works to English readers.

Whoever reads the works which I have thus briefly mentioned will regret

that so genial and gifted a man as M. Töpffer should have been so soon

snatched away from earth. It is rare to find in any author's or artist's

life such calm happiness as that which smiled over his existence. Fame

did not spoil him; and if he lived long enough to win it, he died too

soon to enjoy it.

The last two years of M. Töpffer's life were years of continual

suffering, through which his amiable cheerfulness never faltered. When

he was told by his physicians that he could not recover, as if he

thought only of alleviating the sorrow of those who loved him, he did

not give way for one hour to impressions of sadness, and his private

journal alone received the confidence of the keen regret he felt in

taking farewell of his young wife and his lovely children. To the very

last day of his life his friends found him in the evening surrounded by

his family, and even then handling the pencil for their amusement and

his own.

On Sundays, Calame dined with him; and we may imagine what a brilliant

coloring of thought must have characterized the conversation of these

two sympathetic men.

In 1844, when M. Töpffer had just concluded his romance of "Rosa et

Gertrude," his disease took an alarming turn, and he became aware that

he was fast drawing to the close of his earthly voyage. After two

repeated visits to the French watering-place of Vichy, he returned to

Geneva. Towards the end of the following winter he was obliged to

abandon those duties which hitherto had been to him so pure an

enjoyment. Unable now to write, he tried painting, which, it will be

remembered, he had given up in early manhood. Leaning heavily forward in

his chair, his easel before him, he painted with an enthusiasm which was

the last of his life. But that diversion could not be kept up long, and

he was soon compelled to sit motionless, awaiting his release.

On the morning of the 8th of June, 1846, consoled by the hopes of the

Christian, he expired. On the 14th he was followed to his final

resting-place by the whole city, among whom were those who in him had

lost their friend, their colleague, and their master. His remains sleep

in the cemetery of Plain-palais, which he has so graphically described

in "La Peur"; but his memory and his works still live in the minds of

his countrymen, and his fame is daily widening, wherever the good, the

true, and the beautiful are appreciated.

THE CHIMNEY-CORNER.

X.

THE WOMAN QUESTION: OR, WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH HER?

"Well, what will you do with her?" said I to my wife.

My wife had just come down from an interview with a pale, faded-looking

young woman in rusty black attire, who had called upon me on the very

common supposition that I was an editor of the "Atlantic Monthly."

By the bye, this is a mistake that brings me, Christopher Crowfield,

many letters that do not belong to me, and which might with equal

pertinency be addressed, "To the Man in the Moon." Yet these letters

often make my heart ache,--they speak so of people who strive and sorrow

and want help; and it is hard to be called on in plaintive tones for

help which you know it is perfectly impossible for you to give.

For instance, you get a letter in a delicate hand, setting forth the old

distress,--She is poor, and she has looking to her for support those

that are poorer and more helpless than herself: she has tried sewing,

but can make little at it; tried teaching, but cannot now get a

school,--all places being filled, and more than filled; at last has

tried literature, and written some little things, of which she sends you

a modest specimen, and wants your opinion whether she can gain her

living by writing. You run over the articles, and perceive at a glance

that there is no kind of hope or use in her trying to do anything at

literature; and then you ask yourself, mentally, "What is to be done

with her? What can she do?"

Such was the application that had come to me this morning,--only,

instead of by note, it came, as I have said, in the person of the

applicant, a thin, delicate, consumptive-looking being, wearing that

rusty mourning which speaks sadly at once of heart-bereavement and

material poverty.

My usual course is to turn such cases over to Mrs. Crowfield; and it is

to be confessed that this worthy woman spends a large portion of her

time and wears out an extraordinary amount of shoe-leather in performing

the duties of a self-constituted intelligence-office.

Talk of giving money to the poor!--what is that, compared to giving

sympathy, thought, time, taking their burdens upon you, sharing their

perplexities? They who are able to buy off every application at the door

of their heart with a five or ten dollar bill are those who free

themselves at least expense.

My wife had communicated to our friend, in the gentlest tones and in the

blandest manner, that her poor little pieces, however interesting to her

own household circle, had nothing in them wherewith to enable her to

make her way in the thronged and crowded thoroughfare of letters,--that

they had no more strength or adaptation to win bread for her than a

broken-winged butterfly to draw a plough; and it took some resolution in

the background of her tenderness to make the poor applicant entirely

certain of this. In cases like this, absolute certainty is the very

greatest, the only true kindness.

It was grievous, my wife said, to see the discouraged shade which passed

over her thin, tremulous features, when this certainty forced itself

upon her. It is hard, when sinking in the waves, to see the frail bush

at which the hand clutches uprooted; hard, when alone in the crowded

thoroughfare of travel, to have one's last bank-note declared a

counterfeit. I knew I should not be able to see her face, under the

shade of this disappointment; and so, coward that I was, I turned this

trouble, where I have turned so many others, upon my wife.

"Well, what shall we do with her?" said I.

"I really don't know," said my wife, musingly.

"Do you think we could get that school in Taunton for her?"

"Impossible; Mr. Herbert told me he had already twelve applicants for

it."

"Couldn't you get her plain sewing? Is she handy with her needle?"

"She has tried that, but it brings on a pain in her side, and cough; and

the Doctor has told her it will not do for her to confine herself."

"How is her handwriting? Does she write a good hand?"

"Only passable."

"Because," said I, "I was thinking if I could get Steele and Simpson to

give her law-papers to copy."

"They have more copyists than they need now; and, in fact, this woman

does not write the sort of hand at all that would enable her to get on

as a copyist."

"Well," said I, turning uneasily in my chair, and at last hitting on a

bright masculine expedient, "I'll tell you what must be done. She must

get married."

"My dear," said my wife, "marrying for a living is the very hardest way

a woman can take to get it. Even marrying for love often turns out badly

enough. Witness poor Jane."

Jane was one of the large number of people whom it seemed my wife's

fortune to carry through life on her back. She was a pretty, smiling,

pleasing daughter of Erin, who had been in our family originally as

nursery-maid. I had been greatly pleased in watching a little idyllic

affair growing up between her and a joyous, good-natured young Irishman,

to whom at last we married her. Mike soon after, however, took to

drinking and unsteady courses, and the result has been to Jane only a

yearly baby, with poor health, and no money.

"In fact," said my wife, "if Jane had only kept single, she could have

made her own way well enough, and might have now been in good health and

had a pretty sum in the savings bank. As it is, I must carry not only

her, but her three children, on my back."

"You ought to drop her, my dear. You really ought not to burden yourself

with other people's affairs as you do," said I, inconsistently.

"How _can_ I drop her? Can I help knowing that she is poor and

suffering? And if I drop her, who will take her up?"

Now there is a way of getting rid of cases of this kind, spoken of in a

quaint old book, which occurred strongly to me at this moment:--

"If a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, and one

of you say unto them, 'Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled,'

notwithstanding ye give them not those things which are needful to the

body, what doth it profit?"

I must confess, notwithstanding the strong point of the closing

question, I looked with an evil eye of longing on this very easy way of

disposing of such cases: a few sympathizing words, a few expressions of

hope that I did not feel, a line written to turn the case into somebody

else's hands,--any expedient, in fact, to hide the longing eyes and

imploring hands from my sight was what my carnal nature at this moment

greatly craved.

"Besides," said my wife, resuming the thread of her thoughts in regard

to the subject just now before us,--"as to marriage, it's out of the

question at present for this poor child; for the man she loved and would

have married lies low in one of the graves before Richmond. It's a sad

story;--one of a thousand like it. She brightened for a few moments, and

looked almost handsome, when she spoke of his bravery and goodness. Her

father and lover have both died in this war. Her only brother has

returned from it a broken-down cripple, and she has him and her poor old

mother to care for, and so she seeks work. I told her to come again

to-morrow, and I would look about for her a little to-day."

"Let me see, how many are now down on your list to be looked about for,

Mrs. Crowfield?--some twelve or thirteen, are there not? You've got

Tom's sister disposed of finally, I hope,--that's a comfort!"

"Well, I'm sorry to say she came back on my hands yesterday," said my

wife, patiently. "She is a foolish young thing, and said she didn't like

living out in the country. I'm sorry, because the Morrises are an

excellent family, and she might have had a life-home there, if she had

only been steady and chosen to behave herself properly. But yesterday I

found her back on her mother's hands again; and the poor woman told me

that the dear child never could bear to be separated from her, and that

she hadn't the heart to send her back."

"And, in short," said I, "she gave you notice that you must provide for

Miss O'Connor in some more agreeable way. Cross that name off your list,

at any rate. That woman and girl need a few hard raps in the school of

experience before you can do anything for them."

"I think I shall," said my long-suffering wife; "but it's a pity to see

a young thing put in the direct road to ruin."

"It is one of the inevitables," said I, "and we must save our strength

for those that are willing to help themselves."

"What's all this talk about?" said Bob, coming in upon us rather

brusquely.

"Oh, as usual, the old question," said I,--"'What's to be done with

her?'"

"Well," said Bob, "it's exactly what I've come to talk with mother

about. Since she keeps a distressed-women's agency-office, I've come to

consult her about Marianne. That woman will die before six months are

out, a victim to high civilization and the Paddies. There we are, twelve

miles out from Boston, in a country villa so convenient that every part

of it might almost do its own work,--everything arranged in the most

convenient, contiguous, self-adjusting, self-acting, patent-right,

perfective manner,--and yet, I tell you, Marianne will die of that

house. It will yet be recorded on her tombstone, 'Died of conveniences.'

For myself, what I languish for is a log cabin, with a bed in one

corner, a trundle-bed underneath for the children, a fire-place only six

feet off, a table, four chairs, one kettle, a coffee-pot, and a tin

baker,--that's all. I lived deliciously in an establishment of this kind

last summer, when I was up at Lake Superior; and I am convinced, if I

could move Marianne into it at once, that she would become a healthy and

a happy woman. Her life is smothered out of her with comforts: we have

too many rooms, too many carpets, too many vases and knickknacks, too

much china and silver; she has too many laces and dresses and bonnets;

the children all have too many clothes;--in fact, to put it

Scripturally, our riches are corrupted, our garments are moth-eaten, our

gold and our silver is cankered,--and, in short, Marianne is sick in

bed, and I have come to the agency-office for-distressed-women to take

you out to attend to her.

"The fact is," continued Bob, "that, since our cook married and Alice

went to California, there seems to be no possibility of putting our

domestic cabinet upon any permanent basis. The number of female persons

that have been through our house, and the ravages they have wrought on

it for the last six months, pass belief. I had yesterday a bill of sixty

dollars' plumbing to pay for damages of various kinds which had had to

be repaired in our very convenient water-works; and the blame of each

particular one had been bandied like a shuttlecock among our three

household divinities. Biddy privately assured my wife that Kate was in

the habit of emptying dust-pans of rubbish into the main drain from the

chambers, and washing any little extra bits down through the bowls; and,

in fact, when one of the bathing-room bowls had overflowed so as to

damage the frescoes below, my wife, with great delicacy and precaution,

interrogated Kate as to whether she had followed her instructions in the

care of the water-pipes. Of course she protested the most immaculate

care and circumspection. 'Sure, and she knew how careful one ought to

be, and wasn't of the likes of thim as wouldn't mind what throuble they

made,--like Biddy, who would throw trash and hair in the pipes, and

niver listen to her tellin'; sure, and hadn't she broken the pipes in

the kitchen, and lost the stoppers, as it was a shame to see in a

Christian house?' Ann, the third girl, being privately questioned,

blamed Biddy on Monday and Kate on Tuesday; on Wednesday, however, she

exonerated both; but on Thursday, being in a high quarrel with both, she

departed, accusing them severally not only of all the evil practices

aforesaid, but of lying, and stealing, and all other miscellaneous

wickednesses that came to hand. Whereat the two thus accused rushed in,

bewailing themselves and cursing Ann in alternate strophes, averring

that she had given the baby laudanum, and, taking it out riding, had

stopped for hours with it in a filthy lane, where the scarlet fever was

said to be rife,--in short, made so fearful a picture, that Marianne

gave up the child's life at once, and has taken to her bed. I have

endeavored all I could to quiet her, by telling her that the

scarlet-fever story was probably an extemporaneous work of fiction, got

up to gratify the Hibernian anger at Ann, and that it wasn't in the

least worth while to believe one thing more than another from the fact

that any of the tribe said it. But she refuses to be comforted, and is

so Utopian as to lie there, crying,--'Oh, if I only could get one that I

could trust,--one that really would speak the truth to me,--one that I

might know really went where she said she went, and really did as she

said she did!' To have to live so, she says, and bring up little

children with those she can't trust out of her sight, whose word is good

for nothing,--to feel that her beautiful house and her lovely things are

all going to rack and ruin, and she can't take care of them, and can't

see where or when or how the mischief is done,----in short, the poor

child talks as women do who are violently attacked with housekeeping

fever tending to congestion of the brain. She actually yesterday told me

that she wished, on the whole, she never had got married, which I take

to be the most positive indication of mental alienation."

"Here," said I, "we behold at this moment two women dying for the want

of what they can mutually give one another,--each having a supply of

what the other needs, but held back by certain invisible cobwebs,

slight, but strong, from coming to each other's assistance. Marianne has

money enough, but she wants a helper in her family, such as all her

money has been hitherto unable to buy; and here close at hand is a woman

who wants home-shelter, healthy, varied, active, cheerful labor, with

nourishing food, kind care, and good wages. What hinders these women

from rushing to the help of one another, just as two drops of water on a

leaf rush together and make one? Nothing but a miserable prejudice,--but

a prejudice so strong that women will starve in any other mode of life,

rather than accept competency and comfort in this."

"You don't mean," said my wife, "to propose that our _protégée_ should

go to Marianne as a servant?"

"I do say it would be the best thing for her to do, the only opening

that I see,--and a very good one, too, it is. Just look at it. Her bare

living at this moment cannot cost her less than five or six dollars a

week,--everything at the present time is so very dear in the city. Now

by what possible calling open to her capacity can she pay her board and

washing, fuel and lights, and clear a hundred and some odd dollars a

year? She could not do it as a district school-teacher; she certainly

cannot, with her feeble health, do it by plain sewing; she could not do

it as a copyist. A robust woman might go into a factory and earn more;

but factory-work is unintermitted, twelve hours daily, week in and out,

in the same movement, in close air, amid the clatter of machinery; and a

person delicately organized soon sinks under it. It takes a stolid,

enduring temperament to bear factory-labor. Now look at Marianne's house

and family, and see what is insured to your _protégée_ there.

"In the first place, a home,--a neat, quiet chamber, quite as good as

she has probably been accustomed to,--the very best of food, served in a

pleasant, light, airy kitchen, which is one of the most agreeable rooms

in the house, and the table and table-service quite equal to those of

most farmers and mechanics. Then her daily tasks would be light and

varied,--some sweeping, some dusting, the washing and dressing of

children, the care of their rooms and the nursery,--all of it the most

healthful, the most natural work of a woman,--work alternating with

rest, and diverting thought from painful subjects by its variety,--and

what is more, a kind of work in which a good Christian woman might have

satisfaction, as feeling herself useful in the highest and best way: for

the child's nurse, if she be a pious, well-educated woman, may make the

whole course of nursery-life an education in goodness. Then, what is far

different from many other modes of gaining a livelihood, a woman in this

capacity can make and feel herself really and truly beloved. The hearts

of little children are easily gained, and their love is real and warm,

and no true woman can become the object of it without feeling her own

life made brighter. Again, she would have in Marianne a sincere,

warm-hearted friend, who would care for her tenderly, respect her

sorrows, shelter her feelings, be considerate of her wants, and in every

way aid her in the cause she has most at heart, the succor of her

family. There are many ways besides her wages in which she would

infallibly be assisted by Marianne, so that the probability would be

that she could send her little salary almost untouched to those for

whose support she was toiling,--all this on her part."

"But," added my wife, "on the other hand, she would be obliged to

associate and be ranked with common Irish servants."

"Well," I answered, "is there any occupation, by which any of us gain

our living, which has not its disagreeable side? Does not the lawyer

spend all his days either in a dusty office or in the foul air of a

court-room? Is he not brought into much disagreeable contact with the

lowest class of society? Are not his labors dry and hard and exhausting?

Does not the blacksmith spend half his life in soot and grime, that he

may gain a competence for the other half? If this woman were to work in

a factory, would she not often be brought into associations distasteful

to her? Might it not be the same in any of the arts and trades in which

a living is to be got? There must be unpleasant circumstances about

earning a living in any way; only I maintain that those which a woman

would be likely to meet with as a servant in a refined, well-bred,

Christian family would be less than in almost any other calling. Are

there no trials to a woman, I beg to know, in teaching a district

school, where all the boys, big and little, of a neighborhood

congregate? For my part, were it my daughter or sister who was in

necessitous circumstances, I would choose for her a position such as I

name, in a kind, intelligent, Christian family, before many of those to

which women do devote themselves."

"Well," said Bob, "all this has a good sound enough, but it's quite

impossible. It's true, I verily believe, that such a kind of servant in

our family would really prolong Marianne's life years,--that it would

improve her health, and be an unspeakable blessing to her, to me, and

the children,--and I would almost go down on my knees to a really

well-educated, good, American woman who would come into our family, and

take that place; but I know it's perfectly vain and useless to expect

it. You know we have tried the experiment two or three times of having a

person in our family who should be on the footing of a friend, yet do

the duties of a servant, and that we _never_ could make it work well.

These half-and-half people are so sensitive, so exacting in their

demands, so hard to please, that we have come to the firm determination

that we will have no sliding-scale in our family, and that whoever we

are to depend on must come with _bona-fide_ willingness to take the

position of a servant, such as that position is in our house; and

_that_, I suppose, your _protégée_ would never do, even if she could

thereby live easier, have less hard work, better health, and quite as

much money as she could earn in any other way."

"She would consider it a personal degradation, I suppose," said my wife.

"And yet, if she only knew it," said Bob, "I should respect her far more

profoundly for her willingness to take that position, when adverse

fortune has shut other doors."

"Well, now," said I, "this woman is, as I understand, the daughter of a

respectable stone-mason; and the domestic habits of her early life have

probably been economical and simple. Like most of our mechanics'

daughters, she has received in one of our high schools an education

which has cultivated and developed her mind far beyond those of her

parents and the associates of her childhood. This is a common fact in

our American life. By our high schools the daughters of plain workingmen

are raised to a state of intellectual culture which seems to make the

disposition of them in any kind of industrial calling a difficult one.

They all want to teach school,--and school-teaching, consequently, is an

overcrowded profession,--and, failing that, there is only millinery and

dress-making. Of late, it is true; efforts have been made in various

directions to widen their sphere. Type-setting and book-keeping are in

some instances beginning to be open to them.

"All this time there is lying, neglected and despised, a calling to

which womanly talents and instincts are peculiarly fitted,--a calling

full of opportunities of the most lasting usefulness,--a calling which

insures a settled home, respectable protection, healthful exercise, good

air, good food, and good wages,--a calling in which a woman may make

real friends, and secure to herself warm affection: and yet this calling

is the one always refused, shunned, contemned, left to the alien and the

stranger, and that simply and solely because it bears the name of

_servant_. A Christian woman, who holds the name of Christ in her heart

in true devotion, would think it the greatest possible misfortune and

degradation to become like him in taking upon her 'the form of a

servant.' The founder of Christianity says, 'Whether is greater, he that

sitteth at meat or he that serveth? But _I_ am among you as he that

serveth.' But notwithstanding these so plain declarations of Jesus, we

find that scarce any one in a Christian land will accept real advantages

of position and employment that come with that name and condition."

"I suppose," said my wife, "I could prevail upon this woman to do all

the duties of the situation, if she could be, as they phrase it,

'treated as one of the family.'"

"That is to say," said Bob, "if she could sit with us at the same table,

be introduced to our friends, and be in all respects as one of us. Now

as to this, I am free to say that I have no false aristocratic scruples.

I consider every well-educated woman as fully my equal, not to say my

superior; but it does not follow from this that she would be one whom I

should wish to make a third party with me and my wife at mealtimes. Our

meals are often our seasons of privacy,--the times when we wish in

perfect unreserve to speak of matters that concern ourselves and our

family alone. Even invited guests and family friends would not be always

welcome, however agreeable at times. Now a woman may be perfectly worthy

of respect, and we may be perfectly respectful to her, whom nevertheless

we do not wish to take into the circle of intimate friendship. I regard

the position of a woman who comes to perform domestic service as I do

any other business relation. We have a very respectable young lady in

our employ who does legal copying for us, and all is perfectly pleasant

and agreeable in our mutual relations; but the case would be far

otherwise, were she to take it into her head that we treated her with

contempt, because my wife did not call on her, and because she was not

occasionally invited to tea. Besides, I apprehend that a woman of quick

sensibilities, employed in domestic service, and who was so far treated

as a member of the family as to share our table, would find her position

even more painful and embarrassing than if she took once for all the

position of a servant. We could not control the feelings of our friends;

we could not always insure that they would be free from aristocratic

prejudice, even were we so ourselves. We could not force her upon their

acquaintance, and she might feel far more slighted than she would in a

position where no attentions of any kind were to be expected. Besides

which, I have always noticed that persons standing in this uncertain

position are objects of peculiar antipathy to the servants in full; that

they are the cause of constant and secret cabals and discontents; and

that a family where the two orders exist has always raked up in it the

smouldering embers of a quarrel ready at any time to burst out into open

feud."

"Well," said I, "here lies the problem of American life. Half our women,

like Marianne, are being faded and made old before their time by

exhausting endeavors to lead a life of high civilization and refinement

with only such untrained help as is washed up on our shores by the tide

of emigration. Our houses are built upon a plan that precludes the

necessity of much hard labor, but requires rather careful and nice

handling. A well-trained, intelligent woman, who had vitalized her

finger-ends by means of a well-developed brain, could do all the work of

such a house with comparatively little physical fatigue. So stands the

case as regards our houses. Now over against the women that are

perishing in them from too much care, there is another class of American

women that are wandering up and down, perishing for lack of some

remunerative employment. That class of women, whose developed brains and

less developed muscles mark them as peculiarly fitted for the

performance of the labors of a high civilization, stand utterly aloof

from paid domestic service. Sooner beg, sooner starve, sooner marry for

money, sooner hang on as dependents in families where they know they are

not wanted, than accept of a quiet home, easy, healthful work, and

certain wages, in these refined and pleasant modern dwellings of ours."

"What is the reason of this?" said Bob.

"The reason is, that we have not yet come to the full development of

Christian democracy. The taint of old aristocracies is yet pervading all

parts of our society. We have not yet realized fully the true dignity of

labor, and the surpassing dignity of domestic labor. And I must say that

the valuable and courageous women who have agitated the doctrines of

Woman's Rights among us have not in all things seen their way clear in

this matter."

"Don't talk to me of those creatures," said Bob, "those men-women, those

anomalies, neither flesh nor fish, with their conventions, and their

cracked woman-voices strained in what they call public speaking, but

which I call public squeaking! No man reverences true women more than I

do. I hold a real, true, thoroughly good _woman_, whether in my parlor

or my kitchen, as my superior. She can always teach me something that I

need to know. She has always in her somewhat of the divine gift of

prophecy; but in order to keep it, she must remain a woman. When she

crops her hair, puts on pantaloons, and strides about in conventions,

she is an abortion, and not a woman."

"Come! come!" said I, "after all, speak with deference. We that choose

to wear soft clothing and dwell in kings' houses must respect the

Baptists, who wear leathern girdles and eat locusts and wild honey. They

are the voices crying in the wilderness, preparing the way for a coming

good. They go down on their knees in the mire of life to lift up and

brighten and restore a neglected truth; and we that have not the energy

to share their struggle should at least refrain from criticizing their

soiled garments and ungraceful action. There have been excrescences,

eccentricities, peculiarities about the camp of these reformers; but the

body of them have been true and noble women, and worthy of all the

reverence due to such. They have already in many of our States reformed

the laws relating to woman's position, and placed her on a more just and

Christian basis. It is through their movements that in many of our

States a woman can hold the fruits of her own earnings, if it be her ill

luck to have a worthless, drunken spendthrift for a husband. It is owing

to their exertions that new trades and professions are opening to woman;

and all that I have to say of them is, that in the suddenness of their

zeal for opening new paths for her feet, they have not sufficiently

considered the propriety of straightening, widening, and mending the one

broad, good old path of domestic labor, established by God Himself. It

does appear to me, that, if at least a portion of their zeal could be

spent in removing the stones out of this highway of domestic life, and

making it pleasant and honorable, they would effect even more. I would

not have them leave undone what they are doing; but I would, were I

worthy to be considered, humbly suggest to their prophetic wisdom and

enthusiasm, whether, in this new future of woman which they wish to

introduce, woman's natural, God-given employment of _domestic service_

is not to receive a new character and rise in a new form.

"'To love and serve' is a motto worn with pride on some aristocratic

family shields in England. It ought to be graven on the Christian

shield. _Servant_ is the name which Christ gives to the _Christian_; and

in speaking of his kingdom as distinguished from earthly kingdoms, he

distinctly said, that rank there should be conditioned, not upon desire

to command, but on willingness to serve.

"'Ye know that the princes of the Gentiles exercise dominion over them,

and they that are great exercise authority upon them. But it shall not

be so among you: but whosoever will be great among you, let him be your

minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your

_servant_.'

"Why is it, that this name of servant, which Christ says is the highest

in the kingdom of heaven, is so dishonored among us professing

Christians, that good women will beg or starve, will suffer almost any

extreme of poverty and privation, rather than accept home, competence,

security, with this honored name?"

"The fault with many of our friends of the Woman's Rights order," said

my wife, "is the depreciatory tone in which they have spoken of the

domestic labors of a family as being altogether below the scope of the

faculties of woman. '_Domestic drudgery_' they call it: an expression

that has done more harm than any two words that ever were put together.

"Think of a woman's calling clear-starching and ironing domestic

drudgery, and to better the matter turning to type-setting in a grimy

printing-office! Call the care of china and silver, the sweeping of

carpets, the arrangement of parlors and sitting rooms, drudgery; and go

into a factory and spend the day amid the whir and clatter and thunder

of machinery, inhaling an atmosphere loaded with wool and

machine-grease, and keeping on the feet for twelve hours, nearly

continuously! Think of its being called drudgery to take care of a

clean, light, airy nursery, to wash and dress and care for two or three

children, to mend their clothes, tell them stories, make them

playthings, take them out walking or driving; and rather than this, to

wear out the whole livelong day, extending often deep into the night, in

endless sewing, in a close room of a dressmaking establishment! Is it

any less drudgery to stand all day behind a counter, serving customers,

than to tend a door-bell and wait on a table? For my part," said my

wife, "I have often thought the matter over, and concluded, that, if I

were left in straitened circumstances, as many are in a great city, I

would seek a position as a servant in one of our good families."

"I envy the family that you even think of in that connection," said I.

"I fancy the amazement which would take possession of them as you began

to develop among them."

"I have always held," said my wife, "that family work, in many of its

branches, can be better performed by an educated woman than an

uneducated one. Just as an army where even the bayonets think is

superior to one of mere brute force and mechanical training, so, I have

heard it said, some of our distinguished modern female reformers show an

equal superiority in the domestic sphere,--and I do not doubt it. Family

work was never meant to be the special province of untaught brains, I

have sometimes thought I should like to show what I could do as a

servant."

"Well," said Bob, "to return from all this to the question, What's to be

done with her? Are you going to _my_ distressed woman? If you are,

suppose you take _your_ distressed woman along, and ask her to try it. I

can promise her a pleasant house, a quiet room by herself, healthful and

not too hard work, a kind friend, and some leisure for reading, writing,

or whatever other pursuit of her own she may choose for her recreation.

We are always quite willing to lend books to any who appreciate them.

Our house is surrounded by pleasant grounds, which are open to our

servants as to ourselves. So, let her come and try us. I am quite sure

that country air, quiet security, and moderate exercise in a good home

will bring up her health; and if she is willing to take the one or two

disagreeables which may come with all this, let her try us."

"Well," said I, "so be it; and would that all the women seeking homes

and employment could thus fall in with women who have homes and are

perishing in them for want of educated helpers!"

On this question of woman's work I have yet more to say, but must defer

it to another month.

JEREMY BENTHAM.

When I first knew this great and good man, he was in his seventy-ninth

year, and quite as remarkable for strength of constitution, (though he

had been always ailing up to the age of threescore,) and for

cheerfulness of temper, as for the oddities which made him a

laughing-stock for Professor Wilson and the reprobates of "Blackwood," a

prodigious myth for the "Edinburgh" and "Quarterly," and a sort of

Cocklane ghost for Sydney Smith, Hazlitt, Captain Parry, Tom Moore, and

Lord Byron.

His "Benthamee" was believed to be a language he had invented for

himself, and quite incapable of being understood, or even deciphered, by

any but a thorough-going disciple, such as Dr., now Sir John, Bowring,

James Mill, the author of "British India," John Stuart Mill, the two

Austins, or George Grote, the banker and historian of Greece.

"Ah," said Mrs. Wheeler, a strong-minded, clever woman, the Mary

Wollstonecraft of her day, on hearing that I had been asked to the

"Hermitage" of Queen-Square Place by Mr. Bentham,--"Ah, you have no idea

of what is before you! I wonder you are not afraid."

"Afraid, my dear Madam! Of what should I be afraid?"

"Afraid of being left alone with him after dinner. He cannot bear

contradiction. The queerest old man alive. One of his most intimate

friends told me that he was undoubtedly deranged, mad as a March hare

upon some subjects, and a monomaniac upon others. Do you know that he

keeps a relay of young men, thoroughly trained for the work, to follow

him round all day and pick up his droppings,--or what his followers call

'sibylline leaves,'--bits of paper, that is, written all over with

cabalistic signs, which no mortal could ever hope to decipher without a

long apprenticeship? These 'leaves' he scatters round him right and

left, while on the trot through his large, beautiful garden, or, if in

the house, while taking his 'post-prandial' vibration,--the after-dinner

walk through a narrow passageway running between a raised platform in

what he calls his 'workshop,' and the outer partition. Here he labors

day after day, and year after year, at codification, without stopping to

draw a long breath, or even to look up, so afraid is he of what may

happen to the world, if he should be taken away before it is all

finished. And here, on this platform, the table for one guest, two

secretaries, and himself is always set, and he never has more than one

guest at a time."

Extravagant and laughable as all this appeared to me at the time, I

found truth enough at the bottom, before six months were over, to

justify many of the drollest caricatures.

That Mr. Bentham's minutes were drops of gold about this time, and his

half-hours ingots, in the estimation of others, I had reason to

know,--of others, too, among the foremost celebrities of the age. Hence,

though he gave capital dinners, it was one of the rarest things in the

world for a stranger to be seen at his table. The curious and the

inquisitive stood no chance; and men of the highest rank were constantly

refused the introductions they sought.

"Anne, if the Duke of Sussex calls, I am not at home," said he one day

to his housekeeper: nobody ever knew why.

And there were hundreds of distinguished men, otherwise well-informed,

who believed in Jeremy Bentham, afar off, somewhat as others do in the

heroes of Ossian, or in their great Scandinavian prototypes, Woden and

Thor. If to be met with at all, it was only along the tops of mountains,

where "mist and moonlight mingle fitfully."

For myself, I can truly say, that, of those I met with, who talked most

freely about him, and who wrote as if well acquainted, not only with his

works, but with the man himself, there was not one in fifty who had ever

set eyes on him or knew where to look for the "Hermitage," while the

fiftieth could not tell me whether he was an Englishman or Frenchman by

birth, (most of his writings on jurisprudence being written by him in

French,) nor whether he was living or dead.

Nevertheless, they were full of anecdotes. They went with the scoffers,

and quoted Sydney Smith and "Blackwood," while "the world's dread laugh"

made them shy of committing themselves to any decided opinion. But if

Bentham was a myth, surely Dumont was not, and the shadow might well be

allowed to prove the substance; and yet they persisted in believing the

most extravagant inventions, and the drollest, without investigation or

misgiving.

And even I,--I, myself,--though familiar with his works, both in French

and English, was so much influenced by the mystery about him, and by the

stories I heard of him, and by the flings I saw in the leading journals,

that I was betrayed into writing as follows in "Blackwood," about a year

before I first met Mr. Bentham, notwithstanding my profound convictions

of his worth and greatness, and my fixed belief that he was cruelly

misunderstood and shamefully misrepresented, and that his "Morals and

Legislation" and his "Theory of Rewards and Punishments" would change

the jurisprudence of the world, as they certainly have done:--

"Setting aside John Locke's Constitution for North Carolina, and Jeremy

Bentham's conundrums on Legislation, to speak reverently of what we

cannot speak irreverently of, _a truly great and incomprehensible mind,

whose thoughts are problems, and whose words--when they are

English--miracles_," etc.

This paragraph occurs _incidentally_. I durst not go farther at the

time; for Bentham had never been mentioned but with a sneer in that

journal. I was writing a review of another "British Traveller in

America," whose blundering misrepresentations had greatly disturbed me.

The book was entitled, "A Summary View of America ... By an Englishman."

My review was the longest paper, I believe, that ever appeared in

"Blackwood." It was the leader for December, 1824; and on the back of

the title-page is a note by Christopher North himself, (Professor

Wilson,) from which I extract the following rather significant passages.

"Our readers will perceive that this number opens with an article much

longer than any that ever appeared in our journal before. As a general

rule, we hate and detest articles of anything like this length; but we

found, on perusing this, (and so will our readers, when they follow our

example,) that in reality every paragraph of it is an article by itself;

in fact, that the paper is not an article, but a collection of many

articles upon subjects, all full of interest, and most of them not less

important than interesting."

"In short, this _review_ of a single book on America contains more new

facts, more new reasonings, more new speculations of and concerning the

United States of America, than have as yet appeared in any ten books (by

themselves, books) upon that subject. This is enough for us, and this

will be enough for our readers.

"We do not know personally the author of this article; nor do we pledge

ourselves for the justice of many of his views. From internal evidence

we believe that he says nothing but what he believes to be true."

On the whole, perhaps, I had better add another paragraph from

Christopher North's note. It may serve to disabuse not a few of my

countrymen who have hitherto misunderstood the purpose of my "mission"

abroad, and especially the nature of my connection with the "Blackwood"

freebooters.

"It is certain that he does know America well," continues the Professor;

"and it is equally certain that we fully participate in his feelings, as

to the folly or knavery of every writer, English or American, who libels

either of these countries for the amusement of the other; and we have

not the smallest doubt that the appearance of such a writer as we have

had the good fortune to introduce will henceforth operate as a salutary

check both on the chatterers of the 'Westminster Review' and the

growlers of the 'Quarterly.'"

Entertaining the opinions I have stated with regard to Mr. Bentham and

his labors, and being well aware that his early writings in English (the

"Fragment on Government," for example, wherein, at the age of

twenty-eight, he enters the lists with Blackstone so successfully, and

the "Defence of Usury," an argument not only unanswered, but

unanswerable, to this day) were such models of clearness, strength, and

precision, and so remarkable for a transparent beauty of style, that the

first was attributed to Lord Mansfield, and the last to others of like

reputation; while some of his earlier pamphlets (like that which is

entitled "Emancipate your Colonies," being an address to the National

Assembly of France, whose predecessors had made him a French citizen, or

the "Draught of a Code for the Organization of the Judicial

Establishment of France," written at the age of two-and-forty) were

quite as remarkable for genius, warmth, manly strength, and a lofty

eloquence, as the earlier writings mentioned were for clearness and

logical precision,--how could I be guilty of such irreverence, not to

say impertinence?

My answer is, that the believers in "Blackwood," having been pampered so

long on highly seasoned, fiery pap, to which the lines of M. G. Lewis

might often be applied,--

"And this juice of hell,

Wherever it fell,

To a cinder burned the floor,"--

were not ready for the whole truth, for the strong meat, much less for

the lion's meat I should have been delighted to serve them with; and

so, as in the case of Leigh Hunt and some others eminently obnoxious to

that journal, I slipped in the few words I have quoted _incidentally_,

as a sort of entering wedge: and the result in both cases, I must

acknowledge, fully justified my expectations; for neither Mr. Bentham

nor Leigh Hunt was ever unhandsomely treated or in any way disparaged by

that journal from that time forward, so far as I know.

Let me add, that I did this for the same reason that I began writing

about our country, and about the institutions, the people, the

literature, and the fine arts of America, as if I were an

Englishman,--for otherwise what hope had I of being admitted into the

"Field of the Cloth of Gold," or of being allowed to break a lance in

the tournament which was always open there?--and that I continued

writing as an Englishman long after it was known by Blackwood himself,

and by Wilson, that I was not only an American, but a Yankee, and a

Yankee to the backbone, and that the signature I had adopted--"Carter

Holmes"--was not so much a _nom de plume_ as a _nom de guerre_, till I

had got possession of the enemy's battery, and turned the guns upon his

camp.

In personal appearance, in features, and in the habitual expression of

countenance, Mr. Bentham bore an astonishing resemblance to our Dr.

Franklin. He was, to be sure, of a somewhat heavier build, though

shorter by two or three inches, I should say, judging by the bronze

full-length you have in Boston. The prevailing expression was much alike

in both; but there was not so much of constitutional benignity in the

looks of Bentham, nor was he ever so grave and thoughtful as Franklin is

generally represented in his portraitures; but he was fuller of

shrewdness and playfulness,--of downright drollery, indeed,--of boyish

fun,--and, above all, of a warm-hearted, unquestioning sympathy for

everything alive, man or beast, that he called "virtuous," like the

"virtuous deer" and the "affectionate swan": and all this you could see

plainly in the man's countenance, whether at play or in repose.

So great, indeed, was the outward resemblance between these two

extraordinary men,--so much alike in appearance were they, though so

utterly unlike in reality,--that, after Mr. Bentham had passed the age

of threescore-and-five, a bust of Dr. Franklin, by a celebrated French

artist, was bought by Ricardo, at the suggestion of La Fayette, I

believe, and sent to Mr. James Mill for a likeness of Bentham.

"Do you know," said the philosopher to me one day, while talking upon

this very subject, "that Ricardo was my grand-disciple?"

"Your grand-disciple? How so?"

"Why, you see, Mill was my disciple, and Ricardo was his; _ergo_,

Ricardo was my grand-disciple: hey?"

But perhaps you would like to see for yourself the "white-haired Sage of

Queen-Square Place," as Dr. Bowring, now Sir John Bowring, used to call

him,--the "Philosopher,"--the "Hermit,"--the "High Priest of Reform," as

others, like Mr. Canning, the Premier, Sir Samuel Romilly, Sir Francis

Burdett, the two Mills, father and son, Dr. Southwood Smith, the

Austins, and Frank Place, the great radical tailor, used to call him.

If so, have the goodness to follow me step by step for a few minutes,

forgetting all the long years that have interposed, and you shall see

him, with your eyes shut, as I saw him first, and as I continued to see

him almost every day for eighteen months or so, face to face.

Picture to yourself a man "fourscore and upwards," like Lear, and like

Lear, too, "mightily abused," about five feet seven, a little stooping,

but still vigorous and alert; with a pleasant, fresh countenance, and

the complexion of a middle-aged, plump, healthy woman, such as Rubens or

Gilbert Stuart would gloat over in portraiture, and love to paint for a

wager; with a low, cheerful, trembling voice in conversation, though

loud and ringing in the open air; large, clear, bluish-gray eyes,--I

think I cannot be mistaken about the color, though Hazlitt, who was a

tenant of Bentham's at one time, and got snubbed for some little

impertinence, which of course he never forgave, calls them "lack-lustre

eyes"; very soft, plentiful white hair, slightly tinged with gold, like

flossed silk in the sunshine,--pushed back from a broad, but rather low

forehead, and flowing down to the shoulders. This white hair, when the

wind blows it about his face in the open air, or he is talking earnestly

at his own table,--and he never goes to any other,--he has a strange

habit of throwing off with a sudden crook and spring of the left elbow,

and a sort of impatient jerk of the left forefinger, which has come to

be so characteristic of the man himself, that, if Mathews (Charles

Mathews) were to do that, and that only, before you, after you had been

with Bentham for five minutes, you would have, not, perhaps, a

photograph or a portrait, but a "charcoal sketch" of the philosopher,

which you would instantly acknowledge. And, by the way, this reminds me

that I wanted to call these "Charcoal Sketches,"--that title being mine

long before the late Joseph C. Neal borrowed it of me without leave, and

used it for his "Loafer" and a variety of capital sketches, which have

been attributed to me, and still are, notwithstanding my denials. I

wrote one number only,--the first. It was a Yankee sketch; while his

were street sketches, and among the best in our language.

But let us return to the living Bentham. The stoop, you see, is not so

much on account of his great age as from a long habit of bending over

his abominable manuscript,--the worst you ever saw, perhaps, not

excepting Rufus Choate's or Napoleon Bonaparte's,--day after day, and

year after year, while adding his marginal annotations in "Benthamee" to

what has been corrected over and over again, and rewritten more than

once by the secretary.

He wears a plain, single-breasted coat, of the Quaker type, with a

narrow, straight collar, and a waistcoat of thin, striped calico, all

open to the weather, and trousers,--not small-clothes, nor breeches,

never being able to look at himself in breeches without laughing, he

says; thick woollen stockings rolled up over his knees, and shoes with

ties instead of buckles,--in short, the every-day costume of our

Revolutionary fathers, barring the breeches, the shoe-buckles, and the

ruffles, which he never could endure.

In the warmest weather he wears thick leather gloves, and in the coldest

a straw hat, bound and edged with the brightest green ribbon, and

carries a stout stick of buckthorn, which he has named Dapple, after the

ass of Sancho Panza, for whom he professes the greatest admiration.

While thus equipped, and while you are in conversation with him perhaps,

or answering one of his hurried questions, he starts off ahead in a slow

trot, up one alley and down another, or to and fro in the large garden

of Queen-Square Place,--the largest but one of all that open into the

Green Park; and this trot he will continue for a whole hour

sometimes, without losing his breath or evincing any signs of

weariness,--occasionally shouting at the top of his lungs, to show that

his wind is untouched, till the whole neighborhood rings with the echo,

and the blank walls of the Knightsbridge Barracks "answer from their

misty shroud."

On the whole, therefore, that extravagant story told by Captain Parry

has a pretty good foundation, though he never saw with his own eyes what

he describes with so much drollery, but took the whole upon trust; for

Mr. Bentham was in the habit of going after his annuity every year,

trotting all the way down and back through Fleet Street, with his white

hair flying loose, and followed by one or both of his two secretaries.

He was the last survivor--the very last--of the beneficiaries, and

seemed to take a pleasure in astonishing the managers once a year with

his "wind and bottom." Parry represents him as being taken for a

lunatic running away from his keepers.

Having now the man himself before you, let me give you some idea of his

habits and characteristics, his temper,--and I never saw him out of

temper in my life, though he had enough to try him almost every day in

his household arrangements,--his kindness of heart, his drollery, and

his wonderful powers of endurance, while working out the great problem

of his life.

At the time I knew him, he used to sleep in a bag, and sometimes with

most of his clothes on. This he did for economy. "It took less of

sheeting," he said. Then, too, there was not so much likelihood of his

getting the clothes off, should he get restless or fidgety. He was read

to sleep every night by one of his secretaries, who told me that he

often amused himself with reading the same paragraph or the same page

over and over again, without turning a leaf, the philosopher declaring

that he had never lost a word of the whole, and that he not only

understood, but remembered, the drift of the author. In this way my

"Brother Jonathan," then just published by Blackwood in three large

volumes, was read to him every night for weeks, and greatly to his

satisfaction, as I then understood; though it seems by what Dr.

Bowring--I beg his pardon, Sir John Bowring--says on the subject, that

the "white-haired sage" was wide enough awake, on the whole, to form a

pretty fair estimate of its unnaturalness and extravagance: being

himself a great admirer of Richardson's ten-volume stories, like

"Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe," and always looking upon them as the

standard for novel-writers.

Mr. Bentham was very "regular" in his habits, _very_,--and timed most of

his doings, whether asleep or awake, by a watch lying on the table. But

then he _always_ breakfasted between twelve and three, or a little later

on special occasions, and always dined at half past six, or thereabouts,

taking two cups of strong coffee in bed every morning, though he never

allowed himself but one, and died in the belief that he had never broken

the pledge.

And yet, notwithstanding all this, he maintained that there is no

getting along in this world--or the other--without "regularity," or what

he called "system." And that "system" he carried into all the business

of life, as well as into legislation and government; going back, after

years of uninterrupted labor and the severest analysis, to invent a

panopticon, a self-sustaining penitentiary, or rather to apply that

invention of his brother, General Sir Samuel Bentham, to the bettering

of our prison-houses and to the restoration of the lost,--or perhaps a

ballot-box, that nothing might be wanted, when that "system" he valued

himself so much upon should be adopted throughout the world, as the

outlines already are.

Scores of anecdotes are crowding upon my recollection, as I call to mind

his affectionate manner, his habitual good temper, and his amiable,

almost childish, kindness of heart. While yet a boy, for example,--and

this he told me himself, with a singular mixture of self-complacency and

self-depreciation, as if more than half ashamed of his weakness,--while

yet a boy, he was on a visit, where two different persons undertook to

help him to the goodies, among which was a magnificent gooseberry-pie,

one of his favorite dishes to the last. He ate until he could eat no

more. A third person offered him another piece; but, notwithstanding his

capacity, being "full up to here," he was obliged to refuse. He couldn't

swallow another mouthful, and the idea of _ingratitude_ was so strong

with him that he fell a-crying. I have no doubt of his entire

truthfulness; but I could not help thinking of the poor boy at his

grandfather's table on Christmas-day, who began at last to take things

rather seriously. "What's the matter, Georgie? what are you crying for?"

said the grandfather. "I can't eat another mouthful, grandpa," said

Georgie, still blubbering. "Never mind, my boy, never mind, fill your

pockets." "They're all full now, grandpa."

One of the cleverest women I ever knew, Mrs. Sarah Austin, the

magnificent mother of Lady Duff Gordon, and the author of a capital and

safe book on Germany, which seems to be little known here, though

greatly esteemed there, once wrote me as follows. She was a great

favorite of Mr. Bentham, a pet indeed; and her husband, the elder

Austin, John, was a disciple of the philosopher, a briefless barrister,

though one of the clearest reasoners and profoundest thinkers of the

age, as a paper on Jurisprudence, in the "Encyclopædia Britannica," will

show. He wrote very little, but his pages were worth volumes; and he

gave Benthamism unadulterated and undiluted, though made intelligible to

the "meanest capacity," in or out of the "Edinburgh" and the

"Quarterly,"--grasping every subject he handled with fingers of steel.

"God bless you," she says, after we had been talking about the

philosopher and his vagaries and whimsicalities,--"God bless you for

exalting me in my beloved grandpa's good graces. You can't think how

dearly I do love him, legislation and _all that_ apart; and yet, if

there ever was a woman peculiarly prone to love and admire a man for his

public affections and public usefulness, I do say I am that she, and

that I could not love a paragon of beauty, wit, and private kindness, if

he looked on the good or ill being of mankind with indifference or

scorn, or with anti-social feelings. Think of the divine old man growing

a sort of vetch in his garden to cram his pockets with for the deer in

Kensington Garden. I remember his pointing it out to me, and telling me

the '_virtuous deer_' were fond of it, and ate it out of his hand. I

could have kissed his feet; it was the feeling of a kind,

tender-hearted, loving child."

He had another pet, almost a rival on some special occasions for Mrs.

Austin. It was a large sleepy-looking tomcat, very black, and of a most

uncommon seriousness of deportment. The philosopher treated him with

great consideration, I might almost say reverence, and called him

Doctor,--but whether an LL. D., a D. D., or only an M. D., I never

clearly understood, though I have a faint recollection, that, on the

happening of some event in which Tom bore a part, he accounted for the

deference he showed, by calling him the Reverend Doctor somebody. Like

Byron, too, he once had a pet bear; but he was in Russia at the time,

and the wolves got into the poor creature's box, on a terrible winter's

night, and carried off a part of his face, a depredation which the

philosopher never forgot nor forgave to his dying day. He always kept a

supply of stale bread in the drawer of his dining-table for the

"mousies."

When he introduced me to Mr. Joseph Hume, the great penny-wise and

pound-foolish reformer, he begged me to bear in mind that he was _only_

a Scotchman, or "no better than a Scotchman"; and he once gave me an

open letter to the celebrated philanthropist, Dr. Southwood Smith, which

he asked me to read before it was delivered. I did so, and found that he

wished the Doctor to know that I had been at Queen-Square Place a long

while, and that, so far as he knew I had neither told lies nor stolen

spoons. Of course I delivered the letter, leaving Dr. Smith to take the

consequences, if any silver should be missed after I left him.

And, by the way, this reminds me that this very Dr. Smith was the

individual to whom he bequeathed his body, with certain directions,

which appear to have been carried out to the very letter, according to

Miss Margaret Fuller, who describes what she herself saw with her own

eyes not long after Mr. Bentham's death.

"I became acquainted with Dr. Southwood Smith," she says. "On visiting

him, we saw an object which I have often heard celebrated, and had

thought would be revolting, but found, on the contrary, an agreeable

sight; this is the skeleton of Jeremy Bentham. It was at Bentham's

request, that the skeleton, dressed in the same dress he habitually

wore, stuffed out to an exact resemblance of life, and with a

portrait-mask in wax,--the best I ever saw,--sits there as assistant to

Dr. Smith in the entertainment of his guests, and companion of his

studies. The figure leans a little forward, resting the hands on a stout

stick which Bentham always carried, and had named 'Dapple'; the attitude

is quite easy, the expression on the whole mild, winning, yet highly

individual."--In Westminster Abbey there was at this time, and probably

is now, a wax figure of Lord Nelson in the very dress he wore at

Trafalgar. It is set up in a show-case, just as Barnum would do it.

One other incident, showing his imperturbable good temper, and I have

done. A Frenchman had somehow got access to him,--through Dr. Bowring, I

believe. No sooner was he seated than he pulled out Mr. Bentham's

pamphlet, already mentioned, and entitled, "Emancipate your Colonies,"

which opens in this way:--

"You have made me a Frenchman. Hear me speak like one."

This the poor Frenchman read, in an ecstasy of admiration, as if

written, "You have make me a Frainchman. Hear me speak like _own_." Yet

Mr. Bentham kept his countenance, gave the poor fellow a good dinner,

and gossiped with him till the time had run out.

But Mr. Bentham could be "terribly in earnest," when the proper occasion

arose. Aaron Burr had been a guest of his for a long while, after being

driven abroad by the outburst of indignation here,--and, while with him,

made such revelations of character, that Mr. Bentham, who acknowledged

his talents, actually shuddered when he mentioned his name. Burr

declared, in so many words, that he meant to kill Hamilton, because he

had threatened to do so long before. He told Mr. Bentham, while boasting

of his great success with our finest women, that Mrs. Madison herself

was his mistress before marriage; and seriously proposed--in accordance

with what may be found in his Life by Matthew L. Davis, about educating

daughters and sons alike, and exposing them in the same way--that he

would send for his daughter Theodosia, and Mr. Bentham should take her

for his mistress; and in a marginal note, now before me, by the Reverend

John Pierpont, I find abundant confirmation of what Mr. Bentham told me,

though Mr. Davis undertook to say that the stories of Aaron Burr's

_bonnes fortunes_ were true, and that he had a trunkful of letters from

the leading women of his day to prove it, and that Mr. Bentham was

_untrustworthy_. Upon this point I challenged him to the proof; but he

shrunk from the issue.

"This reminds me," says Mr. Pierpont, in the note referred to, "that

Colonel William Alston, the father of Joseph, who married Miss Burr,

once told me, at his own table, that, soon after the marriage of his son

to Miss Burr, her father, Colonel Burr, had told him, (Colonel Alston,)

that, rather than have had his daughter marry otherwise than to his

mind, he would have made her the mistress of some gentleman of rank or

fortune, who would have placed her in the station in society for which

he had educated her.

"I believe, however," he adds, in a postscript, "that not even parental

authority or influence could ever have brought the beautiful and

accomplished Miss Theodosia Burr thus to prostitute herself to her

father's ambitious purposes."

In speaking of Burr, one day, and of his wonderful strength of character

and keenness of observation, he broke away suddenly, called him an

"atrocious scoundrel," and then asked me about his life and history.

Then it was that the kind-hearted, benevolent old man underwent a sudden

transfiguration. He trembled all over; his clear eyes lighted up; his

white hair was like a glory about his face; and he seemed like one of

the Hebrew Prophets, in his terrible denunciations of the heartless

manslayer, and the shameless, boastful profligate.

Our very pleasant, and, to me, most profitable intercourse for a year

and a half was brought to an end by the happening of two or three

incidents. His fat housekeeper, who ruled him with a rod of iron, and

insulted Mrs. Austin and others, undertook to manage me in the same way,

and got packed off in consequence, though I did all I could to keep the

secret, and prevent the catastrophe; but he insisted on knowing why I

left him, and he applied to the secretaries, who were witnesses of the

whole transaction. The philosopher was indignant, and insisted on her

making me a suitable apology. I said I wanted no apology, having made up

my mind to go on my journey. She refused, and he cut her adrift, after

having been so dependent upon her, I know not how many years, that he

would allow her to say, "The pan is put away," when he asked for more of

a favorite dish,--fried parsley,--which he had prepared for Dr.

Macculloch, the geologist, who at one time could eat nothing else. She

was reinstated, however, within two or three years after I left him.

The other incident was this. Mr. Bentham had urged me to write a paper

for the "Westminster Review," of which Dr. Bowring and Mr. Henry

Southern were the editors. I did so, and took for my text four or five

orations by Webster, Everett, and Sprague, and then launched out upon

the subject of Jurisprudence, of the Militia System, as it prevailed

here at the time,--a monstrous folly, and a monstrous outrage upon the

rights of man,--and of Slavery. The proof came without a word of

alteration or amendment. Of course I had nothing to do but correct any

verbal errors. But, lo! when the article appeared, not only had changes

been made, passages struck out, and various emendations worked in, but I

was made to say the very reverse of what I did say, and to utter

opinions which I never entertained, and for which I have had to suffer

from that day to this among my countrymen.

For example. The editor, who had never seen the pamphlets, as he proves

by calling them "books," interpolates the following, which, as I have

said before, I have had to answer for:--

"Violent exaggeration is the character of American literature at the

present day, and, compared with the chaster and more rational style of

_our_ best writers, the style of the North American authors _is usually

the rant and unmeaning vehemence of a strolling Thespian_, when placed

beside the _calm, appropriate, and expressive delivery of an

accomplished actor_." Bear in mind that the samples I gave were from

Webster, and Everett, and Sprague!--three of our coldest and clearest

crystals, and among the least impassioned, and certainly the least

extravagant, of our orators. "Sometimes," the editor adds, with a show

of relenting at last, "sometimes the reader will find these remarkable

parts the worst, and sometimes the best of the paragraph, and often

composed in a spirit worthy of a less vitiated expression."[D]

This was a little too much; but, owing to the expostulations of Mr.

Bentham, who had wasted about twenty or twenty-five thousand dollars on

the "Westminster Review," without a hope of getting a sixpence in

return, I consented to overlook the outrage. But my confidence in the

amiable Dr. Bowring was ended forever. We had a short interview, but no

intimacy after this, and I had begun to think of Northern Europe more

seriously than ever, when at last the tiff with the housekeeper settled

the question,--the Doctor declaring, though he knew from Mr. Bentham's

own lips how much he desired me to stay, and how unwilling he was to

part with me, that he, Mr. Bentham, said that he would as lief have a

rattlesnake under his roof!

FOOTNOTES:

[D] See "Westminster Review" for January, 1826.

A FAREWELL TO AGASSIZ.

How the mountains talked together,

Looking down upon the weather,

When they heard our friend had planned his

Little trip among the Andes!

How they'll bare their snowy scalps

To the climber of the Alps,

When the cry goes through their passes,

"Here comes the great Agassiz!"

"Yes, I'm tall," says Chimborazo,

"But I wait for him to say so,--

That's the only thing that lacks,--he

Must see me, Cotopaxi!"

"Ay! ay!" the fire-peak thunders,

"And he must view my wonders!

I'm but a lonely crater,

Till I have him for spectator!"

The mountain hearts are yearning,

The lava-torches burning,

The rivers bend to meet him,

The forests bow to greet him,

It thrills the spinal column

Of fossil fishes solemn,

And glaciers crawl the faster

To the feet of their old master!

Heaven keep him well and hearty,

Both him and all his party!

From the sun that broils and smites,

From the centipede that bites,

From the hail-storm and the thunder,

From the vampire and the condor,

From the gust upon the river,

From the sudden earthquake shiver,

From the trip of mule or donkey,

From the midnight howling monkey,

From the stroke of knife or dagger,

From the puma and the jaguar,

From the horrid boa-constrictor

That has scared us in the pictur',

From the Indians of the Pampas,

Who would dine upon their grampas,

From every beast and vermin

That to think of sets us squirming,

From every snake that tries on

The traveller his p'ison,

From every pest of Natur',

Likewise the alligator,

And from two things left behind him,

(Be sure they'll try to find him,)--

The tax-bill and assessor,--

Heaven keep the great Professor!

May he find, with his apostles,

That the land is full of fossils,

That the waters swarm with fishes

Shaped according to his wishes,

That every pool is fertile

In fancy kinds of turtle,

New birds around him singing,

New insects, never stinging,

With a million novel data

About the articulata,

And facts that strip off all husks

From the history of mollusks.

And when, with loud Te Deum,

He returns to his Museum,

May he find the monstrous reptile

That so long the land has kept ill

By Grant and Sherman throttled,

And by Father Abraham bottled,

(All specked and streaked and mottled

With the scars of murderous battles,

Where he clashed the iron rattles

That gods and men he shook at,)

For all the world to look at!

God bless the great Professor!

And Madam too, God bless her!

Bless him and all his band,

On the sea and on the land,

As they sail, ride, walk, and stand,--

Bless them head and heart and hand,

Till their glorious raid is o'er,

And they touch our ransomed shore!

Then the welcome of a nation,

With its shout of exultation,

Shall awake the dumb creation,

And the shapes of buried æons

Join the living creatures' pæans,

While the mighty megalosaurus

Leads the palæozoic chorus,--

God bless the great Professor,

And the land his proud possessor,--

Bless them now and evermore!

THE FORGE.

CHAPTER I.

"One more horse to shoe, Sandy. The man's late, but he's come a matter

of ten mile, perhaps, over the cross road by Derby, yonder. Lead the

critter up, boy, and give a look at the furnace."

I stooped to replenish the glowing fire, then turned toward the door,

made broad and high for entrance of man and beast, and giving a coarse

frame to the winter landscape without. The trees fluttered their

snow-plumed wings in the chill wind; on the opposite hill a red light

glared a response to our glowing smithy. It was the eye of elegant

luxury confronting the eye of toil; for it shone from the windows of the

only really fine mansion for miles around. I had always felt grateful to

those stone walls for standing there, surrounded by old trees on lawn

and woodland, an embodiment to my imagination of all I had heard or read

of stately homes, and a style of life remote from my own, and

fascinating from its very mystery.

But I anticipate. My glance travelled over the intervening stretch of

level country, wrapped in its winding-sheet of snow, and stopped at a

tall figure confronting me, leading by the bridle the finest horse I had

ever seen.

"Well, young man, shall you or I lead in the horse?" he asked,

haughtily; "that light on the hill must be reached before an hour goes

by, if I would keep an engagement"; and tossing me the bridle, as he

spoke, he drew carelessly toward the forge.

The few villagers whose day's work was ended, or whose business called

them to the smithy, suddenly remembered waiting wives and children at

home, the bit of supper spread for their return, or the evening gossip

at the tavern; and thinking the matter they came for could wait the

morning, since the smith was busy, gave way, and left only the stranger,

my master, myself, and the noble horse grouped around the forge.

"Look alive, Sandy! you'd better keep at it steady, if you want to git

to your schoolin' to-night," growled the blacksmith, in an undertone;

for he, too, had a memory for the smoking dish at home, and would gladly

stop work to eat of it.

So I busied myself at once collecting the needed materials, while the

smith proceeded to lift the horse's leg and examine the foot. The animal

resisted the attempt, however, by plunging in the most violent manner.

"Confound the beast!" muttered the blacksmith, as he dodged to escape a

kick.

"I thought as much," said the stranger, quietly. "The horse is very

particular as to who handles him. I shall have to hold his foot, I

suppose"; and with rather a scornful smile, as if the dislike of his

horse to my master confirmed his own, he stepped up and held out a

slender brown hand.

The horse lifted his foot, and gently dropped it on the outstretched

palm. No bird ever settled more trustfully on its nest.

My master swore an oath or two by way of astonishment, and then, seizing

his shoe, approached again. But the scene was repeated with even more

violence on the part of the horse: he pranced, reared, shook his head,

and snorted at the smith, who again drew off.

"I sha'n't get off to-night," murmured the stranger, impatiently.

"Let me try," I said. "Horses have their fancies, as well as people.

He'll like me, may-be."

"May-be he will," laughed my master, hoarsely; "but you're not a boss at

puttin' a shoe on. A dumb critter might take a shine to you, who's one

of their kind." And again he laughed at his own wit.

"Step up and try," exclaimed the stranger, impatiently.

I grasped the leg firmly in my hand; the horse made no resistance, and I

began my work.

"Well, seein' as you've made friends with the critter, I'll be the

gainer and take a bit of supper," said my master, after a dogged stare.

"Be sure you put it on strong, Sandy. I don't say as I'll charge any

more, though I'd make a man pay for showin' he'd a spite agin me, let

alone a dumb critter." And taking his hat from a peg, he walked off,

leaving me, with the sparks flying from the forge, busy at the shoe, and

the stranger, with one arm across the neck of the horse, watching me.

Ten minutes of silent work, and, as I loosened my grasp on the leg for a

moment, I met the eye of the gentleman, who, I was conscious, had been

watching me narrowly.

"The horse likes you," he said, pleasantly, here again as though he

shared the feeling.

"Yes," I replied. "Is he in the habit of doing as he did to-night with

strangers?"

"He is fastidious, if you know what that means,--as fond of gentlemen as

his master," he returned, so pleasantly, that, when I looked up,

reddening at the cool assumption of the speech, blacksmith's apprentice

though I was, my eye fell beneath the amused glance of his.

"I'm not a gentleman," I said, after a pause,--a little resentfully, I

fear; "but I'm not a clown, like my master."

"No, that one can see at a glance," he replied. "You may be a gentleman

for aught I see to the contrary; but it requires a great deal to make

one.--What school was that the blacksmith spoke of?"

"It is a village class kept by a young lady who rides over from the

hillside twice a week to teach us poor fellows something. I'm learning

to draw," I added,--the frankness coaxed out of me by a sympathy implied

rather than expressed.

"And you are sorry enough to lose any of this lesson," he said, kindly,

as I put the horse's foot, firmly shod, upon the ground. "There is the

regular pay which goes to the smith, I suppose; and here is a ten-dollar

bill for you, if you have the sense to take it. I don't know what kind

of a youth you may be; but you have a good head and face, and evidently

are superior to the people about you. You don't feel obliged to use

their language or lead their life because you are thrown with them, I

suppose; but neither are you obliged to leave this work because you are

better than the man who calls himself your master. Learn all you can and

get a smithy of your own. A good blacksmith is as respectable as a good

artist," he said, looking at me keenly, as he mounted his horse, and

then rode rapidly through the village street.