In the town called Cantabridge, now a city, water-veined and gas
windpiped, in the street running down to the Bridge, beyond which
dwelt Sally, told of in a book of a friend of mine, was of old a house
inhabited by three maidens. They left no near kinsfolk, I believe;
whether they did or not, I have no ill to speak of them; for they lived
and died in all good report and maidenly credit. The house they lived
in was of the small, gambrel-roofed cottage pattern, after the shape of
Esquires' houses, but after the size of the dwellings of handicraftsmen.
The lower story was fitted up as a shop. Specially was it provided with
one of those half-doors now so rarely met with, which are to whole
doors as spencers worn by old folk are to coats. They speak of limited
commerce united with a social or observing disposition--on the part of
the shopkeeper,--allowing, as they do, talk with passers-by, yet keeping
off such as have not the excuse of business to cross the threshold.
On the door-posts, at either side, above the half-door, hung certain
perennial articles of merchandise, of which my memory still has hanging
among its faded photographs a kind of netted scarf and some pairs of
thick woollen stockings. More articles, but not very many, were stored
inside; and there was one drawer, containing children's books, out of
which I once was treated to a minute quarto ornamented with handsome
cuts. This was the only purchase I ever knew to be made at the shop kept
by the three maiden ladies, though it is probable there were others. So
long as I remember the shop, the same scarf and, I should say, the same
stockings hung on the door-posts.--You think I am exaggerating again,
and that shopkeepers would not keep the same article exposed for years.
Come to me, the Professor, and I will take you in five minutes to a shop
in this city where I will show you an article hanging now in the very
place where more than thirty years ago I myself inquired the price of
it of the present head of the establishment. [ This was a glass alembic,
which hung up in Daniel Henchman's apothecary shop, corner of Cambridge
and Chambers streets.]
The three maidens were of comely presence, and one of them had
had claims to be considered a Beauty. When I saw them in the old
meeting-house on Sundays, as they rustled in through the aisles in silks
and satins, not gay, but more than decent, as I remember them, I thought
of My Lady Bountiful in the history of “Little King Pippin,” and of the
Madam Blaize of Goldsmith (who, by the way, must have taken the hint of
it from a pleasant poem, “Monsieur de la Palisse,” attributed to De la
Monnoye, in the collection of French songs before me). There was some
story of an old romance in which the Beauty had played her part. Perhaps
they all had had lovers; for, as I said, they were shapely and seemly
personages, as I remember them; but their lives were out of the flower
and in the berry at the time of my first recollections.
One after another they all three dropped away, objects of kindly
attention to the good people round, leaving little or almost nothing,
and nobody to inherit it. Not absolutely nothing, of course. There must
have been a few old dresses--perhaps some bits of furniture, a Bible,
and the spectacles the good old souls read it through, and little
keepsakes, such as make us cry to look at, when we find them in old
drawers;--such relics there must have been. But there was more. There
was a manuscript of some hundred pages, closely written, in which the
poor things had chronicled for many years the incidents of their daily
life. After their death it was passed round somewhat freely, and fell
into my hands. How I have cried and laughed and colored over it! There
was nothing in it to be ashamed of, perhaps there was nothing in it to
laugh at, but such a picture of the mode of being of poor simple good
old women I do believe was never drawn before. And there were all the
smallest incidents recorded, such as do really make up humble life,
but which die out of all mere literary memoirs, as the houses where the
Egyptians or the Athenians lived crumble and leave only their temples
standing. I know, for instance, that on a given day of a certain year,
a kindly woman, herself a poor widow, now, I trust, not without special
mercies in heaven for her good deeds,--for I read her name on a proper
tablet in the churchyard a week ago,--sent a fractional pudding from her
own table to the Maiden Sisters, who, I fear, from the warmth and detail
of their description, were fasting, or at least on short allowance,
about that time. I know who sent them the segment of melon, which in her
riotous fancy one of them compared to those huge barges to which we give
the ungracious name of mudscows. But why should I illustrate further
what it seems almost a breach of confidence to speak of? Some kind
friend, who could challenge a nearer interest than the curious strangers
into whose hands the book might fall, at last claimed it, and I was glad
that it should be henceforth sealed to common eyes. I learned from it
that every good and, alas! every evil act we do may slumber unforgotten
even in some earthly record. I got a new lesson in that humanity which
our sharp race finds it so hard to learn. The poor widow, fighting
hard to feed and clothe and educate her children, had not forgotten the
poorer ancient maidens. I remembered it the other day, as I stood by her
place of rest, and I felt sure that it was remembered elsewhere. I know
there are prettier words than pudding, but I can't help it,--the pudding
went upon the record, I feel sure, with the mite which was cast into the
treasury by that other poor widow whose deed the world shall remember
forever, and with the coats and garments which the good women cried
over, when Tabitha, called by interpretation Dorcas, lay dead in the
upper chamber, with her charitable needlework strewed around her.
--Such was the Book of the Maiden Sisters. You will believe me more
readily now when I tell you that I found the soul of Iris in the one
that lay open before me. Sometimes it was a poem that held it, sometimes
a drawing, angel, arabesque, caricature, or a mere hieroglyphic
symbol of which I could make nothing. A rag of cloud on one page, as I
remember, with a streak of red zigzagging out of it across the paper as
naturally as a crack runs through a China bowl. On the next page a dead
bird,--some little favorite, I suppose; for it was worked out with a
special love, and I saw on the leaf that sign with which once or twice
in my life I have had a letter sealed,--a round spot where the paper
is slightly corrugated, and, if there is writing there, the letters
are somewhat faint and blurred. Most of the pages were surrounded with
emblematic traceries. It was strange to me at first to see how often
she introduced those homelier wild-flowers which we call weeds,--for it
seemed there was none of them too humble for her to love, and none too
little cared for by Nature to be without its beauty for her artist
eye and pencil. By the side of the garden-flowers,--of Spring's curled
darlings, the hyacinths, of rosebuds, dear to sketching maidens, of
flower-de-luces and morning-glories, nay, oftener than these, and more
tenderly caressed by the colored brush that rendered them,--were those
common growths which fling themselves to be crushed under our feet and
our wheels, making themselves so cheap in this perpetual martyrdom that
we forget each of them is a ray of the Divine beauty.
Yellow japanned buttercups and star-disked dandelions,--just as we see
them lying in the grass, like sparks that have leaped from the kindling
sun of summer; the profuse daisy-like flower which whitens the fields,
to the great disgust of liberal shepherds, yet seems fair to loving
eyes, with its button-like mound of gold set round with milk-white rays;
the tall-stemmed succory, setting its pale blue flowers aflame, one
after another, sparingly, as the lights are kindled in the candelabra
of decaying palaces where the heirs of dethroned monarchs are dying out;
the red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,--“the
white man's foot,” as the Indians called it,--the wiry, jointed stems of
that iron creeping plant which we call “knot-grass,” and which loves its
life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe,
as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;--all these plants, and many
more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.--On one of the
pages were some musical notes. I touched them from curiosity on a piano
belonging to one of our boarders. Strange! There are passages that I
have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they
were gasping for words to interpret them. She must have heard the
strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor's
chamber. The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held
these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.
Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded
and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water. On one side
an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow. On the
other a threaded waterfall. The red morning-tint that shone in the drops
had a strange look,--one would say the cliff was bleeding;--perhaps she
did not mean it. Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey,
with his wings spread over some unseen object.--And on the very
next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on
the title-page of Fuller's “Holy War,” in which I recognized without
difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most
resplendent caricature--three only excepted,--the Little Gentleman,
myself, and one other.
I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the
girl's little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.--There is a
left arm again, though;--no,--that is from the “Fighting Gladiator,” the
“Jeune Heros combattant” of the Louvre;--there is the broad ring of the
shield. From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the “Gladiator's”
arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost
slender,--such is the perfection of that miraculous marble. I never
felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that
statue.]--Here is something very odd, to be sure. An Eden of all the
humped and crooked creatures! What could have been in her head when she
worked out such a fantasy? She has contrived to give them all beauty
or dignity or melancholy grace. A Bactrian camel lying under a palm. A
dromedary flashing up the sands,--spray of the dry ocean sailed by the
“ship of the desert.” A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy
in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion
of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough
collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast. And
here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with answering curves
in their bowed necks, as if they had snake's blood under their white
feathers; and grave, high-shouldered herons standing on one foot
like cripples, and looking at life round them with the cold stare of
monumental effigies.--A very odd page indeed! Not a creature in it
without a curve or a twist, and not one of them a mean figure to look
at. You can make your own comment; I am fanciful, you know. I believe
she is trying to idealize what we vulgarly call deformity, which she
strives to look at in the light of one of Nature's eccentric curves,
belonging to her system of beauty, as the hyperbola, and parabola belong
to the conic sections, though we cannot see them as symmetrical and
entire figures, like the circle and ellipse. At any rate, I cannot help
referring this paradise of twisted spines to some idea floating in
her head connected with her friend whom Nature has warped in the
moulding.--That is nothing to another transcendental fancy of mine. I
believe her soul thinks itself in his little crooked body at times,--if
it does not really get freed or half freed from her own. Did you ever
see a case of catalepsy? You know what I mean,--transient loss of sense,
will, and motion; body and limbs taking any position in which they are
put, as if they belonged to a lay-figure. She had been talking with
him and listening to him one day when the boarders moved from the table
nearly all at once. But she sat as before, her cheek resting on her
hand, her amber eyes wide open and still. I went to her, she was
breathing as usual, and her heart was beating naturally enough,--but she
did not answer. I bent her arm; it was as plastic as softened wax, and
kept the place I gave it.--This will never do, though, and I sprinkled
a few drops of water on her forehead. She started and looked round.--I
have been in a dream,--she said;--I feel as if all my strength were in
this arm;--give me your hand!--She took my right hand in her left, which
looked soft and white enough, but--Good Heaven! I believe she will crack
my bones! All the nervous power in her body must have flashed through
those muscles; as when a crazy lady snaps her iron window-bars,--she who
could hardly glove herself when in her common health. Iris turned pale,
and the tears came to her eyes;--she saw she had given pain. Then she
trembled, and might have fallen but for me;--the poor little soul had
been in one of those trances that belong to the spiritual pathology of
higher natures, mostly those of women.
To come back to this wondrous book of Iris. Two pages faced each other
which I took for symbolical expressions of two states of mind. On the
left hand, a bright blue sky washed over the page, specked with a single
bird. No trace of earth, but still the winged creature seemed to be
soaring upward and upward. Facing it, one of those black dungeons such
as Piranesi alone of all men has pictured. I am sure she must have
seen those awful prisons of his, out of which the Opium-Eater got
his nightmare vision, described by another as “cemeteries of departed
greatness, where monstrous and forbidden things are crawling and twining
their slimy convolutions among mouldering bones, broken sculpture, and
mutilated inscriptions.” Such a black dungeon faced the page that held
the blue sky and the single bird; at the bottom of it something was
coiled,--what, and whether meant for dead or alive, my eyes could not
make out.
I told you the young girl's soul was in this book. As I turned over the
last leaves I could not help starting. There were all sorts of faces
among the arabesques which laughed and scowled in the borders that ran
round the pages. They had mostly the outline of childish or womanly or
manly beauty, without very distinct individuality. But at last it seemed
to me that some of them were taking on a look not wholly unfamiliar to
me; there were features that did not seem new.--Can it be so? Was there
ever such innocence in a creature so full of life? She tells her heart's
secrets as a three-years-old child betrays itself without need of being
questioned! This was no common miss, such as are turned out in
scores from the young-lady-factories, with parchments warranting them
accomplished and virtuous,--in case anybody should question the fact. I
began to understand her;--and what is so charming as to read the secret
of a real femme incomprise?--for such there are, though they are not the
ones who think themselves uncomprehended women.
Poets are never young, in one sense. Their delicate ear hears the
far-off whispers of eternity, which coarser souls must travel towards
for scores of years before their dull sense is touched by them.
A moment's insight is sometimes worth a life's experience. I have
frequently seen children, long exercised by pain and exhaustion, whose
features had a strange look of advanced age. Too often one meets such in
our charitable institutions. Their faces are saddened and wrinkled, as
if their few summers were threescore years and ten.
And so, many youthful poets have written as if their hearts were old
before their time; their pensive morning twilight has been as cool
and saddening as that of evening in more common lives. The profound
melancholy of those lines of Shelley,
“I could lie down like a tired child
And weep away the life of care
Which I have borne and yet must bear.”
came from a heart, as he says, “too soon grown old,”--at twenty-six
years, as dull people count time, even when they talk of poets.
I know enough to be prepared for an exceptional nature,--only this gift
of the hand in rendering every thought in form and color, as well as
in words, gives a richness to this young girl's alphabet of feeling and
imagery that takes me by surprise. And then besides, and most of all, I
am puzzled at her sudden and seemingly easy confidence in me. Perhaps
I owe it to my--Well, no matter! How one must love the editor who first
calls him the venerable So-and-So!
--I locked the book and sighed as I laid it down. The world is always
ready to receive talent with open arms. Very often it does not know what
to do with genius. Talent is a docile creature. It bows its head meekly
while the world slips the collar over it. It backs into the shafts like
a lamb. It draws its load cheerfully, and is patient of the bit and of
the whip. But genius is always impatient of its harness; its wild blood
makes it hard to train.
Talent seems, at first, in one sense, higher than genius,--namely, that
it is more uniformly and absolutely submitted to the will, and therefore
more distinctly human in its character. Genius, on the other hand, is
much more like those instincts which govern the admirable movements of
the lower creatures, and therefore seems to have something of the
lower or animal character. A goose flies by a chart which the Royal
Geographical Society could not mend. A poet, like the goose, sails
without visible landmarks to unexplored regions of truth, which
philosophy has yet to lay down on its atlas. The philosopher gets his
track by observation; the poet trusts to his inner sense, and makes the
straighter and swifter line.
And yet, to look at it in another light, is not even the lowest instinct
more truly divine than any voluntary human act done by the suggestion
of reason? What is a bee's architecture but an unobstructed divine
thought?--what is a builder's approximative rule but an obstructed
thought of the Creator, a mutilated and imperfect copy of some absolute
rule Divine Wisdom has established, transmitted through a human soul as
an image through clouded glass?
Talent is a very common family-trait; genius belongs rather to
individuals;--just as you find one giant or one dwarf in a family, but
rarely a whole brood of either. Talent is often to be envied, and genius
very commonly to be pitied. It stands twice the chance of the other of
dying in hospital, in jail, in debt, in bad repute. It is a perpetual
insult to mediocrity; its every word is a trespass against somebody's
vested ideas,--blasphemy against somebody's O'm, or intangible private
truth.
--What is the use of my weighing out antitheses in this way, like a
rhetorical grocer?--You know twenty men of talent, who are making their
way in the world; you may, perhaps, know one man of genius, and very
likely do not want to know any more. For a divine instinct, such as
drives the goose southward and the poet heavenward, is a hard thing to
manage, and proves too strong for many whom it possesses. It must have
been a terrible thing to have a friend like Chatterton or Burns. And
here is a being who certainly has more than talent, at once poet and
artist in tendency, if not yet fairly developed,--a woman, too;--and
genius grafted on womanhood is like to overgrow it and break its stem,
as you may see a grafted fruit-tree spreading over the stock which
cannot keep pace with its evolution.
I think now you know something of this young person. She wants nothing
but an atmosphere to expand in. Now and then one meets with a nature
for which our hard, practical New England life is obviously utterly
incompetent. It comes up, as a Southern seed, dropped by accident in one
of our gardens, finds itself trying to grow and blow into flower among
the homely roots and the hardy shrubs that surround it. There is no
question that certain persons who are born among us find themselves many
degrees too far north. Tropical by organization, they cannot fight for
life with our eastern and northwestern breezes without losing the
color and fragrance into which their lives would have blossomed in
the latitude of myrtles and oranges. Strange effects are produced by
suffering any living thing to be developed under conditions such as
Nature had not intended for it. A French physiologist confined some
tadpoles under water in the dark. Removed from the natural stimulus of
light, they did not develop legs and arms at the proper period of their
growth, and so become frogs; they swelled and spread into gigantic
tadpoles. I have seen a hundred colossal human tadpoles, overgrown
Zarvce or embryos; nay, I am afraid we Protestants should look on a
considerable proportion of the Holy Father's one hundred and thirty-nine
millions as spiritual larvae, sculling about in the dark by the aid
of their caudal extremities, instead of standing on their legs, and
breathing by gills, instead of taking the free air of heaven into the
lungs made to receive it. Of course we never try to keep young souls
in the tadpole state, for fear they should get a pair or two of legs
by-and-by and jump out of the pool where they have been bred and fed!
Never! Never. Never?
Now to go back to our plant. You may know, that, for the earlier stages
of development of almost any vegetable, you only want air, water, light,
and warmth. But by-and-by, if it is to have special complex principles
as a part of its organization, they must be supplied by the soil;--your
pears will crack, if the root of the tree gets no iron,--your
asparagus-bed wants salt as much as you do. Just at the period of
adolescence, the mind often suddenly begins to come into flower and to
set its fruit. Then it is that many young natures, having exhausted
the spiritual soil round them of all it contains of the elements
they demand, wither away, undeveloped and uncolored, unless they are
transplanted.
Pray for these dear young souls! This is the second natural birth;--for
I do not speak of those peculiar religious experiences which form the
point of transition in many lives between the consciousness of a general
relation to the Divine nature and a special personal relation. The
litany should count a prayer for them in the list of its supplications;
masses should be said for them as for souls in purgatory; all good
Christians should remember them as they remember those in peril through
travel or sickness or in warfare.
I would transport this child to Rome at once, if I had my will. She
should ripen under an Italian sun. She should walk under the frescoed
vaults of palaces, until her colors deepened to those of Venetian
beauties, and her forms were perfected into rivalry with the Greek
marbles, and the east wind was out of her soil. Has she not exhausted
this lean soil of the elements her growing nature requires?
I do not know. The magnolia grows and comes into full flower on Cape
Ann, many degrees out of its proper region. I was riding once along that
delicious road between the hills and the sea, when we passed a thicket
where there seemed to be a chance of finding it. In five minutes I had
fallen on the trees in full blossom, and filled my arms with the sweet,
resplendent flowers. I could not believe I was in our cold, northern
Essex, which, in the dreary season when I pass its slate-colored,
unpainted farm-houses, and huge, square, windy, 'squire-built
“mansions,” looks as brown and unvegetating as an old rug with its
patterns all trodden out and the colored fringe worn from all its
border.
If the magnolia can bloom in northern New England, why should not a poet
or a painter come to his full growth here just as well? Yes, but if
the gorgeous tree-flower is rare, and only as if by a freak of Nature
springs up in a single spot among the beeches and alders, is there not
as much reason to think the perfumed flower of imaginative genius will
find it hard to be born and harder to spread its leaves in the clear,
cold atmosphere of our ultra-temperate zone of humanity?
Take the poet. On the one hand, I believe that a person with the
poetical faculty finds material everywhere. The grandest objects of
sense and thought are common to all climates and civilizations. The sky,
the woods, the waters, the storms, life, death love, the hope and vision
of eternity,--these are images that write themselves in poetry in every
soul which has anything of the divine gift.
On the other hand, there is such a thing as a lean, impoverished life,
in distinction from a rich and suggestive one. Which our common New
England life might be considered, I will not decide. But there are some
things I think the poet misses in our western Eden. I trust it is not
unpatriotic to mention them in this point of view as they come before us
in so many other aspects.
There is no sufficient flavor of humanity in the soil out of which we
grow. At Cantabridge, near the sea, I have once or twice picked up an
Indian arrowhead in a fresh furrow. At Canoe Meadow, in the Berkshire
Mountains, I have found Indian arrowheads. So everywhere Indian
arrowheads. Whether a hundred or a thousand years old, who knows?
who cares? There is no history to the red race,--there is hardly an
individual in it;--a few instincts on legs and holding a tomahawk--there
is the Indian of all time. The story of one red ant is the story of all
red ants. So, the poet, in trying to wing his way back through the life
that has kindled, flitted, and faded along our watercourses and on our
southern hillsides for unknown generations, finds nothing to breathe or
fly in; he meets
“A vast vacuity! all unawares,
Fluttering his pennons vain, plumb down he drops
Ten thousand fathom deep.”
But think of the Old World,--that part of it which is the seat of
ancient civilization! The stakes of the Britons' stockades are still
standing in the bed of the Thames. The ploughman turns up an old Saxon's
bones, and beneath them is a tessellated pavement of the time of
the Caesars. In Italy, the works of mediaeval Art seem to be of
yesterday,--Rome, under her kings, is but an intruding newcomer, as
we contemplate her in the shadow of the Cyclopean walls of Fiesole or
Volterra. It makes a man human to live on these old humanized soils.
He cannot help marching in step with his kind in the rear of such a
procession. They say a dead man's hand cures swellings, if laid on them.
There is nothing like the dead cold hand of the Past to take down our
tumid egotism and lead us into the solemn flow of the life of our race.
Rousseau came out of one of his sad self-torturing fits, as he cast his
eye on the arches of the old Roman aqueduct, the Pont du Gard.
I am far from denying that there is an attraction in a thriving railroad
village. The new “depot,” the smartly-painted pine houses, the spacious
brick hotel, the white meeting-house, and the row of youthful and leggy
trees before it, are exhilarating. They speak of progress, and the time
when there shall be a city, with a His Honor the Mayor, in the place of
their trim but transient architectural growths. Pardon me, if I prefer
the pyramids. They seem to me crystals formed from a stronger solution
of humanity than the steeple of the new meeting-house. I may be wrong,
but the Tiber has a voice for me, as it whispers to the piers of the
Pons Alius, even more full of meaning than my well-beloved Charles
eddying round the piles of West Boston Bridge.
Then, again, we Yankees are a kind of gypsies,--a mechanical and
migratory race. A poet wants a home. He can dispense with an apple-parer
and a reaping-machine. I feel this more for others than for myself, for
the home of my birth and childhood has been as yet exempted from the
change which has invaded almost everything around it.
--Pardon me a short digression. To what small things our memory and our
affections attach themselves! I remember, when I was a child, that
one of the girls planted some Star-of-Bethlehem bulbs in the southwest
corner of our front-yard. Well, I left the paternal roof and wandered
in other lands, and learned to think in the words of strange people.
But after many years, as I looked on the little front-yard again, it
occurred to me that there used to be some Star-of-Bethlehems in the
southwest corner. The grass was tall there, and the blade of the plant
is very much like grass, only thicker and glossier. Even as Tully
parted the briers and brambles when he hunted for the sphere-containing
cylinder that marked the grave of Archimedes, so did I comb the grass
with my fingers for my monumental memorial-flower. Nature had stored my
keepsake tenderly in her bosom; the glossy, faintly streaked blades were
there; they are there still, though they never flower, darkened as they
are by the shade of the elms and rooted in the matted turf.
Our hearts are held down to our homes by innumerable fibres, trivial
as that I have just recalled; but Gulliver was fixed to the soil, you
remember, by pinning his head a hair at a time. Even a stone with a
whitish band crossing it, belonging to the pavement of the
back-yard, insisted on becoming one of the talismans of memory. This
intussusception of the ideas of inanimate objects, and their faithful
storing away among the sentiments, are curiously prefigured in the
material structure of the thinking centre itself. In the very core of
the brain, in the part where Des Cartes placed the soul, is a small
mineral deposit, consisting, as I have seen it in the microscope, of
grape-like masses of crystalline matter.
But the plants that come up every year in the same place, like the
Star-of-Bethlehems, of all the lesser objects, give me the liveliest
home-feeling. Close to our ancient gambrel-roofed house is the dwelling
of pleasant old Neighbor Walrus. I remember the sweet honeysuckle that I
saw in flower against the wall of his house a few months ago, as long
as I remember the sky and stars. That clump of peonies, butting their
purple heads through the soil every spring in just the same circle, and
by-and-by unpacking their hard balls of buds in flowers big enough
to make a double handful of leaves, has come up in just that place,
Neighbor Walrus tells me, for more years than I have passed on this
planet. It is a rare privilege in our nomadic state to find the home of
one's childhood and its immediate neighborhood thus unchanged. Many born
poets, I am afraid, flower poorly in song, or not at all, because they
have been too often transplanted.
Then a good many of our race are very hard and unimaginative;--their
voices have nothing caressing; their movements are as of machinery
without elasticity or oil. I wish it were fair to print a letter a young
girl, about the age of our Iris, wrote a short time since. “I am *** ***
***,” she says, and tells her whole name outright. Ah!--said I, when I
read that first frank declaration,--you are one of the right sort!--She
was. A winged creature among close-clipped barn door fowl. How tired
the poor girl was of the dull life about her,--the old woman's “skeleton
hand” at the window opposite, drawing her curtains,--“Ma'am shooing away
the hens,”--the vacuous country eyes staring at her as only country
eyes can stare,--a routine of mechanical duties, and the soul's
half-articulated cry for sympathy, without an answer! Yes,--pray for
her, and for all such! Faith often cures their longings; but it is so
hard to give a soul to heaven that has not first been trained in the
fullest and sweetest human affections! Too often they fling their hearts
away on unworthy objects. Too often they pine in a secret discontent,
which spreads its leaden cloud over the morning of their youth. The
immeasurable distance between one of these delicate natures and the
average youths among whom is like to be her only choice makes one's
heart ache. How many women are born too finely organized in sense and
soul for the highway they must walk with feet unshod! Life is adjusted
to the wants of the stronger sex. There are plenty of torrents to be
crossed in its journey; but their stepping-stones are measured by the
stride of man, and not of woman.
Women are more subject than men to atrophy of the heart. So says the
great medical authority, Laennec. Incurable cases of this kind used
to find their hospitals in convents. We have the disease in New
England,--but not the hospitals. I don't like to think of it. I will not
believe our young Iris is going to die out in this way. Providence will
find her some great happiness, or affliction, or duty,--and which would
be best for her, I cannot tell. One thing is sure: the interest she
takes in her little neighbor is getting to be more engrossing than ever.
Something is the matter with him, and she knows it, and I think worries
herself about it.
I wonder sometimes how so fragile and distorted a frame has kept the
fiery spirit that inhabits it so long its tenant. He accounts for it in
his own way.
The air of the Old World is good for nothing, he said, one day.--Used
up, Sir,--breathed over and over again. You must come to this side, Sir,
for an atmosphere fit to breathe nowadays. Did not worthy Mr. Higginson
say that a breath of New England's air is better than a sup of Old
England's ale? I ought to have died when I was a boy, Sir; but I could
n't die in this Boston air,--and I think I shall have to go to New York
one of these days, when it's time for me to drop this bundle,--or to New
Orleans, where they have the yellow fever,--or to Philadelphia, where
they have so many doctors.
This was some time ago; but of late he has seemed, as I have before
said, to be ailing. An experienced eye, such as I think I may call mine,
can tell commonly whether a man is going to die, or not, long before he
or his friends are alarmed about him. I don't like it.
Iris has told me that the Scottish gift of second-sight runs in her
family, and that she is afraid she has it. Those who are so endowed
look upon a well man and see a shroud wrapt about him. According to the
degree to which it covers him, his death will be near or more remote. It
is an awful faculty; but science gives one too much like it. Luckily
for our friends, most of us who have the scientific second-sight school
ourselves not to betray our knowledge by word or look.
Day by day, as the Little Gentleman comes to the table, it seems to me
that the shadow of some approaching change falls darker and darker over
his countenance. Nature is struggling with something, and I am afraid
she is under in the wrestling-match. You do not care much, perhaps, for
my particular conjectures as to the nature of his difficulty. I should
say, however, from the sudden flushes to which he is subject, and
certain other marks which, as an expert, I know how to interpret, that
his heart was in trouble; but then he presses his hand to the right
side, as if there were the centre of his uneasiness.
When I say difficulty about the heart, I do not mean any of those
sentimental maladies of that organ which figure more largely in romances
than on the returns which furnish our Bills of Mortality. I mean some
actual change in the organ itself, which may carry him off by slow and
painful degrees, or strike him down with one huge pang and only time
for a single shriek,--as when the shot broke through the brave Captain
Nolan's breast, at the head of the Light Brigade at Balaklava, and with
a loud cry he dropped dead from his saddle.
I thought it only fair to say something of what I apprehended to
some who were entitled to be warned. The landlady's face fell when I
mentioned my fears.
Poor man!--she said.--And will leave the best room empty! Has n't he got
any sisters or nieces or anybody to see to his things, if he should be
took away? Such a sight of cases, full of everything! Never thought
of his failin' so suddin. A complication of diseases, she expected.
Liver-complaint one of 'em?
After this first involuntary expression of the too natural selfish
feelings, (which we must not judge very harshly, unless we happen to
be poor widows ourselves, with children to keep filled, covered, and
taught,--rents high,--beef eighteen to twenty cents per pound,)--after
this first squeak of selfishness, followed by a brief movement of
curiosity, so invariable in mature females, as to the nature of the
complaint which threatens the life of a friend or any person who may
happen to be mentioned as ill,--the worthy soul's better feelings
struggled up to the surface, and she grieved for the doomed invalid,
until a tear or two came forth and found their way down a channel worn
for them since the early days of her widowhood.
Oh, this dreadful, dreadful business of being the prophet of evil! Of
all the trials which those who take charge of others' health and lives
have to undergo, this is the most painful. It is all so plain to the
practised eye!--and there is the poor wife, the doting mother, who has
never suspected anything, or at least has clung always to the hope which
you are just going to wrench away from her!--I must tell Iris that I
think her poor friend is in a precarious state. She seems nearer to him
than anybody.
I did tell her. Whatever emotion it produced, she kept a still face,
except, perhaps, a little trembling of the lip.--Could I be certain that
there was any mortal complaint?--Why, no, I could not be certain; but it
looked alarming to me.--He shall have some of my life,--she said.
I suppose this to have been a fancy of hers, or a kind of magnetic power
she could give out;--at any rate, I cannot help thinking she wills her
strength away from herself, for she has lost vigor and color from that
day. I have sometimes thought he gained the force she lost; but this may
have been a whim, very probably.
One day she came suddenly to me, looking deadly pale. Her lips moved,
as if she were speaking; but I could not at first hear a word. Her hair
looked strangely, as if lifting itself, and her eyes were full of wild
light. She sunk upon a chair, and I thought was falling into one of her
trances. Something had frozen her blood with fear; I thought, from
what she said, half audibly, that she believed she had seen a shrouded
figure.
That night, at about eleven o'clock, I was sent for to see the Little
Gentleman, who was taken suddenly ill. Bridget, the servant, went before
me with a light. The doors were both unfastened, and I found myself
ushered, without hindrance, into the dim light of the mysterious
apartment I had so longed to enter.
I found these stanzas in the young girl's book among many others. I give
them as characterizing the tone of her sadder moments.