The principle that underlies these extracts, and makes them

ministrative of evil, is the principle that a woman can benefit her

children by sacrificing herself. It teaches, that pale, thin faces and

feeble steps are excellent things in young mothers,--provided they are

gained by maternal duties. We infer that it is meet, right, and the

bounden of such to give up society, reading, riding, music, and become

indifferent to dress, cultivation, recreation, to everything, in short,

except taking care of the children. It is all just as wrong as it can

be. It is wrong morally; it is wrong socially; wrong in principle,

wrong in practice. It is a blunder as well as a crime, for it works

woe. It is a wrong means to accomplish an end; and it does not

accomplish the end, after all, but demolishes it.

On the contrary, the duty and dignity of a mother require that she

should never subordinate herself to her children. When she does so,

she does it to their manifest injury and her own. Of course, if

illness or accident demand unusual care, she does well to grow thin and

pale in bestowing unusual care. But when a mother in the ordinary

routine of life grows thin and pale, gives up riding, reading, and the

amusements and occupations of life, there is a wrong somewhere, and her

children shall reap the fruits of it. The father and mother are the

head of the family, the most comely and the most honorable part. They

cannot benefit their children by descending from their Heaven-appointed

places, and becoming perpetual and exclusive feet and hands. This is

the great fault of American mothers. They swamp themselves in a slough

of self-sacrifice. They are smothered in their own sweetness. They

dash into domesticity with an impetus and abandonment that annihilate

themselves. They sink into their families like a light in a poisonous

well, and are extinguished.

One hears much complaint of the direction and character of female

education. It is dolefully affirmed that young ladies learn how to

sing operas but not how to keep house,--that they can conjugate Greek

verbs, but cannot make bread,--that they are good for pretty toying,

but not for homely using. Doubtless there is foundation for this

remark, or it would never have been made. But I have been in the East

and the West, and the North and the South; I know that I have seen the

best society, and I am sure I have seen very bad, if not the worst; and

I never met a woman whose superior education, whose piano, whose

pencil, whose German, or French, or any school-accomplishments, or even

whose novels, clashed with her domestic duties. I have read of them in

books; I did hear of one once; but I never met one,--not one. I have

seen women, through love of gossip, through indolence, through sheer

famine of mental PABLUM, leave undone things that ought to be

done,--rush to the assembly, lecture-room, the sewing-circle, or

vegetate in squalid, shabby, unwholesome homes; but I never saw

education run to ruin. So it seems to me that we are needlessly

alarmed in that direction.

I have seen scores and scores of women leave school, leave their piano

and drawing and fancy-work, and all manner of pretty and pleasant

things, and marry and bury themselves. You hear of them about six

times in ten years, and there is a baby each time. They crawl out of

the farther end of the ten years, sallow and wrinkled and lank,--teeth

gone, hair gone, roses gone, plumpness gone,--freshness, and vivacity,

and sparkle, everything that is dewy, and springing, and spontaneous,

gone, gone, gone forever. This our Tract-Society book puts very

prettily. "She wraps herself in the robes of infantile simplicity,

and, burying her womanly nature in the tomb of childhood, patiently

awaits the sure-coming resurrection in the form of a noble,

high-minded, world-stirring son, or a virtuous, lovely daughter. The

nursery is the mother's chrysalis. Let her abide for a little season,

and she shall emerge triumphantly, with ethereal wings and a happy

flight."

But the nursery ought not to be the mother's chrysalis. God never

intended her to wind herself up into a cocoon. If he had, he would

made her a caterpillar. She has no right to bury her womanly nature in

the tomb of childhood. It will surely be required at her hands. It

was given her to sun itself in the broad, bright day, to root itself

fast and firm in the earth, to spread itself wide to the sky, that her

children in their infancy and youth and maturity, that her husband in

his strength and his weakness, that her kinsfolk and neighbors and the

poor of the land, the halt and the blind and all Christ's little ones,

may sit under its shadow with great delight. No woman has a right to

sacrifice her own soul to problematical, high-minded, world-stirring

sons, and virtuous, lovely daughters. To be the mother of such, one

might perhaps pour out one's life in draughts so copious that the

fountain should run dry; but world-stirring people are extremely rare.

One in a century is a liberal allowance. The overwhelming

probabilities are, that her sons will be lawyers and shoemakers and

farmers and commission-merchants, her daughters nice, "smart," pretty

girls, all good, honest, kind-hearted, commonplace people, not at all

world-stirring, not at all the people one would glory to merge one's

self in. If the mother is not satisfied with this, if she wants them

otherwise, she must be otherwise. The surest way to have high-minded

children is to be high-minded yourself. A man cannot burrow in his

counting-room for ten or twenty of the best years of his life, and come

out as much of a man and as little of a mole as he went in. But the

twenty years should have ministered to his manhood, instead of

trampling on it. Still less can a woman bury herself in her nursery,

and come out without harm. But the years should have done her great

good. This world is not made for a tomb, but a garden. You are to be

a seed, not a death. Plant yourself, and you will sprout. Bury

yourself, and you can only decay. For a dead opportunity there is no

resurrection. The only enjoyment, the only use to be attained in this

world, must be attained on the wing. Each day brings its own

happiness, its own benefit; but it has none to spare. What escapes

today is escaped forever. Tomorrow has no overflow to atone for the

lost yesterdays.

Few things are more painful to look upon than the self-renunciation,

the self-abnegation of mothers,--painful both for its testimony and its

prophecy. Its testimony is of over-care, over-work, over-weariness,

the abuse of capacities that were bestowed for most sacred uses, an

utter waste of most pure and life-giving waters. Its prophecy is early

decline and decadence, forfeiture of position and power, and worst,

perhaps, of all, irreparable loss and grievous wrong to the children

for whom all is sacrificed.

God gives to the mother supremacy in her family. It belongs to her to

maintain it. This cannot not be done without exertion. The temptation

to come down from her throne, and become a mere hewer of wood and

drawer of water is very strong. It is so much easier to work with the

hands than with the head. One can chop sticks all day serenely

unperplexed. But to administer a government demands observation and

knowledge and judgment and resolution and inexhaustible patience. Yet,

however uneasy lies the head that wears the crown of womanhood, that

crown cannot be bartered away for any baser wreath without infinite

harm. In both cases there must be sacrifice; but in the one case it is

unto death, in the other unto life. If the mother stands on high

ground, she brings her children up to her own level; if she sinks, they

sink with her.

To maintain her rank, no exertion is too great, no means too small.

Dress is one of the most obvious things to a child. If the mother wears

cheap or shabby or ill-assorted clothes, while the children's are fine

and harmonious, it is impossible that they should not receive the

impression that they are of more consequence than their mother.

Therefore, for her children's sake, if not for her own, the mother

should always be well-dressed. Her baby, so far as it is concerned in

the matter, instead of being an excuse for a faded bonnet, should be an

inducement for a fresh one. It is not a question of riches or poverty;

it is a thing of relations. It is simply that the mother's dress--her

morning and evening and street and church dress--should be quite as

good as, and if there is any difference, better than her child's. It

is of manner of consequence how a child is clad, provided only its

health be not injured, its taste corrupted, or its self-respect

wounded. Children look prettier in the cheapest and simplest materials

than in the richest and most elaborate. But how common is it to see

the children gaily caparisoned in silk and feathers and flounces, while

the mother is enveloped in an atmosphere of cottony fadiness! One

would take the child to be mistress, and the mother a servant. "But,"

the mother says, "I do not care for dress, and Caroline does. She,

poor child, would be mortified not to be dressed like the other

children." Then do you teach her better. Plant in her mind a higher

standard of self-respect. Don't tell her you cannot afford to do for

her thus and thus; that will scatter premature thorns along her path;

but say that you do not approve of it; it is proper for her to dress in

such and such a way. And be so nobly and grandly a woman that she

shall have faith in you.

It is essential also that the mother have sense, intelligence,

comprehension. As much as she can add of education and accomplishments

will increase her stock in trade. Her reading and riding and music,

instead of being neglected for her children's sake, should for their

sake be scrupulously cultivated. Of the two things, it is a thousand

times better that they should be attended by a nursery-maid in their

infancy than by a feeble, timid, inefficient matron in their youth. The

mother can oversee half a dozen children with a nurse; but she needs

all her strength, all her mind, her own eyes, and ears, and quick

perceptions, and delicate intuition, and calm self-possession, when her

sturdy boys and wild young girls are leaping and bounding and careering

into their lusty life. All manner of novel temptations beset

them,--perils by night and perils by day,--perils in the house and by

the way. Their fierce and hungry young souls, rioting in awakening

consciousness, ravening for pleasure, strong and tumultuous, snatch

eagerly at every bait. They want then a mother able to curb, and

guide, and rule them; and only a mother who commands their respect can

do this. Let them see her sought for her social worth,--let them see

that she is familiar with all the conditions of their life,--that her

vision is at once broader and keener than theirs,--that her feet have

travelled along the paths they are just beginning to explore,--that she

knows all the phases alike of their strength and their weakness,--and

her influence over them is unbounded. Let them see her uncertain,

uncomfortable, hesitating, fearful without discrimination, leaning

where she ought to support, interfering without power of suggesting,

counseling, but not controlling, with no presence, no hearing, no

experience, no prestige, and they will carry matters with a high hand.

They will overrule her decisions, and their love will not be unmingled

with contempt. It will be strong enough to prick them when they have

done wrong, but not strong enough to keep them from doing wrong.

Nothing gives a young girl such vantage-ground in society and in life

as a mother,--a sensible, amiable, brilliant, and commanding woman.

Under the shelter of such a mother's wing, the neophyte is safe. This

mother will attract to herself the wittiest and the wisest. The young

girl can see society in its best phases, without being herself drawn

out into its glare. She forms her own style on the purest models. She

gains confidence, without losing modesty. Familiar with wisdom, she

will not be dazed by folly. Having the opportunity to make

observations before she begins to be observed, she does not become the

prey of the weak and the wicked. Her taste is strengthened and

refined, her standard elevates itself; her judgment acquires a firm

basis. But cast upon own resources, her own blank inexperience, at her

first entrance into the world, with nothing to stand between her and

what is openly vapid and covertly vicious, with no clear eye to detect

for her the false and distinguish the true, no firm, judicious hand to

guide tenderly and undeviatingly, to repress without irritating and

encourage without emboldening, what wonder that the peach-bloom loses

its delicacy, deepening into rouge or hardening into brass, and the

happy young life is stranded on a cruel shore?

Hence it follows that our social gatherings consist, to so lamentable

an extent, of pert youngsters, or faded oldsters. Thence come those

abominable "young people's parties," where a score or two or three of

boys and girls meet and manage after their own hearts. Thence it

happens that conversation seems to be taking its place among the Lost

Arts, and the smallest of small talk reigns in its stead. Society,

instead of giving its tone to the children, takes it from them, and

since it cannot be juvenile, becomes insipid, and because it is too old

to prattle, jabbers. Talkers are everywhere, but where are the men

that say things? Where are the people that can be listened to and

quoted? Where are the flinty people whose contact strikes fire? Where

are the electric people who thrill a whole circle with sudden vitality?

Where are the strong people who hedge themselves around with their

individuality, and will be roused by no prince's kiss, but taken only

by storm, yet once captured, are sweeter than the dews of Hymettus?

Where are the seers, the prophets, the Magi, who shall unfold for us

the secrets of the sky and the seas, and the mystery of human hearts?

Yet fathers and mothers not only acquiesce in this state of things,

they approve of it. They foster it. They are forward to annihilate

themselves. They are careful to let their darlings go out alone, lest

they be a restraint upon them,--as if that were not what parents were

made for. If they were what they ought to be, the restraint would be

not only wholesome, but impalpable. The relation between parents and

children should be such that pleasure shall not be quite perfect,

unless shared by both. Parents ought to take such a tender, proud,

intellectual interest in the pursuits and amusements of their children

that the children shall feel the glory of the victory dimmed, unless

their parents are there to witness it. If the presence of a sensible

mother is felt as a restraint, it shows conclusively that restraint is

needed.

A woman also needs self-cultivation, both physical and mental, in order

to self-respect. Undoubtedly Diogenes glorified himself in his tub.

But people in general, and women in universal,--except the

geniuses,--need the pomp of circumstance. A slouchy garb is both effect

and cause of a slouchy mind. A woman who lets go her hold upon dress,

literature, music, amusement, will almost inevitably slide down into a

bog of muggy moral indolence. She will lose her spirit, and when the

spirit is gone out of a woman, there not much left of her. When she

cheapens herself, she diminishes her value. Especially when the

evanescent charms of mere youth are gone, when the responsibilities of

life have left their mark upon her, is it indispensable that she attend

to all the fitnesses of externals, and strengthen and polish all her

mental and social qualities. By this I do not mean that women should

allow themselves to lose their beauty as they increase in years. Men

grow handsomer as they grow older. There is no reason, there ought to

be no reason, why women should not. They will have a different kind of

beauty, but it will be just as truly beauty and more impressive and

attractive than the beauty of sixteen. It is absurd to suppose that

God has made women so that their glory passes away in half a dozen

years. It is absurd to suppose that thought and feeling and passion

and purpose, all holy instincts and impulses, can chisel away on a

woman's face for thirty, forty, fifty years, and leave that face at the

end worse than they found it. They found it a negative,--mere skin and

bone, blood and muscle and fat. They can but leave their mark upon it,

and the mark of good is good. Pity does not have the same finger-touch

as revenge. Love does not hold the same brush as hatred. Sympathy and

gratitude and benevolence have a different sign-manual from cruelty and

carelessness and deceit. All these busy little sprites draw their fine

lines, lay on their fine colors; the face lights up under their tiny

hands; the prisoned soul shines clearer and clearer through, and there

is the consecration and the poet's dream.

But such beauty is made, not born. Care and despondency come of

themselves, and groove their own furrows. Hope and intelligence and

interest and buoyancy must be wooed for their gentle and genial touch.

A mother must battle against the tendencies that drag her downward.

She must take pains to grow, or she will not grow. She must sedulously

cultivate her mind and heart, or her old age will be ungraceful; and if

she lose freshness without acquiring ripeness, she is indeed in an evil

case. The first, the most important trust which God has given to any

one is himself. To secure this trust, He has made us so that in no

possible way can we benefit the world so much as by making the most of

ourselves. Indulging our whims, or, inordinately, our just tastes, is

not developing ourselves; but neither is leaving our own fields to grow

thorns and thistles, that we may plant somebody else's garden-plot,

keeping our charge. Even were it possible for a mother to work well

to her children in thus working ill to herself, I do not think she

would be justified in doing it. Her account is not complete when she

says, "Here are they whom thou hast given me." She must first say,

"Here am I." But when it is seen that suicide is also child-murder, it

must appear that she is under doubly heavy bonds for herself.

Husbands, moreover, have claims, though wives often ignore them. It is

the commonest thing in the world to see parents tender of their

children's feelings, alive to their wants, indulgent to their tastes,

kind, considerate, and forbearing; but to each other hasty, careless,

and cold. Conjugal love often seems to die out before parental love.

It ought not so to be. Husband and wife should each stand first in the

other's estimation. They have no right to forget each other's comfort,

convenience, sensitiveness, tastes, or happiness, in those of their

children. Nothing can discharge them from the obligations which they

are under to each other. But if a woman lets herself become shabby,

drudgy, and commonplace as a wife, in her efforts to be perfect as a

mother, can she expect to retain the consideration that is due to the

wife? Not a man in the world but would rather see his wife tidy, neat,

and elegant in her attire, easy and assured in her bearing, intelligent

and vivacious in her talk, than the contrary; and if she neglect these

things, ought she to be surprised if he turns to fresh woods and

pastures new for the diversion and entertainment which he seeks in vain

at home? This is quaky ground, but I know where I am, and I am not

afraid. I don't expect men or women to say that they agree with me,

but I am right for all that. Let us bring our common sense to bear on

this point, and not be fooled by reiteration. Cause and effect obtain

here as elsewhere. If you add two and two, the result is four, however

much you may try to blink it. People do not always tell lies, when

they are telling what is not the truth; but falsehood is still

disastrous. Men and women think they believe a thousand which they do

not believe; but as long as they think so, it is just as bad as if it

were so. Men talk--and women listen and echo--about the overpowering

loveliness and charm of a young mother surrounded by her blooming

family, ministering to their wants and absorbed in their welfare,

self-denying and self-forgetful; and she is lovely and charming; but if

this is all, it is little more than the charm and loveliness of a

picture. It is not magnetic and irresistible. It has the semblance,

but not the smell of life. It is pretty to look at, but it is not

vigorous for command. Her husband will have a certain kind of

admiration and love. Her wish will be law within a certain very

limited sphere; but beyond that he will not take her into his counsels

and confidence. A woman must make herself obvious to her husband, or

he will drift out beyond her horizon. She will be to him very nearly

what she wills and works to be. If she adapts herself to her children,

and does not adapt herself to her husband, he will fall into the

arrangement, and the two will fall apart. I do not mean that they

quarrel, but they will lead separate lives. They will be no longer

husband and wife. There will be a domestic alliance, but no marriage.

A predominant interest in the same objects binds them together after a

fashion; but marriage is something beyond that. If a woman wishes and

purposes to be the friend of her husband,--if she would be valuable to

him, not simply as the nurse of his children and the directress of his

household, but as a woman fresh and fair and fascinating,--to him

intrinsically lovely and attractive,--she should make an effort for it.

It is not by any means a thing that comes of itself, or that can be

left to itself. She must read, and observe, and think, and rest up to

it. Men, as a general thing, will not tell you so. They talk about

having the slippers ready, and enjoin women to be domestic. But men

are blockheads,--dear, and affectionate, and generous

blockheads,--benevolent, large-hearted, and chivalrous,--kind, and

patient, and hard-working,--but stupid where women are concerned.

Indispensable and delightful as they are in real life,--pleasant and

comfortable as women actually find them,--not one in ten thousand but

makes a dunce of himself the moment he opens his mouth to theorize

about women. Besides, they have "an axe to grind." The pretty things

they inculcate--slippers, and coffee, and care, and courtesy--ought

indeed to be done, but the others ought not to be left undone. And to

the former women seldom need to be exhorted. They take to them

naturally. A great many more women fret boorish husbands with fond

little attentions than wound appreciative ones by neglect. Women

domesticate themselves to death already. What they want is

cultivation. They need to be stimulated to develop a large,

comprehensive, catholic life, in which their domestic duties shall have

an appropriate niche, and not dwindle down to a narrow and servile one,

over which those duties shall spread and occupy the whole space.

This mistake is the foundation of a world of wretchedness and ruin. I

can see Satan standing at the mother's elbow. He follows her around

into the nursery and the kitchen. He tosses up the babies and the

omelets, delivers dutiful harangues about the inappropriateness of the

piano and the library, and grins fiendishly in his sleeve at the wreck

he is making,--a wreck not necessarily of character, but of happiness;

for I suppose Satan has so bad a disposition, that, if he cannot do all

the harm he would wish, he will still do all he can. It is true that

there are thousands of good men married to fond and foolish women, and

they are happy. Well, the fond and foolish women are very fortunate.

They have fallen into hands that will entreat them tenderly, and they

will not perceive any lack. Nor are the noble men wholly unfortunate,

in that they have not taken to their hearts shrews. But this is not

marriage.

There are women less foolish. They see their husbands attracted in

other directions more often and more easily than in theirs. They have

too much sterling worth and profound faith to be vulgarly jealous.

They fear nothing like shame or crime; but they feel the fact that

their own preoccupation with homely household duties precludes real

companionship, the interchange of emotions, thoughts, sentiments,--a

living, and palpable, and vivid contact of mind with mind, of heart

with heart. They see others whose leisure ministers to grace,

accomplishments, piquancy, and attractiveness, and the moth flies

towards the light by his own nature. Because he is a wise, and

virtuous, and honorable moth, he does not dart into the flame. He does

not even scorch his wings. He never thinks of such a thing. He merely

circles around the pleasant light, sunning himself in it without much

thought one way or another, only feeling that it is pleasant; but

meanwhile Mrs. Moth sits at home in darkness, mending the children's

clothes, which is not exhilarating. Many a woman who feels that she

possesses her husband's affection misses something. She does not

secure his fervor, his admiration. His love is honest and solid, but a

little dormant, and therefore dull. It does not brace, and tone, and

stimulate. She wants not the love only, but the keenness, and edge,

and flavor of the love; and she suffers untold pangs. I know it, for I

have seen it. It is not a thing to be uttered. Most women do not

admit it even to themselves; but it is revealed by a lift of the

eyelash, by a quiver of the eye, by a tone of the voice, by a trick of

the finger.

But what is the good of saying all this, if a woman cannot help

herself? The children must be seen to, and the work must be done, and

after that she has no time left. The "mother of a young and increasing

family," with her "pale, thin face and feeble step," and her

"multiplied and wearying cares," is "completely worn down with so many

children." She has neither time nor for self-culture, beyond what she

may obtain in the nursery. What satisfaction is there in proving that

she is far below where she ought to be, if inexorable circumstance

prevent her from climbing higher? What use is there in telling her

that she will alienate her husband and injure her children by her

course, when there is no other course for her to pursue? What can she

do about it?

There is one thing that she need not do. She need not sit down and

write a book, affirming that the most glorious and desirable condition

imaginable. She need not lift up her voice and declare that "she lives

above the ills and disquietudes of her condition, in an atmosphere of

love and peace and pleasure far beyond the storms and conflicts of this

material life." Who ever heard of the mother of a young and increasing

family living in an atmosphere of peace, not to say pleasure, above

conflicts and storms? Who does not know that the private history of

families with the ordinary allowance of brains is a record of recurring

internecine warfare? If she said less, we might believe her. When she

says so much, we cannot help suspecting. To make the best of any

thing, it is not necessary to declare that it is the best thing.

Children must be taken care of; but it is altogether probable that

there are too many of them. Some people think that opinion several

times more atrocious than murder in the first degree; but I see no

atrocity in it. I think there is an immense quantity of nonsense

about, regarding this thing. I believe in Malthus,--a great deal more

than Malthus did himself. The prosperity of a country is often

measured by its population; but quite likely it should be taken in

inverse ratio. I certainly do not see why the mere multiplication of

the species is so indicative of prosperity. Mobs are not so altogether

lovely that one should desire their indefinite increase. A village is

honorable, not according to the number, but the character of its

residents. The drunkards and the paupers and the thieves and the

idiots rather diminish than increase its respectability. It seems to me

that the world would be greatly benefited by thinning out. Most of the

places that I have seen would be much unproved by being decimated, not

to say quinqueted or bisected. If people are stubborn and rebellious,

stiff-necked and uncircumcised in heart and ears, the fewer of them the

better. A small population, trained to honor and virtue, to liberality

of culture and breadth of view, to self-reliance and self-respect, is a

thousand times better than an over-crowded one with everything at loose

ends. As with the village, so with the family. There ought to be no

more children than can be healthily and thoroughly reared, as regards

the moral, physical, and intellectual nature both of themselves and

their parents. All beyond this is wrong and disastrous. I know of no

greater crime than to give life to souls, and then degrade them, or

suffer them to be degraded. Children are the poor man's blessing and

Cornelia's jewels, just so long as Cornelia and the poor man can make

adequate provision for them. But the ragged, filthy, squalid,

unearthly little wretches that wallow before the poor man's shanty-door

are the poor man's shame and curse. The sickly, sallow, sorrowful

little ones, shadowed too early by life's cares, are something other

than a blessing. When Cornelia finds children too many for her, when

her step trembles and her cheek fades, when the sparkle dies on her

chalice-brim and her salt has lost its savor, her jewels are Tarpeian

jewels. One child educated by healthy and happy parents is better than

seven dragging their mother into the grave, notwithstanding the

unmeasured reprobation of our little book. Of course, if they can

stand seven, very well. Seven and seventy times seven, if you like,

only let them be buds, not blights. If we obeyed the laws of God,

children would be like spring blossoms. They would impart as much

freshness and strength as they abstract. They are a natural

institution, and Nature is eminently healthy. But when they "come

crowding into the home-nest," as our book daintily says, they are

unnatural. God never meant the home-nest to be crowded. There is room

enough and elbow-room enough in the world for everything that ought to

be in it. The moment there is crowding, you may be sure something

wrong is going on. Either a bad thing is happening, or too much of a

good thing, which counts up just the same. The parents begin to repair

the evil by a greater one. They attempt to patch their own rents by

dilapidating their children. They recruit their own exhausted energies

by laying hold of the young energies around them, and older children

are wearied, and fretted, and deformed in figure and temper by the care

of younger children. This is horrible. Some care and task and

responsibility are good for a child's own development; but care and

toil and labor laid upon children beyond what is best for their own

character is intolerable and inexcusable oppression. Parents have no

right to lighten their own burdens by imposing them upon the children.

The poor things had nothing to do with being born. They came into the

world without any volition of their own. Their existence began only to

serve the pleasure or the pride of others. It was a culpable cruelty,

in the first place, to introduce them into a sphere where no adequate

provision could be made for their comfort and culture; but to shoulder

them, after they get here, with the load which belongs to their parents

is outrageous. Earth is not a paradise at best, and at worst it is

very near the other place. The least we can do is to make the way as

smooth as possible for the new-comers. There is not the least danger

that it will be too smooth. If you stagger under the weight which you

have imprudently assumed, stagger. But don't be such an unutterable

coward as to illumine your own life by darkening the young lives which

sprang from yours. I wonder that children do not open their mouths and

curse the father that begat and the mother that bore them. I often

wonder that parents do not tremble lest the cry of the children whom

they oppress go up into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth, and bring down

wrath upon their guilty heads. It was well that God planted filial

affection and reverence as an instinct in the human breast. If it

depended upon reason it would have but a precarious existence.

I wish women would have the sense and courage,--I will not say, to say

what they think, for that is not always desirable,--but to think

according to the facts. They have a strong desire to please men, which

is quite right and natural; but in their eagerness to do this, they

sometimes forget what is due to themselves. To think namby-pambyism

for the sake of pleasing men is running benevolence into the ground.

Not that women consciously do this, but they do it. They don't mean to

pander to false masculine notions, but they do. They don't know that

they are pandering to them, but they are. Men say silly things, partly

because they don't know any better, and partly because they don't want

any better. They are strong, and can generally make shift to bear

their end of the pole without being crushed. So they are tolerably

content. They are not very much to blame. People cannot be expected

to start on a crusade against ills of which they have but a vague and

cloudy conception. The edge does not cut them, and so they think it is

not much of a sword after all. But women have, or ought to have, a

more subtle and intimate acquaintance with realities. They ought to

know what is fact and what is fol-de-rol. They ought to distinguish

between the really noble and the simply physical, not to say faulty.

If men do not, it is women's duty to help them. I think, if women

would only not be quite so afraid of being thought unwomanly, they

would be a great deal more womanly than they are. To be brave, and

single-minded, and discriminating, and judicious, and clear-sighted,

and self-reliant, and decisive, that is pure womanly. To be womanish

is not to be womanly. To be flabby, and plastic, and weak, and

acquiescent, and insipid, is not womanly. And I could wish sometimes

that women would not be quite so patient. They often exhibit a degree

of long-suffering entirely unwarrantable. There is no use in suffering,

unless you cannot help it; and a good, stout, resolute protest would

often be a great deal more wise, and Christian, and beneficial on all

sides, than so much patient endurance. A little spirit and "spunk"

would go a great way towards setting the world right. It is not

necessary to be a termagant. The firmest will and the stoutest heart

may be combined with the gentlest delicacy. Tameness is not the stuff

that the finest women are made of. Nobody can be more kind,

considerate, or sympathizing towards weakness or weariness than men, if

they only know it exists; and it is a wrong to them to go on bolstering

them up in their bungling opinions, when a few sensible ideas, wisely

administered, would do so much to enlighten them, and reveal the path

which needs only to be revealed to secure their unhesitating entrance

upon it. It is absurd to suppose that unvarying acquiescence is

necessary to secure and retain their esteem, and that a frank avowal of

differing opinions, even if they were wrong, would work its forfeiture.

A respect held on so frail a tenure were little worth. But it is not

so. I believe that manhood and womanhood are too truly harmonious to

need iron bands, too truly noble to require the props of falsehood.

Truth, simple and sincere, without partiality and without hypocrisy, is

the best food for both. If any are to be found on either side too weak

to administer or digest it, the remedy is not to mix it with folly or

falsehood, for they are poisons, but to strengthen the organisms with

wholesome tonics,--not undiluted, perhaps, but certainly unadulterated.

O Edmund Sparkler, you builded better than you knew, when you reared

eulogiums upon the woman with no nonsense about her.

CAMILLA'S CONCERT

I, who labor under the suspicion of not knowing the difference between

"Old Hundred" and "Old Dan Tucker,"--I, whose every attempt at music,

though only the humming of a simple household melody, has, from my

earliest childhood, been regarded as premonitory symptom of epilepsy,

or, at the very least, hysterics, to be treated with cold water, the

bellows, and an unmerciful beating between my shoulders,--I, who can

but with much difficulty and many a retrogression make my way among the

olden mazes of tenor, alto, treble, bass, and who stand "clean daft" in

the resounding confusion of andante, soprano, falsetto, palmetto,

pianissimo, akimbo, l'allegro, and il penseroso,--_I_ was bidden to

Camilla's concert, and, like a sheep to slaughter, I went.

He bears a great loss and sorrow who has "no ear for music." Into one

great garden of delights he may not go. There needs no flaming sword

to bar the way, since for him there is no gate called Beautiful which

he should seek to enter. Blunted and stolid he stumbles through life

for whom its harp-strings vainly quiver. Yet, on the other hand, what

does he not gain? He loses the concord of sweet sounds, but he is

spared the discord of harsh noises. For the surges of bewildering

harmony and the depths of dissonant disgust, he stands on the levels of

perpetual peace. You are distressed, because in yonder well-trained

orchestra a single voice is pitched one sixteenth of a note too high.

For me, I lean out of my window on summer nights enraptured over the

organ-man who turns poor lost Lilian Dale round and round with his

inexorable crank. It does not disturb me that his organ wheezes and

sputters and grunts. Indeed, there is for me absolutely no wheeze, no

sputter, no grunt. I only see dark eyes of Italy, her olive face, and

her gemmed and lustrous hair. You mutter maledictions on the infernal

noise and caterwauliug. I hear no caterwauliug, but the river-god of

Arno ripples soft songs in the summertide to the lilies that bend above

him. It is the guitar of the cantatrice that murmurs through the

scented, dewy air,--the cantatrice with the laurel yet green on her

brow, gliding over the molten moonlit water-ways of Venice, and

dreamily chiming her well-pleased lute with the plash of the oars of

the gondolier. It is the chant of the flower-girl with large eyes

shining under the palm-branches in the market-place of Milan; and with

the distant echoing notes come the sweet breath of her violets and the

unquenchable odors of her crushed geraniums borne on many a white sail

from the glorified Adriatic. Bronzed cheek and swart brow under my

window, I shall by and by throw you a paltry nickel cent for your

tropical dreams; meanwhile tell me, did the sun of Dante's Florence

give your blood its fierce flow and the tawny hue to your bared and

brawny breast? Is it the rage of Tasso's madness that burns in your

uplifted eyes? Do you take shelter from the fervid noon under the

cypresses of Monte Mario? Will you meet queenly Marguerite with myrtle

wreath and myrtle fragrance, as she wanders through the chestnut vales?

Will you sleep tonight between the colonnades under the golden moon of

Napoli? Go back, O child of the Midland Sea! Go out from this cold

shore, that yields crabbed harvests for your threefold vintages of

Italy. Go, suck the sunshine from Seville oranges under the elms of

Posilippo. Go, watch the shadows of the vines swaying in the

mulberry-trees from Epomeo's gales. Bind the ivy in a triple crown

above Bianca's comely hair, and pipe not so wailingly to the Vikings of

this frigid Norseland.

But Italy, remember, my frigid Norseland has a heart of fire in her

bosom beneath its overlying snows, before which yours dies like the

white sick hearth-flame before the noonday sun. Passion, but not

compassion, is here "cooled a long age in the deep-delved earth." We

lure our choristers with honeyed words and gentle ways: you lay your

sweetest songsters on the gridiron. Our orchards ring with the

full-throated happiness of a thousand birds: your pomegranate groves

are silent, and your miserable cannibal kitchens would tell the reason

why, if outraged spits could speak. Go away, therefore, from my

window, Giuseppo; the air is growing damp and chilly, and I do not

sleep in the shadows of broken temples.

Yet I love music; not as you love it, my friend, with intelligence,

discrimination, and delicacy, but in a dull, woodeny way, as the "gouty

oaks" loved it, when they felt in their fibrous frames the stir of

Amphion's lyre, and "floundered into hornpipes"; as the gray, stupid

rocks loved it, when they came rolling heavily to his feet to listen;

in a great, coarse, clumsy, ichthyosaurian way, as the rivers loved sad

Orpheus's wailing tones, stopping in their mighty courses, and the

thick-hided hippopotamus dragged himself up from the unheeded pause of

the waves, dimly thrilled with a vague ecstasy. The confession is sad,

yet only in such beastly fashion come sweetest voices to me,--not in

the fulness of all their vibrations, but sounding dimly through many an

earthly layer. Music I do not so much hear as feel. All the exquisite

nerves that bear to your soul these tidings of heaven in me lie torpid

or dead. No beatitude travels to my heart over that road. But as

sometimes an invalid, unable through mortal sickness to swallow his

needed nutriment, is yet kept alive many days by immersed in a bath of

wine and milk, which somehow, through unwonted courses, penetrates to

the sources of vitality,--so I, though the natural avenues of sweet

sounds have been hermetically sealed, do yet receive the fine flow of

the musical ether. I feel the flood of harmony pouring around me. An

inward, palpable, measured tremulousness of the subtile secret essence

of life attests the presence of some sweet disturbing cause, and, borne

on unseen wings, I mount to loftier heights and diviner airs.

So I was comforted for my waxed ears and Camilla's concert.

There is one other advantage in being possessed with a deaf-and-dumb

devil, which, now that I am on the subject of compensation, I may as

well mention. You are left out of the arena of fierce discussion and

debate. You do not enter upon the lists wherefrom you would be sure to

come off discomfited. Of all reputations, a musical reputation seems

the most shifting and uncertain; and of all rivalries, musical

rivalries are the most prolific of heart-burnings and discomfort. Now,

if I should sing or play, I should wish to sing and play well. But what

is well? Nancie in the village "singing-seats" stands head and

shoulders above the rest, and wears her honors tranquilly, an authority

at all rehearsals and serenades. But Anabella comes up from the town

to spend Thanksgiving, and, without the least mitigation or remorse of

voice, absolutely drowns out poor Nancie, who goes under, giving many

signs. Yet she dies not unavenged, for Harriette sweeps down from the

city, and immediately suspends the victorious Anabella from her

aduncate nose, and carries all before her. Mysterious is the

arrangement of the world. The last round of the ladder is not yet

reached. To Madame Morlot, Harriette is a savage, une bete, without

cultivation. "Oh, the dismal little fright! a thousand years of study

would be useless; go, scour the floors; she has positively no voice."

No voice, Madame Morlot? Harriette, no voice,--who burst every ear-drum

in the room last night with her howling and hooting, and made the

stoutest heart tremble with fearful forebodings of what might come

next? But Madame Morlot is not infallible, for Herr Driesbach sits

shivering at the dreadful noises which Madame Morlot extorts from his

sensitive and suffering piano, and at the necessity which lies upon him

to go and congratulate her upon her performance. Ah! if his tortured

conscience might but congratulate her and himself upon its close! And

so the scale ascends. Hills on hills and Alps on Alps arise, and who

shall mount the ultimate peak till all the world shall say, "Here

reigns the Excellence"? I listen with pleasure to untutored Nancie

till Anabella takes all the wind from her sails. I think the force of

music can no further go than Madame Morlot, and, behold, Herr Driesbach

has knocked out that underpinning. I am bewildered, and I say,

helplessly, "What shall I admire and be a la mode?" But if it is so

disheartening to me, who am only a passive listener, what must be the

agonies of the dramatis personae? "Hang it!" says Charles Lamb, "how

I like to be liked, and what I do to be liked!" And do Nancie,

Harriette, and Herr Driesbach like it any less? What shall avenge them

for their spretae injuria formae? What can repay the hapless

performer, who has performed her very best, for learning by terrible,

indisputable indirections that her cherished and boasted Cremona is but

a very second fiddle?

So, standing on the high ground of certain immunity from criticism and

hostile judgment, I do not so much console myself as I do not stand in

need of consolation. I rather give thanks for my mute and necessarily

unoffending lips, and I shall go in great good-humor to Camilla's

concert.

There are many different ways of going to a concert. You can be one of

a party of fashionable people to whom music is a diversion, a pastime,

an agreeable change from the assembly or the theatre. They applaud,

they condemn, they criticise. They know all about it. Into such

company as this, even I, whose poor old head is always getting itself

wedged in where it has no business to be, have chanced to be thrown.

This is torture. My cue is to turn into the Irishman's echo, which

always returned for his "How d'ye do?" a "Pretty well, thank you." I

cling to the skirts of that member of the party who is agreed to have

the best taste and echo his responses an octave higher. If he sighs at

the end of a song, I bring out my pocket-handkerchief. If he says

"charming," I murmur "delicious." If he thinks it "exquisite," I

pronounce it "enchanting." Where he is rapt in admiration, I go into a

trance, and so shamble through the performances, miserable impostor

that I am, and ten to one nobody finds out that I am a dunce, fit for

treason, stratagem, and spoils. It is a great strain upon the mental

powers, but it is wonderful to see how much may be accomplished, and

what skill may be attained, by long practice.

Also one may go to a concert as a conductor with a single musical

friend. By conductor I do not mean escort, but a magnetic conductor,

rapture conductor, a fit medium through which to convey away his

delight, so that he shall not become surcharged and explode. He does

not take you for your pleasure, nor for his own, but for use. He

desires some one to whom he can from time to time express his opinions

and his enthusiasm, sure of an attentive listener,--since nothing is so

pleasant as to see one's views welcomed. Now you cannot pretend that

in such a case your listening is thoroughly honest. You are receptive

of theories, criticisms, and reminiscences; but you would not like to

be obliged to pass an examination on them afterwards. You do, it must

be confessed, sometimes, in the midst of eloquent dissertations, strike

out into little flowery by-paths of your own, quite foreign to the

grand paved-ways along which your friend supposes he is so kind as to

be leading you. But however digressive your mind may be, do not suffer

your eyes to digress. Whatever may be the intensity of your ennui,

endeavor to preserve an animated expression, and your success is

complete. This is all that is necessary. You will never be called

upon for notes or comments. Your little escapades will never be

detected. It is not your opinions that were sought, nor your education

that was to be furthered. You were only an escape-pipe, and your

mission ceased when the soul of song fled and the gas was turned off.

This, too, is all that can justly be demanded. Minister, lecturer,

singer, no one has any right to ask of his audience anything more than

opportunity,--the externals of attention. All the rest is his own

look-out. If you prepossess your mind with a theme, you do not give

him an even chance. You must offer him in the beginning a tabula

rasa,--a fair field, and then it is his business to go in and win your

attention; and if he cannot, let him pay the costs, for the fault is

his own.

This also is torture, but its name is Zoar, a little one.

There is yet another way. You may go with one or many who believe in

individuality. They go to the concert for love of music,--negatively

for its rest and refreshment, positively for its embodied delights.

They take you for your enjoyment, which they permit you to compass

after your own fashion. They force from you no comment. They demand

no criticism. They do not require censure as your certificate of

taste. They do not trouble themselves with your demeanor. If you

choose to talk in the pauses, they are receptive and cordial. If you

choose to be silent, it is just as well. If you go to sleep, they will

not mind,--unless, under the spell of the genius of the place, your

sleep becomes vocal, and you involuntarily join the concert in the

undesirable role of De Trop. If you go into raptures, it is all the

same; you are not watched and made a note of. They leave you at the

top of your bent. Whether you shall be amused, delighted, or

disgusted, they respect your decisions and allow you to remain free.

How did I go to my concert? Can I tell for the eyes that made "a

sunshine in the shady place"? Was I not veiled with the beautiful

hair, and blinded with the lily's white splendor? So went I with the

Fairy Queen in her golden coach drawn by six white mice, and, behold, I

was in Camilla's concert-room.

It is to be a fiddle affair. Now I am free to say, if there is

anything I hate, it is a fiddle. Hide it away under as many Italian

coatings as you choose, viol, violin, viola, violone, violoncello,

violoncellettissimo, at bottom it is all one, a fiddle; in its best

estate, a whirligig, without dignity, sentiment, or power; and at worst

a rubbing, rasping, squeaking, woollen, noisy nuisance that it sets

teeth on edge to think of. I shudder at the mere memory of the

reluctant bow dragging its slow length across the whining strings. And

here I am, in my sober senses, come to hear a fiddle!

But it is Camilla's. Do you remember a little girl who, a few years

ago, became famous for her wonderful performance on the violin? At six

years of age she went to a great concert, and of all the fine

instruments there, the unseen spirit within her made choice, "Papa, I

should like to learn the violin." So she learned it and loved it, and

when ten years old delighted foreign and American audiences with her

marvelous genius. It was the little Camilla who now, after ten years

of silence, tuned her beloved instrument once more.

As she walks softly and quietly in, I am conscious of a disappointment.

I had unwittingly framed for her an aesthetic violin, with the

essential strings and bridge and bow indeed, but submerged and forgot

in such Orient splendors as befit her glorious genius. Barbaric pearl

and gold, finest carved work, flashing gems from Indian watercourses,

the delicatest pink sea-shell, a bubble-prism caught and

crystallized,--of all rare and curious substances wrought with dainty

device, fantastic as a dream, and resplendent as the light, should her

instrument be fashioned. Only in "something rich and strange" should

the mystic soul lie sleeping for whom her lips shall break the spell of

slumber, and her young fingers unbar the sacred gates. And, oh me! it

is, after all, the very same old red fiddle! Dee, dee!

But she neither glides nor trips nor treads, as heroines invariably do,

but walks in like a Christian woman. She steps upon the stage and

faces the audience that gives her hearty greeting and waits the

prelude. There is time for cool survey. I am angry still about the red

fiddle, and I look scrutinizingly at her dress, and think how ugly is

the mode. The skirt is white silk,--a brocade, I believe,--at any rate,

stiff, and, though probably full to overflowing in the hands of the

seamstress, who must compress it within prescribed limits about the

waist, looks scanty and straight. Why should she not, she who comes

before us tonight, not as a fashion, but an inspiration,--why should

she not assume that immortal classic drapery whose graceful falls and

folds the sculptor vainly tries to imitate, the painter vainly seeks to

limn? When Corinne tuned her lyre at the Capitol, when she knelt to be

crowned with her laurel crown at the hands of a Roman senator, is it

possible to conceive her swollen out with crinoline? And yet I

remember, that, though sa roe etait blanche, et son costume etait tres

pittoresque, it was sans s'e carter cependant assez des usages recus

pour que l'on put y trouver de l'affectation; and I suppose, if one

should now suddenly collapse from conventional rotundity to antique

statuesqueness, the great "on" would very readily "y trouver de

l'affectation." Nevertheless, though one must dress in Rome as Romans

do, and though the Roman way of dressing is, taking all things into the

account, as good as any, and if not more graceful, a thousand times

more convenient, wholesome, comfortable, and manageable that Helen's,

still it does seem that, when one steps out of the ordinary area of

Roman life and assumes an abnormal position, one might, without

violence, assume temporarily an abnormal dress, and refresh our dilated

eyes once more with flowing, wavy outlines. Music is one of the

eternities: why should not its accessories be? Why should a discord

disturb the eye, when only concords delight the ear?

But I lift my eyes from Camilla's unpliant drapery to the red red rose

in her hair, and thence, naturally, to her silent face, and in that

instant ugly dress and red red rose fade out of my sight. What is it

that I see, with tearful tenderness and a nameless pain at the heart?

A young face deepened and drawn with suffering; dark, large eyes, whose

natural laughing light has been quenched in tears, yet shining still

with a distant gleam caught from the eternal fires. O still, pathetic

face! A sterner form than Time has passed and left his vestige there.

Happy little girl, playing among the flickering shadows of the

Rhine-land, who could not foresee the darker shadows that should settle

and never lift nor flicker from her heavy heart? Large, lambent eyes,

that might have been sweet, but now are only steadfast,--that may yet

be sweet, when they look tonight into a baby's cradle, but gazing now

upon a waiting audience, are only steadfast. Ah! so it is. Life has

such hard conditions, that every dear and precious gift, every rare

virtue, every pleasant facility, every genial endowment, love, hope,

joy, wit, sprightliness, benevolence, must sometimes be cast into the

crucible to distil the one elixir, patience. Large, lambent eyes, in

which days and nights of tears are petrified, steadfast eyes that are

neither mournful nor hopeful nor anxious, but with such unvoiced

sadness in their depths that the hot tears well up in my heart, what do

you see in the waiting audience? Not censure, nor pity, nor

forgiveness for you do not need them,--but surely a warm human

sympathy, since heart can speak to heart, though the thin, fixed lips

have sealed their secret well. Sad mother, whose rose of life was

crushed before it had budded, tender young lips that had drunk the cup

of sorrow to the dregs, while their cup of bliss should hardly yet be

brimmed for life's sweet springtime, your crumbling fanes and broken

arches and prostrate columns lie not among the ruins of Time. Be

comforted of that. They witness of a more pitiless Destroyer, and by

this token I know there shall dawn a brighter day. The God of the

fatherless and the widow, of the worse than widowed and fatherless, the

Avenger of the Slaughter of the Innocents, be with you, and shield and

shelter and bless!

But the overture wavers to its close, and her soul hears far off the

voice of the coming Spirit. A deeper light shines in the strangely

introverted eyes,--the look as of one listening intently to a distant

melody which no one else can hear,--the look of one to whom the room

and the people and the presence are but a dream, and past and future

centre on the far-off song. Slowly she raises her instrument. I

almost shudder to see the tawny wood touching her white shoulder; yet

that cannot be common or unclean which she so loves and carries with

almost a caress. Still intent, she raises the bow with a slow sweep,

as were a wand of divination. Nearer and nearer comes the heavenly

voice, pouring around her a flood of mystic melody. And now at last it

breaks upon our ears,--softly at first, only a sweet faint echo from

that other sphere, but deepening, strengthening, conquering,--now

rising on the swells of a controlling passion, now sinking into the

depths with its low wail of pain; exultant, scornful, furious, in the

glad outburst of opening joy and the fierce onslaught of strength;

crowned, sceptred, glorious in garland and singing-robes, throned in

the high realms of its inheritance, a kingdom of boundless scope and

ever new delights: then sweeping down through the lower world with

diminishing rapture, rapture lessening into astonishment, astonishment

dying into despair, it gathers up the passion and the pain, the blight

and woe and agony; all garnered joys are scattered. Evil supplants the

good. Hope dies, love pales, and faith is faint and wan. But every

death has its moaning ghost, pale spectre of vanished loves. Oh,

fearful revenge of the outraged soul! The mysterious, uncomprehended,

incomprehensible soul! The irrepressible, unquenchable, immortal soul,

whose every mark is everlasting! Every secret sin committed against it

cries out from the house-tops. Cunning may strive to conceal, will may

determine to smother, love may fondly whisper, "It does not hurt"; but

the soul will not BE outraged. Somewhere, somehow, when and where you

least expect, unconscious, perhaps, to its owner, unrecognized by the

many, visible only to the clear vision, somewhere, somehow, the soul

bursts asunder its bonds. It is but a little song, a tripping of the

fingers over the keys, a drawing of the bow across the strings,--only

that! Only that? It is the protest of the wronged and ignored soul.

It is the outburst of the pent and prisoned soul. All the ache and

agony, all the secret wrong and silent endurance, all the rejected love

and wounded trust and slighted truth, all the riches wasted, all the

youth poisoned, all the hope trampled, all the light darkened,--all

meet and mingle in a mad whirl of waters. They surge and lash and

rage, a wild storm of harmony. Barriers are broken. Circumstance is

not. The soul! the soul! the soul! the wronged and fettered soul! the

freed and royal soul! It alone is king. Lift up your heads, O ye

gates, and be ye lift up, ye everlasting doors, and the King of Glory

shall come in! Tremble, O Tyrant, in your mountain-fastness! Tremble,

Deceiver, in your cavern under the sea! Your victim is your accuser.

Your sin has found you out. Your crime cries to Heaven. You have

condemned and killed the just. You have murdered the innocent in

secret places, and in the noonday sun the voice of their blood crieth

unto God from the ground. There is no speech nor language. There is no

will nor design. The seal of silence is unbroken. But unconscious,

entranced, inspired, the god has lashed his Sybil on. The vital

instinct of the soul, its heaven-born, up-springing life, flings back

the silver veil, and reveals the hidden things to him who hath eyes to

see.

The storm sobs and soothes itself to silence. There is a hush, and

then an enthusiasm of delight. The small head slightly bows, the still

face scarcely smiles, the slight form disappears,--and after all, it

was only a fiddle.

"When Music, heavenly maid, was young," begins the ode; but Music,

heavenly maid, seems to me still so young, so very young, as scarcely

to have made her power felt. Her language is yet unlearned. When a

baby of a month is hungry or in pain, he contrives to make the fact

understood. If he is at peace with himself and his surroundings, he

leaves no doubt on the subject. To precisely this degree of

intelligibility has the Heavenly Maid attained among us. When

Beethoven sat down to the composition of one of his grand harmonies,

there was undoubtedly in his mind as distinct a conception of that

which he wished to express, of that within him which clamored for

expression, as ever rises before a painter's eye, or sings in a poet's

brain. Thought, emotion, passion, hope, fear, joy, sorrow, each had

its life and law. The painter paints you this. This the poet sings

you. You stand before a picture, and to your loving, searching gaze

its truths unfold. You read the poem with the understanding, and catch

its concealed meanings. But what do you know of what was in

Beethoven's soul? Who grasps his conception? Who faithfully renders,

who even thoroughly knows his idea? Here and there to some patient

night-watcher the lofty gates are unbarred, "on golden hinges turning."

But, for the greater part, the musician who would tell so much speaks

to unheeding ears. We comprehend him but infinitesimally. It is the

Battle of Prague. Adrianus sits down to the piano, and Dion stands by

his side, music-sheet in hand, acting as showman. "The cannon," says

Dion, at the proper place, and you imagine you recognize reverberation.

"Charge," continues Dion, and with a violent effort you fancy the

ground trembles. "Groans of the wounded," and you are partly

horror-struck and partly incredulous. But what lame representation is

this! As if one should tie a paper around the ankle of the Belvedere

Apollo, with the inscription, "This is the ankle." A collar declares,

"This is the neck." A bandeau locates his "forehead." A bracelet

indicates the "arm." Is the sculpture thus significant? Hardly more

does our music yet signify to us. You hear an unfamiliar air. You

like it or dislike it, or are indifferent. You can tell that it is

slow and plaintive, or brisk and lively, or perhaps even that it is

defiant or stirring; but how insensible you are to the delicate shades

of its meaning! How hidden is the song in the heart of the composer

till he gives you the key! You hear as though you heard not. You hear

the thunder, and the cataract, and the crash of the avalanche; but the

song of the nightingale, the chirp of the katydid, the murmur of the

waterfall never reach you. This cannot be the ultimatum. Music must

hold in its own bosom its own interpretation, and man must have in his

its corresponding susceptibilities. Music is language, and language

implies a people who employ and understand it. But music, even by its

professor, is as yet faintly understood. Its meanings go on crutches.

They must be helped out by words. What does this piece say to you?

Interpret it. You cannot. You must be taught much before you can know

all. It must be translated from music into speech before you can

entirely assimilate it. Musicians do not trust alone to notes for

moods. Their light shines only through a glass darkly. But in some

other sphere, in some happier time, in a world where gross wants shall

have disappeared, and therefore the grossness of words shall be no

longer necessary, where hunger and thirst and cold and care and passion

have no more admittance, and only love and faith and hope and

admiration and aspiration, shall crave utterance, in that blessed

unseen world shall not music be the everyday speech, conveying meaning

not only with a sweetness, but with an accuracy, delicacy, and

distinctness, of which we have now but a faint conception? Here words

are not only rough, but ambiguous. There harmonies shall be minutely

intelligible. Speak with what directness we can, be as explanatory,

emphatic, illustrative as we may, there are mistakes,

misunderstandings, many and grievous, and consequent missteps and

catastrophes. But in that other world language shall be exactly

coexistent with life; music shall be precisely adequate to meaning.

There shall be no hidden corners, no bungling incompatibilities, but

the searching sound penetrates into the secret sources of the soul,

all-pervading. Not a nook, not a crevice, no maze so intricate, but

the sound floats in to gather up fragrant aroma, to bear it yonder to

another waiting soul, and deposit it as deftly by unerring magnetisms

in the corresponding clefts.

Toot away, then, fifer-fellow! Turn your slow crank, inexorable

Italian! Thrum your thrums, Miss Laura, for Signor Bernadotti! You

are a way off, but your footprints point the right way. With many a

yawn and sigh subjective, I greatly fear me, many a malediction

objective, you are "learning the language of another world." To us,

huddled together in our little ant-hill, one is "une bete," and one is

"mon ange"; but from that fixed star we are all so far to have no

parallax.

But I come down from the golden stars, for the white-robed one has

raised her wand again, and we float away through the glowing gates of

the sunrise, over the purple waves, over the vine-lands of sunny

France, in among the shadows of the storied Pyrenees. Sorrow and

sighing have fled away. Tragedy no longer "in sceptred pall comes

sweeping by"; but young lambs leap in wild frolic, silken-fleeced sheep

lie on the slopes of the hills, and shepherd calls to shepherd from his

mountain-peak. Peaceful hamlets lie far down the valley, and every

gentle height blooms with a happy home. Dark-eyed Basque girls dance

through the fruitful orchards. I see the gleam of their scarlet scarfs

wound in with their bold black hair. I hear their rich voices trilling

the lays of their land, and ringing with happy laughter. But I mount

higher and yet higher, till gleam and voice are lost. Here the

freshening air sweeps down, and the low gurgle of living water purling

out from cool, dark chasms, mingles with the shepherd's flute. Here the

young shepherd himself climbs, leaping from rock to rock, supple,

strong, brave, and free as the soul of his race,--the same iron in his

sinews, and the same fire in his blood that dealt the "dolorous rout"

to Charlemagne a thousand years ago. Sweetly across the path of

Roncesvalles blow the evening gales, wafting tender messages to the

listening girls below. Green grows the grass and gay the flowers that

spring from the blood of princely paladins, the flower of chivalry. No

bugle-blast can bring old Roland back, though it wind long and loud

through the echoing woods. Lads and lasses, worthy scions of valiant

stems, may sit on happy evenings in the shadow of the vines, or group

themselves on the greensward in the pauses of the dance, and sing their

songs of battle and victory,--the olden legends of their heroic sires;

but the strain that floats down from e darkening slopes into their

heart of hearts, the song that reddens in their glowing cheeks, and

throbs in their throbbing breasts, and shines in their dewy eyes, is

not the shock of deadly onset, glorious though it be. It is the sweet

old song,--old, yet ever new,--whose burden is,

Come live with me and be my love,"--

old, yet always new,--sweet and tender, and not to be gainsaid, whether

it be piped to a shepherdess in Arcadia, or whether a princess hears it

from princely lips in her palace on the sea.

But the mountain shadows stretch down the valleys and wrap the meadows

in twilight. Farther and farther the notes recede as the flutesman

gathers his quiet flock along the winding paths. Smooth and far in the

tranquil evening-air fall the receding notes, a clear, silvery

sweetness; farther and farther in the hushed evening air, lessening and

lowering, as you bend to listen, till the vanishing strain just

cleaves, a single thread of pearl-pure melody, finer, finer, finer,

through the dewy twilight, and--you hear only your own heart-beats. It

is not dead, but risen. It never ceased. It knew no pause. It has

gone up the heights to mingle with the songs of the angels. You rouse

yourself with a start, and gaze at your neighbor half bewildered. What

is it? Where are we? Oh, my remorseful heart! There is no shepherd,

no mountain, no girl with scarlet ribbon and black braids bound on her

beautiful temples. It was only a fiddle on a platform!

Now you need not tell me that. I know better. I have lived among

fiddles all my life,--embryotic, Silurian fiddles, splintered from

cornstalks, that blessed me in the golden afternoons of green summers

waving in the sunshine of long ago,--sympathetic fiddles that did me

yeomen's service once, when I fell off a bag of corn up garret and

broke my head, and the frightened fiddles, not knowing what else to do,

came and fiddled to me lying on the settee, with such boundless,

extravagant flourish that nobody heard the doctor's gig rolling by, and

so sinciput and occiput were left overnight to compose their own

quarrels, whereby I was naturally all right before the doctor had a

chance at me, suffering only the slight disadvantage of going

broken-headed through life. What I might have been with a whole skull,

I don't know; but I will say, that, good or bad, and even in fragments,

my head is the best part of me.

Yes, I think I may dare affirm that whatever there is to know about a

fiddle I know, and I can give my affidavit that it is no fiddle that

takes you up on its broad wings, outstripping the "wondrous horse of

brass," which required

"the space of a day natural,

This is to sayn, four and twenty houres,

Wher so you list, in drought or elles showres,

To beren your body into every place

To which your herte willeth for to pace,

Withouten wemme of you, thurgh foule or faire,"

since it bears you, "withouten" even so much as your "herte's" will, in

a moment's time, over the and above the stars.

A fiddle, is it? Do not for one moment believe it.--A poet walked

through Southern woods, and the Dryads opened their hearts to him.

They unfolded the secrets that dwell in the depths of forests. They

sang to him under the starlight the songs of their green, rustling

land. They whispered the loves of the trees sentient to poets:--

"The sayling pine; the cedar, proud and tall;

The vine-propt elme; the poplar, never dry;

The builder oake, sole king of forrests all;

The aspine, good for staves; the cypresse funerall;

The lawrell, meed of mightie conquerours

And poets sage; the firre, that weepeth stille;

The willow, worne of forlorne paramours;

The eugh, obedient to the benders will

The birch, for shaftes; the sallow, for the mill;

The mirrhe, sweete-bleeding in the bitter wounde;

The warlike beech; the ash, for nothing ill;

The fruitful olive; and the platane round;

The carver holme; the maple, seldom inward sound."

They sang to him with their lutes. They danced before him with sunny,

subtile grace, wreathing with strange loveliness. They brought him

honey and wine in the white cups of lilies, till his brain was drunk

with delight; and they kept watch by his moss pillow, while he slept.

In the dew of the morning, he arose and felled the kindly tree that had

sheltered him, not knowing it was the home of Arborine, fairest of the

wood-nymphs. But he did it not for cruelty, but tenderness, to carve a

memorial of his most memorable night, and so pulled down no thunders on

his head. For Arborine loved him, and, like her, sister Undine in the

North, found her soul in loving him. Unseen, the beautiful nymph

guided his hand as he fashioned the sounding viol, not knowing he was

fashioning a palace for a soul new-born. He wrought skilfully strung

the intense chords, and smote them with the sympathetic bow. What

burst of music flooded the still air! What new song trembled among the

mermaiden tresses of the oaks! What new presence quivered in every

listening harebell and every fearful windflower? The forest felt a

change, for tricksy nymph had proved a mortal love, and put off her

fairy phantasms for the deep consciousness of humanity. The wood heard,

bewildered. A shudder as of sorrow thrilled through it. A breeze that

was almost sad swept down the shady aisles as the Poet passed out into

the sunshine and the world.

But Nature knows no pain, though Arborines appear never more. A balm

springs up in every wound. Over the hills, and far away beyond their

utmost purple rim, and deep into the dying days the happy love-born one

followed her love, happy to exchange her sylvan immortality for the

spasm of mortal life,--happy, in her human self-abnegation, to lie

close on his heart and whisper close in his ear, though he knew only

the loving voice and never the loving lips. Through the world they

passed, the Poet and his mystic viol. It gathered to itself the

melodies that fluttered over sea and land,--songs of the mountains, and

songs of the valleys,--murmurs of love, and the trumpet-tones of

war,--bugle-blast of huntsman on the track of the chamois, and mother's

lullaby to the baby at her breast. All that earth had of sweetness the

nymph drew into her viol-home, and poured it forth anew in strains of

more than mortal harmony. The fire and fervor of human hearts, the

quiet ripple of inland waters, the anthem of the stormy sea, the voices

of the flowers and the birds, their melody to the song of her who knew

them all.

The Poet died. Died, too, sweet Arborine, swooning away in the fierce

grasp of this stranger Sorrow, to enter by the black gate of death into

the full presence and recognition of him by loving whom she had learned

to be.

The viol passed into strange hands, and wandered down the centuries,

but its olden echoes linger still. Fragrance of Southern woods,

coolness of shaded waters, inspiration of mountain-breezes, all the

secret forces of Nature that the wood-nymph knew, and the joy, the

passion, and the pain that throb only in a woman's heart, lie still,

silent under the silent strings, but wakening into life at the touch of

a royal hand.

Do you not believe my story? But I have seen the viol and the royal

hand!

CHERI

Cheri is the Canary-bird,--a yellow bird with a white tail, when the

cat leaves him any tail at all. He came as a gift, and I welcomed him,

but without gratitude. For a gift is nothing. Always behind the gift

stands the giver, and under the gift lies the motive. The gift itself

has no character. It may be a blunder, a bribe, an offering, according

to the nature and design of the giver; and you are outraged, or

magnanimous, or grateful. Cheri came to me with no love-token under

his soft wings,--only the "good riddance" of his heartless master.

Those little black eyes had twinkled, those shining silken feathers had

gleamed, that round throat had waved with melody in vain. He had worn

his welcome out. Even the virtues which should have throbbed, tender

and all-embracing, under priestly vestments, had no tenderness, no

embrace for him,--only a mockery and a prophecy, a cold and cynical

prediction that I should soon tire of his shrill voice. Yes, Cheri,

your sweet silver trills, your rippling June-brook warbles, were to him

only a shrew's scolding. I took the bird wrathfully, his name had been

Cherry, and rechristened him on the spot Cheri, in anticipation of the

new life that was to dawn upon him, no longer despised Cherry, but

Cheri, my cherished one.

He has been with me now nearly a year, and every trick of his voice and

head and tail is just as fresh, graceful, and charming as on the first

day of his arrival. He is a constant recreation and delight. I put

him in my own room, and went up to look at him two or three times the

first evening. Every time I looked he would be quite still, but his

little black beads of eyes shone wide open in the candle-light, and I

recalled how Chaucer's

"Smale foules maken melodie

That slepen alle night with open eye,"

and reflected that Cheri certainly made melodie enough in the daytime

to be ranked with the poetic tribe; but one night, after he had been

here long enough to have worn away his nervous excitement, I happened

to go into the room very softly, and the black beads had disappeared.

The tiny head had disappeared, too, and only a little round ball of

feathers was balanced on his perch. Then I remembered that chickens

have a way of putting their heads in their pockets when they go to

sleep, and poetry yielded to poultry, Cheri stepped out of Chaucer, and

took his place in the hencoop.

He has had an eventful life since he came to me. In the summer I hung

him on a hook under piazza for the merry company of robins and

bluebirds, which he enjoyed excessively. One day, in the midst of a

most successful concert, an envious gust swept down the cage, up went

the door, and out flew the frightened bird. I could have borne to lose

him, but I was sure he would lose himself,--a tender little dilettante,

served a prince all the days of his life, never having to lift a finger

to help himself, or knowing a want unsatisfied. Now, thrown suddenly

upon his own resources, homeless, friendless, forlorn, how could ever

make his fortune in this bleak New England, for all he has, according

to Cuvier, more brains in his head in proportion to his size than any

other created being? I saw him already in midsummer, drenched with

cold rains, chilled and perishing; but sharper eyes than mine had

marked his flight, and a pair of swift hands plunged after him into the

long grass that tangled his wings and kept him back from headlong

destruction. Amicable relations between Cheri and the cat are on a

most precarious footing. The cat was established in the house before

Cheri came,--a lovely, frolicsome kitten, that sat in my lap, purred in

my face, rubbed her nose against my book, and grew up, to my horror,

out of all possibility of caresses, into a great, ugly, fierce,

fighting animal, that comes into the house drenched and dripping from

the mud-puddle in which she has been rolling in a deadly struggle with

every Tom Hyer and Bill Sayers of the cat kind that make night hideous

through the village. This cat seems to be possessed with a devil every

time she looks at Cheri. Her green eyes bulge out of her head, her

whole feline soul rushes into them, and glares with a hot,

greeny-yellow fire and fury of unquenchable desire. One evening I had

put the cage on a chair, and was quietly reading in the room below,

when a great slam and bang startled the house. "The bird!" shrieked a

voice, mine or another's. I rushed upstairs. The moonlight shone in,

revealing the cage upturned on the floor, the water running, the seeds

scattered about, and a feather here and there. The cat had managed to

elude observation and glide in, and she now managed to elude

observation and glide out. Cheri was alive, but his enemy had attacked

him in the flank, and turned his left wing, which was pretty much gone,

according to all appearances. He could not mount his perch, and for

three days, crouching on the floor of his cage, life seemed to have

lost its charm. His spirits drooped, his appetite failed, and his song

was hushed. Then his feathers grew out again, his spirit returned to

him with his appetite, and he hopped about as good as new. To think

that cat should have been able to thrust her villanous claw in far

enough to clutch a handful of feathers of him before she upset the

cage! I have heard that canaries sometimes die of fright. If so, I

think Cheri would have been justified in doing it. To have a great

overgrown monster, with burning globes of eyes as big as your head and

claws as sharp as daggers, come glaring on you in the darkness,

overturn your house, and grab half your side with one huge paw, is a

thing well calculated to alarm a person of delicate organization.

Then I said to myself, this cat thinks she has struck a placer, and a

hundred to one she will be driving her pick in here again directly. So

I removed the cage immediately, and set it on a high bureau, with a

"whisking-stick" close by it. Sure enough I was awakened the next

morning before day by a prolonged and mournful "maeouw" of

disappointment from the old dragon at not finding the prey where she

had expected. Before she had time to push her researches to success,

she and I and the stick were not letting the grass grow under our feet

on the stairs. Long after, when the fright and flurry had been

forgotten, the cage was again left in a rocking-chair in the upper

front entry, where I had been sitting in sunshine all the afternoon

with Cheri, who thinks me, though far inferior to a robin or a finch,

still better than no company at all. In the course of the evening I

happened to open the lower entry door, when the cat suddenly appeared

on the lower stair. I should have supposed she had come from the

sitting-room with me, but for a certain elaborate and enforced

nonchalance in her demeanor, a jaunty air of insouciance, as far

removed, on the one hand, from the calm equilibrium of dignity which

almost imperceptibly soothes and reassures you, as from the guileless

gayety of infantile ignorance, which perforce "medicines your

weariness," on the other,--a demeanor which at once disgusts and alarms

you. I felt confident that some underhand work was going on. I went

upstairs. There was Cheri again, this time with his right wing gone,

and a modicum of his tail. The cage had retained its position, but the

Evil One had made her grip at him; and the same routine of weariness,

silence, loss of appetite and spirits was to be gone through with

again, followed by re-pluming and recuperating. But every time I think

of it, I am lost in wonder at the skill and sagacity of that cat. It

was something to carry on the campaign in a rocking-chair, without

disturbing the base of operations so as to make a noise and create a

diversion in favor of the bird; but the cunning and self-control which,

as soon as I opened the door, made her leave the bird, and come purring

about my feet, and tossing her innocent head to disarm suspicion, was

wonderful. I look at her sometimes, when we have been sitting together

a while, and say, with steadfast gaze, "Cat-soul, what are you? Where

are you? Whence come you? Whither go you?" But she only her whiskers,

and gives me no satisfaction.

But I saw at once that I must make a different disposition of Cheri.

It would never do to have him thus mauled. To be sure, I suppose the

cat might be educationally mauled into letting him alone; but why

should I beat the beast for simply acting after her kind? Has not the

Manciple, with as much philosophy as poetry, bidden,--

"Let take a cat, and foster hire with milke

And tendre flesh, and make hire couche of silke,

And let hire see a mous go by the wall,

Anon she weiveth milke and flesh, and all,

And every deintee that is in that hous,

Swich appetit hath she to ete the mous

Lo, here hath kind hire domination,

And appetit flemeth discretion"?

Accordingly I respected the "domination" of "kind," took the cage into

the parlor and hung it up in the folds of the window-curtain, where

there is always sunshine, wrapping a strip of brown paper around the

lower part of the cage, so that he should not scatter his seeds over

the carpet. What is the result? Perversely he forsakes his cup of

seed, nicely mixed to suit his royal taste; forsakes his conch-shell,

nicely fastened within easy reach; forsakes the bright sand that lies

whitely strewn beneath his feet, and pecks, pecks, pecks away at that

stiff, raw, coarse brown paper, jagging great gaps in it from hour to

hour. I do not mind the waste of paper, even at its present high

prices; but suppose there should be an ornithological dyspepsia, or a

congestion of the gizzard, or some internal derangement? The

possibility of such a thing gave me infinite uneasiness at first; but

he has now been at it so long without suffering perceptible harm, that

I begin to think Nature knows what she is about, and brown paper agrees

with birds. I am confident, however, that he would devout it all the

same, whether it were salutary or otherwise, for he is a mule-headed

fellow. I let him loose on the flower-stand yesterday, hoping he might

deal death to a horde of insects who had suddenly squatted on the soil

of the money-plant. He scarcely so much as looked at the insects, but

hopped up to the adjoining rose-bush, and proceeded to gorge himself

with tender young leaves. I tilted him away from that, and he

fluttered across the money-plant over to the geranium opposite.

Disturbed there, he flashed to the other side of the stand, and, quick

as thought, gave one mighty dab at a delicate little fuchsia that is

just "picking up" from the effects of transplanting and a long winter

journey. Seeing he was bent on making himself disagreeable, I put him

into his cage again, first having to chase him all about the room to

catch him, and prying him up at last from between a picture and the

wall, where he had flown and settled down in his struggle to get out.

For my Cheri is not in the least tame. He is an entirely uneducated

bird. I have seen canaries sit on people's fingers and eat from their

tongues, but Cheri flies around like a madman at the first approach of

fingers. Indeed, he quite provokes me by his want of trust. He ought

to know by this time that I am his friend, yet he goes off into violent

hysterics the moment I touch him. He does not even show fight. There

is no outcry of anger or alarm, but one "Yang!" of utter despair. He

gives up at once. Life is a burden, his "Yang!" says. "Everything is

going to ruin. There is no use in trying. I wish I never was born.

Yang!" Little old croaker, what are you Yang-ing for? Nobody wishes

to harm you. It is your little cowardly heart that sees lions and

hyenas in a well-meaning forefinger and thumb. Be sensible.

Another opportunity for the exhibition of his perversity is furnished

by his bathing. His personal habits are exquisite. He has a

gentleman's liking for cold water and the appliances of cleanliness;

but if I spread a newspaper on the floor, and prepare everything for a

comfortable and convenient bath, the little imp clings to his perch

immovable. It is not only a bath that he wishes, but fun. Mischief is

his sine qua non of enjoyment. "What is the good of bathing, if you

cannot spoil anything?" says he. "If you will put the bathtub in the

window, where I can splash and spatter the glass and the curtains and

the furniture, very well, but if not, why--" he sits incorrigible, with

eyes half closed, pretending to be sleepy, and not see water anywhere,

the rogue!

One day I heard a great "to-do" in the cage, and found that half the

blind was shut, and helped Cheri to a reflection of himself, which he

evidently thought was another bird, and he was in high feather. He

hopped about from perch to perch, sidled from one side of the cage to

the other, bowed and bobbed and courtesied to himself, sung and swelled

and smirked, and became thoroughly frantic with delight. "Poor thing!"

I said, "you are lonely, no wonder." I had given him a new and shining

cage, a green curtain, a sunny window; but of what avail are these to a

desolate heart? Who does not know that the soul may starve in

splendor? "Solitude," says Balzac, I think, "is a fine thing; but it

is also a fine thing to have some one to whom you can say, from time to

time, that solitude is a fine thing." I know that I am but a poor

substitute for a canary-bird,--a gross and sorry companion for one of

ethereal mould. I can supply seed and water and conch-shells, but what

do I know of finchy loves and hopes? What sympathy have I to offer in

his joyous or sorrowful moods? How can I respond to his enthusiasms?

How can I compare notes with him as to the sunshine and the trees and

the curtain and views of life? It is not sunshine, but sympathy, that

lights up houses into homes. Companionship is what he needs, for his

higher aspirations and his everyday experiences,--somebody to whom he

can observe "The sand is rather gritty today, isn't it?"

"Very much as usual, my dear."

"Here is a remarkably plump seed, my dear, won't you have it?"

"No, thank you, dear, nothing more. Trol-la-la-r-r-r!"

"Do let me help you to a bit of this hemp. It is quite a marvel of

ripeness."

"Thank you. Just a snip. Plenty."

"My dear, I think you are stopping in the bathtub too long this

morning. I fancied you a trifle hoarse yesterday."

"It was the company, pet. I strained my voice slightly in that last

duet."

"We shall have to be furnished with a new shell before long. This old

one is getting to be rather the last peas of the picking."

"Yes, I nearly broke my beak over it yesterday. I was quite ashamed of

it when the ladies were staring at you so admiringly."

"Little one, I have a great mind to try that swing. It has tempted me

this long while."

"My love, I beg you will do no such thing. You will inevitably break

your neck."

Instead of this pleasant conjugal chit-chat, what has he? Nothing. He

stands looking out at the window till his eyes ache, and then he turns

around and looks at me. If any one comes in and begins to talk, and he

delightedly joins, he gets a handkerchief thrown over his cage.

Sometimes the cat creeps in,--very seldom, for I do not trust her, even

with the height of the room between them, and punish her whenever I

find her on forbidden ground, by taking her upstairs and putting her

out on the porch-roof, where she has her choice to stay and starve or

jump off. This satisfies my conscience while giving a good lesson to

the cat, who is not fond of saltatory feats, now that she is getting

into years. If it is after her kind to prey upon birds, and she must

therefore not be beaten, it is also after her kind to leap from

anywhere and come down on her feet, and therefore the thing does not

harm her. Whenever she does stealthily worm herself in, Cheri gives

the pitch the moment he sets eyes on her. Cat looks up steadily at him

for five minutes. Cheri, confident, strikes out in a very tempting

way. Cat describes a semicircle around the window, back and forth, back

and forth, keeping ever her back to the room and her front to the foe,

glaring and mewing and licking her chaps. O, what a delicious tit-bit,

if one could but get at it! Cheri sings relentlessly. Like Shirley

with Louis Moore in her clutches, he will not subdue one of his charms

in compassion.

"Certes it is NOT of herte, all that he sings."

She leaps into a chair. Not a quarter high enough. She jumps to the

window-seat, and walks to and fro, managing the turning-points with

much difficulty. Impossible. She goes over to the other window.

Still worse. She takes up position on the sofa, and her whole soul

exhales into one want.

She mews and licks her chaps alternately. Cheri "pitilessly sweet"

sings with unsparing insolence at the top of his voice, and looks

indifferently over her head.

That is the extent of his society. "It is too bad," I said one day,

and scoured the country for a canary-bird. Everybody had had one, but

it was sold. Then I remembered Barnum's Happy Family, and went out to

the hen-pen, and brought in a little auburn chicken, with white breast,

and wings just budding; a size and a half larger than Cheri, it is

true, but the smallest of the lot, and very soft and small for a

chicken, the prettiest wee, waddling tot you ever saw, a Minnie Warren

of a little duck, and put him in the cage. A tempest in a teapot!

Cheri went immediately into fits and furies. He hopped about

convulsively. You might have supposed him attacked simultaneously with

St. Anthony's fire, St. Vitus's dance, and delirium tremens. He

shrieked, he writhed, he yelled, he raved. The chicken was stupid. If

he had exerted himself a little to be agreeable, if he had only shown

the smallest symptom of interest or curiosity or desire to cultivate an

acquaintance, I have no doubt something might have been accomplished;

but he just huddled down in one corner of the cage, half frightened to

death, like a logy, lumpy, country bumpkin as he was, and I swept him

back to his native coop in disgust. Relieved from the lout's presence,

Cheri gradually laid aside his tantrums, smoothed down his ruffled

plumes, and resumed the manners of a gentleman.

My attempt at happy families was nipped in the bud, decidedly.

By and by I went to the market-town, and, having sold my butter and

eggs, hunted up a bird-fancier. He had plenty of heliotropes,

verbenas, and japonicas, and HAD had plenty of birds, but of course

they were every one gone. Nobody wanted them. He had just about given

them away, for a quarter of a dollar or so, and since then ever so many

had been to buy them. Could he tell me where I might find one? Yes, he

sold one to the barber last week, down near the depot. Didn't believe

but what he would sell it. Was it a female bird? For my ambition had

grown by what it fed on, and, instead of contenting myself simply with

a companion for Cheri, I was now planning for a whole brood of

canaries, with all the interests of housekeeping, baby-tending, and the

manifold small cares incident upon domestic life. In short, I was

launching out upon an entirely new career, setting a new world

a-spinning in that small wire cage. Yes, it was a female bird. A good

bird? For I could not understand the marvelously low price. Yes 'm,

prime. Had eight young ones last year. Eight young ones! I rather

caught my breath. I wanted a brood, but I thought three was the

regular number, and I must confess I could hardly look with fortitude

on such a sudden and enormous accession of responsibility. Besides,

the cage was not half large enough. And how could they all bathe? And

how could I take proper care of so many? And, dear me, eight young

ones! And eight more next year is sixteen. And the grandchildren! And

the great-grandchildren! Hills on hills and Alps on Alps! I shall be

pecked out of house and home. I walked up the street musingly, and

finally concluded not to call on the barber just yet.

It was very well I did so, for just afterwards Cheri's matins and

vespers waxed fainter and fainter, and finally ceased altogether. In

great anxiety I called in the highest medical science, which announced

that he was only shedding his feathers. This opinion was corroborated

by numerous little angelic soft fine feathers scattered about in

localities that precluded the cat. Cheri is a proud youngster, and I

suppose he thought if he must lose his good looks, there was no use in

keeping up his voice; therefore he moped and pouted for several months,

and would have appeared to very great disadvantage in case I had

introduced a stranger to his good graces.

So Cheri is still alone in the world, but when my ship comes home from

sea and brings an additional hour to my day, and a few golden eagles to

my purse, he is going to have his mate, eight young ones and all, and I

shall buy him a new cage, a trifle smaller than Noah's ark, and a cask

of canary-seed and a South Sea turtle-shell, and just put them in the

cage and let them colonize. If they increase and multiply beyond all

possibility of provision, why, I shall by that time, perhaps have

become world-encrusted and hard-hearted, and shall turn the cat in upon

them for an hour or two, which will no doubt have the effect of at once

thinning them down to wieldy proportions.

Sweet little Cheri. My heart smites me to see you chirping there so

innocent and affectionate while I sit here plotting treason against

you. Bright as is the day and dazzling as the sunlit snow, you turn

away from it all, so strong is your craving for sympathy, and bend your

tiny head towards me to pour out the fulness of your song.

And what a song it is! All the bloom of his beautiful islands sheds

its fragrance there. The hum of his honey-bees roving through beds of

spices, the loveliness of dark-eyed maidens treading the wine-press

with ruddy feet, the laughter of young boys swinging in the vines and

stained with the scented grapes,--all the music that rings through his

orange-groves, all the sunshine of the tropics caught in the glow of

fruit and flower, in the blue of sky and sea, in the blinding whiteness

of the shore and the amethystine evening,--all come quivering over the

western wave in the falls of his tuneful voice. You shall hear it

while the day is yet dark in the folds of the morning twilight,--a

weak, faint, preliminary "whoo! whoo!" uncertain and tentative, then a

trill or two of awakened assurance, and then, with a confident,

courageous gush and glory of soul, he flings aside all minor

considerations, and dashes con amore into the very middle of things. I

am not musical, and cannot give you his notes in technical hieroglyphs,

but in exact and intelligible lines such as all may understand, whether

musical or not, his song is like this,--and you may rely upon its

accuracy, for I wrote it down from his own lips this morning:--

/_`'`______ ....... ^^------^^^

^^\\^^^-------- / / /

---- ||| ----^^_^/ ^^^ ///\\\ ^^

SIDE-GLANCES AT HARVARD CLASS-DAY

It happened to me once to "assist" at the celebration of Class-Day at

Harvard University. Class-Day is the peculiar institution of the

Senior Class, and marks its completion of College study and lease from

College rules.

Harvard has set up her Lares and Penates in a fine old grove, or a fine

old grove and green have sprouted up around her, as the case may

be,--most probably the latter, if one may judge from the appearance of

the buildings which constitute the homes of the students, and which

seem to have been built, and to be now sustained, without the remotest

reference to taste or influence, but solely to furnish

shelter,--angular, formal, stiff, windowy, bricky, and worse within

than without. Why, I pray to know, as the first inquiry suggested by

Class-Day, why is it that a boys' school should be placed beyond the

pale of civilization? Do boys take so naturally to the amenities of

life, that they can safely dispense with the conditions of amenity?

Have boys so strong a predisposition to grace, that society can afford

to take them away from home and its influences, and turn them loose

with dozens of other boys into a bare and battered boarding-house, with

its woodwork dingy, unpainted, gashed, scratched; windows dingy and

dim; walls dingy and gray and smoked; everything narrow and rickety,

unhomelike and unattractive?

America boasts of having the finest educational system in the world.

Harvard is, if not the most distinguished, certainly among the first

institutions in the country; but it is necessary only to stand upon the

threshold of the first Harvard house which I entered, to pass through

its mean entry and climb up its uncouth staircase, to be assured that

our educational system has not yet found its key-stone. It has all the

necessary materials, but it is incomplete. At its base it is falling

every day more and more into shape and symmetry, but towards the top it

is still only a pile of pebbles and boulders, and no arch. We have

Primary Schools, Grammar Schools, High Schools, in which, first, boys

and girls are educated together, as it seems impossible not to believe

that God meant them to be; in which, secondly, home life and school

life come together, and correct each other; in which, thirdly,

comfortable and comely arrangements throughout minister to

self-respect. But the moment you rise as high as a college, nature is

violated. First, boys go off by themselves to their own destruction;

secondly, home influences withdrawn; and, thirdly,--at Harvard, which

the only college I ever visited,--the thorough comeliness which is

found in the lower grades of schools does not appeal. The separation

of boys and girls in school is a subject which has much talked about,

but has not yet come to its adequate discussion. But the achievements

of the past are the surest guaranties of the future. When we remember

that, sixty years ago, the lowest district public schools were open to

boys only, and that since that time girls have flocked into every grade

of school below a college, it is difficult to believe that college

doors will forever stand closed to them. _I_ believe that the time

will come when any system framed for boys alone or for girls alone will

be looked upon in the same light in which we now regard a monastery or

a nunnery. Precisely the same course will not be prescribed to both

sexes, but they will be associated in their education to the

inestimable advantage of both.