An eminent divine once described to me a scene he witnessed at a

funeral, which he said nearly caused him to expire with--well, you shall

see. An intimate acquaintance of his, who belonged to a neighboring

parish, having died, he was naturally induced to assist at the

burial-service. The rector of this parish was a man who, though

sensitive in the extreme to the absurdities of others,--being, in fact,

a regular son of Momus,--was entirely unconscious of his own amusing

eccentricities. Among these, numerous and singular, he had the habit

of suddenly stopping in the middle of a sentence, while preaching, and

calling out to the sexton, across the church, "Dooke, turn on more gas!"

or "Dooke, shut that window!" or "Dooke, do"--something else which

was pretty sure to be wanting itself done during the delivery of his

discourse. Nearly every Sunday, strangers not acquainted with his ways

were startled out of their propriety by some such unexpected behavior.

On the occasion referred to, the funeral procession having entered the

churchyard, and my informant and the officiating clergyman having taken

their places at the head of the grave, the undertaker and his assistants

having removed the coffin from the hearse, and the mourners, of whom

there was a large crowd, having gathered into a circular audience, the

Reverend Doctor ---- began the service.

"'Man that is born of a woman'--Oh, stop those carriages! don't you see

where they are going to?" (he suddenly broke out, rushing from the place

where he stood, frantically, among the bystanders; and then returning to

his former position, continued,)--"'hath but a short time to live, and

is full of misery. He cometh up'--Oh, don't let that coffin down

yet! wait till I tell you to," (addressed to the undertaker, who was

anticipating the proper place in the service,)--"'and is cut down like a

flower; he fleeth as it were a shadow,'--Please to hold the umbrella

a little further over my head," (_sotto voce_ to the man who was

endeavoring to protect his head from the sun,)-"'and never continueth in

one stay.'--Hold the umbrella a little higher, will you?" (_sotto voce_

again to the man holding the umbrella.)--"'In the midst of life we are

in death.'--Stand down from there, boys, and be quiet!" (addressed to

some urchins who were crowding and pushing one another about the grave,

in their efforts to look at the coffin.) At length he had proceeded

without further interruptions as far as the sentence, "'We therefore

commit his body to the ground; earth to earth, ashes to ashes, dust to

dust,'"--when Dooke, the sexton,--a queer, impetuous fellow,--who was

vainly endeavoring to keep the boys away from the edge of the grave,

seized suddenly the rope with which the coffin had just been lowered

down, and, stooping forward, laid it like a whip-lash, "cut!" across the

shins of a dozen youngsters, making them leap with "Oh! oh! oh!" a

foot from the ground, and scatter in short order,--"'looking for

the'"--(turning to my friend, as he witnessed the successful exploit of

his favorite sexton, and whispering in his ear,) "_Dooke made 'em hop

that time, didn't he!_--'general resurrection in the last day, and the

life of the world to come.'"

Dooke's mode of dispersing the boys, and the officiating clergyman's

comment upon it, parenthesized into the middle of the most solemn

sentence of the burial-service, were too much for the usual stern

gravity of my clerical friend, and, under pretence of shedding tears, he

buried his face in his handkerchief and his handkerchief in his hat and

shook with laughter.

Speaking of funerals reminds me of a congenial subject.--Nothing in New

York astonishes visitors from the country so much as the magnificent

coffin-shops, rivalling, in the ostentatious and tempting display of

their wares, the most elegant stores on Broadway. Model coffins, of the

latest style and pattern, are set up on end in long rows and protected

by splendid show-cases, with the lids removed to exhibit their rich

satin lining. Fancy coffins, decorated with glittering ornaments, are

placed seductively in bright plate-glass windows, and put out for

baiting advertisements upon the side-walks: as much as to say, "Walk in,

walk in, ladies and gentlemen! Now's your chance! here's your fine, nice

coffins!"--while in ornamental letters upon extensive placards hung

about the doors, "IRON COFFINS," "ROSEWOOD COFFINS," "AIR-TIGHT

COFFINS," "MAHOGANY COFFINS," "PATENT SARCOPHAGI," address the eyes

and appeal to the purses of the passers-by. And I saw in one of these

places, the other day, painted on glass and inclosed in an elegant gilt

frame, "ICE COFFINS," which struck me as queer enough. As though it were

not sufficiently cool to be dead!

It seems to me, that, in this matter, the undertakers, digging a little

too deep below the surface of the present age, have thrown out some of

the mystical and grotesque remains of a very antique religious faith,

which look as singular just now to the eyes of common people as would an

Egyptian temple with its sacred Apis in Broadway, or a Sphinx on Boston

Common. To the eyes of an old Egyptian, no object could be more grateful

than the sarcophagus in which he was to repose at death. He purchased it

as early in life as he could raise the means, and displayed it in his

parlor as an attractive and costly ornament. Indeed, I do not know but

it was useful as well, and the children kept their playthings in it, or

the young ladies their knitting-work and embroidery.

Are we not, in this class of our tastes and feelings, becoming rapidly

Egyptianized? Why, I expect in a year or two to see coffins introduced

into the parlors of the Fifth Avenue, and to find them, when their

owners fail or absquatulate, advertised for sale at auction, with the

rest of the household furniture, at a great sacrifice on the original

cost.

"--> ONE SUPERB COFFIN OF ELEGANT PATTERN AND SUPERIOR WORKMANSHIP, AS

GOOD AS NEW. TWO DITTO, SLIGHTLY DAMAGED."

And then the fashion will become popular with the less aristocratic

portion of the community, and you will see crowds of servant-girls and

street-loungers around the windows of our magnificent coffin-bazaars,

and hear from them such exclamations as these: "Oh! do look here,

Matilda! Wouldn't you like to have such a nice coffin as that?" or,

"What a dear, sweet sarcophagus that one is there!" or, "Faith, I should

like to own that air-tight!"

* * * * *

But the day is now far advanced. The funeral processions have ceased to

arrive, and the husbandmen, having sown the immortal seed furnished by

the metropolis, with shovels and empty dinner-pails, are on their way,

whistling and talking in groups, homeward. The number of loungers and

sight-seers is rapidly diminishing as the light in the more thickly

shaded walks becomes dim, and the clock at the gateway indicates the

near approach of the hour when the portals will be closed.

--Alone with the dead! Alone in the night among tombs and graves! How

many readers do not at the sight of these words feel an involuntary

_soupçon_ of a shudder? Would not the cause of this indefinable secret

dread of the darkness which covers a graveyard be a curious matter

of inquiry? Let one ever so cultivated and skeptical, familiar as a

physician or a soldier with the spectacle of death, ever so full of

mental and physical courage, passing alone late at night through a

graveyard, hear the least sound among the graves, or see a moving object

of any kind, especially a white one, and he will instantly feel an

_alloverishness_ foreign to ordinary experience, and I will not answer

for him that his hair does not stand on end and his flesh grow rough as

a nutmeg-grater. A company of three or four persons would feel far less

disturbed. This proves the emotion to be genuine _fear_. And with this

recognized as a fact, ask the question, Of what are you afraid? What

makes your feet stick to the ground so fast, or inspires you to take to

your legs and run for your life? "A ridiculous, foolish superstition,"

reason answers.

I do not intend by this to intimate that you, reader, bold and

courageous person that I know you to be, would not dare to go through a

graveyard at night. By no means. I only predicate the existence within

you of this ridiculous, foolish superstition, and maintain that you

would do so under _all_ circumstances with peculiar feelings which you

did not possess before you entered it and which you will not possess

as soon as you have left it, and under _certain_ circumstances with a

trembling of the nerves and a palpitation of the heart, and that the

occasion _might_ occur when you would be still _more_ strongly and

strangely affected. To illustrate the latter case I have an anecdote

_à-propos_.

A college class-mate, (Poor B----! the shadows of the Pyramids now fall

upon his early grave!) a young man easily agitated, to be sure, and

possibly timid, on his way home, late one autumn night, from the

house of a relative in the country, was hurrying past a dismal old

burying-yard in the midst of a gloomy wood, when he was suddenly

startled by a strange noise a short distance from the road. Turning

his head, alarmed, in the direction whence it proceeded, he was

horror-struck at seeing through the darkness a white object on the

ground, struggling as if in the grasp of some terrible monster.

Instantly the blood froze in his veins; he stood petrified,--the

howlings of the wind, clanking of chains, and groans of agony, filling

his ears,--with his eyes fixed in terror upon the white shape rolling

and plunging and writhing among the tombs. Attempting to run, his feet

refused to move, and he swooned and fell senseless in the road. A party

of travellers, happening shortly to pass, stumbled over his body.

Raising him upon his feet, they succeeded by vigorous shakes in

restoring him to a state of consciousness.

While explaining to them the cause of his fright, the noise was renewed.

The men, although somewhat alarmed, clubbed their individual courage,

climbed the wall, and found--nearly in the centre of the graveyard--_an

old white horse_ thrown down by his fetters and struggling violently to

regain his feet.

B---- assured me, the explanation of the spectacle instinctively

occurring to his mind at the moment as indubitable was that some

reprobate had just been buried there, and that the Devil, coming for

his body, was engaged in binding his unwilling limbs, preparatory to

carrying him away!

The reader may smile at the weakness and folly displayed in this case,

but the assertion may nevertheless be safely ventured, that there is not

one person in a hundred who would not under the same circumstances have

been greatly disturbed, or would have invented a much less frightfully

absurd solution of the phenomenon than poor B----'s.

I think the singular feelings associated with graveyard darkness, which

the wisest and bravest of men find slumbering beneath all their courage

and philosophy, would be found upon investigation to proceed principally

from two sources,--a constitutional inclination to religious

superstition, and an acquired educational belief in the reality of the

dreams and fancies of poets, mingled, of course, with some natural

cowardice.

The dryest and hardest men have more poetry in them than they or we

begin to suspect. Indeed, if we could take our individual or collective

culture to pieces and award to each separate influence its due and just

share of results, I should not be surprised at finding that the poet had

done more in the way of fashioning our education than the scientist

or any other teacher. Milton, to give but a single example, with his

speculations concerning the Fall,--its effects upon humanity, the brute

creation, and physical nature,--and his imaginary conflicts between

the hostile armies of heaven, and his celestial and Satanic

personifications, has had so much influence in Anglo-Saxon culture, that

nine-tenths of the people believe, without knowing it, as firmly in

"Paradise Lost" as in the text of the Bible. The Governor of Texas,

citing in his proclamation a familiar passage in Shakspeare as emanating

from the inspired pen of the Psalmist, is not to so great extent

an example of ignorance as an illustration of the lofty peerage

instinctively assigned the great dramatist in the ordinary associations

of our thoughts. This faith in the visionary world of poets is instilled

into us (and it is for this reason that Rousseau, in his masterly

work on education, the "Émile," reprobates the custom as promotive of

superstition) in early infancy by our parents and nurses with their

stories of nymphs, fairies, elves, dwarfs, giants, witches, hobgoblins,

and the like fabulous beings, and, as soon as we are able to read, by

the tales of genii, sorcerers, demons, ghouls, enchanted caves and

castles, and monsters and monstrosities of every name. The exceedingly

impressible and poetical nature of children (for all children are poets

and talk poetry as soon as they can lisp) appropriates and absorbs with

intense relish these fanciful myths, and for years they believe more

firmly in their truth than in the realities of the actual world. And I

more than suspect that this child-credulity rather slumbers in the grown

man, smothered beneath superimposed skepticisms and cognitions, than is

ever eradicated from his mind, and thus, upon the shock of an emergency

disturbing him suddenly to the foundation, is ready to burst up through

the crevices of his shattered practical experience and appear on the

surface of his judgment and understanding.

In addition, then, to an instinctive tendency to religious superstition,

(of which I shall here say nothing,) to the fairy mythology of the

nursery, and the phantom machinery invented by poets to clothe with the

semblance of reality their dreams and fancies, can be traced in a great

measure the existence in the mind of the _credulity_ which renders the

_fear_ in question possible, opening an introduction for it into the

heart excited by inexplicable phenomena or circumstanced where such

phenomena might, according to our superstitious beliefs, easily occur.

Without entering into an analysis of the _fear_ itself, beyond the

remark that any extraordinary sight or sound not immediately explicable

by the eye or ear to the understanding (as a steamboat to the Indians or

a comet to our ancestors) is a legitimate cause of the emotion, as well

as the _possibility_ of the occurrence of such sights and sounds,

for believing which we have seen man prepared, first by natural

superstitious inclination, and secondly by a peculiar education,--I will

only further add, for the purpose of a brief introduction to an anecdote

I wish to relate, that there is another fountain of knowledge, from

which we drink at a later period than childhood, as well as then, whose

waters are strongly impregnated with this superstitious, fear-provoking

credulity: I mean the stories of _ghosts_ which have been seen and heard

in all ages and countries, revealing important secrets, pointing out

the places where murder has been committed or treasure concealed,

foretelling deaths and calamities, and forewarning men of impending

dangers. Hundreds of books familiar to all have been written upon this

subject and form an extensive department of our literature, especially

of our older literature.

The philosopher attempts to account for such phenomena by referring them

to optical illusions or a disordered condition of the brain, making them

_subjective_ semblances instead of _objective_ realities. But one is

continually being puzzled and perplexed with evidence contradicting this

hypothesis, which, upon any other subject _a priori_ credible to the

reason and judgment, would be received as satisfactory and decisive

without a moment's hesitation. In truth, with all the light which

science is able to shed upon it, and all the resolute shutting of the

eyes at points which no elucidating theory is available to explain,

there are facts in this department of supernaturalism which stagger the

unbelief of the stoutest skeptic.

It is constantly urged, among other objections to the credibility

of supernatural apparitions, that the names of the witnesses have

singularly and suspiciously disappeared,--that you find them, upon

investigation, substantiated thus: A very worthy gentleman told another

very worthy gentleman, who told a very intelligent lady, who told

somebody else, who told the individual who finally communicated the

incident to the world. There are, however, as just intimated, instances

in which such ambiguity is altogether wanting. Among these is one so

well authenticated by well-known witnesses of undoubted veracity, that,

having never before been published, I venture to relate it here.

My informant was Professor Tholuck, of Halle University, the most

eminent living theologian in Germany, and the principal ecclesiarch of

the Prussian Church. He prefaced the account by assuring me that it

was received from the lips of De Wette himself, immediately after the

occurrence,--that De Wette was an intimate personal friend, a plain,

practical man, of remarkably clear and vigorous intellect, with no more

poetry and imagination in his nature than just sufficient to keep him

alive,--in a word, that he would rely upon his coolness of judgment

and accuracy of observation, under any possible combination of

circumstances, as confidently as upon those of any man in the world.

Dr. De Wette, the famous German Biblical critic, returning home one

evening between nine and ten o'clock, was surprised, upon arriving

opposite the house in which he resided, to see a bright light burning in

his study. In fact, he was rather more than surprised; for he distinctly

remembered to have extinguished the candles when he went out, an hour or

two previously, locked the door, and put the key in his pocket, which,

upon feeling for it, was still there. Pausing a moment to wonder by

what means and for what purpose any one could have entered the room, he

perceived the shadow of a person apparently occupied about something in

a remote corner. Supposing it to be a burglar employed in rifling his

trunk, he was upon the point of alarming the police, when the man

advanced to the window, into full view, as if for the purpose of looking

out into the street. _It was De Wette himself!_--the scholar, author,

professor,--his height, size, figure, stoop,--his head, his face, his

features, eyes, mouth, nose, chin, every one,--skullcap, study-gown,

neck-tie, all, everything: there was no mistaking him, no deception

whatever: there stood Dr. De Wette in his own library, and he out in

the street:--why, he must be _somebody else!_ The Doctor instinctively

grasped his body with his hands, and tried himself with the

psychological tests of self-consciousness and identity, doubtful, if

he could believe his senses and black were not white, that he longer

existed his former self, and stood, perplexed, bewildered, and

confounded, gazing at his other likeness looking out of the window. Upon

the person's retiring from the window, which occurred in a few moments,

De Wette resolved not to dispute the possession of his study with

the other Doctor before morning, and ringing at the door of a house

opposite, where an acquaintance resided, he asked permission to remain

over night.

The chamber occupied by him commanded a full view of the interior of

his library, and from the window he could see his other self engaged

in study and meditation, now walking up and down the room, immersed in

thought, now sitting down at the desk to write, now rising to search

for a volume among the book-shelves, and imitating in all respects

the peculiar habits of the great Doctor engaged at work and busy with

cogitations. At length, when the cathedral clock had finished striking

through first four and then eleven strokes, as German clocks are wont

to do an hour before twelve, De Wette Number Two manifested signs of

retiring to rest,--took out his watch, the identical large gold one the

other Doctor in the other chamber felt sure was at that moment safe

in his waistcoat-pocket, and wound it up, removed a portion of his

clothing, came to the window, closed the curtains, and in a few moments

the light disappeared. De Wette Number One, waiting a little time until

convinced that Number Two had disposed himself to sleep, retired also

his-self to bed, wondering very much what all this could mean.

Rising the next morning, he crossed the street, and passed up-stairs to

his library. The door was fastened; he applied the key, opened it, and

entered. No one was there; everything appeared in precisely the same

condition in which he had left it the evening before,--his pen lying

upon the paper as he had dropped it on going out, the candles on the

table and the mantel-piece evidently not having been lighted, the

window-curtains drawn aside as he had left them; in fine, there was not

a single trace of any person's having been in the room. "Had he been

insane the night before? He must have been. He was growing old;

something was the matter with his eyes or brain; anyhow, he had been

deceived, and it was very foolish of him to have remained away all

night." Endeavoring to satisfy his mind with some such reflections

as these, he remembered he had not yet examined his bed-room. Almost

ashamed to make the search, now convinced it was all an hallucination of

the senses, he crossed the narrow passageway and opened the door. He

was thunderstruck. The ceiling, a lofty, massive brick arch, had fallen

during the night, filling the room with rubbish and crushing his bed

into atoms. De Wette the Apparition had saved the life of the great

German scholar.

Tholuck, who was walking with me in the fields near Halle when relating

the anecdote, added, upon concluding, "I do not pretend to account

for the phenomenon; no knowledge, scientific or metaphysical, in my

possession, is adequate to explain it; but I have no more doubt it

actually, positively, literally did occur, than I have of the existence

of the sun _im Himmel da_."

CULTURE.

The word of ambition at the present day is Culture. Whilst all the world

is in pursuit of power, and of wealth as a means of power, culture

corrects the theory of success. A man is the prisoner of his power. A

topical memory makes him an almanac; a talent for debate, a disputant;

skill to get money makes him a miser, that is, a beggar. Culture reduces

these inflammations by invoking the aid of other powers against the

dominant talent, and by appealing to the rank of powers. It watches

success. For performance Nature has no mercy, and sacrifices the

performer to get it done,--makes a dropsy or a tympany of him. If she

wants a thumb, she makes one at the cost of arms and legs, and any

excess of power in one part is usually paid for at once by some defect

in a contiguous part.

Our efficiency depends so much on our concentration, that Nature

usually, in the instances where a marked man is sent into the world,

overloads him with bias, sacrificing his symmetry to his working power.

It is said, no man can write but one book; and if a man have a defect,

it is apt to leave its impression on all his performances. If she create

a policeman like Fouché, he is made up of suspicions and of plots to

circumvent them. "The air," said Fouché, "is full of poniards." The

physician Sanctorius spent his life in a pair of scales, weighing his

food. Lord Coke valued Chaucer highly, because the Canon Yeman's Tale

illustrates the Statute _Hen. V. Chap. 4_, against Alchemy. I saw a man

who believed the principal mischiefs in the English state were derived

from the devotion to musical concerts. A freemason, not long since, set

out to explain to this country, that the principal cause of the success

of General Washington was the aid he derived from the freemasons.

But, worse than the harping on one string, Nature has secured

individualism by giving the private person a high conceit of his weight

in the system. The pest of society is egotists. There are dull and

bright, sacred and profane, coarse and fine egotists. 'Tis a disease

that, like influenza, falls on all constitutions. In the distemper

known to physicians as _chorea_, the patient sometimes turns round

and continues to spin slowly on one spot. Is egotism a metaphysical

varioloid of this malady? The man runs round a ring formed by his own

talent, falls into an admiration of it, and loses relation to the world.

It is a tendency in all minds. One of its annoying forms is a craving

for sympathy. The sufferers parade their miseries, tear the lint from

their bruises, reveal their indictable crimes, that you may pity them.

They like sickness, because physical pain will extort some show of

interest from the bystanders; as we have seen children, who, finding

themselves of no account when grown people come in, will cough till they

choke, to draw attention.

This distemper is the scourge of talent,--of artists, inventors, and

philosophers. Eminent spiritualists shall have an incapacity of putting

their act or word aloof from them, and seeing it bravely for the nothing

it is. Beware of the man who says, "I am on the eve of a revelation!" It

is speedily punished, inasmuch as this habit invites men to humor it,

and, by treating the patient tenderly, to shut him up in a narrower

selfism, and exclude him from the great world of God's cheerful fallible

men and women. Let us rather be insulted, whilst we are insultable.

Religious literature has eminent examples; and if we run over our

private list of poets, critics, philanthropists, and philosophers, we

shall find them infected with this dropsy and elephantiasis, which we

ought to have tapped.

This goitre of egotism is so frequent among notable persons, that we

must infer some strong necessity in Nature which it subserves,--such as

we see in the sexual attraction. The preservation of the species was a

point of such necessity, that Nature has secured it at all hazards by

immensely overloading the passion, at the risk of perpetual crime and

disorder. So egotism has its root in the cardinal necessity by which

each individual persists to be what he is.

This individuality is not only not inconsistent with culture, but is the

basis of it. Every valuable nature is there in its own right; and the

student we speak to must have a mother-wit invincible by his culture,

which uses all books, arts, facilities, and elegancies of intercourse,

but is never subdued and lost in them. He only is a well-made man who

has a good determination. And the end of culture is, not to destroy

this,--God forbid!--but to train away all impediment and mixture,

and leave nothing but pure power. Our student must have a style and

determination, and be a master in his own specialty. But, having this,

he must put it behind him. He must have a catholicity, a power to see

with a free and disengaged look every object. Yet is this private

interest and self so overcharged, that, if a man seeks a companion

who can look at objects for their own sake, and without affection

or self-reference, he will find the fewest who will give him that

satisfaction; whilst most men are afflicted with a coldness, an

incuriosity, as soon as any object does not connect with their

self-love. Though they talk of the object before them, they are thinking

of themselves, and their vanity is laying little traps for your

admiration.

But after a man has discovered that there are limits to the interest

which his private history has for mankind, he still converses with his

family, or a few companions,--perhaps with half a dozen personalities

that are famous in his neighborhood. In Boston, the question of life is

the names of some eight or ten men. Have you seen Mr. Allston, Doctor

Channing, Mr. Adams, Mr. Webster, Mr. Greenough? Have you heard Everett,

Garrison, Father Taylor, Theodore Parker? Have you talked with Messieurs

Turbinewheel, Summitlevel, and Lacofrupees? Then you may as well die. In

New York, the question is of some other eight, or ten, or twenty. Have

you seen a few lawyers, merchants, and brokers,--two or three scholars,

two or three capitalists, two or three editors of newspapers? New

York is a sucked orange. All conversation is at an end, when we have

discharged ourselves of a dozen personalities, domestic or imported,

which make up our American existence. Nor do we expect anybody to be

other than a faint copy of these heroes.

Life is very narrow. Bring any club or company of intelligent men

together again after ten years, and if the presence of some penetrating

and calming genius could dispose them to frankness, what a confusion

of insanities would come up! The "causes" to which we have sacrificed,

Tariff or Democracy, Whiggism or Abolition, Temperance or Socialism,

would show like roots of bitterness and dragons of wrath: and our

talents are as mischievous as if each had been seized upon by some bird

of prey, which had whisked him away from fortune, from truth, from the

dear society of the poets, some zeal, some bias, and only when he was

now gray and nerveless was it relaxing its claws, and he awaking to

sober perceptions.

Culture is the suggestion from certain best thoughts, that a man has a

range of affinities, through which he can modulate the violence of any

master-tones that have a droning preponderance in his scale, and succor

him against himself. Culture redresses his balance, puts him among his

equals and superiors, revives the delicious sense of sympathy, and warns

him of the dangers of solitude and repulsion.

'Tis not a compliment, but a disparagement, to consult a man only on

horses, or on steam, or on theatres, or on eating, or on books, and,

whenever he appears, considerately to turn the conversation to the

bantling he is known to fondle. In the Norse heaven of our forefathers,

Thor's house had five hundred and forty floors: and Man's house has five

hundred and forty floors. His excellence is facility of adaptation,

and of transition through many related points to wide contrasts and

extremes. Culture kills his exaggeration, his conceit of his village or

his city. We must leave our pets at home when we go into the street, and

meet men on broad grounds of good meaning and good sense. No performance

is worth loss of geniality. 'Tis a cruel price we pay for certain fancy

goods called fine arts and philosophy. In the Norse legend, Allfadir did

not get a drink of Mimir's spring, (the fountain of wisdom,) until he

left his eye in pledge. And here is a pedant that cannot unfold his

wrinkles, nor conceal his wrath at interruption by the best, if their

conversation do not fit his impertinency,--here is he to afflict us with

his personalities. 'Tis incident to scholars, that each of them fancies

he is pointedly odious in his community. Draw him out of this limbo of

irritability. Cleanse with healthy blood his parchment skin. You restore

to him his eyes which he left in pledge at Mimir's spring. If you are

the victim of your doing, who cares what you do? We can spare your

opera, your gazetteer, your chemic analysis, your history, your

syllogisms. Your man of genius pays dear for his distinction. His head

runs up into a spire, and, instead of a healthy man, merry and wise, he

is some mad dominie. Nature is reckless of the individual. When she has

points to carry, she carries them. To wade in marshes and sea-margins is

the destiny of certain birds; and they are so accurately made for this,

that they are imprisoned in those places. Each animal out of its

habitat would starve. To the physician, each man, each woman, is an

amplification of one organ. A soldier, a locksmith, a bank-clerk, and

a dancer could not exchange functions. And thus we are victims of

adaptation.

The antidotes against this organic egotism are--the range and variety

of attractions, as gained by acquaintance with the world, with men of

merit, with classes of society, with travel, with eminent persons, and

with the high resources of philosophy, art, and religion: books, travel,

society, solitude.

The hardiest skeptic, who has seen a horse broken, a pointer trained, or

who has visited a menagerie, or the exhibition of the Industrious Fleas,

will not deny the validity of education. "A boy," says Plato, "is the

most vicious of all wild beasts"; and, in the same spirit, the old

English poet Gascoigne says, "A boy is better unborn than untaught." The

city breeds one kind of speech and manners; the back-country a different

style; the sea another; the army a fourth. We know that an army which

can be confided in may be formed by discipline,--that by systematic

discipline all men may be made heroes. Marshal Lannes said to a French

officer, "Know, Colonel, that none but a poltroon will boast that he

never was afraid." A great part of courage is the courage of having done

the thing before. And, in all human action, those faculties will be

strong which are used. Robert Owen said, "Give me a tiger, and I will

educate him." 'Tis inhuman to want faith in the power of education,

since to meliorate is the law of Nature; and men are valued precisely as

they exert onward or meliorating force. On the other hand, poltroonery

is the acknowledging an inferiority to be incurable.

Incapacity of melioration is the only mortal distemper. There are people

who can never understand a trope, or any second or expanded sense given

to your words, or any humor,--but remain literalists, after hearing the

music and poetry and rhetoric and wit of seventy or eighty years. They

are past the help of surgeon or clergy. But even these can understand

pitchforks and the cry of "Fire!"--and I have noticed in some of this

class a marked dislike of earthquakes.

Let us make our education brave and preventive. Politics is an

after-work, a poor patching. We are always a little late. The evil is

done, the law is passed, and we begin the up-hill agitation for repeal

of that of which we ought to have prevented the enacting. We shall

one day learn to supersede politics by education. What we call our

root-and-branch reforms of slavery, war, gambling, intemperance, is only

medicating the symptoms. We must begin higher up,--namely, in Education.

Our arts and tools give to him who can handle them much the same

advantage over the novice as if you extended his life ten, fifty, or a

hundred years. And I think it the part of good sense to provide every

fine soul with such culture, that it shall not, at thirty or forty

years, have to say, "This which I might do is made hopeless through my

want of weapons."

But it is conceded that much of our training fails of effect,--that all

success is hazardous and rare,--that a large part of our cost and pains

is thrown away. Nature takes the matter into her own hands, and, though

we must not omit any jot of our system, we can seldom be sure that it

has availed much, or that as much good would not have accrued from a

different system.

Books, as containing the finest records of human wit, must always enter

into our notion of culture. The best heads that ever existed, Pericles,

Plato, Julius Caesar, Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, were well-read,

universally educated men, and quite too wise to undervalue letters.

Their opinion has weight, because they had means of knowing the opposite

opinion. We look that a great man should be a good reader, or in

proportion to the spontaneous power should be the assimilating power.

Good criticism is very rare, and always precious. I am always happy to

meet persons who perceive the transcendent superiority of Shakspeare

over all other writers. I like people who like Plato. Because this love

does not consist with self-conceit.

But books are good only as far as a boy is ready for them. He sometimes

gets ready very slowly. You send your child to the schoolmaster; but

'tis the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the Latin

class; but much of his tuition comes on his way to school, from the

shop-windows. You like the strict rules and the long terms; and he finds

his best leading in a by-way of his own, and refuses any companions but

of his choosing. He hates the grammar and _Gradus_, and loves guns,

fishing-rods, horses, and boats. Well, the boy is right; and you are not

fit to direct his bringing-up, if your theory leaves out his gymnastic

training. Archery, cricket, gun and fishing-rod, horse and boat, are all

educators, liberalizers; and so are dancing, dress, and the street-talk;

and--provided only the boy has resources, and is of a noble and

ingenuous strain--these will not serve him less than the books. He

learns chess, whist, dancing, and theatricals. The father observes that

another boy has learned algebra and geometry in the same time. But the

first boy has acquired much more than these poor games along with them.

He is infatuated for weeks with whist and chess; but presently will find

out, as you did, that, when he rises from the game too long played, he

is vacant and forlorn, and despises himself. Thenceforward it takes

place with other things, and has its due weight in his experience. These

minor skills and accomplishments--for example, dancing--are tickets of

admission to the dress-circle of mankind, and the being master of them

enables the youth to judge intelligently of much on which otherwise he

would give a pedantic squint. Landor said, "I have suffered more from my

bad dancing than from all the misfortunes and miseries of my life

put together." Provided always the boy is teachable, (for we are not

proposing to make a statue out of punk,) football, cricket, archery,

swimming, skating, climbing, fencing, riding, are lessons in the art of

power, which it is his main business to learn,--riding specially, of

which Lord Herbert of Cherbury said, "A good rider on a good horse is as

much above himself and others as the world can make him." Besides, the

gun, fishing-rod, boat, and horse constitute, among all who use them,

secret freemasonries.

They are as if they belonged to one club.

There is also a negative value in these arts. Their chief use to the

youth is, not amusement, but to be known for what they are, and not to

remain to him occasions of heartburn. We are full of superstitions. Each

class fixes its eyes on the advantages it has not: the refined, on rude

strength; the democrat, on birth and breeding. One of the benefits of a

college-education is, to show the boy its little avail. I knew a leading

man in a leading city, who, having set his heart on an education at the

university and missed it, could never quite feel himself the equal

of his own brothers who had gone thither. His easy superiority to

multitudes of professional men could never quite countervail to him this

imaginary defect. Balls, riding, wine-parties, and billiards pass to a

poor boy for something fine and romantic, which they are not; and a free

admission to them on an equal footing, if it were possible, only once or

twice, would be worth ten times its cost, by undeceiving him.

I am not much an advocate for travelling, and I observe that men run

away to other countries because they are not good in their own, and run

back to their own because they pass for nothing in the new places. For

the most part, only the light characters travel. Who are you that have

no task to keep you at home? I have been quoted as saying captious

things about travel; but I mean to do justice. I think there is a

restlessness in our people which argues want of character. All educated

Americans, first or last, go to Europe,--perhaps because it is their

mental home, as the invalid habits of this country might suggest. An

eminent teacher of girls said, "The idea of a girl's education is

whatever qualifies them for going to Europe." Can we never extract this

tape-worm of Europe from the brain of our country-men? One sees very

well what their fate must be. He that does not fill a place at home

cannot abroad. He only goes there to hide his insignificance in a larger

crowd. You do not think you will find anything there which you have

not seen at home? The stuff of all countries is just the same. Do you

suppose there is any country where they do not scald milkpans, and

swaddle the infants, and burn the brushwood, and broil the fish? What is

true anywhere is true everywhere. And let him go where he will, he can

find only so much beauty or worth as he carries.

Of course, for some men travel may be useful. Naturalists, discoverers,

and sailors are born. Some men are made for couriers, exchangers,

envoys, missionaries, bearers of despatches, as others are for farmers

and working-men. And if the man is of a light and social turn, and

Nature has aimed to make a legged and winged creature, framed for

locomotion, we must follow her hint, and furnish him with that breeding

which gives currency as sedulously as with that which gives worth. But

let us not be pedantic, but allow to travel its full effect. The boy

grown up on the farm which he has never left is said in the country to

have had _no chance_, and boys and men of that condition look upon work

on a railroad or drudgery in a city as opportunity. Poor country-boys of

Vermont and Connecticut formerly owed what knowledge they had to their

peddling-trips to the Southern States. California and the Pacific Coast

are now the university of this class, as Virginia was in old times. "To

have _some chance_" is their word. And the phrase, "to know the world,"

or to travel, is synonymous with all men's ideas of advantage and

superiority. No doubt, to a man of sense travel offers advantages. As

many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades,

so many times is he a man. A foreign country is a point of comparison

where-from to judge his own. One use of travel is, to recommend the

books and works of home; (we go to Europe to be Americanized;) and

another, to find men. For as Nature has put fruits apart in latitudes,

a new fruit in every degree, so knowledge and fine moral quality she

lodges in distant men. And thus, of the six or seven teachers whom each

man wants among his contemporaries, it often happens that one or two of

them live on the other side of the world.

Moreover, there is in every constitution a certain solstice, when the

stars stand still in our inward firmament, and when there is required

some foreign force, some diversion or alternative, to prevent

stagnation. And, as a medical remedy, travel seems one of the best. Just

as a man witnessing the admirable effect of ether to lull pain, and,

meditating on the contingencies of wounds, cancers, lockjaws, rejoices

in Dr. Jackson's benign discovery, so a man who looks at Paris, at

Naples, or at London, says, "If I should be driven from my own home,

here, at least, my thoughts can be consoled by the most prodigal

amusement and occupation which the human race in ages could contrive and

accumulate."

Akin to the benefit of foreign travel, the aesthetic value of railroads

is to unite the advantages of town and country life, neither of which we

can spare. A man should live in or near a large town, because, let his

own genius be what it may, it will repel quite as much of agreeable and

valuable talent as it draws, and, in a city, the total attraction of all

the citizens is sure to conquer, first or last, every repulsion, and

drag the most improbable hermit within its walls some day in the

year. In town he can find the swimming-school, the gymnasium, the

dancing-master, the shooting-gallery, opera, theatre, and panorama,--the

chemist's shop, the museum of natural history, the gallery of fine arts,

the national orators in their turn, foreign travellers, the libraries,

and his club. In the country he can find solitude and reading, manly

labor, cheap living, and his old shoes,--moors for game, hills for

geology, and groves for devotion. Aubrey writes, "I have heard Thomas

Hobbes say, that, in the Earl of Devon's house, in Derbyshire, there was

a good library and books enough for him, and his Lordship stored the

library with what books he thought fit to be bought. But the want

of good conversation was a very great inconvenience, and, though he

conceived he could order his thinking as well as another, yet he found

a great defect. In the country, in long time, for want of good

conversation, one's understanding and invention contract a moss on them,

like an old paling in an orchard."

Cities give us collision. 'Tis said, London and New York take the

nonsense out of a man. A great part of our education is sympathetic and

social. Boys and girls who have been brought up with well-informed and

superior people show in their manners an inestimable grace. Fuller says,

that "William, Earl of Nassau, won a subject from the King of Spain

every time he put off his hat." You cannot have one well-bred man

without a whole society of such. They keep each other up to any

high point. Especially women: it requires a great many cultivated

women,--saloons of bright, elegant, reading women, accustomed to ease

and refinement, to spectacles, pictures, sculpture, poetry, and to

elegant society,--in order that you should have one Madame de Staël.

The head of a commercial house, or a leading lawyer or politician, is

brought into daily contact with troops of men from all parts of the

country,--and those, too, the driving-wheels, the business-men of each

section,--and one can hardly suggest for an apprehensive man a

more searching culture. Besides, we must remember the high social

possibilities of a million of men. The best bribe which London offers

to-day to the imagination is, that, in such a vast variety of people

and conditions, one can believe there is room for persons of romantic

character to exist, and that the poet, the mystic, and the hero may hope

to confront their counterparts.

I wish cities could teach their best lesson,--of quiet manners. It is

the foible especially of American youth,--pretension. The mark of the

man of the world is absence of pretension. He does not make a speech; he

takes a low business-tone, avoids all brag, is nobody, dresses plainly,

promises not at all, performs much, speaks in monosyllables, hugs his

fact. He calls his employment by its lowest name, and so takes from evil

tongues their sharpest weapon. His conversation clings to the weather

and the news, yet he allows himself to be surprised into thought, and

the unlocking of his learning and philosophy. How the imagination is

piqued by anecdotes of some great man passing incognito, as a king in

gray clothes!--of Napoleon affecting a plain suit at his glittering

levee!--of Burns, or Scott, or Beethoven, or Wellington, or Goethe,

or any container of transcendent power, passing for nobody!--of

Epaminondas, "who never says anything, but will listen eternally!"--of

Goethe, who preferred trifling subjects and common expressions in

intercourse with strangers, worse rather than better clothes, and to

appear a little more capricious than he was! There are advantages in the

old hat and box-coat. I have heard, that, throughout this country, a

certain respect is paid to good broadcloth: but dress makes a little

restraint; men will not commit themselves. But the box-coat is like

wine; it unlocks the tongue, and men say what they think. An old poet

says,--

"Go far and go sparing;

For you'll find it certain,

The poorer and the baser you appear,

The more you'll look through still."[A]

[Footnote A: Beaumont and Fletcher: The Tamer Tamed.]

Not much otherwise Milnes writes, in the "Lay of the Humble":--

"To me men are for what they are,

They wear no masks with me."

'Tis odd that our people should have--not water on the brain,--but

a little gas there. A shrewd foreigner said of the Americans, that

"whatever they say has a little the air of a speech." Yet one of the

traits down in the books, as distinguishing the Anglo-Saxon, is a trick

of self-disparagement. To be sure, in old, dense countries, among a

million of good coats, a fine coat comes to be no distinction, and you

find humorists. In an English party, a man with no marked manners or

features, with a face like red dough, unexpectedly discloses wit,

learning, a wide range of topics, and personal familiarity with good men

in all parts of the world, until you think you have fallen upon some

illustrious personage. Can it be that the American forest has refreshed

some weeds of old Pictish barbarism just ready to die out,--the love of

the scarlet feather, of beads, and tinsel? The Italians are fond of

red clothes, peacock-plumes, and embroidery; and I remember, one rainy

morning in the city of Palermo, the street was in a blaze with scarlet

umbrellas. The English have a plain taste. The equipages of the grandees

are plain. A gorgeous livery indicates new and awkward city-wealth. Mr.

Pitt, like Mr. Pym, thought the title of _Mister_ good against any king

in Europe. They have piqued themselves on governing the whole world in

the poor, plain, dark committee-room which the House of Commons sat in

before the fire.

Whilst we want cities as the centres where the best things are found,

cities degrade us by magnifying trifles. The countryman finds the town

a chop-house, a barber's shop. He has lost the lines of grandeur of the

horizon, hills and plains, and, with them, sobriety and elevation. He

has come among a supple, glib-tongued tribe, who live for show, servile

to public opinion. Life is dragged down to a fracas of pitiful cares and

disasters. You say the gods ought to respect a life whose objects

are their own; but in cities they have betrayed you to a cloud of

insignificant annoyances:--

"Mirmidons, race féconde,

Mirmidons,

Enfins nous commandons;

Jupiter livre le monde

Aux mirmidons, aux mirmidons."[B]

[Footnote B: Béranger.]

'Tis heavy odds

Against the gods,

When they will match with myrmidons.

We spawning, spawning myrmidons,

Our turn to-day; we take command:

Jove gives the globe into the hand

Of myrmidons, of myrmidons.

What is odious but noise, and people who scream and bewail?--people

whose vane points always east, who live to dine, who send for the

doctor, who raddle themselves, who toast their feet on the register,

who intrigue to secure a padded chair and a corner out of the draught?

Suffer them once to begin the enumeration of their infirmities, and the

sun will go down on the unfinished tale. Let these triflers put us out

of conceit with petty comforts. To a man at work, the frost is but a

color; the rain, the wind, he forgot them when he came in. Let us learn

to live coarsely, dress plainly, and lie hard. The least habit of

dominion over the palate has certain good effects not easily estimated.

Neither will we be driven into a quiddling abstemiousness. 'Tis a

superstition to insist on a special diet. All is made at last of the

same chemical atoms.

A man in pursuit of greatness feels no little wants. How can you mind

diet, bed, dress, or salutes or compliments, or the figure you make in

company, or wealth, or even the bringing things to pass, when you think

how paltry are the machinery and the workers? Wordsworth was praised to

me, in Westmoreland, for having afforded to his country neighbors an

example of a modest household, where comfort and culture were secured

without display. And a tender boy who wears his rusty cap and outgrown

coat, that he may secure the coveted place in college and the right

in the library, is educated to some purpose. There is a great deal of

self-denial and manliness in poor and middle-class houses, in town and

country, that has not got into literature, and never will, but that

keeps the earth sweet,--that saves on superfluities, and spends on

essentials,--that goes rusty, and educates the boy,--that sells the

horse, but builds the school,--works early and late, takes two looms in

the factory, three looms, six looms, but pays off the mortgage on the

paternal farm, and then goes back cheerfully to work again.

We can ill spare the commanding social benefits of cities; they must be

used,--yet cautiously, and haughtily,--and will yield their best values

to him who best can do without them. Keep the town for occasions, but

the habits should be formed to retirement. Solitude, the safeguard of

mediocrity, is to genius the stern friend, the cold, obscure shelter

where moult the wings which will bear it farther than suns and stars. He

who should inspire and lead his race must be defended from travelling

with the souls of other men,--from living, breathing, reading, and

writing in the daily, time-worn yoke of their opinions. "In the morning,

solitude," said Pythagoras,--that Nature may speak to the imagination,

as she does never in company, and that her favorite may make

acquaintance with those divine strengths which disclose themselves to

serious and abstracted thought. 'Tis very certain that Plato, Plotinus,

Archimedes, Hermes, Newton, Milton, Wordsworth did not live in a crowd,

but descended into it from time to time as benefactors: and the wise

instructor will press this point of securing to the young soul, in the

disposition of time and the arrangements of living, periods and habits

of solitude. The high advantage of university-life is often the mere

mechanical one, I may call it, of a separate chamber and fire,--which

parents will allow the boy without hesitation at Cambridge, but do not

think needful at home. We say solitude, to mark the character of the

tone of thought; but if it can be shared between two, or more than two,

it is happier, and not less noble. "We four," wrote Neander to his

sacred friends, "will enjoy at Halle the inward blessedness of a

_civitas Dei_, whose foundations are forever friendship. The more I know

you, the more I dissatisfy and must dissatisfy all my wonted companions.

Their very presence stupefies me. The common understanding withdraws

itself from the one centre of all existence."

Solitude takes off the pressure of present importunities, that more

catholic and humane relations may appear. The saint and poet seek

privacy to ends the most public and universal: and it is the secret of

culture, to interest the man more in his public than in his private

quality. Here is a new poem, which elicits a good many comments in

the journals and in conversation. From these it is easy, at last, to

eliminate the verdict which readers passed upon it; and that is, in the

main, unfavorable. The poet, as a craftsman, is interested only in the

praise accorded to him, and not in the censure, though it be just; and

the poor little poet hearkens only to that, and rejects the censure, as

proving incapacity in the critic. But the poet _cultivated_ becomes a

stockholder in both companies,--say Mr. Curfew,--in the Curfew stock,

and in the _humanity_ stock; and, in the last, exults as much in the

demonstration of the unsoundness of Curfew as his interest in the former

gives him pleasure in the currency of Curfew. For the depreciation of

his Curfew stock only shows the immense values of the humanity stock.

As soon as he sides with his critic against himself, with joy, he is a

cultivated man.

We must have an intellectual quality in all property and in all action,

or they are nought. I must have children, I must have events, I must

have a social state and history, or my thinking and speaking want body

or basis. But to give these accessories any value, I must know them as

contingent and rather showy possessions, which pass for more to the

people than to me. We see this abstraction in scholars, as a matter

of course: but what a charm it adds when observed in practical men!

Bonaparte, like Caesar, was intellectual, and could look at every object

for itself, without affection. Though an egotist _à l'outrance_, he

could criticize a play, a building, a character, on universal grounds,

and give a just opinion. A man known to us only as a celebrity in

politics or in trade gains largely in our esteem, if we discover that he

has some intellectual taste or skill: as when we learn of Lord Fairfax,

the Long Parliament's general, his passion for antiquarian studies; or

of the French regicide Carnot, his sublime genius in mathematics; or of

a living banker, his success in poetry; or of a partisan journalist,

his devotion to ornithology. So, if, in travelling in the dreary

wildernesses of Arkansas or Texas, we should observe on the next seat a

man reading Horace, or Martial, or Calderon, we should wish to hug him.

In callings that require roughest energy, soldiers, sea-captains, and

civil engineers sometimes betray a fine insight, if only through a

certain gentleness when off duty: a good-natured admission that there

are illusions, and who shall say that he is not their sport? We only

vary the phrase, not the doctrine, when we say that culture opens the

sense of beauty. A man is a beggar who only lives to the useful, and,

however he may serve as a pin or rivet in the social machine, cannot be

said to have arrived at self-possession. I suffer, every day, from the

want of perception of beauty in people. They do not know the charm with

which all moments and objects can be embellished,--the charm of manners,

of self-command, of benevolence. Repose and cheerfulness are the badge

of the gentleman,--repose in energy. The Greek battle-pieces are calm;

the heroes, in whatever violent actions engaged, retain a serene

aspect: as we say of Niagara, that it falls without speed. A cheerful,

intelligent face is the end of culture, and success enough; for it

indicates the purpose of Nature and wisdom attained.

When our higher faculties are in activity, we are domesticated,

and awkwardness and discomfort give place to natural and agreeable

movements. It is noticed that the consideration of the great periods and

spaces of astronomy induces a dignity of mind and an indifference

to death. The influence of fine scenery, the presence of mountains,

appeases our irritations and elevates our friendships. Even a high dome,

and the expansive interior of a cathedral, have a sensible effect

on manners. I have heard that stiff people lose something of their

awkwardness under high ceilings and in spacious halls. I think sculpture

and painting have an effect to teach us manners and abolish hurry.

But, over all, culture must reinforce from higher influx the empirical

skills of eloquence, or of politics, or of trade and the useful arts.

There is a certain loftiness of thought and power to marshal and

adjust particulars, which can come only from an insight of their whole

connection. The orator who has once seen things in their divine order

will never quite lose sight of this, and will come to affairs as from a

higher ground, and, though he will say nothing of philosophy, he will

have a certain mastery in dealing with them, and an incapableness of

being dazzled or frighted, which will distinguish his handling from that

of attorneys and factors. A man who stands on a good footing with the

heads of parties at Washington reads the rumors of the newspapers and

the guesses of provincial politicians with a key to the right and

wrong in each statement, and sees well enough where all this will end.

Archimedes will look through your Connecticut machine at a glance, and

judge of its fitness. And much more, a wise man who knows not only what

Plato, but what Saint John can show him, can easily raise the affair

he deals with to a certain majesty. Plato says, Pericles owed this

elevation to the lessons of Anaxagoras. Burke descended from a higher

sphere when he would influence human affairs. Franklin, Adams,

Jefferson, Washington, stood on a fine humanity, before which the brawls

of modern senates are but pot-house politics.

But there are higher secrets of culture, which are not for the

apprentices, but for proficients. These are lessons only for the brave.

We must know our friends under ugly masks. The calamities are our

friends. Ben Jonson specifies in his address to the Muse:--

"Get him the time's long grudge, the court's ill-will,

And, reconciled, keep him suspected still,

Make him lose all his friends, and, what is worse,

Almost all ways to any better course;

With me thou leav'st a better Muse than thee,

And which thou brought'st me, blessed Poverty."

We wish to learn philosophy by rote, and play at heroism. But the wiser

God says, Take the shame, the poverty, and the penal solitude that

belong to truth-speaking. Try the rough water, as well as the smooth.

Rough water can teach lessons worth knowing. When the state is unquiet,

personal qualities are more than ever decisive. Fear not a revolution

which will constrain you to live five years in one. Don't be so tender

at making an enemy now and then. Be willing to go to Coventry sometimes,

and let the populace bestow on you their coldest contempts. The finished

man of the world must eat of every apple once. He must hold his hatreds

also at arm's length, and not remember spite. He has neither friends nor

enemies, but values men only as channels of power.

He who aims high must dread an easy home and popular manners. Heaven

sometimes hedges a rare character about with ungainliness and odium, as

the burr that protects the fruit. If there is any great and good thing

in store for you, it will not come at the first or the second call, nor

in the shape of fashion, ease, and city drawing-rooms. Popularity is for

dolls. "Steep and craggy," said Porphyry, "is the path of the gods."

Open your Marcus Antoninus. In the opinion of the ancients, he was the

great man who scorned to shine, and who contested the frowns of Fortune.

They preferred the noble vessel too late for the tide, contending with

winds and waves, dismantled and unrigged, to her companion borne into

harbor with colors flying and guns firing. There is none of the social

goods that may not be purchased too dear, and mere amiableness must not

take rank with high aims and self-subsistency.

Bettine replies to Goethe's mother, who chides her disregard of

dress,--"If I cannot do as I have a mind, in our poor Frankfort, I shall

not carry things far." And the youth must rate at its true mark the

inconceivable levity of local opinion. The longer we live, the more we

must endure the elementary existence of men and women: and every brave

heart must treat society as a child, and never allow it to dictate.

"All that class of the severe and restrictive virtues," said Burke, "are

almost too costly for humanity." Who wishes to be severe? Who wishes

to resist the eminent and polite, in behalf of the poor and low and

impolite? and who that dares do it can keep his temper sweet, his frolic

spirits? The high virtues are not debonair, but have their redress in

being illustrious at last. What forests of laurel we bring, and the

tears of mankind, to those who stood firm against the opinion of their

contemporaries! The measure of a master is his success in bringing all

men round to his opinion twenty years later.

Let me say here, that culture cannot begin too early. In talking with

scholars, I observe that they lost on ruder companions those years of

boyhood which alone could give imaginative literature a religious and

infinite quality in their esteem. I find, too, that the chance for

appreciation is much increased by being the son of an appreciator, and

that these boys who now grow up are caught not only years too late, but

two or three births too late, to make the best scholars of. And I think

it a presentable motive to a scholar, that, as, in an old community, a

well-born proprietor is usually found, after the first heats of youth,

to be a careful husband, and to feel an habitual desire that the estate

shall suffer no harm by his administration, but shall be delivered

down to the next heir in as good condition as he received it,--so,

a considerate man will reckon himself a subject of that secular

melioration by which mankind is mollified, cured, and refined, and will

shun every expenditure of his forces on pleasure or gain, which will

jeopardize this social and secular accumulation.

The fossil strata show us that Nature began with rudimental forms,

and rose to the more complex as fast as the earth was fit for their

dwelling-place,--and that the lower perish, as the higher appear. Very

few of our race can be said to be yet finished men. We still carry

sticking to us some remains of the preceding inferior quadruped

organization. We call these millions men; but they are not yet men.

Half-engaged in the soil, pawing to get free, man needs all the music

that can be brought to disengage him. If Love, red Love, with tears

and joy,--if Want with his scourge,--if War with his cannonade,--if

Christianity with its charity,--if Trade with its money,--if Art with

its portfolios,--if Science with her telegraphs through the deeps of

space and time, can set his dull nerves throbbing, and by loud taps on

the tough chrysalis can break its walls and let the new creature emerge

erect and free,--make way, and sing paean! The age of the quadruped is

to go out,--the age of the brain and of the heart is to come in.

The time will come when the evil forms we have known can no more be

organized. Man's culture can spare nothing, wants all the material. He

is to convert all impediments into instruments, all enemies into power.

The formidable mischief will only make the more useful slave. And if one

shall read the future of the race hinted in the organic effort of Nature

to mount and meliorate, and the corresponding impulse to the Better in

the human being, we shall dare affirm that there is nothing he will not

overcome and convert, until at last culture shall absorb the chaos and

gehenna. He will convert the Furies into Muses, and the hells into

benefit.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR.

Between the dark and the daylight,

When the night is beginning to lower,

Comes a pause in the day's occupations

That is known as the Children's Hour.

I hear in the chamber above me

The patter of little feet,

The sound of a door that is opened,

And voices soft and sweet.

From my study I see in the lamplight,

Descending the broad hall-stair,

Grave Alice, and laughing Allegra,

And Edith with golden hair.

A whisper, and then a silence:

Yet I know by their merry eyes

They are plotting and planning together

To take me by surprise.

A sudden rush from the stairway,

A sudden raid from the hall!

By three doors left unguarded

They enter my castle wall!

They climb up into my turret

O'er the arms and back of my chair;

If I try to escape, they surround me;

They seem to be everywhere.

They almost devour me with kisses,

Their arms about me entwine,

Till I think of the Bishop of Bingen

In his Mouse-Tower on the Rhine!

Do you think, O blue-eyed banditti,

Because you have scaled the wall,

Such an old moustache as I am

Is not a match for you all?

I have you fast in my fortress,

And will not let you depart,

But put you down into the dungeons

In the round-tower of my heart.

And there will I keep you forever,

Yes, forever and a day,

Till the walls shall crumble to ruin,

And moulder in dust away!

THREE-MILE CROSS.

It seems but yesterday, although more than thirteen years have gone

by, since I first opened the little garden-gate and walked up the path

leading to Mary Russell Mitford's cottage at Three-Mile Cross. A friend

in London had given me his card to the writer of "Our Village," and I

had promised to call on my way to Oxford, and have a half-hour's chat

over her geraniums with the charming person whose sketches I had read

with so much interest in my own country. Her cheerful voice at the

head of the stairs, telling her little maid to show me the way to her

sitting-room, sounded very musically, and I often observed in later

interviews how like a melody her tones always appeared in conversation.

Once when she read a lyrical poem, not her own, to a group of friends

assembled at her later residence, in Swallowfield, of which number it

was my good-fortune to be one, the verses came from her lips like an

exquisite chant. Her laugh had a ringing sweetness in it, rippling out

sometimes like a beautiful chime of silver bells; and when she told

a comic story, which she often did with infinite tact and grace, she

joined in with the jollity at the end, her eyes twinkling with delight

at the pleasure her narrative was always sure to bring. Her enjoyment of

a joke was something delicious, and when she heard a good thing for

the first time her exultant mirth was unbounded. As she sat in her

easy-chair, listening to a Yankee story which interested her, her "Dear

me! dear me! dear me!" (three times repeated always)

"Rang like a golden jewel down a golden stair."

The sunny summer-day was falling full on her honeysuckles, lilies, and

roses, when I first saw her face in the snug cottage at Three-Mile

Cross. As we sat together at the open casement, looking down on the

flowers that sent up their perfumes to her latticed window like fragrant

tributes from a fountain of distilled sweet waters, she pointed out,

among the neighboring farm-houses and villas, the residences of her

friends, in all of whom she seemed to have the most affectionate

interest. I noticed, as the village children went by her window, they

all stopped to bow and curtsy. One curly-headed urchin made bold to take

off his well-worn cap and wait to be recognized as "little Johnny,"--"no

great scholar," said the kind-hearted old lady to me, "but a sad rogue

among our flock of geese. Only yesterday, the young marauder was

detected by my maid with a plump gosling stuffed half-way into his

pocket!" While she was thus discoursing of Johnny's peccadilloes, the

little fellow looked up with a knowing expression, and very soon caught

in his cap a gingerbread dog, which the old lady threw to him from the

window. "I wish he loved his book as well as he relishes sweet cake,"

sighed she, as the boy kicked up his heels and disappeared down the

lane.

Full of anecdote, her conversation that afternoon ran on in a perpetual

flow of good-humor, until it was time for me to be on my way toward the

University City. From that time till she died, our friendship continued,

and, during other visits to England, I saw her frequently, driving about

the country with her in her pony-chaise, and spending many happy hours

under her cottage-roof. She was always the same cheerful spirit,

enlivening our intercourse with shrewd and pertinent observations and

reminiscences, some of which it may not be out of place to reproduce

here. Country life, its scenery and manners, she was never tired of

depicting; but not infrequently she loved to talk of those celebrities

in literature and art whom she had known intimately, with a vivacity and

sweetness of temper never-failing and delightful. I well remember, one

autumn evening, when half a dozen friends were sitting in her library

after dinner, talking with her of Tom Taylor's Life of Haydon, then

lately published, how graphically she described to us the eccentric

painter, whose genius she was among the fore-most to recognize.

The flavor of her discourse I cannot reproduce; but I was too much

interested in what she was saying to forget the main incidents she drew

for our edification, during those pleasant hours now far away in the

past.

"I am a terrible forgetter of dates," she used to say, when any one

asked her of the time when; but for the _manner how_ she was never at a

loss. "Poor Haydon!" she began. "He was an old friend of mine, and I am

indebted to Sir William Elford, one of my dear father's correspondents

during my girlhood, for a suggestion which sent me to look at a picture

then on exhibition in London, and thus was brought about my knowledge of

the painter's existence. He, Sir William, had taken a fancy to me, and

I became his child-correspondent. Few things contribute more to that

indirect after-education, which is worth all the formal lessons of the

school-room a thousand times told, than such good-humored condescension

from a clever man of the world to a girl almost young enough to be his

granddaughter. I owe much to that correspondence, and, amongst other

debts, the acquaintance of Haydon. Sir William's own letters were most

charming,--full of old-fashioned courtesy, of quaint humor, and

of pleasant and genial criticism on literature and on art. An

amateur-painter himself, painting interested him particularly, and

he often spoke much and warmly of the young man from Plymouth, whose

picture of the 'Judgment of Solomon' was then on exhibition in London.

'You must see it,' said he, 'even if you come to town on purpose.'"--The

reader of Haydon's Life will remember that Sir William Elford, in

conjunction with a Plymouth banker named Tingecombe, ultimately

purchased the picture. The poor artist was overwhelmed with astonishment

and joy when he walked into the exhibition-room and read the label,

"Sold," which had been attached to his picture that morning before

he arrived. "My first impulse," he says in his Autobiography, "was

gratitude to God."

"It so happened," continued Miss Mitford, "that I merely passed through

London that season, and, being detained by some of the thousand and one

nothings which are so apt to detain women in the great city, I arrived

at the exhibition, in company with a still younger friend, so near the

period of closing, that more punctual visitors were moving out, and the

doorkeeper actually turned us and our money back. I persisted, however,

assuring him that I only wished to look at one picture, and promising

not to detain him long. Whether my entreaties would have carried

the point or not, I cannot tell; but half a crown did; so we stood

admiringly before the 'Judgment of Solomon.' I am no great judge of

painting; but that picture impressed me then, as it does now, as

excellent in composition, in color, and in that great quality of telling

a story which appeals at once to every mind. Our delight was sincerely

felt, and most enthusiastically expressed, as we kept gazing at the

picture, and seemed, unaccountably to us at first, to give much pleasure

to the only gentleman who had remained in the room,--a young and very

distinguished-looking person, who had watched with evident amusement our

negotiation with the doorkeeper. Beyond indicating the best position to

look at the picture, he had no conversation with us; but I soon surmised

that we were seeing the painter, as well as his painting; and when, two

or three years afterwards, a friend took me by appointment to view the

'Entry into Jerusalem,' Haydon's next great picture, then near its

completion, I found I had not been mistaken.

"Haydon was, at that period, a remarkable person to look at and listen

to. Perhaps your American word _bright_ expresses better than any other

his appearance and manner. His figure, short, slight, elastic, and

vigorous, looked still more light and youthful from the little

sailor's-jacket and snowy trousers which formed his painting costume.

His complexion was clear and healthful. His forehead, broad and

high, out of all proportion to the lower part of his face, gave an

unmistakable character of intellect to the finely placed head. Indeed,

he liked to observe that the gods of the Greek sculptors owed much of

their elevation to being similarly out of drawing! The lower features

were terse, succinct, and powerful,--from the bold, decided jaw, to the

large, firm, ugly, good-humored mouth. His very spectacles aided the

general expression; they had a look of the man. But how shall I attempt

to tell you of his brilliant conversation, of his rapid, energetic

manner, of his quick turns of thought, as he flew on from topic to

topic, dashing his brush here and there upon the canvas? Slow and quiet

persons were a good deal startled by this suddenness and mobility. He

left such people far behind, mentally and bodily. But his talk was so

rich and varied, so earnest and glowing, his anecdotes so racy, his

perception of character so shrewd, and the whole tone so spontaneous and

natural, that the want of repose was rather recalled afterwards than

felt at the time. The alloy to this charm was a slight coarseness of

voice and accent, which contrasted somewhat strangely with his constant

courtesy and high breeding. Perhaps this was characteristic. A defect

of some sort pervades his pictures. Their great want is equality and

congruity,--that perfect union of qualities which we call _taste_. His

apartment, especially at that period when he lived in his painting-room,

was in itself a study of the most picturesque kind. Besides the great

picture itself, for which there seemed hardly space between the walls,

it was crowded with casts, lay figures, arms, tripods, vases, draperies,

and costumes of all ages, weapons of all nations, books in all tongues.

These cumbered the floor; whilst around hung smaller pictures, sketches,

and drawings, replete with originality and force. With chalk he could do

what he chose. I remember he once drew for me a head of hair with nine

of his sweeping, vigorous strokes! Among the studies I remarked that

day in his apartment was one of a mother who had just lost her only

child,--a most masterly rendering of an unspeakable grief. A sonnet,

which I could not help writing on this sketch, gave rise to our long

correspondence, and to a friendship which never flagged. Everybody feels

that his life, as told by Mr. Taylor, with its terrible catastrophe, is

a stern lesson to young artists, an awful warning that cannot be set

aside. Let us not forget that amongst his many faults are qualities

which hold out a bright example. His devotion to his noble art, his

conscientious pursuit of every study connected with it, his unwearied

industry, his love of beauty and of excellence, his warm family

affection, his patriotism, his courage, and his piety, will not easily

be surpassed. Thinking of them, let us speak tenderly of the ardent

spirit whose violence would have been softened by better fortune, and

who, if more successful, would have been more gentle and more humble."

And so with her vigilant and appreciative eye she saw, and thus in her

own charming way she talked of the man, whose name, says Taylor, as a

popularizer of art, stands without a rival among his brethren.

* * * * *

Her passion for the Drama continued through life, and to see a friend's

play would take her up to London when nothing else would tempt her to

leave her cottage. It was delightful to hear her talk of the old actors,

many of whom she had known. She loved to describe John Kemble, Mrs.

Siddons, Miss O'Neill, and Edmund Kean, as they were wont to electrify

the town. Elliston was a great favorite, and she had as many good things

to tell of him as Elia ever had. One autumn afternoon she related all

the circumstances attending the "first play" she ever saw,--which, by

the way, was a tragedy enacted in a barn somewhere in the little town of

Alresford, where she was born. The winking candles dividing the stage

from the audience, she used to say, were winking now in her memory,

although fifty years had elapsed since her father took her, a child of

four years, to see "Othello." Her talent at mimicry made her always most

interesting, when she spoke of Munden and his pleasant absurdities on

the stage. For Bannister, Johnstone, Fawcett, and Emery she had a most

exquisite relish, and she said they had made comedy to her a living art

full of laughter and tears. Her passion for the stage, and overclouded

prospects for the future, led her in early youth to write a play. She

had already written a considerable number of verses which had been

printed, and were honored by being severely castigated by Gifford in the

"Quarterly."

"I didn't mind the great reviewer's blows at all," she used to say. "My

poems had been republished in America; and Coleridge had prophesied that

I should one day write a tragedy."

Talfourd was then, though a young man, a most excellent critic, and lent

a helping hand to the young authoress. Her anxieties attending the first

representation of her play at Covent Garden she was always fond of

relating, and in such a manner that we who listened fell into such

boisterous merriment with her, that I have known carriages stop in front

of her window, and their inmates put out anxiously inquiring heads, to

learn, if possible, what it all meant inside the cottage.

She never forgot "the warm grasp of Mrs. Charles Kemble's hand, when she

saw her, all life and heartiness, at her house in Soho Square,--or the

excellent acting of Young and Kemble and Macready, who did everything

actors could do to secure success for her."

"These are the things," she once wrote, "one thinks of, when sitting

calm and old by the light of a country fire."

The comic and the grotesque that were mingled up with her first

experiences of the stage as a dramatic author were inimitably rendered

by herself, whenever she sat down to relate the story of that visit to

London for the purpose of bringing out her tragedy. The rehearsals,

where "the only grave person present was Mr. Liston!--the tragic

heroines sauntering languidly through their parts in bonnets and thick

shawls,--the untidy ballet-girls" (there was a dance in "Foscari")

"walking through their quadrille to the sound of a solitary

fiddle,"--she was never weary of calling up for the amusement of her

listeners.

The old dramatists she had grown up to worship,--Shakspeare first, as in

all loyalty bound, and after him Fletcher. "Affluent, eloquent, royally

grand," she used to call both Beaumont and Fletcher; and whole scenes

from favorite plays she knew by heart. Dr. Valpy was her neighbor, he

being in the days of her youth headmaster of Reading School. A family

intimacy of long standing had existed between her father's household and

that of the learned and excellent scholar, so that his well-known taste

for the English dramatists had no small influence on Doctor Mitford's

studious daughter. "He helped me also," she said, "to enter into the

spirit of those mighty masters who dealt forth the stern Tragedies of

Destiny."

One of the dearest friends of her youth was Miss Porden, (afterwards

married, as his first wife, to Sir John Franklin,) and at her suggestion

Miss Mitford wrote "Rienzi." I have heard her say, that, going up

to London to bring out that play, she saw her old friend, then Mrs.

Franklin, working a flag for the captain's ship, then about to sail on

one of his early adventurous voyages. The agitation of parting with

her husband was too great for her delicate temperament, and before the

expedition was out of the Channel Mrs. Franklin was dead.

* * * * *

Often and often, when the English lanes were white with blossoms, I

have sat by her side while her faithful servant guided her low-wheeled

pony-chaise among the pleasant roads about Reading and Swallowfield.

Once we went to a cricket-ground together, and as we sat under the

trees, looking on as the game proceeded, she, who fell in love with

Nature when a child, and had studied the landscape till she knew

familiarly every flower and leaf that grows on English soil, assembled

all that was best in poesy from her memory to illustrate the beautiful

scene before us, and to prove how much better and more truly the great

end of existence is answered in a rural life than in the vexatious cares

of city occupation. As we sat looking at the vast lawn, magnificent in

its green apparel, she quoted Irving as one who had understood English

country-life perhaps more deeply and fully than any other foreign author

who had ever written.

Speaking, one day, of the slowness of poetical fame, she said,--

"It always takes ten years to make a poetical reputation in England; but

America is wiser and bolder, and dares say at once, '_This is fine!_'"

She rejoiced greatly in several of the American poets, and was never

weary of quoting certain ringing couplets which she has celebrated in

her "Notes of a Literary Life." "Is there anything under the sun," she

exclaims, "that Dr. Holmes cannot paint?"

During the last six years of her life she became a great invalid and

moved about only with severe pain. "It is not age," she said, "that has

thus prostrated me, but the hard work and increasing anxieties of thirty

years of authorship, during which my poor labors were all that my dear

father and mother had to look to; besides which, for the greater part of

that time I was constantly called upon to attend the sick bed, first of

one parent, and then of the other. I have only to be intensely thankful

that the power of exertion did not fail until the necessity for such

exertion was removed."

"I love poetry and people as well at sixty as I did at sixteen," she

said one day, when I gave her a new volume by an American friend, "and

can never be sufficiently grateful to God for having permitted me to

retain the two joy-giving faculties of admiration and sympathy." The

"Ballad of Cassandra Southwick" she esteemed as one of the finest things

of our time; and of "Astrea" she said,--"Nobody in England can write

the glorious resonant metre of Dryden like that strain, nowadays."

Pope was a great favorite with her, and she took me one morning to an

old house where he was a frequent guest, and where Arabella Fermor, the

heroine of the "Rape of the Lock," passed her married life. On the way

she often quoted the poet, whose works she seemed to know by heart.

Returning at sunset, she was very anxious that I should hear my first

nightingale among the woody lanes of her pretty country; but we were

both disappointed. We listened long, but, although the air was full of

birdsongs that evening, the sweet-voiced warbler was not of the choir.

She talked much, as we rode along, of Kingsley and Ruskin, both of whom

she loved as friends as well as authors. "John Ruskin," she said, "is

good and kind, and charming beyond the common lot of mortals, and there

are pages of his prose, to my thinking, more eloquent than any thing out

of Jeremy Taylor."

Speaking of Humor, she said,--"Between ourselves, I always have a little

doubt of genius, when there is none of that quality: certainly, in the

very highest poetry, the two go together."

She greatly admired Béranger, and often spoke of him as the beautiful

old man, the truest and best type of perfect independence. Hazlitt she

ranked highly as an essayist, and she mentioned that she had heard both

Charles Lamb and Talfourd praise him as not only the most brilliant, but

the soundest of critics.

Among modern romances, those by the author of "The Scarlet Letter"

seemed to impress her almost more than any others; and when "The House

of the Seven Gables" was translated into Russian, she was filled with

delight. Indeed, she was always among the first to cry, "Bravo!" over

any good words for American literature.

"Do coax Mr. Hawthorne and Dr. Holmes," she said one day, "into visiting

England. I want them to be welcomed as they deserve, and as they are

sure to be."

Her interest in the French Emperor's career amounted to enthusiasm, and

one day she told us a very pretty story about him which she knew to

be true. She said, when he was in England after Strasbourg and before

Boulogne, he spent a twelvemonth at Leamington, living in the quietest

manner. One of the principal persons in that town, Mr. H., a very

liberal and accomplished man, made a point of showing every attention in

his power to the Prince; and they very soon became intimate. There

was in the town an old officer of the Emperor's Polish Legion, who,

compelled to leave France after Waterloo, had taken refuge in England,

and, having a natural talent for languages, maintained himself by

teaching French, Italian, and German in different families. The old

exile and the young one found each other out, and the language-master

was soon an habitual guest at the Prince's table, where he was treated

with the most affectionate attention. At last Louis Napoleon was obliged

to repair to London, but before he went he called on his friend Mr. H.

to take leave. After warm thanks to him for all the pleasure he had

experienced in his society, the Prince said,--

"I am about to prove to you my entire reliance upon your unfailing

kindness by leaving you a legacy. I wish to ask that you would transfer

to my poor old friend the goodness you have lavished on me. His health

is failing,--his means are small; pray, call upon him sometimes, and see

that the lodging-house people do not neglect him. Draw upon me for what

may be wanting for his needs or for his comforts."

Mr. H. promised, and faithfully replaced the Prince in his kind

attentions to his old friend. The poor old man grew ill at last, and

died, Mr. H. defraying all the charges of his illness and of his

funeral. "I would willingly have paid them myself," said he, "but I knew

that would have offended and grieved the Prince. I found that provision

had been made at his banker's to answer my drafts to a much larger

amount than the actual debt."

Miss Mitford used to say that she kept this anecdote for non-admirers of

the Emperor.

One day she came limping into the room, with her dog Fanchon following

in the same lame plight,--she laughing heartily at their similarity of

gait, and holding up a letter just in from the post.

"Here," said she, "is an epistle from my dear old friend, Lady M.,"

(Gibbon's correspondent,) "who at the age of eighty-three is caught

by new books, and is as enthusiastic as a girl. She commissions me to

inquire of you all about your new authoress, the writer of 'Uncle Tom's

Cabin,' who she is, and all you know of her. So let me hear what you

have to say about the lady."

During a brief visit to her cottage not long before she died, the chase

was started one evening to find, if possible, the origin of the line

quoted by Byron,--

"A fellow-feeling makes one wondrous kind."

In vain we searched among the poets, and at last all the party gave up

in despair. I went up to London soon after, thinking no more of the lost

line. In a few days, however, came a brief note, as follows:--

"Hurrah, dear friend! I have found the line without any other person's

aid or suggestion! Last night it occurred to me that it was in some

prologue or epilogue; and my little book-room being very rich in the

drama, I have looked through many hundreds of those bits of rhyme, and

at last made a discovery, which, if it have no other good effect, will

at least have 'emptied my head of Corsica,' as Johnson said to Boswell;

for never was the great biographer more haunted by the thought of Paoli

than I by that line. It occurs in an epilogue by Garrick, on quitting

the stage, June, 1776, when the performance was for the benefit of sick

and aged actors.

"Not finding it quoted in Johnson convinced me that it would probably

have been written after the publication of the Dictionary, and

ultimately guided me to the right place. It is singular that epilogues

were just dismissed at the first representation of one of my plays,

'Foscari,' and prologues at another, 'Rienzi.'

"Ever most affectionately yours,

"M.R. MITFORD.

"P.S. I am still a close prisoner in my room. But when fine weather

comes, I will get down in some way or other, and trust myself to that

which never hurts anybody, the honest open air. Spring, and even the

approach of spring, sets me dreaming. I see leafy hedges in my sleep,

and flowery banks, and then I long to make the vision a reality.

I remember that my dog Flush, Fanchon's father, who was a famous

sporting-dog, used, at the approach of the covering season, to hunt in

his sleep, doubtless by the same instinct that works in me. So, as soon

as the sun tells the same story with the primroses, I shall make a

descent after some fashion, and, no doubt, aided by Sam's stalwart arm,

successfully."

* * * * *

After leaving Three-Mile Cross for Swallowfield, her health, never of

late years robust, seemed failing. In one of her letters to me she gives

this pleasant picture of her home:--

"Ill as I am, my spirits are as good as ever; and just at this moment I

am most comfortably seated under the acacia-tree at the corner of the

house,--the beautiful acacia literally loaded with its snowy chains. The

flowering-trees this summer, the lilacs, laburnums, and rhododendrons,

have been one mass of blossoms, but none are so graceful as this

waving acacia. On one side is a syringa, smelling and looking like an

orange-tree,--a jar of roses on the table before me,--fresh gathered

roses,--the pride of my gardener's heart. Little Fanchon is at my

feet, too idle to eat the biscuits with which I am trying to tempt

her,--biscuits from Boston, sent to me by kind Mrs. S., and which

Fanchon ought to like; but you know her laziness of old, and she

improves in it every day."

It was about this period that Walter Savage Landor sent to her these

exquisite lines:--

"The hay is carried; and the Hours

Snatch, as they pass, the linden-flowers;

And children leap to pluck a spray

Bent earthward, and then run away.

Park-keeper! catch me those grave thieves,

About whose frocks the fragrant leaves,

Sticking and fluttering here and there,

No false nor faltering witness bear.

"I never view such scenes as these

In grassy meadow girt with trees,

But comes a thought of her who now

Sits with serenely patient brow

Amid deep sufferings: none hath told

More pleasant tales to young and old.

Fondest was she of Father Thames,

But rambled to Hellenic streams;

Nor even there could any tell

The country's purer charms so well

As Mary Mitford.

"Verse! go forth

And breathe o'er gentle hearts her worth.

Needless the task: but should she see

One hearty wish from you and me,

A moment's pain it may assuage,--

A rose-leaf on the couch of Age."

In the early days of the year 1855 she sent, in her own handwriting,

kind greetings to her old friends only a few hours before she died.

Sweetness of temper and brightness of mind, her never-failing

characteristics, accompanied her to the last; and she passed on in her

usual cheerful and affectionate mood, her sympathies uncontracted by

age, narrow fortune, and pain.

THE PROFESSOR'S STORY.