subject of conversation with professional men of high attainment, and I
never met with one among them who did not, on hearing that I never but
once, and then only for a few hours, submitted to the restraint of these
unnatural machines, refer to that exemption, as a means, the free
respiration, circulation, and powers both of exertion and endurance with
which the Lord has most mercifully gifted me. There can be no doubt that
the hand which first encloses the waist of a girl in these cruel
contrivances, supplying her with a fictitious support, where the hand of
God has placed bones and muscles that ought to be brought into vigorous
action, that hand lays the foundation of bitter sufferings; at the price
of which, and probably of a premature death, the advantage must be
purchased of rendering her figure as unlike as possible to all the
models of female beauty, universally admitted to be such, because they
are chiselled after nature itself. I have seen pictures, and I have read
harrowing descriptions, of the murderous consequences of thus flying in
the face of the Creator's skill, and presuming to mend, to improve, his
perfect work; but my own experience is worth a thousand treatises and
ten thousand illustrations, in bringing conviction to my mind. Once,
when introduced, as it is called, to the public, through the medium of a
ballroom, I did join in persuading my father to allow of a fashionable
lacing-up, though by no means a tight one. I felt much as, I suppose, a
frolicksome young colt feels when first subjected to the goading
apparatus that fetters his wild freedom. I danced, but it was with a
heavy heart and laboring breath; I talked, under the influence of a
stupefying headache, and on my return home flew to my apartment and cut
the goodly fabric in pieces; nor was I ever afterwards tempted so to
tempt my all-wise Maker by saying to the frame that he had fashioned and
supplied with means of healthful growth, "Hitherto shalt thou go and no
further."
Compressure of the feet was with equal strictness forbidden by my
judicious father. This vain custom is perhaps not so fatal as the other,
but it produces many evils. Coldness of the extremities may certainly
exist where nothing of the kind has been practised; but while rejoicing
that I, experimentally, know nothing of it, I cannot help recollecting
that the bounding pulse which plays so joyously through my veins was
never impeded in any part; and feeling this, I would no more expose a
girl to one infliction than I would to the other. Do Christian mothers
take a sufficiently serious and prayerful view of this subject, as
regards their children? Do they weigh, in a balance of God's providing,
this necessary provision of clothing, to separate not only what is
unseemly for the woman professing godly simplicity, but what is
enervating to those physical powers which she is bound to devote to the
Lord, and the weakening of which is actual robbery of him? I fear we
females are more ready to ask counsel one of another in this matter than
of the Lord; or even of our husbands, who, in nine cases out of ten, no
doubt would decide against the foolish and pernicious custom. At least,
in all my arguments with my own sex, I have found the men invariably
siding with me upon this topic.
You will be tired of these digressions, my dear friend, but I set out by
forewarning you that my opinions would be freely stated; and while
touching on a period of mortal life, where the body no less than the
mind usually takes its direction for the rest of our pilgrimage, I
cannot pass by any thing that appears to me of real importance to
either. We will now return to what poets have sung and citizens sighed
for, time out of mind--the delights of rural life.
All cramping is decidedly bad: wholesome restraints there are, which
parents are bound to lay upon their children, and the latter to submit
to; and among other things, I am sure a defined method and regular
habits in education, work, and play, together, with a most strict
attention to scrupulous punctuality, are not only valuable but
indispensable to a right government of the mind and conduct in after-
life. I have daily cause to lament the unavoidable neglect of such a
system in my own case, during three important years; but unavoidable it
was, unless my life had been sacrificed to the maintenance of such
order. Accordingly, mine was the life of a butterfly; and whatever of
the busy bee has since appeared in my proceedings must be ascribed to
divine grace alone. I often recall those days of summer sunshine to
which I have alluded; and the scarcely less joyous winter season, when,
ploughing the light snow, we raced with our inseparable companion, the
favorite pointer, or built up a brittle giant for the glory of
demolishing him with balls of his own substance, or directed the soft
missiles against each other. Accompanied by our father, but never alone,
we made excursions upon our frozen stream; and very sweet it was to the
fond hearts of my tender parents to watch the mantling glow of health,
the elastic vigor of increasing stature, and the unbounded play of most
exuberant spirits, in the poor child whom they had expected to enclose
in an early grave. How often, seated on the low wide brick-work corner
of the immense fireplace in a neighboring farm-house, have I been smoked
among hams and tongues, while watching the progress of baking a homely
cake upon those glowing wood-embers, or keeping guard over a treasury of
apples, nuts, and elderberry wine, all streaming together in the
lusciousness of a promised feast? Patriotism is with me no inert
principle; it verily lives and acts and pervades my whole spirit; and I
believe its energetic character, except as God deigns to work by his
especial influence, is traceable to that early acquaintance with what is
most purely English among us--the homes and the habits of our own bold
yeomanry.
Cities may resemble one another, and the aping propensities of their
inhabitants produce among them a rapid approximation of appearance and
manners; but where shall we look for the counterpart of a rural English
HOME? The thing is as untransferable as the word is untranslatable. The
antique village church, with its broad square tower or low spire, its
stone porch and oak seats, its narrow casements and the many vestiges of
those abominations which the besom of the blessed Reformation swept from
our services, though it could not, without demolishing the building,
efface their relics from its walls; the churchyard surrounding its base,
with undulating hillocks of mortality clad in long, rich grass, where
lie, half hidden, the old grey monumental stones that can no longer tell
the tale of bygone generations; the more modern sculpture, and the
homely grave-rail standing sentry over the last resting-place of the
poor, while some venerable tree overshadows the ground, where it has
probably stood since the first stone of that modest temple was laid by
our forefathers--all these are so endearingly English. The broad, rich
fields, the hedgerow boundaries and stately lines of vigorous trees
guarding their native soil; and above all, the manly bearing of a bold,
an independent, and a peaceful peasantry, the humblest of whom knows
that his cottage is a chartered sanctuary, protected alike from the
aggressions of civil and of ecclesiastical tyranny--these, too, are
English, sacredly English; and they leave upon the heart that has once
expanded among them, an impress never to be effaced. Among national
reformers, what a noble position would he occupy who should prevail upon
our monied countrymen to exchange their habits of periodical vagrancy
into popish lands, for a sojourn in the moral districts of their own
Protestant England, in the confidence that the climate which agreed with
their fathers from generation to generation--as the dates and ages
decipherable on our monuments will testify--would not annihilate them;
and that the sphere in which God had seen good to place them was that
wherein he purposed them to move, to exert their influence, and to
occupy for his glory, with the talents committed to their charge.
I have told you how books of imagination had supplanted the Bible in my
esteem; those books now, in a measure, yielded to the irresistible
attraction of outdoor amusement; but my mind was so abundantly stored
with the glittering tinsel of unsanctified genius, as it shone forth in
the pages of my beloved poets, that no room was left for a craving after
better studies. Yet the turn of my mind was devotional in the extreme;
so much so, that had the Lord permitted me at that time to come in
contact with the wily fascinations of popery, I am sure I should have
fallen, for a season at least, into the snare. God was really in all my
thoughts; not as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ--not as a
being of purer eyes than to behold iniquity--not as He whom I was
required to glorify in my body and in my spirit, being bought with a
price, to be no longer my own but his; no, my religion was a very
attractive sort of Deism, which recognized the Creator of all those
things wherein I delighted, and thought to render him great honor by
such recognition. Thomson's "Hymn on the Seasons" was my body of
divinity; and Pope's atrocious "Universal Prayer" would have become my
manual of devotion, had not my father denounced it as a most blasphemous
outrage upon revelation, and charged me never to repeat what he deeply
regretted that I had committed to memory. I hated profanity, and would
not have omitted the private repetition of a form of prayer, morning or
evening, on any account, nor absented myself from public worship. A
slighting expression applied to the Bible would kindle me into glowing
resentment, expressed with no less sincerity than earnestness, and as a
matter of duty I devoted some time every Sabbath-day to the perusal of
God's word, with which I had become more extensively acquainted by
reading it during sermon-time at church. I well know that even then, and
at a much earlier period too, conviction of my own sinfulness was
working very deeply, though not permanently, in my mind: it was not an
abiding impression, but a thing of fits and starts, overwhelming me
while it lasted, but soon shaken off by diverting my thoughts to
something else. These convictions were unquestionably the result of my
occasional readings in God's book: they always occurred during or
immediately after such perusal, or when some passage was suddenly
brought to my recollection.
LETTER III.
EARLY DAYS.
I grew up a healthy, active, light-hearted girl, wholly devoted to
reading and to rural occupations. The latter, particularly gardening,
served as a counterpoise to the sedentary temptation that would have
proved physically injurious; but laying in, as I daily did, a plentiful
store of romantic adventure or fascinating poetry for rumination when
abroad, my mind was unprofitably occupied at all times, to the exclusion
of better things. On Sundays, indeed, I made it a point of conscience to
abstain from light reading; and, as far as I could, to banish from my
thoughts the week's acquisition of folly. I went to church, and read the
Bible at home with a sermon of Blair's, or some similar writer wholly
destitute of gospel light; and I generally had a short fit of
compunction, on that day, for having been so wholly absorbed in worldly
things during the preceding six; for even then God was striving with me
to bring me unto himself, and many a strong conviction did I forcibly
stifle. The warmth of my natural feelings, the ardor with which I
entered into every thing that interested them, and a sort of energy that
always longed to be doing where any cause that I considered good was to
be promoted--all these would have rendered me a working character, had I
obeyed the gracious call to go into the Lord's vineyard. I say a call,
because though as yet I know nothing whatever of the gospel, I could not
overlook or misunderstand the reiterated injunctions of Scripture to
seek spiritual wisdom, to ask for guidance, and to occupy with the
talent committed to my charge. I knew the promise, "They that seek me
early shall find me," and more than once I trembled under such
scriptures as the latter part of Proverbs 1; but my Sunday resolutions
vanished before the Monday's dawning light, and I rushed again with a
redoubled zest into the seductive regions of my imaginary world. Oh, how
greatly do they err who think that such studies may be safely engaged in
by the young and excitable mind. Some indeed there are so phlegmatic as
to be proof against all the charms of poesy, insensible to the highest
illusions of romance; but their number is small, and the individuals
hard to identify, because a very cold exterior is often like the snow-
capped heights of Etna, overspreading a hoard of volcanic elements of
which the burst and blaze will some day be terrific. Such seem imbued
with the spirit of indifference, because they are abstracted and silent
when the laugh and merry jest go round among their companions; whereas
this abstraction, from outward things results not from deadness of
feeling, but from the intensity with which the mind is brooding over
some phantom known only to itself. Nor do this class of dreamers always
appear devoted to Books: a little reading goes far with them; and the
quality rather than the quantity of their selections is to be looked to.
I have known many parents and teachers argue that it is better to bring
the young acquainted with our standard poets and prose authors of a
worldly cast, while they are yet under careful superintendence, so as to
neutralize what may be unprofitable by judicious remark, and to avert
the dangers attendant on such fascinating introductions at a riper age,
when the restraints of authority are removed. Against this, two reasons
have prevailed with me to exclude from my book-shelves all the furniture
of a worldly library, and to watch against its introduction from other
quarters. One is; the consideration that we are not authorized to
calculate on the continuance of any creature's mortal existence; nor can
we ever know that the being whom we are training for eternity will not
be called into it before such period of life as is here anticipated. In
such a case, how sad to feel that we have needlessly forestalled an evil
day, and even momentarily diverted the young spirit from a sacred path.
The other consideration is this: that as the flesh and the devil will
assuredly do their parts without help from me, and the children of this
world, who are wiser in their generation than the children of light,
will certainly do the same; I may take a lesson of policy from them,
using my best endeavors to preoccupy the field with what is decidedly
good, and humbly hoping that the seed so sown may, through the operation
of the Holy Spirit, take root before the tares are introduced, leaving
little room for them to grow.
Of all the errors into which the world has fallen, none is more fatally
mischievous than the habit of overlooking the personality, the energy,
the power, the watchfulness, the deep cunning of the devil. By a
conventional system, no doubt of his own suggesting, he is never to be
named but in the act of worshipping God, or that of spiritual
instruction. Any other robber and murderer, who was known to be on the
watch to attack our houses, would be the subject of free discourse: his
habits, his haunts, his usual plans, his successful and his baffled
assaults in former cases, would be talked over, and thus a salutary fear
would be kept alive, influencing us to bolt and bar, and watch and ward
with unfailing vigilance, to avert a surprise. But Satan seems to be a
privileged person: we learn, in the nursery, to fancy him a hideous
caricature of human nature, with horns, hoof, and a tail, inspiring
disgust, and a childish fear that wears off as we advance into youth,
leaving an impression rather ludicrous than alarming of the ugly phantom
that, nevertheless, continues identified with him of whom we read in the
Bible. We then perhaps take up Milton, engrafting his poetical
conception upon the original nursery stock, and make a devil half
monster, half archangel, invested with the ugliness of the first and the
sublimity of the second, but still far removed from the scripture
character of that roaring lion who "goeth about seeking whom he may
devour." We do not realize his existence, his presence, his devices;
and so we often do his work from sheer ignorance or inexcusable
thoughtlessness about it.
With me, as I have told you, the Bible did its work and conscience did
hers; but a passion for the unreal proved too strong for both.
Undoubtedly God could have wrought, as afterwards he did, to the casting
down of imaginations and every thing that exalteth itself against
Christ. But how many years of sorrow might have been averted, or how
greatly at least might those sorrows have been mitigated, had not the
inveteracy of a long-cherished disease required such sharp discipline to
bring it under. Pride was the master-sin of my corrupt nature, a pride
that every child of Adam inherits, but which peculiarly beset me. It was
not what usually goes by that name: no one ever accused me of an
approach to haughtiness, neither was I boastful or forward, as far as I
know; but I delighted to model my own character according to the
standard set forth in my foolish books, and by the contemplation of them
I hoped to succeed. I loved to mark in others a mean, ungenerous,
selfish, or malicious trait, and to contrast with it my own high-flown
notions of the opposite qualities. My memory was well stored with fine
sentiments concerning human dignity, honor, virtue, and so forth; and
while secretly applying them--for I was not inclined to make ill-natured
remarks--in contrast to the failings of those around me, I naturally
learned to identify myself with the aforesaid sentiments, and to take it
for granted it was I who shone so brightly at other people's expense.
This is the inevitable consequence of measuring ourselves by ourselves,
as all will do who are not led betimes to the standard appointed of God.
And now, the chambers of imagery being well furnished, I became in
thought the heroine of all the foolish, improbable adventures I met
with. Shakspeare and others having furnished me with dresses and
decorations, every day of my life had its drama. Adventures the most
improbable, situations the most trying, and conversation the most
nonsensical among a visionary acquaintance of my own creating, became
the constant amusement of my mind; or if I took a fancy to any new
companion, that individual was metamorphosed into something equally
unreal, and was soon looked upon in the light, not of sober reality, but
of fanciful extravagance. Of course my estimate alike of persons and of
things was egregiously false; and with a fair portion of common-sense
naturally belonging to me, I became most emphatically a fool. Even when
employed at the pencil, which I dearly loved, I could not trace a figure
on the paper or a landscape on the canvas, that did not presently become
the subject of a separate romance; and it never occurred to me that
there was danger, much less sin, in this. I loved dancing to excess, and
took much delight in all that was brilliant and beautiful; but upon the
whole I preferred the uninterrupted course of my own vain thoughts, and
then admired myself for being of a less dissipated turn than my young
friends. Of course, I am now speaking of the time when, according to the
world's usage, and rather earlier than usual, that is to say, at
sixteen, I was introduced into society, by making my appearance at a
grand election ball; and moreover, publicly receiving the compliments of
the most polished and distinguished of our successful candidates, for
sundry political squibs, said to be full of drollery and point, which
had been traced home to me. Alas for the girl who makes such a debut! We
were now again resident in the town, or rather within the precincts, as
they are called, surrounding that venerable cathedral which had been the
object of my babyish contemplations, and which is endeared to me beyond
any other spot in my native place.
My beloved companion, my brother, had always manifested the most decided
predilection for a military life. Often had he, in earliest childhood,
toddled away from the gate after the fife and drum of a recruiting
party; and often did he march and countermarch me, till I could not
stand for fatigue, with a grenadier's cap, alias a muff, on my head, and
my father's large cane shouldered by way of a firelock. The menaced
invasion had added fuel to his martial fire, and when any other line of
life was pointed out to him, his high spirits would droop, and the
desire of his heart show itself with increasing decision. Our parents
were very anxious to settle him at home for my sake, who seemed unable
to live without him; and I am sure that my influence would have
prevailed even over his long-cherished inclination, so dearly did he
love me, but here the effect of that pernicious reading showed itself
and forged the first link in a long chain of sorrows. I viewed the
matter through the lying medium of romance: glory, fame, a conqueror's
wreath or a hero's grave, with all the vain merit of such a sacrifice as
I must myself make in sending him to the field--these wrought on me to
stifle in my aching bosom the cry of natural affection, and I encouraged
the boy in his choice, and helped him to urge on our parents this
offering up of their only son, the darling of all our hearts, to the
Moloch of war.
Finding that he could not be dissuaded, my father gave a reluctant
consent; and let me here record an instance of generous kindness on the
part of the bishop. He went to London, and by dint of personal,
persevering importunity, obtained in a few days a commission in the
army, at a time when seven hundred applicants, many of them backed by
strong interest, were waiting for the same boon. The suddenness of the
thing was quite stunning; we calculated on a delay of this sore trial;
but it was done, and he was ordered to repair immediately, not to the
dépôt, but to his regiment, then hotly engaged in the Peninsula. The
bishop's kindness did not end here; he carried his generosity further in
other ways, and likewise gave him introductions of great value. I love
to record it of one whose public conduct as a Protestant prelate I am
compelled to lament, but whose private character was most lovely.
Upheld by the intoxicating power of senseless romance, not by confidence
in God, nor even by the reality of the patriotism that I persuaded
myself was at the root of it all, I bore to see that beloved companion
of my life depart for the scene of most bloody conflict. He was not
nearly full grown; a blooming beautiful boy, reared, and up to that time
tenderly guarded under the parental roof, in almost exclusive
companionship with me. There was indeed but one heart between us, and
neither could fancy what it would be to rejoice or to suffer alone. Of
this I had given a proof in the preceding year. He took the measles and
was exceedingly ill, and great precautions were used to preserve me from
the infection; but, unable to brook a separation from him, I baffled
their vigilance, burst into his apartment, and laying my cheek to his,
resisted for a while all efforts to remove me. To my infinite delight I
sickened immediately, and considered it an ample compensation for all
attendant suffering, that I was allowed to sit constantly in the same
room with him.