"You will come with me, Stephen," quietly: then, after a pause, "It is

for life. There is but little time left to decide."

Was there no help? Had the true God no messenger? The winter-wind

blowing through the window filled with fine frost wet his face, lifted

the smothering off his lungs. His eyes grew clear, as his full sense

returned after a while: seeing only at first, it so happened, the fire

in its square frame; and thinking only of that, as the mind always

drowsily absorbs the nearest trifle after a spasm of pain. A bed of pale

red coals now, furred over with white and pearl-colored ashes. It was a

long time since he had seen any open fire,--years, he believed. Where

was it that there had been a fire just like that, with the ashes like

moss over the heat,--and on a night in winter, too, the wind rattling

the panes? Where was it? While Soulé stood waiting for his answer, his

mind was drifting back, like that of a man in his dotage, through its

dull, muddy thoughts, after that one silly memory. He struck on it at

last. A year or two after he was married. In the bedroom. Martha was

sitting by the fire, with the old yellow dog beside her: she was trying

to ride the baby on his neck,--he was the clumsiest brute! He came in

and stopped to see the fun; he noticed the fire then, how cozy and warm

it all was: outside it was hailing, a gust shaking the house. He had

been doing a bit of carpentering,--he did like to go back to the old

trade! This was a wicker chair for the baby,--he had made it in the

stable for a surprise: the girl always liked surprises and such

nonsense. He put it down with a flourish, and he remembered how she

laughed, and Ready growled, and how he and she both got on their knees

to seat the youngster in, and tie him with his bandanna handkerchief. So

silly that all was! When they were on the floor there, and had Master

Jem fastened in, be remembered how she suddenly turned, and put her arms

about his neck, as shyly as when they were first married, and kissed

him. "Only God knows how good you are to me, Stephen," she said. There

were tears in her eyes.--Yarrow passed his hand over his forehead. Did

ever a thought come into your mind like a fresh, clean air into a

stove-heated, foul room? or like the first hearty, living call of

Greatheart through the dungeons of Giant Despair?

"You do not answer me, Stephen?" said his brother. "You will go with

me?"

Yarrow's head was more erect, his eyes less glazed.

"It may be. The chance for me's over in the world, I think. I may as

well serve you. And yet"--

"What?"

"Give me time to think. I want out-of-doors. It's close here. I'll meet

you in the morning."

Soulé caught his wife's uneasy glance.

"What is this, Stephen?"

"Nothing," looking dully out into the night.

"Then"--

"There's some you said were dead,"--as if no one were speaking, with the

same dull look. "Or lost: I think they're not dead. If there might be a

chance yet! If I could but see Martha and the little chaps, it would

save me, John Yarrow, no matter what they'd learned to think of me.

They're mine,--my little chaps. She said the boys should never know. She

said that of her own free will."

"Is it likely she could keep her word?" said Soulé, sneeringly.

"Why, why, she loved me, John,"--a moist color and smile coming out on

his face. "There's a little thing I minded just now that--Yes, Martha

kept her word."

He tapped with his fingers thoughtfully on the mantel-shelf, the smile

lingering yet on his face. The woman's woollen sewing fell from her

hand, and she spoke for the first time. Her tone had a harsh, metallic

twang in it: Yarrow turned curiously, as he heard it.

"What could they be to you, if you found them? They have forgotten you.

In five years they have not sent you a message."

"No,--I know, Madam."

Even that did not hurt him. His face kindled slowly,--still turned to

the fire, as if it were telling him some old story: looking to her at

last, steadfast and manly, like a man who has healthy common-sense

dominant in his head, and an unselfish love at work in his heart. Such a

one is not far from the kingdom of heaven.

"It seems to me as if there might be a chance--yet. It's a long time.

But Martha loved me, Madam. You don't know--I think I'll go, John. It's

close here, 's I said. I'll meet you at the far bridge by dawn, and let

you know."

"It is your only chance," said Soulé, roughly, as he followed him to the

door.

He was a ruined man, if he were balked in this.

"You do not know how the world meets a returned felon, Stephen; you"--

"Let me go," feebly, putting his hand up to his chin in the old fashion.

"I think I know that. I--I've thought of that a good deal. But it seemed

to me as if there might be a chance"; and so, without a word of

farewell, went stumbling down the stairs.

He had given a wistful look at the fire, as he turned away. Perhaps that

would comfort him. God surely has "many voices in the world, and none of

them is without its signification."

An hour before dawn, Yarrow found the place in which he had appointed to

meet his brother. The night had been dark, hailing at intervals; he had

gone tramping up and down the hills and stubble-fields, through snow and

half-frozen mud-gullies, hardly conscious of what he did. The night

seemed long to him now, looking back. He found a burnt sycamore-stump

and got up on it, shivered awhile, felt his shirt, which was wet to the

skin, then took off his shoes and cleared the lumps of slush out of

them. There was something horrible to him in this unbroken silence and

dark and wet cold: he had been in his hot cell so long, the frost stung

him differently from other men, the icy thaw was wetter. It was a narrow

cut in the hills where he was, a bridle-road leading back and running

zigzag for some miles until it returned to the railroad-track. A lonely,

unfrequented place: Frazier would take this by-path; Soulé had chosen it

well to meet him. There was a rickety bridge crossing a hill-stream a

few rods beyond. Yarrow pushed the dripping cap off his forehead, and

looked around. No light nor life on any side: even in the heavens yawned

that breathless, uncolored silence that precedes a winter's dawn. He

could see the Ohio through the gully: why, it used to be a broad,

full-breasted river, glancing all over with light, loaded with steamers

and rafts going down to the Mississippi. He had gone down once, rafting,

with lumber, and a jolly three weeks' float they had of it. Now it was a

solid, shapeless mass of blocks of ice and mud. Winter? yes, but the

world was altered somehow, the very river seemed struck with death. His

teeth chattered; he began to try to rub some warmth into his rheumatic

legs and arms; tried to bring back the fancy of last night about Martha

and the fire. But that was a long way off: there were all these years'

mastering memories to fade it out, you know, and besides, a diseased

habit of desponding. The world was wide to him, cowering out from a

cell: where were Martha and the little chaps lost in it? John said they

were dead. Where should he turn now? There was an aguish pain in his

spine that blinded him: since yesterday he had eaten nothing,--he had no

money to buy a meal; he was a felon,--who would give him work? "There's

some things certain in the world," he muttered.

"That was silly last night,--silly. And yet,--if there could have been a

chance!"

He looked up steadily into the sickly, discolored sky: nothing there but

the fog from these swamps. He had not wished so much that he could hear

of Martha and the children, when he looked up, as of something else

that he needed more. Even the foulest and most careless soul that God

ever made has some moments when it grows homesick, conscious of the

awful vacuum below its life, the Eternal Arm not being there. Yarrow was

neither foul nor careless. All his life, most in those years in the

prison, he had been hungry for Something to rest on, to own him.

Sometimes, when his evil behavior had seemed vilest to him, he had felt

himself trembling on the verge of a great forgiveness. But he could see

so little of the sky in the cell there,--only that three-cornered patch:

he had a fancy, that, if once he were out in the world that He made,--in

the free air,--that, if there were a God, he would find Him out. He had

not found Him.

He sat on the stump awhile, his hands over his eyes, then got down

slowly, buttoning his soggy waistcoat and coat.

"I don't see as there's a chance," he said, dully. "I was a fool to

think there was any better God than the one that"--digging his toe into

the frozen pools. "It's all ruled. I'm not one of the elect."

That was all. After that, he stood waiting for his brother.

"I'll help him. He's the best I know."

Even the faint sigh choked before it rose to his lips,--both manhood and

hope were so dead with inanition; yet a life's failure went in it.

While he stood waiting, Martha Yarrow sat by her kitchen-fire crying to

God to help him; but He knew what things were needed before she asked

Him.

Soulé, with his gun and game-bag, had been coursing over the hills three

miles back, since four o'clock. He had bagged a squirrel or two, enough

to suffice for his morning's work, and now, his piece unloaded, came

stealthily towards the place of rendezvous. He had little hope that

Stephen would help him: he had made up his mind to go through the affair

alone. If _he_ did it, that involved--Pah! what was in a word? Men died

every day. He had quite resolved: Judith and he had talked the matter

over all night. But if Frazier were a younger man, and could fight for

it! Perhaps he was armed: Soulé's face flashed: he stooped and broke the

trigger of his gun, and then went on with a much less heavy step. They

would be more even now. He wanted to reach the bridge by dawn, and meet

his brother. If he refused to help him, he would send him away, and wait

for Frazier alone. About nine o'clock he might expect him.

Frazier, however, had changed his plan. He told Starr the night before,

that, as M. Soulé would not breakfast with him, he had concluded to rise

early, and be off by dawn. "If there's nothing to be done about the

Miami shares, there is no use wasting time here," he thought. So, while

Stephen Yarrow waited near the bridge, the smoke was curling out of the

kitchen-chimney where the cook was making ready the cashier's beefsteak,

and the old man was crawling out of bed. He could hear Starr's children

in the room overhead making an uproar over their stockings. "Christmas

morning, by the way! I must take some knick-knack back to Totty." (As if

his trunk were not always filled with things for Totty, and his shirts

crammed into the lid, when he came home!) "Something for mother, too,"

as he pulled on his socks. "Gloves, now, hey? A dozen pair. I wish I had

asked Madame Soulé what size she wore, last night. Their hands are about

the same size. Mother always had a tidy little paw. So will Totty, eh?"

And so finished dressing, thinking Soulé had a neat little wife, but

insipid.

So Christmas morning came to all of them, the day when, a long time ago,

One who had made a good happy world came back to find and save that

which was lost in it. In these few hundred years had He forgotten the

way of finding?

Stephen Yarrow had fallen into an uneasy doze by the road-side. He had

done with thinking, when he said, "I'll go with John." The way through

life seemed to open clear, exactly the same as it had been before. There

was an end of it. There might have been a chance, but there was none. He

drowsed off into a brutish slumber. Something like a kiss woke him. It

was only the morning air. A clear, sweet-breathed dawn, as we said, that

seemed somehow to have caught a scent of far-off harvest-farms, in lands

where it was not winter. Warm brown clouds yonder with a glow like wine

in them, the splendor of the coming day hinting of itself through.

"I must have slept," said Yarrow, taking off his cap to shake it dry.

There were a thousand shining points on the dingy fur. He rubbed his

heavy eyes and looked about him. The misty rime of the night had frozen

on hills and woods and river,--frosted the whole earth in one

glittering, delicate sheath. The first level bar of sunlight put into

the nostrils of the dead world of the night before the breath of life.

Once in a lifetime, maybe, the sight meets a man's eyes which Yarrow saw

that morning. The very clear blue of the air thrilled with electric

vigor; from the rounded rose-colored summits of the western hills to the

tiniest ire-cased grass-spear at his feet, the land flashed back

unnumbered soft and splendid dyes to heaven; the hemlock-forests near

had grouped themselves into glittering temples, mosques, churches,

whatever form in which men have tried to please God by worshipping Him;

the smoke from the distant village floated up in a constant silver and

violet vapor like an incense-breath. Neither was it a dead morning. The

far-off tinkle of cowbells reached him now and then, the cheery crow

from one farm-yard to another, even children's voices calling, and at

last a slow, sweet chime of churchbells.

"They told me it was Christmas morning," he said, pulling off the old

cap again.

Yarrow's chin had sunk on his breast, as his eager eyes drank all this

morning in. He breathed short and quick, like a child before whom some

incredible pleasure flashes open.

"Well," with a long breath, putting on his cap, "I didn't think of aught

like this, yonder. God help us!"

He didn't know why he smiled or rubbed his hands cheerfully. His sleep

had refreshed him, maybe. But it seemed as if the great beauty and

tenderness of the world were for him, this morning,--as if some great

Power stretched out its arms to him, and spoke through it.

"I'll not be silly again," straightening himself, and buttoning his

coat; but before the words were spoken, his head had sunk again, and he

stood quiet.

Something in all this brought Martha and the little chaps before him, he

did not know why, but his heart ached with a sharper pain than ever,

that made his eyes wet with tears.

"If there should be a chance!"--lifting his hands to the deep of blue in

the east.

This was the free air in which he used to think he could find God.

"What if it were true that He was there,--loving, not hating, taking

care of Martha, and"--

He stopped, catching the word.

"No. I've slipped. I don't forget."

He did forget. He did not remember that he was a thief, standing there.

Whatever substance had been in him at his birth trustworthy rose up now

to meet the voice of God that called to him aloud. His lank jaws grew

red, his eyes a deeper blue, a look in them which his mother may have

seen the like of years and years ago; he beat with his knuckles on his

breast nervously.

"If there could be a chance!" he said, unceasingly; "if I might try

again!"

There was a crackling in the snow-laden bushes upon the hill: he looked

back, and saw his brother coming from the other side, his game-bag over

his shoulder, stooping to avoid notice, his eyes fixed intently on some

object on the road beyond. It was an old man on horseback, jogging

slowly up the path, whistling as he came. Yarrow shuddered with a sudden

horror.

"He means murder! That is Frazier. You could not do it to-day, John!

To-day!" as if Soulé could hear him.

He was between his brother and his victim. The old man came slower, the

hill being steep, looking at the frosted trees, and seeing neither

Yarrow nor the burly figure crouching, tiger-like, among the bushes. One

moment, and he would have passed the bend of the hill,--Soulé could

reach him.

"God help me!" whispered Yarrow, and threw himself forward, pushing the

horse back on his haunches. "Go back! Ten steps farther, and it's too

late! Back, I say!"

The old man gasped.

"Why! what! a slip? an' water-gully?"

"No matter," leading the horse, trembling from head to foot.

Up on the hill there was a sharp break, a heavy footstep on a dead root.

Would John go back or come on? he was strong enough to master both.

Yarrow's throat choked, but he led the horse steadily down the path,

deaf to Frazier's questions.

"Do not draw rein until you reach the station," giving him the bridle at

last.

The old man looked back: he had seen the figure dimly.

"If there's danger, I'll not leave you to meet it alone, my friend,"

fumbling in his breast for a weapon.

Yarrow stamped impatiently.

"Put spurs to your horse!"--wiping his mouth; "it will be yet too late!"

Frazier gave a glance at his face, and obeyed him. A moment more, and he

was out of sight. Yarrow watched him, and then slowly turned, and raised

his head. Soulé had come down, and was standing close beside him,

leaning on his gun. It was the last time the brothers ever faced each

other, and their natures, as God made them, came out bare in that look:

Yarrow's, under all, was the tougher-fibred of the two. John's eyes

fell.

"Stephen, this will hurt me. I"--

"I thought it was well done,"--his hand going uncertainly to his mouth.

"Well, well! you have chosen,"--after a pause.

"Good bye."

"Good bye, boy."

They held each other's hands for a minute; then Soulé turned off, and

strode down the hill. He loosened his cravat as he went, and took a long

breath of relief.

"It was a vile job! But"--his face much troubled. But his wife heard the

story without a word, nor ever alluded to it afterwards. She was human,

like the rest of us.

A moment after he was gone, a curious change took place in the convict,

a reaction,--the excitement being gone. The pain and exposure and hunger

had room to tell now on body and soul. He stretched himself out on a

drift of snow, drunken with sleep, yet every nerve quivering and

conscious, trying to catch another echo of Soulé's step. He was his

brother, he was all he had; it was terrible to be thus alone in the

world: going back to the time when they worked in the shop together. He

raised his head even, and called him,--"Jack!"--once or twice, as he

used to then. It was too late. Such a generous, bull-headed fellow he

was then, taking his own way, and being led at last. He was gone now,

and forever. He was all he had.

The day was out broadly now,--a thorough winter's day, cold and clear,

the frosty air sending a glow through your blood. It sent none into

Yarrow's thinned veins: he was too far gone with all these many years.

The place, as I said, was a lonely one, niched between hills, yet near

enough main roads for him to hear sounds from them: people calling to

each other, about Christmas often; carriages rolling by; great Conestoga

wagons, with their dozens of tinkling bells, and the driver singing;

dogs and children chasing each other through the snow. The big world

was awake and busy and glad, but it passed him by.

"For this man that might have been it has as much use as for a bit of

cold victuals thrown into the street. And the worst is," with a bitter

smile, "I know it, to my heart's core."

The morning passed by, as he lay there, growing colder, his brain

duller.

"I did not think this coat was so thin," he would mutter, as he tried to

pull it over him.

If he got up, where should he go? What use, eh? It was warmer in the

snow than walking about. Conscious at last only of a metallic taste in

his mouth, a weakness creeping closer to his heart every moment, and a

dull wonder if there could yet be a chance. It seemed very far away now.

And Martha and the little chaps--Oh, well!

Some hours may have passed as he lay there, and sleep came; for I fancy

it was a dream that brought the final sharp thought into his brain. He

dragged himself up on one elbow, the old queer smile on his lips.

"I will try," he said.

It took him some time to make his way out into the main road, but he did

it at last, straightening his wet hair under the old cap.

"It's so like a dog to die that way! I'll try, just once, how the world

looks when I face it."

He sat down outside of a blacksmith's forge, the only building in sight,

on the pump-trough, and looked wearily about. His head fell now and then

on his breast from weakness.

"It won't be a very long trial. I'll not beg for food, and I'm not equal

to much work just now,"--with the same grim half-smile.

No one was in sight but the blacksmith and some crony, looking over a

newspaper. Inside. They nodded, when they saw him, and said,--

"Hillo!"

"Hillo!" said Yarrow.

Then they went on with their paper. That was the only sound for a long

time. Some farmers passed after a while, giving him good-morning, in

country-fashion. A trifle, but it was warm, heartsome: he had put the

world on trial, you know, and he was not very far from death. Men more

soured than Yarrow have been surprised to find it was God's world, with

God's own heart, warm and kindly, speaking through every human heart in

it, if they touched them right. About noon, the blacksmith's children

brought him his dinner in a tin bucket, leaving it inside. When they

came out, one freckled baby-girl came up to Yarrow.

"Tie my shoe," she said, putting up one foot, peremptorily. "Are you

hungry?" looking at him curiously, after he had done it, at the same

time holding up a warm seed-cake she was eating to his mouth. He was

ashamed that the spicy smile tempted him to take it. He put it away, and

seated her on his foot.

"Let me ride you plough-boy fashion," he said, trotting her gently for a

minute.

Her father passed them.

"You must pardon me," said Yarrow, with a bow. "I used to ride my boy

so, and"--

"Eh? Yes. Sudy's a good girl. You've lost your little boy, now?" looking

in Yarrow's face.

"Yes, I've lost him."

The blacksmith stood silent a moment, then went in. Soon after a tall

man rode up on a gray horse; it had cast a shoe, and while the smith

went to work within, the rider sat down by Yarrow on the trough, and

began to talk of the weather, politics, etc., in a quiet, pleasant way,

making a joke now and then. He had a thin face, with a scraggy fringe of

yellow hair and whisker about it, and a gray, penetrating eye. The shoe

was on presently, and mounting, with a touch of his hat to Yarrow, he

rode off. The convict hesitated a moment, then called to him.

"I have a word to say to you," coming up, and putting his hand on the

horse's mane.

The man glanced at him, then jumped down.

"Well, my friend?"

"You're a clergyman?"

"Yes."

"So was I once. If you had known, just now, that I was a felon two days

ago released from the penitentiary, what would you have said to me?

Guilty, when I went in, remember. A thief."

The man was silent, looking in Yarrow's face. Then he put his hand on

his arm.

"Shall I tell you?"

"Go on."

"I would have said, that, if ever you preach God's truth again, you will

have learned a deeper lesson than I."

If he meant to startle the man's soul into life, he had done it. He a

teacher, who hardly knew if that good God lived!

"Let me go," he cried, breaking loose from the other's hand.

"No. I can help you. For God's sake tell me who you are."

But Yarrow left him, and went down the road, hiding, when he tried to

pursue him,--sitting close behind a pile of lumber. He was there when

found: so tired that the last hour and the last years began to seem like

dreams. Something cold roused him, nozzling at his throat. An old yellow

dog, its eyes burning.

"Why, Ready," he said, faintly, "have you come?"

"Come home," said the dog's eyes, speaking out what the whole day had

tried to say: "they're waiting for you; they've been waiting always;

home's there, and love's there, and the good God's there, and it's

Christmas day. Come home!"

Yarrow struggled up, and put his arms about the dog's neck: kissed him

with all the hunger for love smothered in these many years.

"He don't know I'm a thief," he thought.

Ready bit angrily at coat and trousers.

"Be a man, and come home."

Yarrow understood. He caught his breath, as he went along, holding by

the fence now and then.

"It's the chance!" he said. "And Martha! It's Martha and the little

chaps!"

But he was not sure. He was yet so near to the place where it would have

been forever too late. If Ready saw that with his wary eye, turned now

and then, as he trotted before,--if he had any terror in his dumb soul,

(or whatever you choose to call it,) or any mad joy, or desire to go

clean daft with rollicking in the snow at what he had done, he put it

off to another season, and kept a stern face on his captive. But Yarrow

watched it; it was the first home-face of them all.

"Be a man," it said. "Let the thief go. Home's before you, and love, and

years of hard work for the God you did not know."

So they went on together. They came at last to the house,--home. He grew

blind then, and stopped at the gate; but the dog went slower, and waited

for him to follow, pushed the door open softly, and, when he went in,

laid down in his old place, and put his paws over his face.

When Martha Yarrow heard the step at last, she got up. But seeing how it

was with him, she only put her arms quietly about his neck, and said,--

"I've waited so long, my husband!"

That was all.

He lay in his old bed that evening; he made her open the door, feeling

strong enough to look at them now, Jem and Tom and Catty, in the warm,

well-lighted room, with all its little Christmas gayeties. They had

known many happy holidays, but none like this: coming in on tiptoe to

look at the white, sad face on the pillow, and to say, under their

breath, "It's father." They had waited so long for him. When he heard

them, the closed eyes always opened anxiously, and looked at them: kind

eyes, full of a more tender, wishful love than even mother's. They came

in only now and then, but Martha he would not let go from him, held her

hand all day. Ready had made his way up on the bed and lay over his

feet.

"That's right, old Truepenny!" he said.

They laughed at that: he had not forgotten the old name. When Martha

looked at the old yellow dog, she felt her eyes fill with tears.

"God did not want a messenger," she thought: as if He ever did!

That evening, while he lay with her head on his breast, as she sat by

the bed, he watched the boys a long time.

"Martha," he said, at last, "you said that they should never know. Did

you keep your word?"

"I kept it, Stephen."

He was quiet a long while after that, and then he said,--

"Some day I will tell them. It's all clearer to me now. If ever I find

the good God, I'll teach Him to my boys out of my own life. They'll not

love me less."

He did not talk much that day; even to her he could not say that which

was in his heart; but it seemed to him there was One who heard and

understood,--looking out, after all was quiet that night, into the far

depth of the silent sky, and going over his whole wretched life down to

that bitterest word of all, as if he had found a hearer more patient,

more tender than either wife or child.

"Is there any use to try?" he cried. "I was a thief."

Then, in the silence, came to him the memory of the old question,--

"Hath no man condemned thee?"

He put his hands over his face:--

"No man, Lord!"

And the answer came for all time:--

"Neither do I condemn thee. Go, and sin no more."

* * * * *

MEMORIÆ POSITUM

R.G.S.

1863.

I.

Beneath the trees,

My life-long friends in this dear spot,

Sad now for eyes that see them not,

I hear the autumnal breeze

Wake the sear leaves to sigh for gladness gone,

Whispering hoarse presage of oblivion,--

Hear, restless as the seas,

Time's grim feet rustling through the withered grace

Of many a spreading realm and strong-stemmed race,

Even as my own through these.

Why make we moan

For loss that doth enrich us yet

With upward yearnings of regret?

Bleaker than unmossed stone

Our lives were but for this immortal gain

Of unstilled longing and inspiring pain!

As thrills of long-hushed tone

Live in the viol, so our souls grow fine

With keen vibrations from the touch divine

Of noble natures gone.

'T were indiscreet

To vex the shy and sacred grief

With harsh obtrusions of relief;

Yet, Verse, with noiseless feet,

Go whisper, "_This_ death hath far choicer ends

Than slowly to impearl in hearts of friends;

These obsequies 'tis meet

Not to seclude in closets of the heart,

But, church-like, with wide door-ways, to impart

Even to the heedless street."

II.

Brave, good, and true,

I see him stand before me now,

And read again on that clear brow,

Where victory's signal flew,

_How sweet were life!_ Yet, by the mouth firm-set,

And look made up for Duty's utmost debt,

I could divine he knew

That death within the sulphurous hostile lines,

In the mere wreck of nobly pitched designs,

Plucks heart's-ease, and not rue.

Happy their end

Who vanish down life's evening stream

Placid as swans that drift in dream

Round the next river-bend!

Happy long life, with honor at the close,

Friends' painless tears, the softened thought of foes!

And yet, like him, to spend

All at a gush, keeping our first faith sure

From mid-life's doubt and eld's contentment poor,

What more could Fortune send?

Right in the van,

On the red rampart's slippery swell,

With heart that beat a charge, he fell

Forward, as fits a man:

But the high soul burns on to light men's feet

Where death for noble ends makes dying sweet;

His life her crescent's span

Orbs full with share in their undarkening days

Who ever climbed the battailous steeps of praise

Since valor's praise began.

III.

His life's expense

Hath won for him coeval youth

With the immaculate prime of Truth;

While we, who make pretence

At living on, and wake and eat and sleep,

And life's stale trick by repetition keep,

Our fickle permanence

(A poor leaf-shadow on a brook, whose play

Of busy idlesse ceases with our day)

Is the mere cheat of sense.

We bide our chance,

Unhappy, and make terms with Fate

A little more to let us wait:

He leads for aye the advance,

Hope's forlorn-hopes that plant the desperate good

For nobler Earths and days of manlier mood;

Our wall of circumstance

Cleared at a bound, he flashes o'er the fight,

A saintly shape of fame, to cheer the right

And steel each wavering glance.

I write of one,

While with dim eyes I think of three:

Who weeps not others fair and brave as he?

Ah, when the fight is won,

Dear Land, whom triflers now make bold to scorn,

(Thee! from whose forehead Earth awaits her morn!)

How nobler shall the sun

Flame in thy sky, how braver breathe thy air,

That thou bred'st children who for thee could dare

And die as thine have done!

* * * * *

MY BOOK.

The trouble about biographies is that by the time they are written the

person is dead. You have heard of him remotely. You know that he sang a

world's songs, founded great empires, won brilliant victories, did

heroes' work; but you do not know the little tender touches of his life,

the things that bring him into near kinship with humanity, and set him

by the household hearth without unclasping the diadem from his brow,

until he is dead, and it is too late forevermore. Then with vague

restlessness you visit the brook in which his trout-line drooped, you

pluck a leaf from the elm that shaded his regal head, you walk in the

graveyard that holds in its bosom his silent dust, only to feel with

unavailing regret that no sunshine of his presence can gleam upon you.

The life that stirred in his voice, shone in his eye, and fortressed

itself in his unconscious bearing, can make to you no revelation. It is

departed, none knows whither. He is as much a part of the past as if he

had tended docks for Abraham on the plains of Mamre.

This, when biographies are at their best. Generally, they are at their

worst. Generally, they don't know the things you wish to learn, and when

they do, they don't tell them. They give you statistics, facts,

reflections, eulogies, dissertations; but what you hunger and thirst

after is the man's inner life. Of what use is it to know what a man

does, unless you know what made him do it? This you can seldom learn

from memoirs. Look at the numerous brood that followed in the wake of

Shelley's fame. Every one gives you, not Shelley, but himself, served up

in Shelley sauce. Think of your own experience: do you not know that the

vital facts of your life are hermetically sealed? Do you not know that

you are a world within a world, whose history and geography may be

summed up in that phrase which used to make the interior of Africa the

most delightful spot in the whole atlas,--"Unexplored Region"? One

person may have started an expedition here, and another there. Here one

may have struck a river-course, and there one may have looked down into

a valley-depth, and all may have brought away their golden grain; but

the one has not followed the river to its source, nor the other wandered

bewilderingly through the valley-lands, and none have traversed the

Field of the Cloth of Gold. So the geographies are all alike:

boundaries, capital, chief towns, rivers, mountains, and lakes. And what

is true of you is doubtless true of all. Faith is not to be put in

biographies. They can tell what your name is, and what was your

grandfather's coat of arms, when you were born, where you lived, and how

you died,--though, if they are no more accurate after you are dead than

they are before, their statements will hardly come under the head of

"reliable intelligence." But even if they are accurate, what then?

Suppose you were born in Pikesville: a thousand people drew their first

breath there, and not one of them was like you in character or fate. You

were born in some year of our Lord. Thousands upon thousands date from

the same year, and each went his own way,--

"One to long darkness and the frozen tide,

One to the peaceful sea!"

All this is nothing and accounts for nothing, yet this is all. Whether

you were susceptible of calmness or deeply turbulent,--whether you were

amiable, or only amiably disposed,--whether you were inwardly blest and

only superficially unrestful, safely moored even while tossing on an

unquiet sea,--what you thought, what you hoped, how you felt, yes, and

how you lived and loved and hated, they do not know and cannot tell. A

biographer may be ever so conscientious, but he stands on the outside of

the circle of his subject, and his view will lack symmetry. There is but

one who, from his position in the centre, is competent to give a fair

and full picture, and that is your own self. A few may possess

imagination, and so partially atone for the disadvantages of position;

but, ten hundred thousand to one, they will not have a chance at your

life. You must die knowing that you are at the mercy of whoever can hold

a pen.

Unless you take time by the forelock and write your biography yourself!

Then you will be sure to do no harm, inasmuch as no one is obliged to

read your narrative; and you may do much good, because, if any one does

read it and become interested in you, he will have the pleasant

consciousness of living in the same world with you. When he drives

through your street, he can put his head out of the carriage-window and

stand a chance of seeing you just coming in at the front gate. Also, if

you write your biography yourself, you can have your choice as to what

shall go in and what shall stay out. You can make a discreet selection

of your letters, giving the go-by to that especial one in which you

rather--is there such a word as spooneyly?--offered yourself to your

wife. Every word was as good as the Bank of England to her, for to her

you were a lover, a knight, a great brown-bearded angel, and all

metaphors, however violent, fell upon good ground. But to the people who

read your life you will be a trader, a lawyer, a shoemaker, who pays his

butcher's bills and looks after the main chance, and the metaphors,

emptied of their fire, but retaining their form, will seem incongruous,

not to say ridiculous. I do not say that your wife's lover and knight

and angel are not a higher and a better, yes, and a truer you, than the

world's trader and lawyer; still your love-letters will probably do

better in the bosom of the love-lettered than on a bookseller's shelves.

Besides these advantages, there is another in præ-humous publication. If

you wait for your biography till you are dead, it is extremely probable

you will lose it altogether. The world has so much to see to ahead that

it can hardly spare a glance over its shoulder to take note of what is

behind. Take the note yourself and make sure of it You will then know

where you are, and be master of the situation.

I purpose, therefore, to write the history of my life, from my entrance

upon it down to a period which is within the memory of men still living.

In so doing, I shall not be careful to trace out that common ground

which may be supposed to underlie all lives, but only indicate those

features which serve to distinguish one from another. Everybody is

christened, cuts his teeth, and eats bread and molasses. Silently will

we, therefore, infer the bread and molasses, and swiftly stride in

seven-league boots from mountain-peak to mountain-peak.

I was born of parents who, though not poor, were respectable, and I had

also the additional distinction of being a precocious child. I differed

from most precocious children, however, in not dying young, and that

opportunity, once let slip, is now forever gone. I believe the

precocious children who do not die young develop into idiots. My family

have never been without well-grounded fears in that line.

Nothing of any importance happened to me after I was born till I grew up

and wrote a book. Indeed, I believe I may say even that never happened,

for I did not write a book. Rather a book came to pass,--somewhat like

the goldsmithery of Aaron, who threw the ear-rings into the fire, and

"there came out this calf"! I went out one day alone, as was my wont, in

an open boat, and drifted beyond sight of land. I had heard that

shipwrecked mariners sometimes throw out a bottle of papers to give

posterity a clue to their fate. I threw out a bottle of papers, less out

of regard to posterity than to myself. They floated into a

printing-press, stiffened themselves, and came forth a book, whereon I

sailed safely ashore, grateful. Alas, in another confusion will there be

another resource?

It is this book which is to form the first, and quite possibly the last

chapter of my life and sufferings, for I don't suppose anything will

ever happen to me again. To be sure, in the book I have just been

reading a girl marries her groom, leaves him, rejects two lovers, kills

her husband, accepts one lover, loses him, marries the second, first

husband comes to light again and is shot, marries second husband over

again, and goes a-journeying with second husband and first lover, first

cousin and two children, in the South of France, before she is

twenty-two years old. But in my country girls think themselves extremely

well off for adventures with one marriage and no murder. But then the

girls in my country do not have the murderous black eyes which shine so

in romances.

My book being fairly wound up and set a-going, of course you wish to

know what came of it. Don't pretend you don't care, for you know you do.

Only don't look at me too closely, or you will disconcert me. Veil now

and then your intent eyes, or my story will surely droop under their

steadfastness. Look sometimes into yonder sunset sky and the beautiful

reticulations drawn darkly against its glowing sheets of color. You

will none the less listen, and I shall all the more enjoy.

You have read much about the anxieties, the forebodings, the

anticipatory tremors of new authors. So have I, but I never felt

them,--not a single foreboding. I was delighted to write a book, and it

never occurred to me that everybody would not be just as delighted to

read it. The first time my book weighed on me was one morning when a

thin, meagre little letter came to me, which turned out to be only a

card bearing the laconic inscription,--

"Twelve copies 'New Sun' sent by express, with the compliments of the

Publishers."

The "New Sun" was my book. I put on my hat and walked straightway up to

the hole in the rock, about a mile round the corner, where the

expressman always leaves my parcels, and took up the package to bring

home. It was very heavy. I balanced it first on one arm and then on the

other, until, as the poet has it,--

"Both were nigh to breaking."

Then I lifted it by the cords, but they cut my fingers. Then I

remembered the natural law, that internal atmospheric pressure prevents

any consciousness of the enormous external pressure exerted by an

atmosphere forty-five miles thick, and applied the law, saying, "These

books have all been upon the inside of my head, of course I shall not

feel them on the outside." So I put the package on my head, and walked

on, making believe I was in a gymnasium, keeping a sharp watch fore and

aft, and considering the distant rumbling of wheels a signal for

lowering my colors. In my country people do not carry their burdens on

their heads, nor would they be likely to account for me on the

principles of Natural Philosophy. I might have been apprehended as a

lunatic, but for my timely caution. Thus the "New Suns" came home and

were speedily divested of their dun wrappings. I lingered over them,

admiring their clear type, their fragrance, their crispness. I opened

them wide, because they would open so frankly. I delighted myself with

their fair, fine smoothness. And then I began to read. I am ashamed to

say I never read a more interesting book!

How very true it is that suffering is about equally distributed, after

all! If you don't have your troubles spread out, you have them in a

lump. The furies may seem to be held in abeyance, but they will only lay

on their lashes all the harder when they do come. My unnatural calmness

was succeeded by a storm of consternation. I pass over the few days that

followed. If you ever put yourself into a pillory in the night just to

see how it seemed, and then found yourself fastened there in good

earnest, and day dawning, and all the marketmen and shopkeepers up and

stirring, and everybody coming by in a few minutes, you will not need to

ask how I felt. When you write a book, you are quite alone and your pen

is entirely private; but when it comes to you so unquestionably printed,

and inexorable, and out-of-doors--Ah, me! It did not seem like a book at

all,--not at all the abstraction and impersonality that were intended,

but my proper self bevelled and (with another syllable inserted) walking

out into the world with malice aforethought.

But though a writer is before critics, did it never occur to you that

the critics are just as much before the writers? A critic's talk about a

book is just as truly a revelation of the critic as the writer's talk in

the book is a revelation of the writer. One man gives you an opinion

that implies attention. He does not go into the depths of the matter,

but he tells you honestly what he likes and what he does not like. This

is good. This is precisely what you wish to know, and will indirectly

help you. Another, from the steps of a throne, in a few sentences, it

may be, or a few columns, classifies you, interprets you not only to the

world, but to yourself; and for this you are immeasurably glad and

grateful. It is neither praise nor censure that you value, but

recognition. Let a writer but feel that a critic reaches into the

_arcana_ of his thought, and no assent is too hearty, nor any dissent

too severe. Another glances up from his eager political strife, and with

the sincerest kindness pens you a nice little sugar-plum, chiefly flour

and water, but flavored with sugar. Thank you! Another flounders in a

wash of words, holding in solution the faintest salt of sense. Heaven

help him! Another dips his spear-point in poison and lets fly. Do you

not see that these people are an open book? Do you not read here the

tranquillity of a self-poised life, the Inner sight of clairvoyance, the

bitterness of disappointed hopes and unsuccessful plans, the amiability

that is not founded upon strength, the pettiness that puts pique above

principle, the frankness that scorns affectation, the comprehensiveness

that embraces all things in its vision, and commands not only

acquiescence, but allegiance, the great-heartedness that by virtue of

its own magnetism attracts all that is good and annihilates all that is

bad?

When my poor little ewe-lamb went out into the world, I did not fear any

shearing he might encounter in America. I don't mind my own countrymen.

I like them, but I am not afraid of them. Two elements go to make up a

book: matter and manner. The former, of course, is its author's own. He

maintains it against all comers. Opposition does not terrify him, for it

is a mere difference of opinion. One is just as likely to be right as

another, and in a hundred years probably we shall all be found wrong

together. But manner can be judged by a fixed standard. Bad English is

bad English this very day, whatever you or I think about it; and bad

English is a bad thing. When I know it, I avoid it, except under extreme

temptation; but the trouble is, I don't know it. I am continually

learning that words in certain relations are misplaced where I never

suspected the smallest derangement, and, no doubt, there are many

dislocations which I have not yet discovered. So far as my own people

are concerned, I don't take this to heart,--because my countryman very

likely perpetrates three barbarisms in correcting my one. He knows this

thing that I did not, but then I know something else that he does not,

and so keep the balance true. Moreover, my America, if I don't use good

English, whose fault is it? You have had me from the beginning. The raw

material was as good as the average; why did you not work it up better?

I went to the best schools you gave me. I learned everything I was set

to learn. You can nowhere find a teacher who will tell you that I ever

evaded a lesson. I was greedy of gain. I spared neither time nor toil. I

lost no opportunity, and here I am, just as good as you made me. So, if

there is any one to blame, it is you, for not giving me better

facilities. The Children's Aid Society warned New York a dozen years ago

that a "dangerous class of untaught" pagans was growing up in her

streets; but she did not think it worth while to arouse herself and

educate them, and one morning she found them burning her house over her

head. You too, my country, have been repeatedly warned of your dangerous

class, a class whom, with malice aforethought, you leave half educated,

and, from ignorance, idle,--and now comes Nemesis! New York had a mob,

and you have--me.

The real ogre was those terrible Englishmen. I was brought up on the

British Quarterlies. Their high and mighty ways entered into my soul. I

never did have any courage or independence, to begin with; and when they

condescended to tread our shores with such lordly airs, I should have

been only too glad to burn incense for a propitiation. So impressive was

their loftiness, their haughty patronage, that their supercilious sneers

at our provincialism were heart-rending, I came to look at everything

with an eye to English judgment. It was not so much whether a book or a

custom were good as whether it would be likely to meet with English

approval. To be the object of their displeasure was a calamity, and at

even a growl from their dreadful throats I was ready to die of terror.

And this slavish subservience lasted beyond the school-room.

But it so happened that by the time my book was set afloat, the

Reviewers had lost their fangs. The war came, and they went over to the

enemy, every one: "North British," "London Quarterly," "Edinburgh," and

even the liberal "Westminster," had but one tone. "Blackwood" was seized

with an evil spirit, and wallowed foaming. The English people may be all

right at the heart. Their slow, but sure and sturdy sense may bring them

at length within hailing distance of the truth. Noble men among them,

Mill and Cairnes and Smith and their kind, made their voices heard in

the midst of opposing din, even through the very pages which had rung

with Southern cheers: but it is not the English people who make up the

Quarterly Reviews. It was not the voice of Mill or Cairnes that answered

first across the waters to the boom of Liberty's guns. When our blood

was hot and our hearts high, and sneers were ten thousand times harder

to bear than blows, we found sneers in plenty where we looked for

God-speed. It may not have been the English heart, only the English

head. But we could not get at the English heart, and the English head

was continually thrust against ours. The fires may have burned warmly on

many a hearth, but we could not see them. The only light that shot

athwart the waters was from the high watch-towers, and it was lurid.

This wrought a change. The English may take on airs in literature; for

our little leisure leaves us short repose, and it would be strange

indeed, if their civilization of centuries had not left its marks in a

finer culture and a deeper thought. But when, leaving literature and

coming down into the fastnesses of life, they gave us hatred for love,

and scorn for reverence,--when they sneered at that which we held

sacred, and reviled that which we counted honorable,--when, green-eyed

and gloating, they saw through their glasses not only darkly, but

disjointed and askance,--when devotion became to them fanaticism, and

love of liberty was lust of power,--did virtue go out of them, or had it

never been in? This, at least, was wrought: when one part of the temple

of our reverence was undermined, the whole structure came down. They who

showed themselves so morally weak cannot maintain even the intellectual

or æsthetic superiority which they have assumed. Henceforth their blame

or praise is not what it was hitherto. When a man rails at my country,

it is little that he rails at me. If they have called the master of the

house Beëlzebub, they of his household would as soon be called little

flies as anything else.

(As a matter of fact, I don't suppose my little venture has ever been

heard of across the ocean. You think it is very presumptuous in me ever

to have thought of it; but I did not think of it. I was only afraid of

it. Suppose the British Quarterly has not vision microscopic enough to

discern you; you like to know how you would feel in a certain

contingency, even if it should never happen. Besides, so many strange

things arise every day, that incongruity seems to have lost its force.

Nothing surprises. Cause and effect are continually dissolving

partnership. Merit and reward do not hunt in couples. If the Tycoon

should send a deputation requesting me to come over at once and settle

matters between himself and his Daimios, I should simply tell him that I

had not the time, but I should not be surprised.)

But if we only did reverence England as once we reverenced her, this is

what I would say:--"Upon my country do not visit my sins. Upon my

country's fame let me fasten no blot. Wherever I am wrong, inelegant,

inaccurate, provincial, visit all your reprobation upon me,--

'Me, me: adsum, qui feci; in me convertite ferrum,

O Angli! mea fraus omnis,'--

upon me as a writer, not upon me as an American. Do not regard me as the

exponent of American culture, or as anywhere near the high-water mark of

American letters. I am not one of the select few, but of the promiscuous

many. Born and bred in a farm-yard, and pattering about among the hens

and geese and calves and lambs when other children were learning to talk

like gentlemen and scholars, what can you expect of me? It is a wonder

that I am as tolerable as I am. It is a sign of the greatness of my

country, that I, who, if I lived in England, should be scattering my

_h_-s in wild confusion, and asking whether Americans were black or

copper-colored, am able in this land of free schools and equal rights to

straighten out my verbs and keep my nouns intact. If you will see the

highest, look on the heights. If you look at me, look at me where I am:

not among those whose infancy was cradled in leisure and luxury, whose

life from the beginning has been carefully attuned to the finest issues,

who for purity of language and dignity of mental bearing may throw down

the gauntlet to the proudest nation in the world,--but among those

children of the soil who take its color, who share its qualities, who

give out its fragrance, who love it and lay their hearts to it and grow

with it, rocky and rugged, yet cherish, it may be hoped, its little

dimples of verdure here and there,--who show not what, with closest

cultivation, it might become, but what, under the broad skies and the

free winds and the common dews and showers, it is. Our conservatories

can boast hues as gorgeous, forms as stately, texture as fine as yours;

but don't look for camellias in a cornfield."

Does this seem a little inconsistent with what I was saying just now to

my homemade critics? Very likely. But truth is many-sided, and one side

you may present at home and the other abroad, according to the

exigencies of the case. You may lecture your country in one breath, and

defend her in the next, without being inconsistent.

Oh, England, England! what shall recompense us for our Lost Leader?

Great and Mighty One, from whose brow no hand but thine own could ever

have plucked the crown! Beautiful land, sacred with the ashes of our

sires, radiant with the victories of the past, brilliant with hopes for

the future,--

"O Love, I have loved you! O my soul,

I have lost you!"

Ah, if these two fatal years might be blotted out! If we could stand

once again where we stood on that October day when the young Prince,

whose gentle blood commanded our attention, and whose gentle ways won

our hearts, bore back to his mother-land and ours the benedictions of a

people! Upon that pale, that white-faced shore I shall one day look, but

woe is me for the bitter memories that will spring up for the love and

loyalty so ruthlessly rent away!

So I borrow your ears, my countrymen, and tell you why it is impossible

to defer to you as much as one would like. Partly, it is because you

talk so wide of the mark. It may not be practicable or desirable to say

much; but so much the more ought what you do say to be to the point. A

good carpenter needs not to vindicate his skill by hammering away hour

after hour on the same shingle; but while he does strike, he hits the

nail on the head. Moreover, you show by your remarks that you have

such--such--well, _stupid_ is what I mean, but I am afraid it would not

be polite to employ that word, so I merely give you the meaning, and

leave you to choose a word to your liking--ideas about the nature, the

facts, and the objects of writing. Look at it a moment. With your gray

goose-quill you sit, O Rhadamanthus, and to your waiting audience

pleasantly enough affirm that I have "taken Benlomond for my model." But

when I happen to remember that the larger part of my book was written

and printed not only before I had ever met Benlomond, but before he had

ever been heard of in this country at least, what faith can I have in

your sagacity? And when, remembering those remarkable coincidences

which sometimes surprise and baffle us, which in science make Adams and

Le Verrier discover the same planet at the same time without knowing

anything of each other's calculations, and which in any department seem

to indicate that a great tide sweeps over humanity, bearing us on its

bosom whithersoever it will, so that

"God's puppets, best and worst,

Are we; there is no last nor first,"--

I institute an examination of Benlomond to discover those generic or

specific peculiarities which are supposed to have made their mark on me,

why, I find for resemblance, that the situations, look you, is both

alike. There is a river in Macedon; there is also, moreover, a river in

Monmouth: 'tis as like as my fingers to my fingers, and there is salmons

in both!

Have I taken Benlomond for my model? But why not Josephus and Ricardo

and François and Michel, any and all who have poured their fancies and

feelings into this mould? Why select the last disciple and ignore the

first apostle? Many prophets have been in Israel whom I resemble as

much, to say the least, as this Benlomond. Is it not, my friend, that,

in the multitude of your words and ways, you have not found time to

renew your acquaintance with these ancient worthies, and so their

features have somewhat faded from your memory? but Benlomond came in but

yesterday, and because he is a newspaper-topic, him you know; and

because at the first blush you running can read that there is a river in

Monmouth and also a river in Macedon, and salmons in both,--'tis as like

as my fingers to my fingers, and Monmouth was built on the model of

Macedon! Ah, my eagle-eyes, Judea, too, had its Jordan, and Damascus its

Abana and Pharpar, and little Massachusetts its Merrimac, which,

"poet-tuned,

Goes singing down his meadows."

But Judea did not type Damascus. The Merrimac bears not the sign of

Abana, nor was Abana born of Jordan: all, obedient to the word of the

Lord, trickled forth from their springs among the hills, and wander

down, one through his vine-land, one through his olive-groves, and one

to meet the roaring of the mill-wheel's rage.

I lay no claim to originality. Uttering feebly, but only

"The thoughts that arise in me,"

I know full well that the soil has been tilled and the seed scattered of

all that is worthy in the world. Where giants have wrestled, it is not

for pigmies to boast their prowess. Where the gods have trodden, let

mortals walk unsandalled. The lowliest of their learners, I sit at the

feet of the masters. To me, as to all the world, the great and the good

of the olden times have left their legacy, and the monarchs of to-day

have scattered blessing. Upon me, as upon all, have their grateful

showers descended. My brow have they crowned with their goodness, and on

my life have their paths dropped fatness. Dreaming under their vines and

fig-trees, I have gathered in my lap and garnered in my heart their

mellow fruits.

"With them I take delight in weal

And seek relief in woe,

And while I understand and feel

How much to them I owe,

My cheeks have often been bedewed

With tears of heartfelt gratitude."

But, though with gladness and joy I render unto Cæsar the things that

are Cæsar's, he shall not have that which does not belong to him.

Neither Benlomond, nor any living man, nor any one man, living or dead,

has any claim to my fealty, be it worth much or little. If I cannot go

in to the banquet on Olympus by the bidding of the master of the feast,

I will forswear ambrosia altogether, and to the end of my days feed on

millet with the peasants in the Vale of Tempe.

Then you sail on another tack, smile and shake your head and say, "It is

all very well, but it has not the element of immortality. Observe the

difference between this writer and Charles Lamb. One is ginger-pop beer

that foams and froths and is gone, while the other is the sound Madeira

that will be better fifty years hence than now."

Well, what of it? Do you mean to say, that, because a man has no

argosies sailing in from, the isles of Eden, freighted with the juices

of the tropics, he shall not brew hops in his own cellar? Because you

will have none but the vintages of dead centuries, shall not the people

delight their hearts with new wine? Because you are an epicure, shall

there be no more cakes and ale? Go to! It is a happy fate to be a poet's

Falernian, old and mellow, sealed in _amphoræ_, to be crowned with

linden-garlands and the late rose. But for all earth's acres there are

few Sabine farms, whither poet, sage, and statesman come to lose in the

murmur of Bandusian founts the din of faction and of strife; and even

there it is not always Cæcuban or Calenian, neither Formian nor

Falernian, but the _vile Sabinum_ in common cups and wreathed with

simple myrtle, that bubbles up its welcome. So, since there must be

lighter draughts, or many a poor man go thirsty, we who are but the

ginger-pop of life may well rejoice, remembering that ginger-pop is

nourishing and tonic,--that thousands of weary wayfarers who could never

know the taste of the costly brands, and who go sadly and wearily, will

be fleeter of foot and gladder of soul because of its humble and

evanescent foam.

Ginger-pop beer is it that you scoff? Verily, you do an unconsidered

deed. When one remembers all the liquids, medicinal, soporific, insipid,

poisonous, which flood the throat of humanity, one may deem himself a

favorite of Fortune to be placed so high in the catalogue. Though upon

his lowliness gleam down the rosy and purple lights of rare old wines

aloft, yet from his altitude he can look below upon a profane crowd in

thick array of depth immeasurable, and rejoice that he is not stagnant

water nor exasperated vinegar nor disappointed buttermilk. Nay, I am not

only content, but exultant. It may be an ignoble satisfaction, yet I

believe I would rather flash and fade in one moment of happy daylight

than be corked and cob-webbed for fifty years in the dungeons of an

unsunned cellar, with a remote possibility, indeed, of coming up from my

incarceration to moisten the lips of beauty or loosen the tongue of

eloquence, but with a far surer prospect of but adding one more to the

potations of the glutton and wine-bibber.

And what, after all, is this oblivion which you flaunt so threateningly?

Even if I do encounter it, no misfortune will happen unto me but such as

is common unto men. Of all the souls of this generation, the number that

will sift through the meshes of the years is infinitesimately small. The

overwhelming majority of names will turn out to be chaff, and be blown

away. I shall be forgotten, but I shall be forgotten in very good

company. The greater part of my kin-folk and acquaintance, your own

self, my critic, and your family and friends, will go down in the same

darkness which ingulfs me. When I am dead, I shall be no deader than the

rest of you, and I shall have been a great deal more alive while I _was_

alive.

I am not afraid to be forgotten. Posterity will have its own

soothsayers, and somewhere among the stars, I trust, I shall be living a

life so intense and complete that I shall never once think to lament

that I am not mulling on a bookshelf down here. Besides, if you insist

upon it, I am not going to be forgotten. You don't know anything more

about it than I do. Knowledge is not always prescience. "This will never

do," ruled Jeffrey from his judgment-seat. "Order reigns in Warsaw,"

pronounced Sebastiani. "I have now gone through the Bible," chuckled Tom

Paine, "as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder,

and fell trees. Here they lie, and the priests, if they can, may replant

them. They may, perhaps, stick them in the ground, but they will never

make them grow." But Wordsworth to-day is reverenced by the nation that

could barb no arrow sharp enough to shoot at him. The evening sky that

bends above Warsaw is red with the watch-fires of her old warfare

bursting anew from their smouldering ashes. And the oaks that doughty

Paine fancied himself to have levelled show not so much as a scratch

upon their sturdy trunks. Nay, I do not forget that even Charles Lamb

was fiercely belabored by his own generation. So, when upon me you pass

sentence of speedy death, I assure you that I shall live a thousand

years, and there is nobody in the world who can demonstrate that I am in

the wrong. Even if after a while I disappear, it proves nothing; you

cannot tell whether I am really submerged, or only lying in the trough

of the sea to mount the crest of the coming wave. Till the thousandth

year proves me moribund, I shall stoutly maintain that I am immortal.

Concerning Charles Lamb the less you say the better. It is easy to build

up a reputation for sagacity by offering incense to the gods who are

already shrined. Of course there is a difference between us. A pretty

rout you would make, if there were not. But, for all your adoration of

Charles Lamb, I dare say he would have liked me a great deal better than

he would you. Would? Why should I intrench myself in hypothesis? _Does_

he not? When I knock at the door of the Inner Temple, does he not fling

it wide open, and does not his face welcome me? When the red fire glows

on the hearth, have I not sat far into the night, Bridget sitting beside

me with heaven's own light shining in her beautiful eyes, and above her

dear head the white gleam of guardian angels hovering tenderly? And when

Elia arches his brows, and lowers at me his storm-clouds, which I do not

mind for the sunshine that will not be hidden behind them,--when in the

sweet, play of June lights and shadows, and the golden haze of

Indian-summer, I forget even the kingly words that go ringing through

the land, waking the mountain-echo,--when I look out upon this gray

afternoon, and see no leaden skies, no pinched and sullen fields, but

green paths, gem-bestrewn from autumn's jewelled hand, and warm light

glinting through the apple-trees under which he stood that soft October

day, till

"Conscious seems the frozen sod

And beechen slope whereon he trod,"--

O Alexander, get out of my sunshine with your bugbear of a Charles Lamb!

"I have heard you for some time with patience. I have been cool,--quite

cool; but don't put me in a frenzy!"

Well, friend, when you have satisfied yourself with the limiting, you

begin on the descriptive adjectives, and pronounce me egotistical.

Certainly. I should be unlike all others of my race, if I were not. It

is a wise and merciful arrangement of Providence, that every one is to

himself the centre of the universe. What a fatal world would this be, if

it were otherwise! When one thinks what a collection of insignificances

we are, how dispensable the most useful of us is to everybody, how

little there is in any of us to make any one care about us, and of how

small importance it is to others what becomes of us,--when one thinks

that even this round earth is so small, that, if it should fall into the

arms of the sun, the sun would just open his mouth and swallow it whole,

and nobody ever suspect it, (_vide_ Tyndall on Heat,) one must see that

this self-love, self-care, and self-interest play a most important part

in the Divine Economy. If one did not keep himself afloat, he would

surely go under. As it is, no matter how disagreeable a person is, he

likes himself,--no matter how uninteresting, he is interested in

himself. Everybody, you, my critic, as well, likes to talk about

himself, if he can get other people to listen; and so long as I can get

several thousand people to listen to me, I shall keep talking, you may

be sure, and so would you,--and if you don't, it is only because you

can't! You are just as egotistical as I am, only you won't own it

frankly, as I do. True, I might escape censure by using such

circumlocutions as "the writer," "the author," or still more cumbrously

by dressing out some lay figure, calling it Frederic or Frederika, and

then, like the Delphic priestesses, uttering my sentiments through its

mouth, for the space of a folio novel; but at bottom it would be my own

self all the while; and besides, in order to get at the thing I wanted

to say, I should have to detain you on a thousand things that I did not

care about, but which would be necessary as links, because, when you

have made a man or a woman, you must do, something with him. You can't

leave him standing, without any visible means of support. One person

writes a novel of four hundred pages to convince you in a roundabout

way, through thirty different characters, that a certain law, or the

mode of administering it, is unjust. He does not mention himself, but

makes his men and women speak his arguments. Another man writes a

treatise of forty pages and gives you his views out of his own mouth.

But he does not put himself into his treatise any more than the other

into his novel. For my part, I think the use of "I" is the shortest and

simplest way of launching one's opinions. Even a _we_ bulges out into

twice the space that _I_ requires, besides seeming to try to evade

responsibility. Better say "_I_" straight out,--"_I_," responsible for

my words here and elsewhere, as they used to say in Congress under the

old _régime_. Besides being the most brave, "I" is also the most modest.

It delivers your opinions to the world through a perfectly transparent

medium. "I" has no relations. It has no consciousness. It is a pure

abstraction. It detains you not a moment from the subject. "The writer"

does. It brings up ideas entirely detached from the theme, and is

therefore impertinent. All you are after is the thing that is thought.

It is not of the smallest consequence who thought it. You may be certain

that it is not always the people who use "I" the most freely who think

most about themselves; and if you are offended, consider whether it may

not be owing to a certain morbidness of your taste as much as to egotism

in the offender.

Remember, also, that, when a writer talks of himself, he is not

necessarily speaking of his own definite John Smith-ship, that does the

marketing and pays the taxes and is a useful member of society. Not at

all. It is himself as one unit of the great sum of mankind. He means

himself, not as an isolated individual, but as a part of humanity. His

narration is pertinent, because it relates to the human family. He

brings forward a part of the common property. He does not touch that

which pertains exclusively to himself. His self is self-created. His

imaginative may have as large a share in the person as his descriptive

powers. You don't understand me precisely? Sorry for you.

You think me arrogant. You would think so a great deal more, if you knew

me better. At heart I believe I incline very much to the opinion of a

charming friend of mine, that, "after all, nobody in the world is of

much account but Susy and me,"--only in my formula I leave out Susy.

Don't, therefore, think solely of the arrogance that is revealed, but

think also of the masses concealed, and in consideration of the greater

repression pardon the great expression. It is not the persons who sin

the least, but those who overcome the strongest temptations, who are the

most virtuous. People endowed by Nature with a sweet humility do not

deserve half the credit for their lovely character that those who are

naturally selfish and arrogant often deserve for being no more

disagreeable than they are. Yes, it must be confessed, you are right in

attributing arrogance,--though, after this meek confession and

repentance, if you do not forgive me freely and fully, for past and

future, your secondary will be a great deal worse than my original

sin;--but you never would accuse me of "an arrogance that disdains

docility," if you had seen the mean-spirited way in which I sit down by

the side of an editor and let him _ram-page_ over my manuscript. Out

fly my best thoughts, my finest figures, my sharpest epigrams,--without

chloroform,--and I give no sign. I have heard that successful authors

can always have everything their own way. I must be the greatest--or the

smallest--failure of the age.

"It will be much better to omit this," says the High Inquisitor, turning

the thumb-screw.

"No," I writhe. "Take everything else, but leave that."

"I am glad to see that you agree with me," he responds, with

Mephistophelian courtesy; and away it goes, and I say nothing, thankful

that enough is left to hobble in at all.

"Revealing somewhat of the arrogance of success," you comment, directed

by your Evil Genius, upon that especial chapter which was written in a

gully of the Valley of Humiliation, when I was gasping under an Ætna of

rejected manuscripts,--when there was not a respectable newspaper in the

country by which I had not been "declined with thanks,"--when, in the

desperation of my determination, I had recourse to bribery, and sent an

editor a dollar with the manuscript, to pay him for the fifteen minutes

it would take to read it. (_Mem._ I never heard from editor, manuscript,

or dollar.) No, it may be arrogance, but it is not the arrogance of

success. Whatever it was, it was in the grain. And, to look at it in

another light, I cannot have been "spoiled by the indulgent praise which

my early efforts received," because, on the other hand, I have always

been praised,--

"Like to the Pontic monarch of old days,

I fed on poisons, till they had no power,

But were a kind of nutriment."

The earliest event I remember is being presented with two cents by one

of the "Committee" visiting the school. And if I could stand two cents

in my tender infancy, don't you suppose I can stand your penny-a-lining

now I am grown up? I may have been spoiled, or I may not have been worth

much to begin with; but the mischief was all done before you ever heard

of me. Confine yourself to facts: dismiss conjectures. State actions:

shun motives. Give results: avoid causes, if you would insure confidence

in your sagacity.

But all this will I forgive and forget, if you will not tell me to stop

writing. _That_ I cannot and will not do. You may iterate and reiterate,

that the public will tire of me. I am sorry for the public, but it is

strong and will be easily rested. Sorry? No, I am not; I am glad. I

should like to pay back a part of the weariness which the public has

inflicted on me in the shape of lectures, lessons, sermons, speeches,

customs, fashions. Why should it have the monopoly of fatiguing?

Minorities have their rights as well as majorities. The spout of a

tea-kettle is not to be compared, in point of bulk, to the tea-kettle,

but it puts in a claim for an equal depth of water, and Nature

acknowledges the claim. I cannot think of reining in yet. I have but

just begun. And everything is so interesting. Nothing is isolated.

Nothing is insignificant. Everything you touch thrills. It does not seem

to matter much what you look at: only look long enough, and a life, its

life, starts out. You see that it has causes and consequences,

dependencies, bearings, and all manner of social interests; and before

you know it, you have become involved in those interests and are one of

the family. For the time, you stake all on that issue, and fight to the

death. As soon as that is decided, and you stop to take breath a moment,

something else comes equally interesting and seeming equally important,

and again your lance is in rest. When it comes to the _quantities_ of

morals, there isn't much difference between one thing and another. And

you ask me to fold my hands and sit still! Not I. One of my youthful

maxims was, "Do something, if it's mischief"; and I intend to follow it,

especially the condition. I promise to do the best I can, but I shall do

it. I will never write for the sake of writing, but I will say my say.

I have not been rumbling underground all my life, to find a volcano at

last, and then let it be choked up after a single eruption. There are

rows of blocks standing around the walls of my workshop, waiting to be

chiselled. They won't be Apollos,--but even Puck is a Robin Goodfellow,

since,

"In one night, ere glimpse of morn,

His shadowy flail hath threshed the corn

That ten day-laborers could not end."

And I shall not confine myself to my sphere. I hate my sphere. I like

everything that is outside of it,--or, better still, my sphere rounds

out infinitely into space. _Nihil humani a me alienum puto._ I was born

into the whole world. I am monarch of all I survey. Wherever I see

symptoms of a pie, thither shall my fingers travel. Wherever a windmill

flaps, it shall go hard but I will have a tilt at it. I shall not wait

till I know what I am talking about. If I did, I never should talk at

all. It is a well-known principle in educational science, that the

surest way to learn anything is to teach it. How fast would Geology get

on, if its professors talked only of what they knew? Planting their feet

firmly on facts, they feel about in all directions for theories. By

carefully noting, publishing, comparing, discussing their uncertainties,

they presently arrive at a certainty. Horace might advocate nine years'

delay. He was building for himself a monument that should defy the

rolling years. He was setting to work in cool blood to compass

immortality, and a little time, more or less, made no difference. Apollo

and Bacchus could afford to wait. Beautiful daughters of beautiful

mothers will exist to the world's end, and their praises will always be

in order. But when, unmindful of the next generation, which will have

its books and its memories, though you are unread and forgotten, mindful

only of this generation which groans and travails in pain, you look on

suffering that you yearn to assuage, danger of which you long to warn,

sadness which you would fain dispel, burdens which you would strive,

though ever so little, to lighten, delay, even for things so desirable

as complete knowledge and perfect polish, becomes not only absurd, but

impossible. Better shoot into the cavern, even if you don't know in what

precise part of it the dragon lies coiled. The flash of your powder may

reveal his whereabouts to a surer marksman. A transient immortality is

of no importance; it is of importance that hearts be purified, homes

made happy, paths cleared, clouds dispelled. Is that ignoble? Very well.

But the noblest way to benefit posterity is to serve the present

age,--to serve it by doing one's best, indeed, but by doing it now, not

waiting for some distant day when one can do it better. A writer

deserves no pardon for careless or hurried writing. As much time as he

has mental ability to spend on it, so much time he should devote to it.

But then speed it on its way. Shut it up for a term of years, and you

will perhaps have a manuscript that says _begin_ where it used to say

_commence_, but in the mean time all the people whom you wished to save

have died of a broken heart,--or lived with one, which is still worse.

Besides, even for improvement, it is better to publish your paper than

to keep it in the drawer. There, all the amendments it can receive will

come from the few feeble advances in knowledge which you may be so

fortunate as to make. But print it and every one immediately gives you

especial attention and the benefit of his judgment. If you should happen

to serve in the right wing of Orthodoxy, you will have the inestimable

boon of the freest criticism from the left wing. And it is the religious

newspapers for not mincing matters. Between Jew and Gentile hostility is

the normal condition of things; and is carried on peaceably enough; but

when Jew meets Jew, then comes the tug of war! These people obey to the

letter the Apostolic injunction, and confess your faults one to another

with a relish that is marvellous to behold, and which must furnish to

the unbelieving world a lively commentary on the old text, "Behold how

these Christians love one another!" When their own list of your

shortcomings is exhausted, ten to one they will take up the parable of

somebody else; and if little Johnny Horner sitting in the corner of his

sanctum has not room in his crowded columns for the whole pie in which

his brother Horner has served you up, never fear but he will put in his

thumb and pick out the plums to enliven his feast withal.

No. I shall keep on writing,--hit, if I can, miss, if I must, but shoot

any way. There is a great deal of firing that kills no men and breaches

no walls, but it worries the enemy. John Brown did not in the least know

what he was doing. His definite attempt was a fatal failure; but the

great and guilty conspiracy behind, of which he saw nothing, was smitten

to the heart under his random blows; his sixteen white men and five

negroes, flung blindly and recklessly against the ramparts of Slavery,

were but the precursors of that great host, black and white, which has

since gone down, organized and intelligent, to tread the wine-press of

the wrath of God.

I fear I am committing the rhetorical error of comparing small things

with great; but, if Virgil could bring in the Cyclops and their

thunderbolts to illustrate his bees, and Demetrius Phalereus justify it,

you will hardly count it a capital offence in me,--and I don't much care

if you do, if I can only convince you that I am not going to be silent

because I don't know the Alpha and Omega of things. I don't pretend to

be logical, or consistent, or coherent. Nature is not. A forest of oaks

burns down or is cut down, and do oaks spring again? No. Pines. Logic,

is baffled, but the land is bettered. A field of corn is planted, and

Nature does not set herself to protect it, but sends a flock of crows to

devour it; the farmers grumble, but the crows are saved alive. Freezing

water contracts awhile, and then without any provocation turns right

about face and expands; if your pitcher stands in the way, so much the

worse for your pitcher, but the little fishes are grateful; and with all

her whims and inconsequences, Nature gets on from year to year without

once failing of seed-time and harvest, cold or heat. How is it with you

and your logic, you men who have been to college and discovered what you

are talking about? You who discuss politics and decide affairs, are you

not continually accusing each other of sophistry, inconsistency, and

shying away from the point? Take up any political or religious

newspaper, and see, if any faith is to be put in testimony, how

deficient in logic are all these logic-mongers,--how all the learned and

logical are accused by other learned and logical of false assumptions,

of invalid reasoning, of foregone conclusions, of pride and prejudice

and passion. One would say that the result of your profound researches

was only to make you more intensely illogical than you could otherwise

be.

"As skilful divers to the bottom fall

Swifter than they who cannot swim at all,

So in the sea of sophisms, to my thinking.

You have a strange alacrity in sinking."

(_Ego et Dorset fecimus!_)

Sure I am my humble ability in the way of unreason can never compass

fallacies so stupendous as those which you attribute to each other; and

if this is all the result of your logic, I will none of it, initialed to

possess at least the advantage, that, when I write nonsense, I know it

is nonsense, while you write it and think it sense. But your thinking so

does not make it so, and you need not rule me out of court on the

strength of it. I acknowledge, in the domain of letters, none but

Squatter Sovereignty. In literature, unlike morals, might makes right.

If I think you are cultivating the soil to its utmost capacity, I shall

not meddle; but if it seems to me that you are letting it lie fallow

while I can draw a furrow to some purpose, you need not warn me off with

your old title-deeds; in my ploughshare shall drive. To a better farmer

I will yield right gladly, but I will not be scared away by a

sign-board.

Nor need you go very far out of your way to affirm that I have not the

requisite experience for writing on such and such topics. As a principle

your remark is absurd. Cannot a doctor prescribe for typhus fever,

unless he has had typhus fever himself? On the contrary, is he not the

better able to prescribe from always having had a sound mind in a sound

body? As a fact, my experience in those things concerning which you

allege its insufficiency has never been presented to you for judgment,

and its discussion is therefore entirely irrelevant. If my statements

are false, they are false; if my arguments are inconclusive, they are

inconclusive: disprove the one and refute the other. But whether this

state of things be owing to a want of experience, or inability to use

experience aright, or any personal circumstance whatever, is a matter in

regard to which all the laws of literary courtesy forbid you to concern

yourself.

And pray, Gentle Critic, do not tell me that I must be content simply to

amuse, or _must_--anything else. Must is a hard word; be not

over-confident of its power. I feel a grandmotherly interest in the

world and its ways; and much as I should like to amuse it, I shall never

be content with that. You may not _like_ to be instructed, my dear

children, but instructed you shall be. You read long ago, in your

story-book, that little Tommy Piper didn't want his face washed, though

he was very willing to be amused with soap-bubbles; but his face needed

washing and got it. I come to you with soap-bubbles indeed, but with

scrubbing-brushes also. If you take to them kindly, it will soon be

over; but if you scream and struggle, I shall not only scrub the harder,

but be all the longer about it.

Sometimes your grave refutations are very amusing. It is astonishing to

see how crank-proof sundry minds are. Everything seems to them on a dead

level of categorical proposition. They walk up to every statue with

their measuring-line of _Barbara, Celarent, Darii, Ferioque Prioris_,

and measure them off with equal solemnity, telling you severely that

this nose is far longer than the classic rule admits, and this arm has

not the swelling proportions of life,--never seeing, that, though

another statue was indeed designed for an Antinoüs, this was never meant

to be anything but a broomstick dressed in your grandfather's cloak,

with a lantern in a pumpkin for a head. Oh, the dreariness of having to

explain pleasantry! of appending to your banter Artemas Ward's

parenthesis, "This is a goak"! of dealing with people who do not know

the difference between a blow and a "love-pat," between Quaker guns and

an Armstrong battery, between a granite paving-stone and the moonshine

on a mud-puddle!

Dear Public, don't begin to be tired yet. I am not. There are many books

still to come, if they can ever be brought to light. They were ready

long ago, but no publisher could be found; and now that I have found a

publisher, I cannot find the books. There is a treatise on the Curvature

of the Square,--a Dissertation on Foreign Literature,--two or three

novels,--a book on Human Life, that is going to turn the world upside

down,--a book on Theology, dull enough to be sensible, that is going to

turn it back again,--and a bandboxful of children's stories. Still, in

spite of this formidable prospect, take the consolation that an end is

sure to come. There is not a particle of reserved force or dormant power

or anything of the kind for you to dread. All there is of me is awake. I

have struck twelve, and at longest it will be but a little while before

I shall run down,--

"And silence like a poultice come

To heal the blows of sound."

And does not the exquisite sensation of departed pain almost atone for

the discomfort of its presence? How heartily, for your sake, would I be

the most profound and able writer in the world, and how gladly should

all my profundity and ability be laid at your feet! And since

"the good but wished with God is done,"

can you not find it in your heart to "yearn o'er my little good and

pardon _my_ much ill"?

Public, you must, whether you can or not. It is a case of life and

death. I am good for nothing but writing; and if you take that resource

away,--you know what the book says about mischief and Satan and idle

hands! and you certainly will take it away, if you do not speak

peaceably unto me. All that I said before was only bravado,--just to

keep a bold front to the foe. I can confide to you under the rose, that,

though without are fightings, within are fears. Pope, was it, who used

to look around upon the missives hurled at him, and say, "These are my

amusement"? But they are not mine. I want you to _like_ me and be

good-natured. It is not that you must always agree with opinions, or not

take exception to what is exceptionable; it is only that you shall not

say things in a sour, cross, disagreeable way. Impale the bait on your

arming-wire, but handle it as if you loved it. Talk thunderbolts, if

necessary, but don't "make faces." The soft south-wind is very,

charming; the northwest-wind, though sharp, is bracing and healthful;

but your raw east-winds,--oh! chain them in the caverns of Æolia, the

country of storms.

Bear with me a little longer in my folly; and, indeed, bear with me, you

who are strong, for the sake of the weak. Many and many there may be to

whom the meat of your metaphysics is indigestible and unpalatable, but

who find strength and cheer in the sincere milk of such words as I can

give. To you who have already set your feet on the high places, that may

be but a bruised reed which is a staff to those who are still struggling

up. Do you go on churning the cream of thought, and salting down its

butter for future ages; I will spread it on thin for the weak digestions

of this. Let scarfs, garters, gold amuse your riper stage, and beads and

prayer-books be the toys of age, but wax not over-wroth, when you behold

the child, by Nature's kindly law, pleased with a rattle!

And after all, Dear Public, it is partly your own fault that I venture

to make still further draughts upon your patience. Though I have trimmed

my sails to opposing rather than to favoring gales, it is not because

the latter have been wanting. But a pin that pricks your finger attracts

to itself far more attention for the time than the thousand influences

that wrap you about only to soothe and delight. The reception that has

been harsh and unfriendly bears no manner of proportion to that which

has been genial and generous. So where you have given me an inch I take

an ell, and commission this bright morning--shine to bear to you my

thanks. For every kind word, whether it have come to me through the

highways or the by-ways, from far or near, from known or unknown, I pray

you receive my grateful acknowledgment. And do not fail to remember,

that he, who, even though self-impelled, goes out from the shelter of

his selfhood into the presence of the great congregation, incurs a Loss

which no praise can make good, encounters a Fate against which no

appreciation is a shield, invokes a Shadow in which the _mens conscia

recti_ is the only resource, and the knowledge of shadows dispelled the

only consolation.

* * * * *

THE MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY.

Mr. Henry Ward Beecher went to Great Britain already well known at home

as the favorite preacher of a large parish, an ardent advocate of

certain leading reforms, one of the most popular lecturers of the

country, a bold, outspoken, fertile, ready, crowd-compelling orator,

whose reported sermons and speeches were fuller of catholic humanity

than of theological subtilties, and whose sympathies were of that lively

sort which are apt to leap the sectarian fold and find good Christians

in every denomination. He was welcomed by friendly persons on the other

side of the Atlantic, partly for these merits, partly also as "the son

of the celebrated Dr. Beecher" and "the brother of Mrs. Beecher Stowe."

After a few months' absence he returns to America, having finished a

more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe

since Franklin pleaded the cause of the young Republic at the Court of

Versailles. He kissed no royal hand, he talked with no courtly

diplomatists, he was the guest of no titled legislator, he had no

official existence. But through the heart of the people he reached

nobles, ministers, courtiers, the throne itself. He whom the "Times"

attacks, he whom "Punch" caricatures, is a power in the land. We may be

very sure, that, if an American is the aim of their pensioned garroters

and hired vitriol-throwers, he is an object of fear as well as of

hatred, and that the assault proves his ability as well as his love of

freedom and zeal for the nation to which he belongs.

Mr. Beecher's European story is a short one in time, but a long one in

events. He went out a lamb, a tired clergyman in need of travel; and as

such he did not strive nor cry, nor did any man hear his voice in the

streets. But in the den of lions where his pathway led him he remembered

hid own lion's nature, and uttered his voice to such effect that its

echoes in the great vaulted caverns of London and Liverpool are still

reaching us, as the sound of the woodman's axe is heard long after the

stroke is seen, as the light of the star shines upon us many days after

its departure from the source of radiance.

Mr. Beecher made a single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered

piecemeal in different places. Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of

October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the

twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall. He has himself furnished us

an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this

protracted and many-jointed oration was made up. At Manchester he

attempted to give a history of that series of political movements,

extending through half a century, the logical and inevitable end of

which was open conflict between the two opposing forces of Freedom and

Slavery. At Glasgow his discourse seems to have been almost

unpremeditated. A meeting of one or two Temperance advocates, who had

come to greet him as a brother in their cause, took on, "quite

accidentally," a political character, and Mr. Beecher gratified the

assembly with an address which really looks as if it had been in great

measure called forth by the pressure of the moment. It seems more like a

conversation than a set harangue. First, he very good-humoredly defines

his position on the Temperance question, and then naturally slides into

some self-revelations, which we who know him accept as the simple

expression of the man's character. This plain speaking made him at home

among strangers more immediately, perhaps, than anything else he could

have told them. "I am born without moral fear. I have expressed my views

in any audience, and it never cost me a struggle. I never could help

doing it."

The way a man handles his egoisms is a test of his mastery over an

audience or a class of readers. What we want to know about the person

who is to counsel or lead us is just what he is, and nobody can tell us

so well as himself. Every real master of speaking or writing uses his

personality as he would any other serviceable material; the very moment

a speaker or writer begins to use it, not for his main purpose, but for

vanity's sake, as all weak people are sure to do, hearers and readers

feel the difference in a moment. Mr. Beecher is a strong, healthy man,

in mind and body. His nerves have never been corrugated with alcohol;

his thinking-marrow is not brown with tobacco-fumes, like a meerschaum,

as are the brains of so many unfortunate Americans; he is the same

lusty, warm-blooded, strong-fibred, brave-hearted, bright-souled,

clear-eyed creature that he was when the college boys at Amherst

acknowledged him as the chiefest among their football-kickers. He has

the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in

bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self-revelation is a

thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common

trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus

it is, that, wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has

addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they

had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a

multitude that look upon him as if he were their brother.

Having magnetized his Glasgow audience, he continued the subject already

opened at Manchester by showing, in the midst of that great toiling

population, the deadly influence exerted by Slavery in bringing labor

into contempt, and its ruinous consequences to the free working-man

everywhere. In Edinburgh he explained how the Nation grew up out of

separate States, each jealous of its special sovereignty; how the

struggle for the control of the united Nation, after leaving it for a

long time in the hands of the South, to be used in favor of Slavery, at

length gave it into those of the North, whose influence was to be for

Freedom; and that for this reason the South, when it could no longer

rule the Nation, rebelled against it. In Liverpool, the centre of vast

commercial and manufacturing interests, he showed how those interests

are injured by Slavery,--"that this attempt to cover the fairest portion

of the earth with a slave-population that buys nothing, and a degraded

white population that buys next to nothing, should array against it the

sympathy of every true political economist and every thoughtful and

far-seeing manufacturer, as tending to strike at the vital want of

commerce,--not the want of cotton, but the want of customers."

In his great closing effort at Exeter Hall in London, Mr. Beecher began

by disclaiming the honor of having been a pioneer in the anti-slavery

movement, which he found in progress at his entry upon public life, when

he "fell into the ranks, and fought as well as he knew how, in the ranks

or in command." He unfolded before his audience the plan and connection

of his previous addresses, showing how they were related to each other

as parts of a consecutive series. He had endeavored, he told them, to

enlist the judgment, the conscience, the interests of the British people

against the attempt to spread Slavery over the continent, and the

rebellion it has kindled. He had shown that Slavery was the only cause

of the war, that sympathy with the South was only aiding the building up

of a slave-empire, that the North was contending for its own existence

and that of popular institutions.

Mr. Beecher then asked his audience to look at the question with him

from the American point of view. He showed how the conflict began as a

moral question; the sensitiveness of the South; the tenderness for them

on the part of many Northern apologizers, with whom he himself had never

stood. He pointed out how the question gradually emerged in politics;

the encroachments of the South, until they reached the Judiciary itself;

he repeated to them the admissions of Mr. Stephens as to the

preponderating influence the South had all along held in the Government.

An interruption obliged him to explain that adjustment of our State and

National governments which Englishmen seem to find so hard to

understand. Nothing shows his peculiar powers to more advantage than

just such interruptions. Then he displays his felicitous facility of

illustration, his familiar way of bringing a great question to the test

of some parallel fact that everybody before him knows. An American

state-question looks as mysterious to an English audience as an ear of

Indian corn wrapt in its sheath to an English wheat-grower. Mr. Beecher

husks it for them as only an American born and bred can do. He wants a

few sharp questions to rouse his quick spirit. He could almost afford to

carry with him his _picadores_ to sting him with sarcasms, his _chulos_

to flap their inflammatory epithets in his face, and his _banderilleros_

to stab him with their fiery insults into a _plaza de toros_,--an

audience of John Bulls.

Having cleared up this matter so that our comatose cousins understood

the relations of the dough and the apple in our national dumpling,--to

borrow one of their royal reminiscences,--having eulogized the fidelity

of the North to the national compact, he referred to the action of "that

most true, honest, just, and conscientious magistrate, Mr. Lincoln,"--at

the mention of whose name the audience cheered as long and loud as if

they had descended from the ancient Ephesians.

Mr. Beecher went on to show how the North could not help fighting when

it was attacked, and to give the reasons that made it necessary to

fight,--reasons which none but a consistent Friend or avowed

non-resistant can pretend to dispute: His ordinary style in speaking is

pointed, _staccatoed_, as is that of most successful extemporaneous

speakers; he is "short-gaited"; the movement of his thoughts is that of

the chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical

wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricians. But when the lance has

pricked him deep enough, when the red flag has flashed in his face often

enough, when the fireworks have hissed and sputtered around him long

enough, when the cheers have warmed him so that all his life is roused,

then his intellectual sparkle becomes a steady glow, and his nimble

sentences change their form, and become long-drawn, stately periods.

"Standing by my cradle, standing by my hearth, standing by the altar of

the church, standing by all the places that mark the name and memory of

heroic men who poured their blood and lives for principle, I declare

that in ten or twenty years of war we will sacrifice everything we have

for principle. If the love of popular liberty is dead in Great Britain,

you will not understand us; but if the love of liberty lives as it once

lived, and has worthy successors of those renowned men that were our

ancestors as much as yours, and whose example and principles we inherit

to make fruitful as so much seed-corn in a new and fertile land, then

you will understand our firm, invincible determination--deep as the sea,

firm as the mountains, but calm as the heavens above us--to fight this

war through at all hazards and at every cost."

When have Englishmen listened to nobler words, fuller of the true soul

of eloquence? Never, surely, since their nation entered the abdominous

period of its existence, recognized in all its ideal portraits, for

which food and sleep are the prime conditions of well-being. Yet the old

instinct which has made the name of Englishman glorious in the past was

there, in the audience before him, and there was "immense cheering,"

relieved by some slight colubrine demonstrations.