hoofs and a mighty cloud of dust, which rose up so dense and high that
the visage of the mountain-side was completely hidden from Ernest's
eyes. All the great men of the neighborhood were there on horseback:
militia officers, in uniform; the member of Congress; the sheriff of the
county; the editors of newspapers; and many a farmer, too, had mounted
his patient steed, with his Sunday coat upon his back. It really was a
very brilliant spectacle, especially as there were numerous banners
flaunting over the cavalcade, on some of which were gorgeous portraits
of the illustrious statesman and the Great Stone Face, smiling
familiarly at one another, like two brothers. If the pictures were to be
trusted, the mutual resemblance, it must be confessed, was marvellous.
We must not forget to mention that there was a band of music, which
made the echoes of the mountains ring and reverberate with the loud
triumph of its strains; so that airy and soul-thrilling melodies broke
out among all the heights and hollows, as if every nook of his native
valley had found a voice, to welcome the distinguished guest. But the
grandest effect was when the far-off mountain precipice flung back the
music; for then the Great Stone Face itself seemed to be swelling the
triumphant chorus, in acknowledgment that, at length, the man of
prophecy was come.
All this while the people were throwing up their hats and shouting, with
enthusiasm so contagious that the heart of Ernest kindled up, and he
likewise threw up his hat, and shouted, as loudly as the loudest, "Huzza
for the great man! Huzza for Old Stony Phiz!" But as yet he had not seen
him.
"Here he is, now!" cried those who stood near Ernest. "There! There!
Look at Old Stony Phiz and then at the Old Man of the Mountain, and see
if they are not as like as two twin-brothers!"
In the midst of all this gallant array, came an open barouche, drawn by
four white horses; and in the barouche, with his massive head uncovered,
sat the illustrious statesman, Old Stony Phiz himself.
"Confess it," said one of Ernest's neighbors to him, "the Great Stone
Face has met its match at last!"
Now, it must be owned that, at his first glimpse of the countenance
which was bowing and smiling from the barouche, Ernest did fancy that
there was a resemblance between it and the old familiar face upon the
mountain-side. The brow, with its massive depth and loftiness, and all
the other features, indeed, were boldly and strongly hewn, as if in
emulation of a more than heroic, of a Titanic model. But the sublimity
and stateliness, the grand expression of a divine sympathy, that
illuminated the mountain visage, and etherealized its ponderous granite
substance into spirit, might here be sought in vain. Something had been
originally left out, or had departed. And therefore the marvellously
gifted statesman had always a weary gloom in the deep caverns of his
eyes, as of a child that has outgrown its playthings, or a man of mighty
faculties and little aims, whose life, with all its high performances,
was vague and empty, because no high purpose had endowed it with
reality.
Still, Ernest's neighbor was thrusting his elbow into his side, and
pressing him for an answer.
"Confess! confess! Is not he the very picture of your Old Man of the
Mountain?"
"No!" said Ernest, bluntly, "I see little or no likeness."
"Then so much the worse for the Great Stone Face!" answered his
neighbor; and again he set up a shout for Old Stony Phiz.
But Ernest turned away, melancholy, and almost despondent: for this was
the saddest of his disappointments, to behold a man who might have
fulfilled the prophecy, and had not willed to do so. Meantime, the
cavalcade, the banners, the music, and the barouches swept past him,
with the vociferous crowd in the rear, leaving the dust to settle down,
and the Great Stone Face to be revealed again, with the grandeur that it
had worn for untold centuries.
"Lo, here I am, Ernest!" the benign lips seemed to say. "I have waited
longer than thou, and am not yet weary. Fear not; the man will come."
The years hurried onward, treading in their haste on one another's
heels. And now they began to bring white hairs, and scatter them over
the head of Ernest; they made reverend wrinkles across his forehead, and
furrows in his cheeks. He was an aged man. But not in vain had he grown
old: more than the white hairs on his head were the sage thoughts in his
mind; his wrinkles and furrows were inscriptions that Time had graved,
and in which he had written legends of wisdom that had been tested by
the tenor of a life. And Ernest had ceased to be obscure. Unsought for,
undesired, had come the fame which so many seek, and made him known in
the great world, beyond the limits of the valley in which he had dwelt
so quietly. College professors, and even the active men of cities, came
from far to see and converse with Ernest; for the report had gone abroad
that this simple husbandman had ideas unlike those of other men, not
gained from books, but of a higher tone,--a tranquil and familiar
majesty, as if he had been talking with the angels as his daily friends.
Whether it were sage, statesman, or philanthropist, Ernest received
these visitors with the gentle sincerity that had characterized him from
boyhood, and spoke freely with them of whatever came uppermost, or lay
deepest in his heart or their own. While they talked together, his face
would kindle, unawares, and shine upon them, as with a mild evening
light. Pensive with the fulness of such discourse, his guests took leave
and went their way; and passing up the valley, paused to look at the
Great Stone Face, imagining that they had seen its likeness in a human
countenance, but could not remember where.
While Ernest had been growing up and growing old, a bountiful Providence
had granted a new poet to this earth. He, likewise, was a native of the
valley, but had spent the greater part of his life at a distance from
that romantic region, pouring out his sweet music amid the bustle and
din of cities. Often, however, did the mountains which had been
familiar to him in his childhood lift their snowy peaks into the clear
atmosphere of his poetry. Neither was the Great Stone Face forgotten,
for the poet had celebrated it in an ode, which was grand enough to have
been uttered by its own majestic lips. This man of genius, we may say,
had come down from heaven with wonderful endowments. If he sang of a
mountain, the eyes of all mankind beheld a mightier grandeur reposing on
its breast, or soaring to its summit, than had before been seen there.
If his theme were a lovely lake, a celestial smile had now been thrown
over it, to gleam forever on its surface. If it were the vast old sea,
even the deep immensity of its dread bosom seemed to swell the higher,
as if moved by the emotions of the song. Thus the world assumed another
and a better aspect from the hour that the poet blessed it with his
happy eyes. The Creator had bestowed him, as the last best touch to his
own handiwork. Creation was not finished till the poet came to
interpret, and so complete it.
The effect was no less high and beautiful, when his human brethren were
the subject of his verse. The man or woman, sordid with the common dust
of life, who crossed his daily path, and the little child who played in
it, were glorified if he beheld them in his mood of poetic faith. He
showed the golden links of the great chain that intertwined them with
an angelic kindred; he brought out the hidden traits of a celestial
birth that made them worthy of such kin. Some, indeed, there were, who
thought to show the soundness of their judgment by affirming that all
the beauty and dignity of the natural world existed only in the poet's
fancy. Let such men speak for themselves, who undoubtedly appear to have
been spawned forth by Nature with a contemptuous bitterness; she having
plastered them up out of her refuse stuff, after all the swine were
made. As respects all things else, the poet's ideal was the truest
truth.
The songs of this poet found their way to Ernest. He read them after his
customary toil, seated on the bench before his cottage-door, where for
such a length of time he had filled his repose with thought, by gazing
at the Great Stone Face. And now as he read stanzas that caused the soul
to thrill within him, he lifted his eyes to the vast countenance beaming
on him so benignantly.
"O majestic friend," he murmured, addressing the Great Stone Face, "is
not this man worthy to resemble thee?"
The Face seemed to smile, but answered not a word.
Now it happened that the poet, though he dwelt so far away, had not only
heard of Ernest, but had meditated much upon his character, until he
deemed nothing so desirable as to meet this man, whose untaught wisdom
walked hand in hand with the noble simplicity of his life. One summer
morning, therefore, he took passage by the railroad, and, in the decline
of the afternoon, alighted from the cars at no great distance from
Ernest's cottage. The great hotel, which had formerly been the palace of
Mr. Gathergold, was close at hand, but the poet, with his carpet-bag on
his arm, inquired at once where Ernest dwelt, and was resolved to be
accepted as his guest.
Approaching the door, he there found the good old man, holding a volume
in his hand, which alternately he read, and then, with a finger between
the leaves, looked lovingly at the Great Stone Face.
"Good evening," said the poet. "Can you give a traveller a night's
lodging?"
"Willingly," answered Ernest; and then he added, smiling, "Methinks I
never saw the Great Stone Face look so hospitably at a stranger."
The poet sat down on the bench beside him, and he and Ernest talked
together. Often had the poet held intercourse with the wittiest and the
wisest, but never before with a man like Ernest, whose thoughts and
feelings gushed up with such a natural freedom, and who made great
truths so familiar by his simple utterance of them. Angels, as had been
so often said, seemed to have wrought with him at his labor in the
fields; angels seemed to have sat with him by the fireside; and,
dwelling with angels as friend with friends, he had imbibed the
sublimity of their ideas, and imbued it with the sweet and lowly charm
of household words. So thought the poet. And Ernest, on the other hand,
was moved and agitated by the living images which the poet flung out of
his mind, and which peopled all the air about the cottage-door with
shapes of beauty, both gay and pensive. The sympathies of these two men
instructed them with a profounder sense than either could have attained
alone. Their minds accorded into one strain, and made delightful music
which neither of them could have claimed as all his own, nor
distinguished his own share from the other's. They led one another, as
it were, into a high pavilion of their thoughts, so remote, and hitherto
so dim, that they had never entered it before, and so beautiful that
they desired to be there always.
As Ernest listened to the poet, he imagined that the Great Stone Face
was bending forward to listen too. He gazed earnestly into the poet's
glowing eyes.
"Who are you, my strangely gifted guest?" he said.
The poet laid his finger on the volume that Ernest had been reading.
"You have read these poems," said he. "You know me, then,--for I wrote
them."
Again, and still more earnestly than before, Ernest examined the poet's
features; then turned towards the Great Stone Face; then back, with an
uncertain aspect, to his guest. But his countenance fell; he shook his
head, and sighed.
"Wherefore are you sad?" inquired the poet.
"Because," replied Ernest, "all through life I have awaited the
fulfilment of a prophecy; and, when I read these poems, I hoped that it
might be fulfilled in you."
"You hoped," answered the poet, faintly smiling, "to find in me the
likeness of the Great Stone Face. And you are disappointed, as formerly
with Mr. Gathergold, and Old Blood-and-Thunder, and Old Stony Phiz. Yes,
Ernest, it is my doom. You must add my name to the illustrious three,
and record another failure of your hopes. For--in shame and sadness do I
speak it, Ernest--I am not worthy to be typified by yonder benign and
majestic image."
"And why?" asked Ernest. He pointed to the volume. "Are not those
thoughts divine?"
"They have a strain of the Divinity," replied the poet. "You can hear in
them the far-off echo of a heavenly song. But my life, dear Ernest, has
not corresponded with my thought. I have had grand dreams, but they
have been only dreams, because I have lived--and that, too, by my own
choice--among poor and mean realities. Sometimes even--shall I dare to
say it?--I lack faith in the grandeur, the beauty, and the goodness,
which my own works are said to have made more evident in nature and in
human life. Why, then, pure seeker of the good and true, shouldst thou
hope to find me, in yonder image of the divine?"
The poet spoke sadly, and his eyes were dim with tears. So, likewise,
were those of Ernest.
At the hour of sunset, as had long been his frequent custom, Ernest was
to discourse to an assemblage of the neighboring inhabitants in the open
air. He and the poet, arm in arm, still talking together as they went
along, proceeded to the spot. It was a small nook among the hills, with
a gray precipice behind, the stern front of which was relieved by the
pleasant foliage of many creeping plants, that made a tapestry for the
naked rock, by hanging their festoons from all its rugged angles. At a
small elevation above the ground, set in a rich framework of verdure,
there appeared a niche, spacious enough to admit a human figure, with
freedom for such gestures as spontaneously accompany earnest thought and
genuine emotion. Into this natural pulpit Ernest ascended, and threw a
look of familiar kindness around upon his audience. They stood, or sat,
or reclined upon the grass, as seemed good to each, with the departing
sunshine falling obliquely over them, and mingling its subdued
cheerfulness with the solemnity of a grove of ancient trees, beneath and
amid the boughs of which the golden rays were constrained to pass. In
another direction was seen the Great Stone Face, with the same cheer,
combined with the same solemnity, in its benignant aspect.
Ernest began to speak, giving to the people of what was in his heart and
mind. His words had power, because they accorded with his thoughts; and
his thoughts had reality and depth, because they harmonized with the
life which he had always lived. It was not mere breath that this
preacher uttered; they were the words of life, because a life of good
deeds and holy love was melted into them. Pearls, pure and rich, had
been dissolved into this precious draught. The poet, as he listened,
felt that the being and character of Ernest were a nobler strain of
poetry than he had ever written. His eyes glistened with tears, he gazed
reverentially at the venerable man, and said within himself that never
was there an aspect so worthy of a prophet and a sage as that mild,
sweet, thoughtful countenance, with the glory of white hair diffused
about it. At a distance, but distinctly to be seen, high up in the
golden light of the setting sun, appeared the Great Stone Face, with
hoary mists around it, like the white hairs around the brow of Ernest.
Its look of grand beneficence seemed to embrace the world.
At that moment, in sympathy with a thought which he was about to utter,
the face of Ernest assumed a grandeur of expression, so imbued with
benevolence, that the poet, by an irresistible impulse, threw his arms
aloft, and shouted,--
"Behold! Behold! Ernest is himself the likeness of the Great Stone
Face!"
Then all the people looked, and saw that what the deep-sighted poet said
was true. The prophecy was fulfilled. But Ernest, having finished what
he had to say, took the poet's arm, and walked slowly homeward, still
hoping that some wiser and better man than himself would by and by
appear, bearing a resemblance to the GREAT STONE FACE.
The Gray Champion
There was once a time when New England groaned under the actual pressure
of heavier wrongs than those threatened ones which brought on the
Revolution. James II., the bigoted successor of Charles the Voluptuous,
had annulled the charters of all the colonies, and sent a harsh and
unprincipled soldier to take away our liberties and endanger our
religion. The administration of Sir Edmund Andros lacked scarcely a
single characteristic of tyranny: a Governor and Council, holding office
from the King, and wholly independent of the country; laws made and
taxes levied without concurrence of the people, immediate or by their
representatives; the rights of private citizens violated, and the titles
of all landed property declared void; the voice of complaint stifled by
restrictions on the press; and, finally, disaffection overawed by the
first band of mercenary troops that ever marched on our free soil. For
two years our ancestors were kept in sullen submission by that filial
love which had invariably secured their allegiance to the mother
country, whether its head chanced to be a Parliament, Protector, or
Popish Monarch. Till these evil times, however, such allegiance had been
merely nominal, and the colonists had ruled themselves, enjoying far
more freedom than is even yet the privilege of the native subjects of
Great Britain.
At length a rumor reached our shores that the Prince of Orange had
ventured on an enterprise the success of which would be the triumph of
civil and religious rights and the salvation of New England. It was but
a doubtful whisper; it might be false, or the attempt might fail; and,
in either case, the man that stirred against King James would lose his
head. Still, the intelligence produced a marked effect. The people
smiled mysteriously in the streets, and threw bold glances at their
oppressors; while, far and wide, there was a subdued and silent
agitation, as if the slightest signal would rouse the whole land from
its sluggish despondency. Aware of their danger, the rulers resolved to
avert it by an imposing display of strength, and perhaps to confirm
their despotism by yet harsher measures. One afternoon in April, 1689,
Sir Edmund Andros and his favorite councillors, being warm with wine,
assembled the redcoats of the Governor's Guard, and made their
appearance in the streets of Boston. The sun was near setting when the
march commenced.
The roll of the drum, at that unquiet crisis, seemed to go through the
streets, less as the martial music of the soldiers, than as a
muster-call to the inhabitants themselves. A multitude, by various
avenues, assembled in King Street, which was destined to be the scene,
nearly a century afterwards, of another encounter between the troops of
Britain and a people struggling against her tyranny. Though more than
sixty years had elapsed since the Pilgrims came, this crowd of their
descendants still showed the strong and sombre features of their
character, perhaps more strikingly in such a stern emergency than on
happier occasions. There were the sober garb, the general severity of
mien, the gloomy but undismayed expression, the Scriptural forms of
speech, and the confidence in Heaven's blessing on a righteous cause,
which would have marked a band of the original Puritans, when threatened
by some peril of the wilderness. Indeed, it was not yet time for the old
spirit to be extinct; since there were men in the street, that day, who
had worshipped there beneath the trees, before a house was reared to the
God for whom they had become exiles. Old soldiers of the Parliament were
here, too, smiling grimly at the thought, that their aged arms might
strike another blow against the house of Stuart. Here, also, were the
veterans of King Philip's war, who had burned villages and slaughtered
young and old, with pious fierceness, while the godly souls throughout
the land were helping them with prayer. Several ministers were scattered
among the crowd, which, unlike all other mobs, regarded them with such
reverence, as if there were sanctity in their very garments. These holy
men exerted their influence to quiet the people, but not to disperse
them. Meantime, the purpose of the Governor, in disturbing the peace of
the town, at a period when the slightest commotion might throw the
country into a ferment, was almost the universal subject of inquiry, and
variously explained.
"Satan will strike his master-stroke presently," cried some, "because he
knoweth that his time is short. All our godly pastors are to be dragged
to prison! We shall see them at a Smithfield fire in King Street!"
Hereupon the people of each parish gathered closer round their minister,
who looked calmly upwards and assumed a more apostolic dignity, as well
befitted a candidate for the highest honor of his profession, the crown
of martyrdom. It was actually fancied, at that period, that New England
might have a John Rogers of her own, to take the place of that worthy in
the Primer.
"The Pope of Rome has given orders for a new St. Bartholomew!" cried
others. "We are to be massacred, man and male child!"
Neither was this rumor wholly discredited, although the wiser class
believed the Governor's object somewhat less atrocious. His predecessor
under the old charter, Bradstreet, a venerable companion of the first
settlers, was known to be in town. There were grounds for conjecturing
that Sir Edmund Andros intended, at once, to strike terror, by a parade
of military force, and to confound the opposite faction by possessing
himself of their chief.
"Stand firm for the old charter, Governor!" shouted the crowd, seizing
upon the idea. "The good old Governor Bradstreet!"
While this cry was at the loudest, the people were surprised by the
well-known figure of Governor Bradstreet himself, a patriarch of nearly
ninety, who appeared on the elevated steps of a door, and, with
characteristic mildness, besought them to submit to the constituted
authorities.
"My children," concluded this venerable person, "do nothing rashly. Cry
not aloud, but pray for the welfare of New England, and expect patiently
what the Lord will do in this matter!"
The event was soon to be decided. All this time, the roll of the drum
had been approaching through Cornhill, louder and deeper, till with
reverberations from house to house, and the regular tramp of martial
footsteps, it burst into the street. A double rank of soldiers made
their appearance, occupying the whole breadth of the passage, with
shouldered matchlocks, and matches burning, so as to present a row of
fires in the dusk. Their steady march was like the progress of a
machine, that would roll irresistibly over everything in its way. Next,
moving slowly, with a confused clatter of hoofs on the pavement, rode a
party of mounted gentlemen, the central figure being Sir Edmund Andros,
elderly, but erect and soldier-like. Those around him were his favorite
councillors, and the bitterest foes of New England. At his right hand
rode Edward Randolph, our arch-enemy, that "blasted wretch," as Cotton
Mather calls him, who achieved the downfall of our ancient government,
and was followed with a sensible curse, through life and to his grave.
On the other side was Bullivant, scattering jests and mockery as he rode
along. Dudley came behind, with a downcast look, dreading, as well he
might, to meet the indignant gaze of the people, who beheld him, their
only countryman by birth, among the oppressors of his native land. The
captain of a frigate in the harbor, and two or three civil officers
under the Crown, were also there. But the figure which most attracted
the public eye, and stirred up the deepest feeling, was the Episcopal
clergyman of King's Chapel, riding haughtily among the magistrates in
his priestly vestments, the fitting representative of prelacy and
persecution, the union of Church and State, and all those abominations
which had driven the Puritans to the wilderness. Another guard of
soldiers, in double rank, brought up the rear.