THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.
A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.
VOL. II.--NOVEMBER, 1858.--NO. XIII.
RAILWAY-ENGINEERING IN THE UNITED STATES.[1]
Though our country can boast of no Watt, Brindley, Smeaton, Rennie,
Telford, Brunel, Stephenson, or Fairbairn, and lacks such
experimenters as Tredgold, Barlow, Hodgkinson, and Clark, yet we
have our Evans and Fulton, our Whistler, Latrobe, Roebling, Haupt,
Ellet, Adams, and Morris,--engineers who yield to none in
professional skill, and whose work will bear comparison with the
best of that of Great Britain or the Continent; and if America does
not show a Thames Tunnel, a Conway or Menai Tubular Bridge, or a
monster steamer, yet she has a railroad-bridge of eight hundred feet
clear span, hung two hundred and fifty feet above one of the wildest
rivers in the world,--locomotive engines climbing the Alleghanies at
an ascent of five hundred feet per mile,--and twenty-five thousand
miles of railroad, employing upwards of five thousand locomotives
and eighty thousand cars, costing over a thousand millions of dollars,
and transporting annually one hundred and thirty millions of
passengers and thirty million tons of freight,--and all this in a
manner peculiarly adapted to our country, both financially and
mechanically.
In England the amount of money bears a high proportion to the amount
of territory; in America the reverse is the case; and the engineers
of the two countries quickly recognized the fact: for we find our
railroads costing from thirty thousand to forty thousand dollars per
mile,--while in England, to surmount much easier natural obstacles,
the cost varies from seventy-five to one hundred thousand dollars
per mile.
The cost of railroad transport will probably never be so low as
carriage by water,--that is, natural water-communication; because
the river or ocean is given to man complete and ready for use,
needing no repairs, and with no interest to pay upon construction
capital. Indeed, it is just beginning to be seen all over the
country that the public have both expected and received too much
accommodation from the companies. Men are perfectly willing to pay
five dollars for riding a hundred miles in a stage-coach; but give
them a nicely warmed, ventilated, cushioned, and furnished car, and
carry them four or five times faster, with double the comfort, and
they expect to pay only half-price,--as a friend of the writer once
remarked, "Why, of course we ought not to pay so much when we a'n't
half so long going,"--as if, when they paid their fare, they not
only bargained for transport from one place to another, but for the
luxury of sitting in a crowded coach a certain number of hours. It
would be hard to show a satisfactory basis for such an establishment
of tolls. We need not wonder at the unprofitableness of many of our
roads when we consider that the relative cost of transport is,--
By Stage, one cent,
By Railroad, two and seven-twelfths;
and the relative charge,--
By Stage, five cents,
By Railroad, three cents;
and the comparative profit, as five less one to three less two and
seven-twelfths, or as _four_ to _five-twelfths_, or as _nine and
six-tenths to one_.
America has, it is true, a grander system of natural
water-communication than any other land except Brazil; but, for all
that, there is really but a small part of the area, either of the
Alleghany coal and iron fields, or of the granaries of the
Mississippi valley, reached even by our matchless rivers. A certain
strip or band of country, bordering the water-courses, is served by
them both as regards export and import; just as much is served
wherever we build a railroad. In fact, whenever we lay a road across
a State, whether it connects the West directly with the East, or
only with some central commercial point in the West, just so often
do we open to market a band of country as long as the road, and
thirty, forty, or fifty miles wide,--the width depending very much
upon the cost of transport over such road; and as the charge is much
less upon a railroad than upon a common road, the distance from the
road from which produce may be brought is much greater with the
former than with the latter. The actual determination of the width
of the band is a simple problem, when the commercial nature of the
country is known.
The people of the great valley have not been slow, where Nature has
denied them the natural, to make for themselves artificial rivers of
iron. These railroads are more completely adapted to the physical
character of the Western States than would be any other mode of
communication. The work of construction is oftentimes very light,
little more being necessary for a railway across the prairies of the
West (generally) than a couple of ditches twenty or thirty feet apart,
the material taken therefrom being thrown into the intermediate space,
thus forming the surface which supports the crossties, the sills or
sleepers, and the rails. Indeed, the double operation of ditching
and embanking is in some cases performed by a single machine,
(a nondescript affair, in appearance half-way between a
threshing-machine and a hundred-and-twenty-pound field-piece,) drawn
by six, eight, or ten pairs of oxen.
It is even probable that in a great many cases the common road would
cost more than the railway in the great central basin of America; as
the rich alluvial soil, when wet in spring or fall, is almost
impassable, and lack of stone and timber prevents the construction
of artificial roads.
The influence of the railroad upon the Western farm-lands is quickly
seen by the following figures, extracted from a lately published
work on railroad construction.
_Table showing the Effect of Railroad Transport upon the Value of
Grain in the Market of Chicago, Illinois_.
WHEAT CORN
Carried by Carried by Carried by Carried by
railroad wagon railroad wagon
At market $49.50 49.50 25.60 25.60
Carried 10 m. 49.25 48.00 24.25 23.26
do. 50 m. 48.75 42.00 24.00 17.25
do. 100 m. 48.00 34.50 23.25 9.75
do. 150 m. 47.25 27.00 22.50 2.25
do. 200 m. 46.50 19.50 21.75 0.00
do. 300 m. 45.00 4.50 20.25 0.00
do. 330 m. 44.55 0.00 19.80 0.00
Thus a ton of corn carried two hundred miles costs by wagon
transport more than it brings at market,--while, moved by
railroad, it is worth $21.75. Also wheat will not bear wagon
transport of 330 miles,--while, moved that distance by railroad
it is worth $44.55 per ton.
The social effect of railroads is seen and felt by those who live in
the neighborhood of large cities. The unhealthy density of
population is prevented, by enabling men to live five, ten, or
fifteen miles away from the city and yet do business therein. The
extent of this diffusion is as the square of the speed of transport.
To illustrate. If a person walks four miles an hour, and is allowed
one hour for passing from his home to his place of business, he can
live four miles from his work; the area, therefore, which may be
lived in is the circle of which the radius is four miles, the
diameter eight miles, and the area 501/4 square miles. If by horse he
can go eight miles an hour, the diameter of the circle becomes
sixteen miles, and the area 201 square miles. Finally, if by
railroad he goes thirty miles an hour, the diameter becomes sixty
miles, and the area 2,827 square miles.
In the case of railroads, as of other labor-saving (and
labor-producing) contrivances, the innovation has been loudly decried;
but though it does render some classes of labor useless, and throw
out of employment some persons, it creates new labor for more than
the old, and gives much more than it takes away.
Twenty years of experience show that the diminished cost of
transport by railroad invariably augments the amount of commerce
transacted, and in a much larger ratio than the reduction of cost. It
is estimated by Dr. Lardner that three hundred thousand horses,
working daily in stages, would be required to perform the
passenger-traffic alone which took place in England during the year
1848.
Regarding the safety of railroad-travelling, though the papers teem
with awful calamities from collisions and other causes, yet so great
is the number of persons who use the new mode of transport, that
travelling by railroad is really about one hundred times safer than
by stage. The mortality upon English roads was for one year observed:
--one person killed for each sixty-five million transported; in
America, for the same time, one in forty-one million.
If we should try to reason from the rate of past railway-growth as
to what the future is to be, we should soon be lost in figures. Thus,
in the United States,--
In 1829 there were 3 miles.
In 1830 41 miles.
In 1840 2167 miles.
In 1850 7355 miles.
In 1856 23,242 miles.
Thus from 1830 to 1840, the rate is as 2167/41 or 53 nearly; from
1840 to 1850, 7355/2167, or 3 nearly; and from 1850 to 1856, 23242/
7355 or 3 nearly; and from 1850 to 1860 we may suppose the rate will
be about 4. The rate is probably now at its permanent maximum,
taking the whole country together,--the increase in New England
having nearly ceased, while west of the Mississippi it has not
reached its average.
Among the larger and more important roads and connected systems in
our country may be named the New York and Erie Railroad,--connecting
the city of New York with Lake Erie at Dunkirk, (and, by the road's
diverging from its western terminus, with "all places West and South,"
as the bills say,)--crossing the Shawangunk Mountains through the
valley of the Neversink, up the Delaware, down the Susquehanna, and
through the rich West of the Empire State.
The Pennsylvania Central Road: from Philadelphia through Lancaster
to Harrisburg, on the Susquehanna, up the Juniata and down the
western slope of the Alleghanies, through rock-cut galleries and
over numberless bridges, reaching at last the bluffs where smoky
Pittsburg sees the Ohio start on its noble course.
The Baltimore and Ohio Railroad: from Baltimore, in Maryland, to
Wheeling and Parkersburg, on the Ohio;--crossing the lowlands to the
Washington Junction, thence up the Patapsco, down the Monocacy, to
the Potomac; up to Harper's Ferry, where the Potomac and the
Shenandoah chafe the rocky base of the romantic little town perched
high above; winding up the North Branch to Cumberland,--the terminus
of the Chesapeake and Ohio Canal, and of the great national turnpike
to the West, for which Wills' Creek opened so grand a gate at the
narrows,--to Piedmont the foot and Altamont the summit, through
Savage Valley and Crabtree Gorge, across the glades, from which the
water flows east to the Chesapeake Bay and west to the Gulf of Mexico;
down Saltlick Creek, and up the slopes of Cheat River and Laurel Hill,
till rivers dwindle to creeks, creeks to rills, and rills lose
themselves on the flanks of mountains which bar the passage of
everything except the railroad; thence, through tunnels of rock and
tunnels of iron, descending Tygart's Valley to the Monongahela, and
thence through a varied but less rugged country to Moundsville,
twelve miles below Wheeling, on the Ohio River.
These are our three great roads where engineering skill has
triumphed over natural obstacles. We have another class of great
lines to which the obstacles were not so much mechanical as financial,
--the physical difficulties being quite secondary. Such are the
trunk lines from the East to the West,--through Buffalo, Erie, and
Cleveland, to Toledo and Detroit, and from Detroit to Chicago, Rock
Island, Burlington, Quincy, and St. Louis; from Pittsburg, Wheeling,
and Parkersburg, on the Ohio, to Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati,
Indianapolis, Louisville, and St. Louis; and from Cleveland, through
Columbus, to Cincinnati, and from Cincinnati to the Northwest.
In progress also may be noticed roads running west from St. Louis,
Hannibal, and Burlington, on the Mississippi, all tending towards
some point in Kansas, from which the great Pacific Road, the
crowning effort of American railway-engineering, may be supposed to
take its departure for California and Oregon.
The chief point of difference between the English and the American
engineer is, that the former defies all opposition from river and
mountain, maintains his line straight and level, fights Nature at
every point, cares neither for height nor depth, rock nor torrent,
builds his matchless roads through the snowy woods of Canada or over
the sandy plains of Egypt with as much unconcern as among the
pleasant fields of Hertford or Surrey, and spans with equal ease the
Thames, the Severn, the St. Lawrence, and the Nile. The words
"fail," "impossible," "can't be done," he knows not; and when all
other means of finding a firm base whereon to build his bridges and
viaducts fail, he puts in a foundation of golden guineas and silver
dollars, which always gives success.
On the other hand, the American engineer, always respectful (though
none the less determined) in the presence of natural obstacles to
his progress, bows politely to the opposing mountain-range, and,
bowing, passes around the base, saying, as he looks back, "You see,
friend, we need have no hard feelings,--the world is large enough
for thee and me." To the broad-sweeping river he gently hints,
"Nearer your source you are not so big, and, as I turned out for the
mountain, why should I not for the river?" till mountain and river,
alike aghast at the bold pigmy, look in silent wonder at the
thundering train which shoulders aside granite hills and tramples
rivers beneath its feet. But if Nature corners him between rocks
heavenward piled on the one hand and roaring torrents on the other,
whether to pass is required a bridge or a tunnel, we find either or
both designed and built in a manner which cannot be bettered. He is
well aware that the directors like rather to see short columns of
figures on their treasurer's books than to read records of great
mechanical triumphs in their engineer's reports.
Of the whole expense of building a railroad, where the country is to
any considerable degree broken, the reduction of the natural surface
to the required form for the road, that is, the earthwork, or,
otherwise, the excavation and embankment, amounts to from thirty to
seventy per cent. of the whole cost. Here, then, is certainly an
important element on which the engineer is to show his ability; let
us look a little at it, even at the risk of being dry.
It is by no means necessary to reduce the natural surface of the
country to a level or horizontal line; if it were so, there would be
an end to all railroads, except on some of the Western prairies.
This was not, however, at first known; indeed, those who were second
to understand the matter denied the possibility of moving a
locomotive even on a level by applying power to the wheels, because,
it was said, the wheels would slip round on the smooth iron rail and
the engine remain at rest. But lo! when the experiment was tried, it
was found that the wheel not only had sufficient bite or adhesion
upon the rail to prevent slipping and give a forward motion to the
engine, but that a number of cars might be attached and also moved.
This point gained, the objectors advanced a step, but again came to
a stand, and said, "If you can move a train on a level, that is all,
--you can't go up hill." But trial proved that easy inclines (called
grades) could be surmounted,--say, rising ten feet for each mile in
length.
The objectors take another step, but again put down their heavy
square-toed foot, and say, "There! aren't you satisfied? you can go
over grades of twenty feet per mile, but no more,--so don't try."
And here English engineers stop,--twenty feet being considered a
pretty stiff grade. Meanwhile, the American engineers Whistler and
Latrobe, the one dealing with the Berkshire mountains in
Massachusetts, the other with the Alleghanies in Virginia, find that
not only are grades of ten and of twenty feet admissible, but, where
Nature requires it, inclines of forty, sixty, eighty, and even one
hundred feet per mile,--it being only remembered, the while, that
just as the steepness of the grade is augmented, the power must be
increased. This discovery, when properly used, is of immense
advantage; but in the hands of those who do not understand the nice
relation which exists between the mechanical and the financial
elements of the question, as governed by the speed and weight of
trains, and by the funds at the company's disposal, is very liable
to be a great injury to the prospects of a road, or even its ruin.
It was urged at one time, that the best road would have the grades
undulating from one end to the other,--so that the momentum acquired
in one descent would carry the train almost over the succeeding
ascent; and that very little steam-power would be needed. This idea
would have place, at least to a certain extent, if the whole
momentum was allowed to accumulate during the descent; but even
supposing there would be no danger from acquiring so great a speed,
a mechanical difficulty was brought to light at once, namely, that
the resistance of the atmosphere to the motion of the train
increased nearly, if not quite, as the square of the speed; so that
after the train on the descent acquired a certain speed, a regular
motion was obtained by the balance of momentum and resistance,
--whence a fall great enough to produce this regular speed would be
advantageous, but no more. On the other hand, the extra power
required to draw the train up the grades much overbalances the gain
by gravity in going down.
Here, then, we have the two extremes: first, spending more money
than the expected traffic will warrant, to cut down hills and fill
up valleys; and second, introducing grades so steep that the amount
of traffic does not authorize the use of engines heavy enough to
work them.
The direction of the traffic, to a certain extent, determines the
rate and direction of the inclines. Thus, the Reading Railroad, from
Philadelphia up the Schuylkill to Reading, and thence to Pottsville,
is employed entirely in the transport of coal from the Lehigh
coal-fields to tide-water in Philadelphia; and it is a very
economically operated road, considering the large amount of ascent
encountered, because the load goes down hill, and the weight of the
train is limited only by the number of empty cars that the engine
can take back.
This adoption of steep inclines may be considered as an American
idea entirely, and to it many of our large roads owe their success.
The Western Railroad of Massachusetts ascends from Springfield to
Pittsfield, for a part of the way, at 83 feet per mile. The New York
and Erie Railroad has grades of 60 feet per mile. The Baltimore and
Ohio climbs the Alleghanies on inclines of 116 feet per mile. The
Virginia Central Road crosses the Blue Ridge by grades of 250 and
295 feet per mile; and the ridge through which the Kingwood Tunnel
is bored, upon the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, was surmounted
temporarily by grades of 500 feet per mile, up which each single car
was drawn by a powerful locomotive.
Another element, of which American engineers have freely availed
themselves, is curvature. More power is required to draw a train of
cars around a curved track than upon a straight line. In England the
radius of curvature is limited to half a mile, or thereabouts. The
English railway-carriage is placed on three axles, all of which are
fixed to the body of the vehicle; the passage of curves, of even a
large diameter, is thus attended by considerable wear and strain;
but in America, the cars, which are much longer than those upon
English roads, are placed upon a pintle or pin at each end, which
pin is borne upon the centre of a four-wheeled truck,--by which
arrangement the wheels may conform to the line of the rails, while
the body of the car is unaffected. This simple contrivance permits
the use of curves which would otherwise be entirely impracticable.
Thus we find curves of one thousand feet radius upon our roads, over
which the trains are run at very considerable speed; while in one
remarkable instance (on the Virginia Central Railroad, before named)
we find the extreme minimum of 234 feet. Such a track does not admit
of high speeds, and its very use implies the existence of natural
obstacles which prevent the acquirement of great velocities.
In fine, the use which the engineer makes of grades and curves, when
the physical nature of the country and the nature and amount of the
traffic expected are known, may be taken as a pretty sure index of
his real professional standing, and sometimes as an index of the
moral man; as when, for example, he steepens his grades to suit the
contractor's ideas of mechanics,--in other words, to save work.
Not less in the construction of bridges and viaducts, than in the
preparation of the road-bed proper, does the American engineering
faculty display itself. Timber, of the best quality, may be found in
almost every part of the country, and nowhere in the world has the
design and building of wooden bridges been carried to such
perfection and such extent as in the United States. We speak here of
structures built by such engineers as Haupt, Adams, and Latrobe,
--and not of those works, wretched alike in design and execution,
which so often become the cause of what are called terrible
catastrophes and lamentable accidents, but which are, in reality,
the just criticisms of natural mechanical laws upon the ignorance of
pretended engineers.
Among the finest specimens of timberwork in America are the Cascade
Bridge upon the New York and Erie Railroad, designed and built by
Mr. Adams, consisting of one immense timber-arch, having natural
abutments in the rocky shores of the creek;--the second edition of
the bridges generally upon the same road, by Mr. McCallum, which
replaced those originally built during the construction of the road,
--these hardly needing to be taken down by other exertion than their
own;--the bridges from one end to the other of the Pennsylvania
Central Road, by Mr. Haupt;--the Baltimore and Ohio "arch-brace"
bridges, by Mr. Latrobe;--and the Genessee "high bridge," (not a
bridge, by the way, but a trestle,) near Portageville, by Mr. Seymour,
which is eight hundred feet long, and carries the road two hundred
and thirty feet above the river, having wooden trestles (post and
brickwork) one hundred and ninety feet high, seventy-five feet wide
at base, and twenty-five feet at top, and carrying above all a
bridge fourteen feet high; containing the timber of two hundred and
fifty acres of land, and sixty tons of iron bolts, costing only
$140,000, and built in the short time of eighteen months. This
structure, if replaced by an earth embankment, would cost half a
million of dollars, and could not be built in less than five years
by the ordinary mode of proceeding.[2]
Further, the interest, for so long a time, on the large amount of
money required to build the embankment, at the high rate of railroad
interest, would nearly, if not quite, suffice to build the wooden
structure.
Again, our wooden bridges of the average span cost about thirty-five
dollars per lineal foot. Let us compare this with the cost of iron
bridges, on the English tubular plan, the spans being the same, and
the piers, therefore, left out of the comparison.
Suppose that a road has in all one mile in length of bridges. Making
due allowance for the difference in value of labor in England and
America, the cost per lineal foot of the iron tubular bridges could
not be less (for the average span of 150 feet) than three hundred
dollars.
5280 feet by $35 is $184,800.00
5280 feet by 300 is $1,584,000.00
The six per cent. interest on the first is $11,088.00
The six per cent. interest on the second is $95,040.00
And the difference is $83,952.00
or nearly enough to rebuild the wooden bridges once in two years;
and ten years is the shortest time that a good wooden bridge should
last.
The reader may wonder why such structures as the bridge over the
Susquehanna at Columbia, which consists of twenty-nine arches, each
two hundred feet span, the whole water-way being a mile long, and
many other bridges spanning large rivers, and having an imposing
appearance, are not referred to in this place. The reason is this:
_large_ bridges are by no means always _great_ bridges; nor do
they require, as some seem to think, skill proportioned to their
length. There are many structures of this kind in America, of twenty,
twenty-five, or thirty spans, where the same mechanical blunders are
repeated over and over again in each span; so that the longer they
are and the more they cost, the worse they are. It does not follow,
because newspapers say, "magnificent bridge," "two million feet of
timber," "eighty or one hundred tons of iron," "cost half a million,"
that there is any merit about either the bridge or its builder; as
one span is, so is the whole; and a bridge fifty feet long, and
costing only a few hundreds, may show more engineering skill than
the largest and most costly viaducts in America. Few bridges require
more knowledge of mechanics and of materials than Mr. Haupt's little
"trussed girders" on the Pennsylvania Central Road,--consisting of a
single piece of timber, trussed with a single rod, under each rail
of the track.
Again, as regards American iron bridges, the same result is
found to a great extent. Thus, Mr. Roebling's Niagara Railroad
Suspension-Bridge cost four hundred thousand dollars, while a
boiler-plate iron bridge upon the tubular system would cost for the
same span about four million dollars, even if it were practicable to
raise a tubular bridge in one piece over Niagara River at the site
of the Suspension Bridge. Strength and durability, _with the utmost
economy_, seem to have been attained by Mr. Wendel Bollman,
superintendent of the road-department of the Baltimore and Ohio
Railroad,--the minute details of construction being so skilfully
arranged, that changes of temperature, oftentimes so fatal to
bridges of metal, have no hurtful effect whatever. And here, again,
is seen the distinctive American feature of adaptation or
accommodation, even in the smallest detail. Mr. Bollman does not get
savage and say, "Messieurs Heat and Cold, I can get iron enough out
of the Alleghanies to resist all the power you can bring against me!"
--but only observes, "Go on, Heat and Cold! I am not going to deal
directly with you, but indirectly, by means of an agent which will
render harmless your most violent efforts!"--or, in other words, he
interposes a short link of iron between the principal members of his
bridge, which absorbs entirely all undue strains.
It is not to be supposed from what has preceded, that the American
engineer does not know how to spend money, because he gets along
with so little, and accomplishes so much; when occasion requires, he
is lavish of his dollars, and sees no longer expense, but only the
object to be accomplished. Witness, for example, the Kingwood Tunnel,
on the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, where for a great distance the
lining or protecting arching inside is of heavy ribs of cast iron,
--making the cost of that mile of road embracing the tunnel about a
million of dollars. Nor will the traveller who observes the
construction of the New York and Erie Railroad up the Delaware Valley,
of the Pennsylvania Central down the west slopes of the Alleghanies,
or of the Baltimore and Ohio down the slopes of Cheat River, think
for a moment that the American engineer grudges money where it is
really needed.
Stone bridges so rarely occur upon the roads of America, that they
hardly need remark. The Starucca Viaduct, by Mr. Adams, upon the New
York and Erie Railroad, and the viaduct over the Patapsco, near the
junction of the Washington branch with the main stem of the
Baltimore and Ohio Railroad, show that our engineers are not at all
behind those of Europe in this branch of engineering. From the civil
let us pass to the mechanical department of railroad engineering.
This latter embraces all the machinery, both fixed and rolling;
locomotives and cars coming under the latter,--and the shop-machines,
lathes, planers, and boring-machines, forging, cutting, punching,
rolling, and shearing engines, pumps and pumping-engines for the
water-stations, turn-tables, and the like, under the former. Of this
branch, little, except the design and working of the locomotive power,
needs to be mentioned as affecting the prosperity of the road.
Machine-shops, engine-houses, and such apparatus, differ but
slightly upon different roads; but the form and dimensions of the
locomotive engines should depend upon the nature of the traffic, and
upon the physical character of the road, and that most intimately,
--so much, indeed, that the adjustment of the grades and curvatures
must determine the power, form, and whole construction of the engine.
This is a fact but little appreciated by the managers of our roads;
when the engineer has completed the road-bed proper, including the
bridging and masonry, he is considered as done with; and as the
succeeding superintendent of machinery is not at that time generally
appointed, the duty of obtaining the necessary locomotive power
devolves upon the president or contractor, or some other person who
knows nothing whatever of the requirements of the road; and as he
generally goes to some particular friend, perhaps even an associate,
he of course takes such a pattern of engine as the latter builds,
--and the consequence is that not one out of fifty of our roads has
steam-power in any way adapted to the duty it is called upon to
perform.
There is no nicer problem connected with the establishment of a
railroad, than, having given the grades, the nature of the traffic,
and the fuel to be used, to obtain therefrom by pure mechanical and
chemical laws the dimensions complete for the locomotives which
shall effect the transport of trains in the most economical manner;
and there is no problem that, until quite lately, has been more
totally neglected.[3]
Of the whole cost of working a railroad about one third is
chargeable to the locomotive department; from which it is plain that
the most proper adaptation is well worth the careful attention of the
engineer. Though it is generally considered that the proper person
to select the locomotive power can be none other than a practical
machinist, and though he would doubtless select the best workmanship,
yet, if not acquainted with the general principles of locomotion, and
aware of the character of the road and of the expected traffic, and
able to judge, (not by so-called experience, but by real knowledge,)
he may get machinery totally unfit for the work required of it.
Indeed, American civil engineers ought to qualify themselves to
equip the roads they build; for none others are so well acquainted
with the road as those who from a thorough knowledge of the matter
have established the grades and the curvatures.
The difference between adaptation and non-adaptation will plainly be
seen by the comparison below. The railway from Boston to Albany may
be divided into four sections, of which the several lengths and
corresponding maximum grades are as tabulated.
Length in miles. Steepest grade
Boston to Worcester, 44 30
Worcester to Springfield, 541/2 50
Springfield to Pittsfield, 52 83
Pittsfield to Albany, 431/2 45
A load of five hundred tons upon a grade of thirty feet per mile
requires of the locomotive a drawing-power of 11,500 lbs.
Upon a 50 feet grade 15,500 lbs.
Upon an 83 feet grade 22,500 lbs.
Upon a 45 feet grade 14,500 lbs.
Now, if the engines are all alike, (as they are very nearly,) and
each is able to exert a drawing-power of five thousand pounds to
move a load of five hundred tons from Boston to Albany, we need as
follows:
B. to W.--11500/5000 or 2 engines.
W. to S.--15500/5000 or 3 engines.
S. to P.--22500/5000 or 5 engines.
P. to A.--14500/5000 or 3 engines.
From which the whole number of miles run by engines for one whole
trip would be,--
B. to W. 44 miles by 2 engines, or 88
W. to S. 541/2 miles by 3 engines, or 1631/2
S. to P. 52 miles by 5 engines, or 260
P. to A. 491/2 miles by 3 engines, or 1481/2
______
And the sum, 660
Now suppose, that, by making the engines for the several divisions
strong in proportion to the resistance encountered upon these
divisions, one engine only is employed upon each; our mileage becomes,
B. to W. 44 by 1 or 44
W. to S. 541/2 by 1 or 541/2
S. to P. 52 by 1 or 52
P. to A. 49 by 1 or 491/2
_____
And the sum, 200 miles.
And the saving of miles run is therefore 660 less 200, or 460; and if
500 tons pass over the road daily, the annual saving of mileage
becomes 460 by 313, or 143,980, or 70 per cent. of the whole. The
actual cost for freight-locomotives per ton, per mile run, during
the year ending Sept. 30, 1855, was 384/1000 of a cent; and the above
143,980 miles saved, multiplied by this fraction, amounts to
$55,288 per annum. The actual expense of working the power will not
of course show the whole 70 per cent. of saving, as heavy and strong
engines cost more at first, and cost more to operate, than lighter
ones; but the figures show the effect of correct adaptation. If we
call the saving 50 per cent. only of the mileage, we have then
(as the locomotive power consumes 30/100 of the whole cost of
operating) 50/100 of 30/100, or 15/100, of the whole cost of working
the road, and this by simply knowing how to adapt the machinery to
the requirement.
So very slight are the points of difference between a good and a bad
engine, that they often escape the eye of those whose business it is
to deal with such works. It is not the brass and steel and bright
metal and elaborate painting that make the really good and
serviceable engine,--but the length, breadth, and depth of its
furnace, the knowledge of proportion shown in its design, and the
mechanical skill exhibited in the fitting of its parts. The
apparently complex portions are really very simple in action, while
the apparently simple parts are those where the greatest knowledge
is required. Any man of ordinary mechanical acquirements can design
and arrange the general form,--the whole mass of cranks, pistons,
connecting-rods, pumps, and the various levers for working the engine;
but to find the correct dimensions of the inner parts of the boiler,
and of the valve-gearing, by which the movements of the steam are
governed, requires a very considerable knowledge of the chemistry of
combustion, of practical geometry, and of the physical properties of
steam. So nice, indeed, is the valve-adjustment of the locomotive,
as depending upon the work it has to do, whether fast or slow, light
or heavy, that a single eighth of an inch too much or too little
will so affect its power as to entirely unfit it for doing its duty
with any degree of economy.
When a single man takes the general charge of five hundred miles of
railroad, upon which the annual pay-roll is a million of dollars,
and which employs over two hundred locomotives and three thousand
cars, earning five million dollars a year,--a road which cost
thirty-three million, has five miles in length of bridges, and over
four hundred buildings,--it is plain that the system of operation
must be somewhat elaborate. And so it is. Indeed, so complete is the
organization and management of _employées_ upon the New York and
Erie Railroad, that the General Superintendent at his office can at
any moment tell within a mile where each car or engine is, what it
is doing, the contents of the car, the consignor and consignee, the
time at which it arrives and leaves each station, (the _actual_ time,
not the time when it _should_ arrive,) and is thus able to correct
all errors almost at the moment of commission, and in reality to
completely control the road.
The great regulator upon long lines of railroad is the electric
telegraph, which connects all parts of the road, and enables one
person to keep, as it were, his eye on the whole road at once.
A single-track railroad, says Mr. McCallum, may be rendered more
safe and efficient by a proper use of the telegraph than a
double-track railroad without,--as the double-tracks commonly
obviate collisions which occur between trains moving in _opposite_
directions, whilst the telegraph may be used effectually in
preventing them between trains moving either in _opposite_
directions or in the _same_ direction; and it is a well-established
fact, deduced from the history of railroads both in Europe and in
this country, that collisions from trains moving in the _same_
direction have proved by far the most fatal and disastrous, and
should be the most carefully guarded against.
From the admirable report of Mr. McCallum, above referred to, we take
the following:--Collisions between fast and slow trains moving in
the same direction are prevented by the following rule: 'The
conductor of a slow train will report himself to the Superintendent
of Division immediately on arrival at a station where, by the
time-table, he should be overtaken by a faster train; and he shall
not leave that station until the fast train passes, without special
orders from the Superintendent of Division.' A slow train, under
such circumstances, may, at the discretion of the Division
Superintendent, be directed to proceed; he, being fully apprised of
the position of the delayed train, can readily form an opinion as to
the propriety of doing so; and thus, while the delayed train is
permitted to run without regard to the slow one, the latter can be
kept entirely out of its way.
"The passing-place for trains is fixed and determined, with orders
positive and defined that neither shall proceed beyond that point
until after the arrival of the other; whereas, in the absence of the
telegraph, conductors are governed by general rules, and their
individual understanding of the same,--which rules are generally to
the effect, that, in case of detention, the train arriving first at
the regular passing-place shall, after waiting a few moments,
_proceed cautiously_ (expecting to meet the other train, which is
generally running as much faster, to make up lost time, as the
cautious train is slower) until they have met and passed; the one
failing to reach the half-way point between stations being required
to back,--a dangerous expedient always,--an example of which
operation was furnished at the disaster on the Camden and Amboy
Railroad near Burlington; the delayed train further being subjected
to the same rule in regard to all other trains of the same class it
may meet, thus pursuing its hazardous and uncertain progress during
the entire trip."
The following table shows the rate and direction of subordination
for a first-class railroad:--
General Superintendent.
Superintendent Roadmaster. Section men.
of road. Roadmaster. Section men.
Roadmaster. Section men.
Foreman of machine-shop. Machinists.
Foreman of blacksmith's shop Blacksmiths.
Superintendent Foreman of carpenter's shop. Carpenters.
of Machinery. Foreman of paint-shop Painters.
Engineers (not on trains). Firemen.
Car-masters. Oilers and cleaners.
Brakemen.
Conductors. Engineers (on trains).
Ticket-collectors.
General passenger-agent. Mail agents.
Station agents. Hackmen.
Switchmen.
Express agents.
Police.
Conductors. Brakemen.
Engineers (on trains).
General freight-agent. Station agents.
Weighers and gaugers.
Yard masters.
Supply agent. Clerks and teamsters furnishing supplies.
Fuel agent. All men employed about wood-sheds.
All subordinates should be accountable to and directed by _their
immediate superiors only_. Each officer must have authority, with
the approval of the general superintendent, to appoint all _employees_
for whose acts he is responsible, and to dismiss any one, when, in
his judgment, the interests of the company demand it.
Fast travelling is one of the most dangerous as well as one of the
most expensive luxuries connected with the railroad system. Few
companies in America have any idea what their express-trains cost
them. Indeed, the proper means of obtaining quick transport are not
at all understood. It is not by forcing the train at an excessively
high speed, but by reducing the number of stops. A train running
four hundred miles, and stopping once in fifty minutes,--each stop,
including coming to rest and starting, being five minutes,--to pass
over the whole distance in eight hours, must run fifty-five miles
per hour; stopping once in twenty minutes, sixty-three miles per hour;
and stopping once in ten minutes, eighty-six miles per hour.
The proportions in which the working expenses are distributed under
the several heads are nearly as follows:--
Management 7
Road-repairs 16
Locomotives 35
Cars 38
Sundries 4
____
In all 100
And the percentage of increase due to fast travelling, to be applied
to the several items of expense, with the resulting increase in
total expense, this:--
Management 7 increased by 0 per cent. is 0.0
Road-repairs 16 do. 27 do. 4.3
Locomotives 35 do. 30 do. 10.5
Cars 38 do. 10 do. 3.8
Sundries 4 do. 0 do. 0.0
____ ____
100 And the whole increase 18.6
The causes of accident beyond the control of passengers are,--
Collision by opposition,
Collision by overtaking,
Derailment by switches misplaced,
Derailment by obstacles on the track,
Breakage of machinery,
Failure of bridges,
Fire,
Explosion.
Those causes which are aggravated by fast travelling are the first,
second, fifth, and sixth. The effects of all are worse at high than
at low velocities.
The proportion of accidents due to each of these causes, taken at
random from one hundred cases on English roads, (American reports do
not detail such information with accuracy,) were,--
Collision 56 56
Breakage of machinery 18 18
Failure of road 14 14
Misplaced switches 5
Obstacles on rails 6
Boiler explosions 1
__ ___
88 100
Eighty-eight per cent. being from those causes which are aggravated
by increase of speed; and if we suppose the amount of aggravation to
augment as the speed, the danger of travelling is eighty-eight per
cent. greater by a fast than by a slow train.
These are the direct evils of high speeds; there are also indirect
evils, which are full as bad.
All trains in motion at the same time, within a certain distance of
the express, must be kept waiting, with steam up, or driven at extra
velocities to keep out of the way.
Where the time-table is so arranged as to call for speed nearly
equal to the full capacity of the engine, it is very obvious that
the risks of failure in "making time" must be much greater than at
reduced rates; and when they do occur, the efforts made to gain the
time must be correspondingly greater and uncertain. A single example
will be sufficient to show this.
A train, whose prescribed rate of speed is thirty miles per hour,
having lost five minutes of time, and being required to gain it in
order to meet and pass an opposing train at a station ten miles
distant, must necessarily increase its speed to forty miles per hour;
and a train, whose prescribed rate of speed is forty miles per hour,
under similar circumstances, must increase its speed to sixty miles
per hour. In the former case it would probably be accomplished,
whilst in the latter it would more probably result in failure,--or,
if successful, it would be so at fearful risk of accident.
However true it may be that many of our large roads are well, some
of them admirably, managed, it is none the less a fact that the
greater portion are directed in a manner far from satisfactory,--many,
indeed, being subjected to the combined influence of ignorance and
recklessness.
Many people wonder at the bad financial state of the American
railroads; the wonder is, to those who understand the way in which
they are managed, that they should be worth anything at all. It is
useless to disguise the fact, says a writer in one of our
railroad-papers, that the great body of our railroad-directors are
entirely unfit for their position. They are, personally, a very
respectable class of men, (Schuylerisms and Tuckermanisms excepted,)
--men who, after having passed through their active business-lives
successfully, and after retirement, are, in the minds of some,
eminently fitted to adorn a director's chair. Never was there a
greater mistake. What is wanted for a railway-director is an active,
clear-headed man, who has not outlived his term of activity. We want
railway-directors who know how to reduce the operating-expenses per
mile, and not men who oppose their bigoted ignorance to everything
like change or improvement, who can see no difference between science
and abstract ideas. It would seem that the only question to be asked
with regard to the fitness of a man for being a director is--Is he
rich and respectable? If he has these qualities, and is pretty
stupid withal, he is in a fair line for election. We tell our
railway-readers, that, if they desire to make their property valuable,
and rescue it from becoming a byword and a reproach, they have got
to elect men of an entirely different stamp,--men of practical
experience, in the best sense of the term, who have intelligence
enough to know and apply all those vital reforms upon which depends
the future success of their undertakings,--the men of the workshop,
the track, and the locomotive. And we shall yet see the more
intelligent of them taking the place, at the directors' board, of
the retired merchants, physicians, and other respectable gentlemen,
who now lend only the names of their respectability to perpetuate a
system of folly that has reduced our railroad-management below
contempt. As at present constituted, our boards are a very showy,
but very useless piece of mechanism. The members attend at meetings
when they feel just like it, and sign their names to documents and
statements which have been prepared for them by others, without much
knowledge of what the contents are; their other duties consisting
chiefly in riding over their own and connecting roads, free of charge.
Why should railway-directors work for nothing for the stockholders?
Ah, Messrs. Stockholders, you little know in reality how fat a
salary your directors make to themselves, by nice little commissions,
by patronizing their favorite builders of locomotives and cars, and
by buying the thousand and one patents that are so urgently
recommended! Do you carry your broken watch to a blacksmith or to a
stone-mason to be mended? Neither, we think. Why, then, do you leave
the management of a work which engineers, machinists, carpenters,
masons, and men of almost every trade, have spent time and care upon
to build, to the respectable merchant, lawyer, or banker, who thinks
the best road that which has the softest cushions and the most
comfortable seats on which to ride?
Railroad-building, remarks a late writer, (Mr. Whiton,) may be
divided into three periods,--the first, the _introductory_, in which
roads were a sort of experimental enterprise, where the men who
labored expected to be paid for their time or money, and were
willing to wait a reasonable time for the expected profit. Second,
the _speculative_ period, when men were possessed with an unhealthy
desire for fortune-making, and, not content to wait the natural
harvest of the seed sown, departed from the sound and honest
principles of construction and management; trying, at first, by all
sorts of pretence and misrepresentation, to conceal, and last by
legislation to counterbalance, the results of their ignorance and of
their insane desires. Railroads were compared, as an investment, to
banks; and it was even supposed that the more they cost the more
they would divide; and tunnels, rock-cuts, and viaducts were then as
much sought after as they are now avoided. Shrewd and intelligent
business-men, who had made for themselves fortunes, embraced these
ridiculous opinions, and seemed at once, upon taking hold of
railroad-enterprises, to lose whatever of common sense they before
might have possessed; and even at the present day these same men
have not the manly honesty to acknowledge their errors, but endeavor
to cover them up with greater.--The third period is that of _reaction_,
which embraces the present time. To a person unacquainted with the
management of railroads, to see a body of men, no one of whom has
ever before had anything to do with mechanical operations, assembled
to decide upon the relative merits of the different plans of bridges
or of locomotives or cars, upon the best means of reducing the
working-expenses of a machine of whose component parts they have not
the slightest idea, of the most complicated and elaborate piece of
mechanism that men have ever designed, might at first seem absurd;
but custom has made it right. It is generally supposed that the
moment a man, be he lawyer, doctor, or merchant, is chosen director
in a railroad enterprise, immediately he becomes possessed of all
knowledge of mechanics, finance, and commerce; but, judging from past
experience, it appears in reality that he leaves behind at such time
whatever common sense he perchance possessed before; otherwise why
does he not follow the same correct business-rules, when managing
the property of others, as when he accumulated his own? A man who
should show as much carelessness and ignorance, when operating for
himself, as railway-directors do when operating for others, would be
considered as a fit subject for an insane asylum.
When railroads are built where they are needed, at the time they are
wanted, in a country able to support them, by permanent investors,
and not by speculators, and are well made by good engineers, and
well managed by competent men, whose interest is really connected
with the success of the enterprise, then they will pay, and be
railroads indeed. But so long as money is obtained on false pretences,
to be played for by State and Wall Street gamblers on the one hand,
and ravenous contractors on the other hand, they will be what they
are,--worthless monuments of extravagance and folly.
"Experience keeps a dear school," says poor Richard, "but fools will
learn in no other."
Let not the reader think for a single moment that we have no
appreciation of the labors of a De Witt Clinton, or of a Livingston,
--that we at all underrate the services of the Eastern capitalists
who render available the public-land grants of the West, whether to
build ship-canals or railroads. We have the highest respect for that
talent without which our Western lands would still be left to the
buffalo and the deer, and the gold and silver of Europe would remain
on the other side of the Atlantic. These capitalists are the
mainsprings of the system; but we should no more apply their energy
and skill to the detailed operation of so mechanical a structure as
a railroad, than we should attach the mainspring of a watch to the
hands directly, without the intermediate connecting chains and wheels.
Not less incompetent for the construction of railways, than are the
directors for the management of the completed roads, are at least
one half of the so-called engineers in America. Obliged to complete
no course of education, to pass no examination, they are at once let
loose upon the country whenever they feel like it, to build what go
by the names of railroads and bridges, but are in reality traps in
which to lose both life and money. Indeed, any man (in the United
States) who has carried a rod or chain is called an engineer; while
the correct definition is, a man who has, first, a thorough knowledge
of mechanics, mathematics, and chemistry,--second, the knowledge
necessary for applying these sciences to the arts,--and last, the
knowledge requisite to the correct adaptation of such arts to the
wants of man, but more than all, that experience which is got only
from continual practice. We have such a class of engineers, and to
them we owe what of fame we have in the engineering world. Second,
comes another grade, men who, commencing as subordinates, without
any preparatory knowledge, but with natural genius, and an intuitive
knowledge of mechanics, need only to have their ideas generalized to
see the bearing of their special knowledge upon the whole, in order
to rank high in the profession. Third, a class who lack both natural
and acquired knowledge, and whose only recommendation is that they
are always for sale to the highest bidder, whether he be president,
director, or contractor; sometimes working nominally for the company,
but really for the contractor,--or in some cases, so debased is this
class of persons, for both contractor and company openly. Of late
years this prostitution of mongrel engineers has had place to an
alarming extent. Let us hope that the old professional pride, and,
better still, a love of truth and honesty for their own sake, may
yet triumph, and place real engineers high above the dead level to
which ignorance and pretence and venality have degraded the
profession.
[Footnote 1: _Handbook of Railroad Construction_, for the Use of
American Engineers. By GEORGE L. VOSE, Civil Engineer. Boston and
Cambridge: James Munroe & Company. 1857.
_Baltimore and Ohio Railroad Reports_, from 1830 to 1850. BENJAMIN
H. LATROBE, Chief Engineer.
_Railways and their Management_, being a Pamphlet written by JAMES
M. WHITON, ESQ., late of the Boston, Concord, and Montreal Railroad.
1856.
_Report of the President, Treasurer, and General Superintendent of
the New York and Erie Railroad Company to the Stockholders_. March,
1856.
_Final Report of_ JOHN A. ROEBLING, _Civil Engineer on the Niagara
Railway Suspension-Bridge_, May, 1855.]
[Footnote 2: Lest these statements should sound extravagant, the
reader will please reckon up the amounts for himself. A bank
twenty-five feet wide on top, eight hundred feet long, and two
hundred and thirty feet high, would contain two million cubic yards
of earth; which, at twenty-five cents per yard, would cost half a
million of dollars, exclusive of a culvert to pass the river, of
sixty, eighty, or one hundred feet span and seven hundred feet long.
Twenty trains per day, of thirty cars each, one car holding two yards,
would be twelve hundred yards per day; two million, divided by
twelve hundred, gives 1,666 days.]
[Footnote 3: The most careless observer has doubtless noticed that
the front part of a locomotive rests upon the centre of a track,
having four small wheels; the back and middle part, he will also
remember, is borne upon large spoke wheels,--which are connected
with the machinery; upon the size of these last depend the power and
speed of the engine. The larger the wheels, the less the power, and
the higher the velocity which may be got; again, the wheel remaining
of the same size, by enlarging the dimensions of the cylinders the
power is increased; and the wheels and cylinders remaining the same,
by enlarging the boiler we can make stronger steam and thus increase
the power. There may be seen upon the road from Boston to
Springfield engines with wheels nearly seven feet in diameter, used
for drawing light express-trains; while upon the roads ascending the
Alleghanies may be seen wheels of only three and a half feet diameter,
which are employed in drawing trains up the steep grades. Increase
of steepness of grades acts upon the locomotive in the same manner
as increase of actual load; as upon a level the natural tendency of
the engine is to stand still, while on an incline the tendency is to
roll backwards down-hill.]
* * * * *
HER GRACE, THE DRUMMER'S DAUGHTER.
[Concluded.]
The girl whose suggestion had brought about this change in her
father's household, introducing anxiety and tears and pain where
these were almost strangers, was not exceeding joyous in view of what
she had done. But she was resolved and calm. It was everything to her,
that night when she lay down to rest, to know that the same roof
that covered her was also spread above the prisoner, and all the
joys of youth passed into forgetfulness as she thought and vowed to
herself concerning the future.
It seemed, perhaps, a state of things involving no consequences,
this sympathy that Elizabeth had shared with the gardener Sandy,
when the prisoner's eyes gazed on them from his window, or turned
towards them while he walked in the garden; but Sandy said to himself,
when she told him that they were to have Laval's place in the prison,
"_It took her_!"--neither did it seem incredible to him when she
assured him that the new house was like home. He honestly believed
that with the child--child he considered her--all things were
possible.
What he had lacked and missed so long that the restoration had a
charm of novelty about it, added to its own excellency, was now the
prisoner's portion. Good manners, kind and courteous voices, greeted
eyes and ears once more. As in the days of Joan Laval, a woman was
now sometimes in attendance on the prisoner. But in not one
particular did Pauline Montier resemble Joan Laval. She called
herself a soldier's wife, and was exact and brave accordingly. She
was thoughtful of her husband's charge, and when she paused in her
efforts for his comfort and content, it was because she had
exhausted the means within her reach, but not her wit in devising.
The effect was soon manifest. The prisoner received this care and
sympathy as he might have received the ministration of angels. The
attendance was almost entirely confined to Montier and his wife, but
now and then Elizabeth also could serve him. She served him with her
heart, with unobtrusive zeal that was exhaustless as the zeal of love.
Unobserved, she watched, as well as waited on him; and oh, how
jealous and impatient of time and authority did she become! Her pity
knew no limit; it beamed from her eyes, spoke through her voice, was
unceasing in activity. He was to her a romance terrible and sweet, a
romance that had more abundant fascination than the world could show
beside.
She went up to his room one morning, carrying his breakfast. Her
father had been ordered to the barracks, and her mother was not well;
the service therefore fell upon her.
The prisoner did not seem to heed her when she entered; at least, he
gave no sign, until she approached him, and even then was not the
first to speak. Going to the window, her eyes followed his to the
garden below.
"It looks well this morning," she said, pleasantly.
"Yes,--but I have seen prettier," he answered.
"Where?" she asked, so quickly that Manuel almost smiled as he
looked at her before he answered. He knew why she spoke thus, and
was not offended by the compassion of her sympathy.
"In my own home, Elizabeth," he answered.
"Aren't you _ever_ going back to it, Sir?" she asked, hurriedly.
He did not reply.
"Won't you ever see it again?" she persisted.
"Banishment,--a prisoner for life," said he, for the first time
explaining to any person his dread sentence.
Elizabeth Montier quietly pondered the words thus spoken.
"If you had your freedom," said she, "would you go back to your own
country?--Your breakfast is cooling, Sir."
Manuel looked at her,--she bore his scrutiny with composure,--then
he came to the table, sat down, and broke his bread, before he
answered this bold speaking.
"Yes," said he, at length. "An honorable man is bound to keep his
honor clean. Mine has been blackened by some false accusation. I owe
it to all who ever believed in me to clear it, if I can."
"And besides, your home is there."
"Yes."
"Oh, if you would only tell me about it! I don't want to know for
anybody else,--only for you. Did you leave many behind, that--that
loved you, Mr. Manuel?"
"Yes," said the prisoner,--but he said no more.
This answer was sufficient; with it Elizabeth walked away from the
table where he sat, and took her stand by the window. By-and-by she
said, speaking low, but with firm accent,--
"I am sorry I asked you anything about it; but I will never speak of
it again. I heard it was for religion; but I know you could not hurt
the Truth. They said you fought against the Church. Then I believe
the Church was wrong. I am not afraid to say it. I want you to
understand. Of course I cannot do anything for you; only I was so in
hopes that I could! You must not be angry with me, Sir, for hoping
that."
The integrity of nature that spoke in these words came to the
hearer's heart with wondrous power and freshness. He looked at
Elizabeth; she was gazing full on him, and lofty was the bearing of
the girl; she had set her own fears and all danger and suspicion at
defiance in these words. Partly he saw and understood, and he
answered,--
"I am not angry. You surprised me. I know you are not curious on
your own account. But you can do nothing for me. I did fight against
the Church, but not any Church that you know. I fought against an
intolerant organization, boundless superstition, shameful idolatry,
because it was making a slave and a criminal of the world.--You can
do nothing for me."
"Nothing?"
"No, dear child, nothing."
"Is it because you think I am a child that you say so?" asked
Elizabeth. "I am not a child. I knew you must be innocent. I will do
anything for you that any one can do. Try me."
The prisoner looked again at the pleader. Truly, she was not a child.
It is not in childhood to be nerved by such courage and such longing
as were in her speech, as that speech was endorsed by her bearing.
His thought toward her seemed to change in this look.
"Can you write, Elizabeth?" asked he.
"I can write," she answered, proudly, standing forward like a young
brave eager for orders. "I can write. My father taught me."
"You might write"--
"A letter?" she asked, breathless.
"Yes." He paused and considered, then continued,--"You might write
to--you might write to my friend, and tell her about the garden,
and how I am now allowed to walk in it,--and about your father and
your mother,--about yourself, too; anything that will make this
place seem pleasant to her. You know the pleasant side of Foray,
--give her that."
"Yes. Is she your mother?"
"No."
"Your sister, Sir?"
"No, Elizabeth. She and I were to have been married."
"Oh, Sir,--and you in Foray,--in a prison,--so far away!"
"Wide apart as death could put us. And shall I let you write to her?
Yes! we will triumph over this death and this grave!"
"By me!--yes,--I will tell her,--it shall surely be by me," said
Elizabeth, in a low voice.
"Then tell her;--you will be able, I know, to think of a great deal
that is comforting. I should not remember it, I'm afraid, if I could
write the letter. Tell her what fine music I have. You can say
something, too, about the garden, as I said. You can speak of the
view from this window. See! it is very fine. You can tell her--yes,
you can tell her now, that I am well, Elizabeth."
"Oh, Sir, can I tell her you are well?"
"Yes,--yes,--say so. Besides, it is true. But you must add that I
have no hope now of our meeting in this world. She can bear it, for
she is strong, like you. She, too, is a soldier's daughter. If you
will say those things, I will tell you her name. That shall be our
secret." In this speech his tone was altogether that of one who
takes the place of a comforter.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, calm and attentive. It was quite impossible
that she should so mistake as to allow the knowledge that was
quickening her perception into pain to appear.
"You must tell her about yourself," said he, again.
"What shall I say? There is nothing about myself to tell, Mr. Manuel."
"Is there not? That would be strange. Tell her what music you like
best to hear your father play. She will understand you by that. Tell
her anything,--she will not call it a trifle. What if she answers
you in the same mood? Should we call it foolish, if she told us her
thoughts, and the events that take place daily in her quiet life?
You can tell her what songs you love to sing. And if she does not
know them, she will learn them, Elizabeth. Tell her how much it
comforts me to hear you sing. Tell her, that, if she has prayed some
light might shine on me from Heaven, her prayer is answered. For it
is true. You serve me like an angel, and I see it all. Tell her she
must love you for my sake,--though there is no need to tell her.--Do
you see?"
"I see."
"Tell her I remember"--There he faltered; he could say no more.
"Yes," said Elizabeth, "I will,--I will tell her everything,
Mr. Manuel,--everything that it would comfort her to hear."
She had written letters now and then. Great pride Montier and
Pauline took in their daughter's skilful use of pen and ink, and
pencil,--for Elizabeth could sketch as well as write. There was
nothing new or strange, therefore, in her addressing this
conversation to a spirit. But, also, there was nothing easy in this
task, though she had the mighty theme of faithful love to dwell upon,
and love's wondrous inspiration to enlighten her labor.
The description to be given of island scenery was such as she had
given more than once, in writing to her distant, unknown relatives.
She need vary only slightly from what she had written before, when
she gave report of her own daily life. She was always eloquent when
talking about the flowers or her father's music.
But this she had undertaken was not a repetition of what she had
done before. With painful anxiety she scrutinized her words, her
thoughts, her feelings. The work was a labor of love; the loving best
know what anguish their labor sometimes costs them. The pain of this
letter was not fairly understood by her who endured it,--it could
not be shared.
Why was she so cautious? why in her caution lurked so much of fear?
Perhaps she might have answered, if questioned by one she trusted,
that further intrusion of herself than should serve as a veil for
the really important information she had to convey would be cruel
intrusion. But there was a very different reason; it had to do with
the sudden revelation made to herself when her father wept at the
prisoner's hard fate,--a revelation that terrified her, and
influenced every succeeding movement; it had to do with the
illumination that came when Manuel told her the sad secret of his
heart,--with that moment when she stood up stronger in love than in
fear, stronger in devotion than in pride, strong for self-sacrifice,
like one who bears a charmed life pierced to the heart, and never so
capable as then.
More than once did Elizabeth rewrite that letter. More than once in
the progress to its completion did she break away from the strange
task, that had evidence of strangeness or of labor, to seek in the
garden, or with her needle, or in the society of father or mother,
deliverance from the trouble that disturbed her. In the toils of
many an argument with her heart and conscience was she caught; but
even through her doubting of the work she had engaged to perform,
she persevered in its continuance, till the letter was ready for
address.
It was surely right to aid, and comfort by such aid, one so
unfortunate as this prisoner; yet her parents must not be implicated
by such transaction. Therefore they must be kept in ignorance, that,
if blame fell anywhere, it might not fall on them. So she satisfied
her conscience;--love will not calculate coldly. But it was less
easy to satisfy her heart.
She had lived but sixteen years; she looked to her youth as to a
protector, while it rebuked her. She leaned upon it, while daily she
took to herself the part of womanhood, its duties and its dignity.
He had called her a child; she called herself a child. She was
careful to let this estimate of herself appear in that letter; and
in what she undertook she was entirely successful; Madeline
Desperiers would be sure to read it as the letter of a child.
When all was done Elizabeth repeated to Manuel the substance of this
letter. He praised it. Jealous scrutiny would find it difficult to
lay its finger on a passage, and condemn the writer for evading the
law concerning the prisoner. When she signed and sealed the letter,
addressed it, and carried it away with her to mail, he was satisfied;
his praise was sweet to the girl who had earned it.
No sooner was this work off her hands than another engaged her. With
a purpose prompted may-be by her angel, certainly by no human word,
and unshared by any human intelligence, Elizabeth began to make a
sketch of the island as seen from Manuel's prison-window. She made
the sketch from memory, correcting it by observation when occasion
called her to the prisoner's room.
At length she brought the sheet of paper, on which this sketch was
drawn, to Manuel, and laid it before him. She did this without any
accompanying word of explanation. In the foreground was the garden,
stretching up the slope of the hill towards the top, where the
fort-wall began; beyond, fort, barracks, settlement,--and still
beyond, the sea. The island of Foray, as thus represented, appeared
like many other views on paper, very pleasing and attractive. Nature
is not responsible for sin and suffering, that she should veil her
glory wherever these may choose to pitch their tent.
The prisoner took the drawing from the table where she had laid it,
and scanned it closely.
"You have left out my house," said he.
"There was no room for it," she answered.
"True!" He understood her. "Do you know whom this is for, Mr. Manuel?
"Whom is it for, Elizabeth?"
"For Madeline; is it a pretty view?"
"Really for her, Elizabeth?"
"Surely. Her eyes shall look on the same view as yours."
"The fort, flag, sea-wall, burial-ground, ocean, barracks, garden;
--it is well done.--Now I will tell you of the place where it will
find her."
He paused a moment ere he began that description. He looked at the
quiet figure of the child for whom he dared recall the past. She
stood with folded hands, so fair, so young, the sight was a
refreshment, and a strange assurance always, to his weary eyes and
weary heart. Never did she look so lovely to him as now when he was
about to speak again to her of his life's love for another.
"It was once a magnificent estate," he began.
"Oh, is she a grand lady?" broke from Elizabeth.
"Yes, a grand lady. You speak well," replied Manuel, with a smile.
"The estate was once ten times as large as this island. Towns and
villages are built over the land now, but the old house stands as it
has stood through ten generations. There she lives. If she stands by
the library-window today, she can see the church built by her
great-grandfather, and the little town of Desperiers, which had in
his day a population of tenantry. She can see the ponds and the park,
and a garden where there are hothouses, and graperies, and
conservatories, and winding walks where you might walk all day and
find something new to surprise and delight you at every turn. There
is a tower that commands a view of fifty miles in one direction. The
old house is full of treasure. She is mistress of all,--the only
representative of a long line of noble men and beautiful women who
have dispensed magnificent hospitality there. The last time I saw her,
Elizabeth, she was standing in the library, a woman so beautiful and
so strong you would not have thought that trouble could approach her.
It came through me. I opened those ancient gates for the black train,
--I, who loved no mortal as I loved her! But I lost her in my fight
for Truth. Shall I complain? Her heart was with mine in that struggle.
Cannot Truth comfort her?"
"She is not lost to you. Sir,--you are not lost to her," cried
Elizabeth, in a voice as strong as breaks sometimes through dying
agony.
"I know," said he, more gently. His thought was not the same as hers;
he was taking refuge in that future which remains to the loving when
this life wholly fails in hope.
"You shall go back to that old place, Sir! You shall--you two--shall
forget all this!"
The prisoner smiled to hear her,--a sad smile, yet a sweet smile too.
He did not despise the comfort she would give him, nor resent her
presumptuous speech.
"As when I dream sometimes," said he, gently,--"or in some pleasant
vision. Yes, that is true, Elizabeth. I have been back, and I shall
go again."
Vehemently now she broke forth. It was love defying the whole
universe, if the whole universe opposed itself to the sovereign
rights of love, the divine strength and the divine courage of love.
--"You shall go on board some vessel, a passenger; you shall see
with your own eyes; your hands shall be free to gather the sweetest
rose that--ever blossomed in the world for you. Mr. Manuel, do not
look so doubting,--do not smile so! Am I not in earnest? Do you not
hear me? As God lives, and as I live, I will do what I promise. Why,
what do you think I am here for?"
Wondering, doubting if he heard aright, Manuel looked at Elizabeth.
The painful, kindly smile, the incredulity, had disappeared from his
face; the power and confidence of her words seemed to persuade him
that at least she purposed seriously and was not uttering mere wishes.
It might be the enthusiasm and generosity of a child that inspired
her speech, but its determination and gravity of utterance demanded
at least a respectful hearing.
"What do you mean, Elizabeth?" he asked.
"I mean that I will go home and explain, and you shall be set free."
He shook his head. "There is nothing to be explained," said he.
"I am not here by mistake. I am very clearly guilty, if there is
guilt in doing what I am accused of. The hearts of those who
condemned me must be changed, and their eyes opened, or I shall
never be set free."
"God chooses humble agents," she said, humbly. "David slew Goliath,
and he was but a lad. He will open the way for me, and by me change
the hearts of those who condemned, and by me open their eyes.
Therefore I shall go,--I shall surely go. Ah, Mr. Manuel, give me
the picture! It is all that you shall have of the island of Foray,
please Almighty God, when these doors are all open for you, and your
hands are free, Sir, and we tell you to come, for the vessel is
waiting!"
She went out from the room while these words took solemn possession
of the place. She locked the door behind her;--no requirement of law
was to be neglected or withstood; she made him a prisoner whom she
would set free;--and from this interview she went away, not to
solitude, and the formation of secret plans, but, as became the
daughter of Adolphus and Pauline Montier, she went quietly, with that
repose of manner which distinguished her through almost every event,
back to her mother's chamber.
There stood Adolphus Montier, drummer to the regiment, jailer to the
prisoner, father of Elizabeth,--loving man, whichever way you looked
at him. He had his French horn in his hands, and was about to raise
it to his lips; in a moment more a blast would have rung through the
house, for Adolphus was in one of his tempestuously happy moods.
But his daughter's entrance arrested his purpose. Say, rather, the
expression of her face performed that feat. He saw, likewise, the
paper which she carried, the pencilled sketch,--and he followed her
with his eyes when she crossed the room and placed it on the mantel
under the engraving of the city of Fatherland. This act took the
parents to the fireplace, for discussion and criticism of their
daughter's work, and of the two homes now brought into contrasted
connection.
"But you have left out the prison," was the comment of Adolphus.
"I am glad of that," said Pauline.
"But it is part of the island."
"It ought to be left out, though," maintained his wife.
"Where would you keep _him_, then?" asked Adolphus, a broad smile
spreading over his face. He knew well enough what the answer would be.
"I'd set him adrift," was Pauline's reply, spoken without the least
pretence of caution.
"Hush!" said her husband; but that was because he was the jailer. He
laughed outright close on this admonition, and asked Elizabeth if
she expected him to make a frame for this picture to hang opposite
Chalons.
"No," she answered, "I am going to take it with me."
"Where now?" asked the parents in one breath.
"Oh, home,--Chalons."
This reply seemed to merit some consideration, by the way the eyes
of Adolphus and Pauline regarded their child. They did not
understand her;--her meaning was deeper than her utterance.
"To Chalons?" repeated Adolphus, quietly.
"Home?" said Pauline;--it was almost the sweetest word she knew,
almost the easiest of utterance.
"You have promised me a hundred times that I should go. Did you mean
it? May I go? You wish me to see the old place and the old people.
But the old place is changing, and the old people are dying. Soon,
if I go to Chalons, it will not be your Chalons I shall see."
Dumb with wonder, Adolphus and Pauline looked at one another. To be
sure, they had done their best in order to excite in the breast of
Elizabeth such love of country as was worthy of their child, and
such curiosity about locality as would constrain her to cherish some
reverent regard for the place of their birth, the home of their
youthful love; but _never_ had they imagined the possibility of her
projecting a pilgrimage in that direction, except under their
guidance. They could hardly imagine it now. Often they had talked
over every step of that journey they would one day make together;
the progress was as familiar to Elizabeth as it could be made by the
description of another; but that they had succeeded in so awaking
the feeling of their child, that she should seriously propose making
the pilgrimage alone, passed their comprehension.
"You know," said Adolphus, with a shrug, "your father is an officer,
and he cannot now leave his post. Are you going to take your mother
along with you?"
He said these words at a venture, not certain of his ground. He was
not kept in suspense long.
"My mother must not leave you," answered Elizabeth, greatly agitated,
and yet speaking strongly, as one whose will exceeded her emotion.
"Then you go alone?" asked Adolphus, shortly. He could not
understand her, and was thoroughly vexed that he could not;
mysteries were not for him. "What is the matter? is it the prison?
Wife!" he turned to Pauline, but, as he looked at her, his
perplexity seemed to increase, as did his impatience also.
Wife and daughter evidently were not in league against him; she, the
mother of his child, shared his anxiety and doubt. Tears were in her
eyes, and he had only been impatient!--she had passed so quickly to
an apprehension that was grievous, Adolphus stood the image of dismay.
Those three, so entirely one, seemed to have been thrust apart by a
resistless evil Fate who had some malignant purpose to serve.
Not now for the first time did Pauline see that the young face
before her was pale, and grave with a gravity once unknown to it. It
might be, that, for the first time, she was asking herself outright
if this prison-life was to serve Elizabeth as it had served the wife
of Laval,--but not for the first time was she now visited by a
foreboding that pointed to this fear.
"It is the prison," said she.
"Elizabeth, is it so? Is this house going to be the death of you?"
asked Montier, abruptly,--referring the point with stern authority,
to the last person who would be likely to acknowledge the danger of
which he spoke.
"If you think _so_, papa and mamma, I must give up the voyage, just
to prove that you are mistaken," answered she.
"Look at her, Adolphus!" said Pauline; "remember what she was a year
ago! She's not the same now. I can see it. Strange if I could not!
Young people are different from old. I thought this place would
never seem like home to me, but I found out my mistake."
"I knew you would," said Adolphus, quickly.
"Of course it is the place for me, on the prisoner's account. I hate
the prison just the same, though. But if I was mistaken, so was
Elizabeth. She thought it would seem like home to her;--it never has;
it never will. But I do not think there is a chance of our being
kept here long by poor Mr. Manuel. Adolphus, I am for Elizabeth's
going home."
"Colonel Farel and his lady are getting ready to go in the next
vessel," said Adolphus, as if in a sleep, or as though his power of
speech opposed and defied him in its activity,--so bewildered did he
look at his wife and daughter.
"Oh, then, may I go? It is only out and back. I will not be long away.
Then we shall all go some day together, and never, never return."
"That is my wish," said Pauline; "isn't it yours, Adolphus?"
"Yes!" And this answer was given by a man who was neither asleep nor
bewildered, but by one who had put himself out of sight, and was
thinking only of others.
Adolphus had not been as blind as Pauline must have supposed him when
she bade him remember what their daughter was a year ago. He, too,
had seen that the bloom was fading from her face, and by many a
device he had striven to divert the gravity, descending upon her,
from taking possession of her. Pauline's words revived every fear,
every anxiety he had felt for their child. Generous as impetuous, he
saw now only one thing to be done, one result to be accomplished.
Elizabeth must sail in the next vessel, and he was not the man to
know another quiet moment till that vessel hove in sight. That was
his way; why hesitate a twelvemonth, when a moment sufficed for a
decision, and the good and happiness of others were concerned in the
deciding? And it was not merely his way, as has been made
sufficiently apparent,--it was his wife's way, and his daughter's.
Yet fain would Pauline have entered now upon a discussion of what
remained to be done; she could have gone on from this point at which
they suddenly found themselves standing so wistfully; she would have
made, in advance, every needful preparation and arrangement for
Elizabeth, up to the time of her return. But Adolphus was in no mood
for this. He must go and see Colonel Farel, he said, by way of excuse,
--and he must see the doctor. It would have been a dangerous
experiment, had Pauline persisted in the endeavor to discover how
much he could endure. Montier felt that he was not fit for family
deliberation now, and wisely made his escape from it.
"I know," said Pauline, when she and her child were left together,
"I know why it is the best thing in the world for you to go on this
voyage,--but--I do not know how you came by the sudden wish to go,
--or if it is sudden, Elizabeth."
No demand,--no confidence required,--not a request, even, to enter
into any secret counsel with her child. But that child saw the
relation in which she stood to the loving woman by her side, whose
eyes were gazing into her eyes, whose love was seeking to fathom her
heart, and she answered humbly, and with confidence,--
"I am going to your old home, my mother,--and to see if it is true
that Manuel is to die here in this abhorred prison. It is my secret,
--it is my errand. I trust you, for you love me; oh, love me, my
mother, and trust me! I dare not live, I cannot endure my freedom,
while he is wearing out his life in a prison. Am I ill? Has it worn
me to see him, this year past, dying by inches? I am glad of it,--I
am proud of it! Now I will see if there is any pity or justice among
rulers."
Pauline Montier was confounded by this outbreak. She had expected no
such word as this she heard. It terrified her, for she was a loving
woman, and she thought she heard in the voice of her daughter the
voice of a woman who loved,--the impassioned, daring voice of one
whom love incited to action such as sober reason never would attempt.
She repented already the words she had spoken to her husband. She
had no power then, could not prevail then, or the misgivings which
sent Adolphus weeping into the wood, and not in search of doctor or
colonel, would have drawn him back to her side, and against their
love and their authority this girl had not prevailed. A question
trembled on her lips. But how should she ask it of her child? She
could not ask it of her child,--but as woman of woman. The simplest
and the shortest speech was best; and far away were curiosity and
authority.
"Elizabeth, do you love this prisoner?"
The answer did not linger.
"He is dying,--a noble man perishing unrighteously! Oh, my mother, in
that land there is a lady waiting to know why the arm of the Lord so
long delays! He shall not die a prisoner! She loves him,--_he loves
her_. I will give them to each other. Only keep him alive till I come."
"My child!"
"Why do you weep?"--but Elizabeth, so speaking, bowed to the floor
by her mother's side, and wept with her, and the tender arms
maternal clasped her close; and the girl did not see when her
mother's eyes looked upward, nor did she hear when her mother's
voice said, with a saint's entreaty, and a lover's faith, "O Saviour!"
That night Elizabeth went for the tray which her father had left in
the prisoner's room when he carried him his supper. No danger that
Adolphus would stand to gossip now with any man, for a moment. His
heart was sore at the prospect of his daughter's departure, at the
prospect of actual separation, every feature of which state of being
he distinctly anticipated; and yet he would have scorned himself,
had he thrown in the way anything like the shadow of an impediment
to her departure from Foray. So far from that, he was already doing
everything, in act and thought, by which that going might be made
more certain and immediate.
Elizabeth found the prisoner sitting before his untasted supper. She
went up the room at a rapid pace.
"Strength does not come of fasting," said she, as she glanced at the
table.
"Appetite does not come of torpor," was the reply, spoken almost as
quickly; he seemed to be echoing her tone. She looked at him
surprised; so much energy of speech she had not expected of him, and
never before had heard.
"I must wait for the tray," said she; and she took her usual stand
by the window. "Eat something to please my mother,--she will be so
troubled."
At this he took his spoon and tasted the porridge, which had grown
cold in the dish before him.
Now, as she stood there waiting, a curious state of mind was that
through which Elizabeth passed. When he answered her greeting, it
was with less apparent weariness, less exhibition of sad
indifference to all things, than usual,--with some animation, indeed;
not at all as one speaks who is dead to every hope. And with this
utterance, which on any other day would have lightened the burden
Elizabeth bore, a new darkening of the spirit of heaviness seemed to
fall upon her. She knew that by her he must have come to--whatever
hopefulness he had; and she would give him freedom that she might
see his face no more!
"There is no crucifixion without pain." It is never with a light
heart that man or woman attends his or her own immolation. There is
awful terror in the triumphs of the divine human nature. If, indeed,
_Suttee_ is noiseless, superstition and force have stifled the
voice of the widow.
And therefore the words which Elizabeth only by an effort restrained,
as she crossed the prison-threshold, could come from her now by
effort only. If she had found him drooping, despairing, utterly cast
down,--no hinderance then to a full utterance of the heroic purpose
which death alone could dampen or defeat! But now some strength
seemed in himself--and liberty would give him to others, of whom he
could not think as quietly as he could think of her. Could she, then,
better afford to weep than to rejoice with him?
Before he had pushed away the table and its contents, before time
constrained her to speak, she said,--
"I promised you something, Mr. Manuel. You remember what. I may go
tomorrow. So tell me,--how shall I serve you best? Tell me now;
something may happen; and I wish my work to be clear."
The prisoner started from the table at these words. He hastily
approached the quiet speaker, his face brightened not more by hope
than by wondering admiration.
"What do you mean?--tomorrow? I am waiting, Elizabeth."
"Colonel Farel and his lady are going home. He has leave of absence.
I have spoken to my father and mother. I have told my mother
everything. She knows that I am going to visit your relations as
well as hers. Tell me how I shall find them. Tell me what I must do.
You shall have freedom, if woman can ask or man can give it."
She had advanced a single step towards him, in thus speaking. She
stood now with hands folded, quiet, waiting his answer.
"Noble girl!" he began; then he paused. Full of reverence was his
gaze.
"Do not praise,--direct me," she said, hurriedly. "I know what I
shall say. But to whom shall I say it?--Yes, I will find her whom
you love. I will carry balm across the sea to heal her breaking heart.
_I_ will join together whom,"--here for an instant she hesitated,
then began again,--"whom God has joined, whom man dared separate.
Direct me, Sir."
And there she stood, waiting. Who sighing beholds her? No
pusillanimity there; but on the very heights of danger, which none
other than the bravest could have gained, dauntless and safe, let her
stand and fight her battle. So strong, yet so defenceless, so
conspicuous for purpose and position there, the arrows rain upon her,
--yet not one is poisoned to the power of hurting her sacred life.
Listen, Elizabeth, while he speaks of _her_! Deeply can his voice
grave every word of direction; not one wilt thou lose! Chosen of the
few from among the many called, go, woman to love, and hero to endure,
--yea, if thou must, as gentle and dauntless martyr, to die before
the stronghold thou wouldst summon to surrender!
Later in the day the prisoner heard Elizabeth singing, as not rarely
he heard her,--for, knowing that the sound of her voice was pleasant
to him, and that its cheerfulness cheered him, she had the habit of
frequenting with her songs that part of the house in which his room
was. The prisoner heard her singing later in the day, and thanked
her for the grace, but did not catch the words whose sound swept
past him. It was an ancient hymn she sang,--one that she often sang;
and that she sang it this day of all days, I copy here the first
verse:--
"Sing, my tongue, the glorious battle,
With completed victory rife,
And above the Cross's trophy
Tell the triumph of the strife,
How the world's Redeemer conquered
_By surrendering of his life_."
* * * * *
The Drummer's Daughter has crossed the sea,--has landed on the
shores of Fatherland. She has even parted from her fellow-voyagers
at the station whence the coach shall take her on to Chalons, that
venerable town and well-beloved, where the lives whence her own
sprung were born and blended. She is in the land of wonders, of
meadows, vineyards, gardens, lakes, and rivers, and of cattle
feeding on a thousand hills,--among the graves of millions of men,
among the works of heroes and of martyrs, in the land of mighty towns,
of palaces, of masters, and of slaves, where a great king is
building the great palace which shall witness, centuries hence, the
dire humiliation of his race.
Of all the crowds and companies that hurry to and fro from one end
of the land to the other, Elizabeth seeks only two persons. It is
not to her father's native town that she is drawn by the superior
attraction. She passes Chalons in the moonlight. When the coach
stops at the inn-door for a change of horses, she keeps her place,
--she acts not with the quicker beating of her heart. She looks about
her as they drive through the silent streets,--out on the moonlit
landscape when they have passed the borders of the town; she sees
the church-towers, and the old buildings, and the river whose
windings she has heard described so often by the voices that once
talked of love all along its borders. Chalons is dear to her; she
looks back with tearful longing when the driver hurries on his
horses as they pass into the open country. But she has no right to
wait on her own pleasure,--to verify her parents' calculations when
they talk together, by the fireside in Foray, of her journeying
through Fatherland.
No,--each sunrise appoints him one more day of imprisonment and exile!
Every sunset leaves him to one more night of cruel dreams which
morning shall deride! And while this can be said, what has Chalons,
or any other spot on earth, that it should lure her into rest?
The higher powers sometimes convey their messages and do their work
after a prosaic fashion. It was no uncommon thing for a young girl
in neat raiment to stand waiting admittance before the door of the
Château Desperiers. Hospitality was called upon in those days not so
often, perhaps, as benevolence; and for its charity the chateau had
a reputation far and wide; the expectation of the poor perished only
in fruition there.
Into the library of this ancient mansion Elizabeth Montier was
ushered by the old gray servant. There she might wait the return of
his mistress; at what hour the return should be anticipated he could
not undertake to say. His counsel to the stranger was, that she had
better return at a later hour; but when Elizabeth said it was
impossible, that she had come from a great distance to see the lady
of the place, and must await her return _there_, he led her without
further parley to the library, and left her.
And from its lofty windows, at her leisure, she might now look down
upon the prospect Prisoner Manuel had described. When she crossed
the threshold of that room, she knew where she was; left alone, she
looked around her. There he once had stood; there he had parted from
Madeline Desperiers; from that last interview he had gone forth to
long captivity! She stood by the lofty, narrow windows, to see what
he had seen when standing before them,--that town the ancient
Desperiers laid out for his tenants in the ancient days,--the church,
the pond, the park,--the garden, so vast, and so astonishing for
beauty, the gazer scarce believed her eyes. And she remembered beds
of flowers under a prison-wall, and who that day looked on them.
He had said that the mistress of this grand domain was a soldier's
daughter. He had said that she was a grand lady. A soldier's
daughter had come here to hold an interview with her! A drummer's
daughter, a girl from out the barracks and the prison of Foray, was
here!--A strange light, so strange that it seemed not natural, broke
from these reflections of Elizabeth, and illuminated the library. It
fell on the great bookcases that were filled from floor to ceiling
with books which cost a fortune, on the great easy-chairs black with
age, on picture and on bust, on the old writing-stand, the more
modern centre-table piled with newspapers and pamphlets, on the
curious clock that told the hours with a "silverey voice." It fell,
too, on a portrait that did not often greet the gaze even of such as
found access into that room,--a portrait of him for whose sake she
was here, having compassed land and sea.
When she first saw the picture, she was sitting in one of the chairs
beside the table,--her eyes had taken cognizance of everything but
that,--and of that became aware so strangely that she could not at
first persuade herself of the nature of the mystery that took such
hold of her and possessed her so wholly. A proud and glorious vision,
it rose up before her, emerging from the shadows of the alcove where
it stood. This was not Manuel, not the wan prisoner of Foray,--but
her heart needed none to tell her it was the hero who had loved the
lady of this château in the splendor of his manhood. She saw it, and
saw nothing more,--the prescience of her soul was satisfied. As he
was, she beheld him now;--was it safe for her to sit there gazing at
that likeness?
The old servant, who now and then walked up and down the hall,
perceiving that the stranger was sitting quiet, with her eyes
generally in one direction, was satisfied that she should prove so
patient with this long delay in his mistress's return. He knew not
what occupied her eyes or thoughts,--fancied, may-be, that she was
numbering the books of the library, or engaged in some equally
diverting occupation.
At last came Madeline.
Learning from the servant in the hall that a young person waited her
return, and had waited half the day, with a patience that was
evidently proof against time, the lady proceeded at once to the
library.
Elizabeth, who heard the arrival, and the approach, arose and stood,
waiting the meeting. In her hand she held a paper scroll, the
drawing of Foray, which she had brought to aid her in this interview.
It was, indeed, a royal person upon whom the eyes of the Drummer's
Daughter fell,--a person whose dignity and grace held at a distance
even those whom they attracted. Nothing short of reverence could
have dictated the movement of any noble mind that had to do with her.
She was the Sister of Mercy, whom the whole country round about knew
for the most righteous Desperiers of them all. The noble line was
ending nobly in her pure and lofty and most gracious womanhood. She
was the star of society, if the "sweet influences" might only be
bound,--no comet, no fiery splendor of intellect or passion, but a
pure light that would still shine through all paling, and enter with
its own distinct ray into the last absorption.
She approached to meet her guest with a kind and frank expression of
regret that she should have been kept waiting so long.
Beholding her, remembering him, strong even through her sense of
impotence, Elizabeth unrolled the pencilling of Foray. The moment
during which she was thus occupied passed in silence; then she
looked up and spoke, with the coldness in which her embarrassment and
emotion sought disguise.
"I came here with a message,--on an errand," said she; "and I have
come so far, that, finding myself really in this house, I did not
like to leave it again till I had seen the lady I sought. I knew
that it would give you pain, if you could know the whole."
"Tell me the whole," was the reply, spoken with evident and
encouraging approval of the stranger's mode of address; and the lady
sat down in the great chair on one side of the table. "Be seated;
tell me your wish."
"It is to serve you," said Elizabeth, a little proudly. "I have not
come to ask favor for myself or mine. I came across the sea for you
and him."
She spoke now with vehemence, and as she spoke glanced at the
portrait in the alcove. Quickly the eyes of Madeline Desperiers
followed hers. How had this stranger managed to discover what was so
securely hidden from the observation of ordinary eyes? She did not
even suspect the light which had illumined that dim recess, and made
it brighter to the gazer than the bright garden even.
"This is Foray," said Elizabeth, exposing now the token that would
instantly make all plain and equal between them. "I should have sent
it to you, Madam, when I wrote; but there was more to be done,--and
so I came. I am Elizabeth Montier. I am a soldier's daughter; so, he
said, are you."
The lady's answer was not at first by speech. She arose, swiftly as
light moves she moved, and brought her guest up to the window of the
shadowy room. Well she scanned the face of Elizabeth.
"Truth," she murmured. "It was you that wrote. You are Truth. You
speak it. Blessings on you! Blessings descend upon you from all the
saints and heroes who have moved and suffered here! Do you come from
him,--Stephen Cordier?"
How proudly and how tenderly she spoke that name! To hear her soothed
the heart of Elizabeth Montier,--soothed her, and made her strong.
"Is that his name?" she asked, pointing to the portrait. "We call
him Manuel." She paused a moment, but not for an answer. Before
Madeline could speak, she went on,--
"If you can hear me, I will tell you of him, and why I am here."
"Tell me all. I can bear to hear anything that you can endure to tell.
You are his friend. I claim you for mine, too. You came to find me.
Speak."
This was the utterance of a calm self-knowledge. By what she had
endured, the woman knew what she could yet endure.
Without pause Elizabeth now spoke. Without interruption the lady
listened,--listened while this young stranger told the life of the
past months, in which he was concerned,--of the garden where she
worked and he walked,--of her father, the musician,--of their old
home near the barracks, and the new home in the prison,--of the day
when he first told her of his country and his love,--how for him she
had written the letter, repeating oftentimes in the narration the
very words he had used,--of his gestures, his looks;--she was
thoughtful of all.
How strangely intelligent in all her communication! Ah, if it was
eager love that hearkened, it was thoughtful love that spoke!
The story, as she told it, was brief; but the voice never faltered
in telling the tale, and the eyes of Elizabeth, with constant
scrutiny, were upon her listener. She was satisfied, when, having
said all, she paused, and had now no further fear for her own
heart's integrity or of the listener's constancy.
A long silence followed her speech. At length said Mlle. Desperiers,--
"I see it all. You are God's messenger from that other world. I have
believed too little. You are truer and wiser than I. Lead me, dear
child! Shall we go to Foray? I will sail with you tomorrow, if you
say so. Better a prison, with him, than all this freedom, so alone."
"He must be set free, first," said Elizabeth. The manner of her
speaking, her look as well as her tone, might almost have been taken
for a rebuke. Madeline might pardon that.
"I have said so," she answered, mildly. "I have tried to move heaven
and earth. I was but a feeble woman. Still it is a consolation to
know that I have done everything my wit or my love could devise, and
not stopped at what looked like extravagance or indelicacy. What
further, Elizabeth? The man who is now in power, and through whom
alone the king can be reached, will grant him liberty"--
"_He will_?"
"At a price that would take away its value from him."
"What is that price?"
"My life. He wants me for his wife,--a purchase, you perceive."
Elizabeth Montier did not heed the scorn and bitterness of these
words, as Mlle. Desperiers spoke them. The blood in her veins seemed
turning to fire,--it swept through her body and brain like the flood
of a volcano,--and she thought, she who knew the prisoner's life,
and all that captivity was to him,--
"Coward and selfish, that will not instantly give up her life for his!"
A very dismal satisfaction, that the woman he loved best should so
prove unworthy of him! The horror of that satisfaction, its
humiliation and its pain, sufficiently attested to the poor girl who
endured it that her soul's integrity remained secure. As if for a
personal conflict with an enemy, she started to her feet.
"It must not be!" she exclaimed.
And, far from suspecting to whom the words were addressed, to what
the speaker closed her eyes, rebuking her pure heart, the lady
answered,--
"Then, unless he outlives this tyranny of power, he will die a
prisoner, Elizabeth. I will go with you to him. I can die with him.
God, certainly, does not require me to stay here longer, for He has
sent you to me."
"He has sent me for _him!_" exclaimed Elizabeth. "I am here to make
him free." She did not add, "If I were you, my life for his!" but
again, in spite of her, she thought it, and a terrible strength of
pride possessed her at that moment.
"Speak on," was the eager, tremulous response. "You are here to set
him free, God knows; but at least I believe wholly in you. What will
you do, Elizabeth?"
"Go to the officer tomorrow. Tell him everything that is to be told.
If he is human"--
"That is what I doubt. He knows what petitions I presented and caused
to be presented to his predecessor."
"You?"
"I?--who but I? Do you think I have been idle, or that I have left
anything undone that I could think to do? Child, the sun has never
risen on me since I saw him last! They say I am dead to the world.
But they who say it know not how terribly true their words are.
Shall I tell _you_ how many times, when the weary days have come to
an end, I have said, in the morning I would make that loathsome
bargain with General Saterges, and in the morning God's grace, as I
believe, has alone prevented me? Do you think that it is because I
love myself better than him, that I have not bought his freedom at
this price? It is because I know him,--because I am sure that
liberty at such price would be worthless to him. I cannot torture
him with the belief that I am unfaithful, nor suffer him to look on
me as a sacrifice. We can endure what God allows. Trust me. You have
done so bravely, you are yourself so true, believe in me. I am
really no coward. I am not a selfish woman."
"Forgive me," said Elizabeth, most humbly. Her pride had left her
defenceless in its flight. If there was not now the true, brave,
generous woman to lift and proclaim herself from the humiliation of
her mistake, alas for her!
The woman was there,--ready and true,--was there. Humbled, yet
resolute, she spoke,--and in her speaking was the triumph of a
spirit that should never again surrender its stronghold of peace.
"You must direct me, Madam. Show me how I shall find this minister.
I will speak then as God's servants spoke of old,--trusting in Him.
If the man will not hear me, then I will conduct you to Foray. You
shall see Mr. Manuel. You can live--with us. My mother's heart is
kind, and my father is a soldier; we shall all love to serve you.
Let us take courage! They cannot prevent us here. You could endure
exile for him?"
"Exile? Ah, how do you shame me! All these years I might have"--
"No," said Elizabeth, hurriedly. "Never till now. You could not. The
way was not open till this day. Love, too must have its servants. I
am yours and his. I trust in God. In His time he has opened His own
way."
By Mlle. Desperiers's management, Elizabeth without difficulty
obtained audience, the next day, of the chief ministerial power of
the realm.
I shall attempt no pictorial description of that interview. The men
of authority know best how often women come into their presence,
burdened with prayers for the pardon of those who have justly, or
unjustly, fallen under the displeasure of the powers that be. From
high station and low Love draws its noblest and most courageous
witnesses, and the ears of the officials are not always deaf.
The case of Stephen Cordier was of sufficient importance to come
under discussion before the governing power as often as that power
underwent a change in person or policy. Twice petitions in his
behalf had been presented,--once by the lady of Château Desperiers
in person,--petitions that were in themselves the proudest praise
of him, the greatest honor that could be conferred upon him. They
had fallen powerless to the ground.
The old man, statesman and soldier, now holding office, had, before
he came to this position, knowing the interest and the kind of
interest taken by Madeline Desperiers in the petitions presented,
volunteered his name to the last document, mentioning, though with
due deference to the fashion of the world, the price at which it was
to be procured,--her hand. His name had just the weight that would
have made the other more honorable names successful in their pleading.
What sort of success was to be expected, now that he occupied the
passage to royalty? Elizabeth Montier crossed the threshold of the
apartment where the old warrior and statesman sat amongst books and
papers, without dismay ruling by pen and voice, as confident in
himself, when he took up these weapons, as in the former time of
sword and powder.
His practice was to receive all petitioners,--all should have
audience. But he made short work of business. Never were affairs
dispatched with more celerity, seldom with less conscience. At a
glance his keen eye read, to his own satisfaction, the state of
every case,--and he came to his own conclusions. His requirement was,
that the petitioner should be self-possessed and brief,--which
requisition, hinted by the doorkeeper, and reiterated by the General
himself, had not always precisely the effect intended.
The fault was not in Mlle. Desperiers that she had proved so
unsuccessful in her petitions, as has been made sufficiently clear.
General Saterges had found in Stephen Cordier a powerful antagonist
in action. He had moved to power through the very paths which Stephen
Cordier had attempted to lay waste. He upheld the faith against
which Cordier had preached a crusade. The old warrior regarded the
young thinker as a personal enemy. It was hardly probable that he
would very energetically strive to procure the reversal of a hard
sentence in behalf of such a man.
As Adolphus Montier's daughter came into his presence, she had not
the bearing common to such as appeared there with intent to plead
for the life or liberty of those they loved. A sense of the
sacredness of her mission was upon her. She had cried to God, and
she believed that He had heard her. Where do the possibilities of
such faith end? "Time would fail me to tell of Gideon, and of Barak,
and of Samson, and of Jephthah, of David also, and of Samuel, and of
the prophets; who through faith subdued kingdoms, wrought
righteousness, obtained promises, stopped the mouths of lions,
quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge of the sword, out of
weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight, turned to flight
the armies of the aliens. Women received their dead raised to life
again; and others were tortured, not accepting deliverance, that
they might obtain a better resurrection; and others had trial of
cruel mockings and scourgings, yea, moreover, of bonds and
imprisonment; they were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted,
were slain with the sword; they wandered about in sheep-skins and
goat-skins, being destitute, afflicted, tormented. _And these all,
having obtained a good report through faith, received not the promise_."
She had considered well what she would do and say, and did not forget
and was not confounded when she stood before the old man, knowing
her time had come. Calm and strong, because so bent on accomplishing
her purpose, and so conscious of her past secret weakness, of her
suspicion and cruel judgment, as if she would here atone for it, she
took stern vengeance of herself.
General Saterges recognized at one glance the evidences of a strong
and determined spirit. When she had crossed the room and stood
before him, he requested her to be seated,--and it was the first
time that he had made such request of such visitor.
Declining the civility, Elizabeth stood, and told her errand. She
had come across the ocean, she said, to plead the cause of a poor
prisoner who was dying under sentence of the law. She paused a moment,
having made this statement, and was answered by a nod. Prisoners
often died without reprieve, he seemed to be aware. This cold
civility warmed the petitioner's speech. Her mother would have been
satisfied, Madeline Desperiers would have been overwhelmed with grief
and horror, to have heard this young girl's testimony in regard to
prison-life. The old man, as he listened, sighed unconsciously,
--for not every nerve in him was strung to cruelty. To one of his
restless career what image of life more dreadful could have been
presented than was in this testimony? To be shut away from human
society so many years, patient, resigned, receiving the few comforts
yet allowed him!--to live on, pure in spirit, lofty in thought,
hoping still in God and man! The old warrior in self-defence,
because she brought the case too vividly, the life too forcibly
before him, broke through the words she was speaking, interrupting
her.
"Who is this person?" he asked.
"Stephen Cordier," was the answer. Without hesitation, even proudly,
she spoke it. She had compelled him to ask the name!
"And who are you?" he asked; and if he felt displeasure, as if his
sympathy, of which he was so chary, had been stolen from him, he did
not allow it to appear.
"Elizabeth Montier," she replied.
"That is no answer. What is a name, if it conveys no meaning to my
mind?"
"I am the daughter of Adolphus and Pauline Montier. My father is a
drummer in the military band of Foray. He is also present keeper of
the prison where Stephen Cordier is confined."
"Very well. Does he know your errand here?"
"He does not. He let me come to this country,--it is his native land,
and my mother's,--he let me come because in his heart he has always
loved his country, and he has never been able to return. We were to
have come back together. But there was an opportunity for me. I
dared not wait. So I am here,--and for nothing, Sir, but this man's
liberty."
Those last words she spoke seemed to quicken the thought of General
Saterges. He drew himself up still more erect in his chair. His eyes
were on Elizabeth with the will to scan her heart of hearts. He spoke,
--
"What is this man to you?"
She paused a moment. And she, too, had a thought. She could play a
game for life. She looked at the old man, hesitated, answered,--
"He is everything."
"Just let me understand you," and he looked upon her as if _he_
might touch her secret. "Do you love Cordier?"
"I love him," she answered, with exceeding dignity, evident
truthfulness.
"Do I understand you?" he said again,--"what are you to him?"
"Everything," she again replied, with perfect confidence and faith.
Was she not liberty and the joy of life to him? If liberty and joy
were ever to be his portion, they must come through her. So she
believed, and thus answered.
"Does he love you?"
"Yes."
"You speak with great assurance. I know the man better, I'm afraid."
Then his voice and manner changed. "He is sentenced. Justice passed
that sentence;--to reverse it were the work of imbecility. Speak no
more. It is not in man to grant what you ask."
He was trying her in her last stronghold,--proving her in her last
depth.
"Is this your answer?" she asked. And indeed, after what had just
passed between them, it did seem incredible.
The old man bowed. He seemed now impassible. He was stern, and hard
as rock. He believed that he had wellnigh been deceived,--and
deception practised successfully on him would have disgraced him in
his own eyes forever. He believed, what he would not trust his lips
to utter, that this applicant was Madeline Desperiers's agent. When
he bowed and did not answer, a fear came down upon Elizabeth that
almost took away her power of speech; that it did not quite deprive
her of that power rendered it so much the more terrible for the
anguish of its emphasis.
"Do women kneel to you when they ask the pardon of those they love?"
said she, with a paling face. "What shall I do to move you? What
have I not done? I trusted, that, having come so far, on such an
errand, it must be that God was my leader. Am I mistaken? Or dare
you withstand God? Tell me,--you are an old man,--have you no pity?
Have you never had a sorrow? Can you not see that I never could have
come here to plead for a bad man's life? Must I go back to see him
die?"
"Madam, you are standing where I cannot come to argue with you. Pity
and justice have their respective duties to perform. Oftentimes pity
may be exercised, and the claims of justice waived; in the case of
the man you plead for, it is simply impossible."
He had risen in displeasure to pronounce these final words. When that
word "impossible" smote her as a sword, he touched a spring in the
table, a bell sounded, Elizabeth went forth,--the audience was over.
She went not with tears, but self-possessed, imperious in mien,
strong in despair. Coming into the presence of Madeline Desperiers,
it was not needful that she should speak to make known the result of
her audience.
"Have you learned when the vessel sails?" was her first question. It
was her reply to the lady's glance,--a glance for which there were
no attendant words in all the language.
"Tomorrow, Elizabeth."
"Are you ready?"
"I will be."
"Then I will give you to him. I promised that, too. I can fulfill that,
at least. You must not think the prison-walls too dreary. My mother"--
"I understand, Elizabeth."
And they sailed on the morrow. No delay for wandering among the
meadows of the pleasant town, for gossip with the men and women who
were in childhood playmates of her father and her mother; no
strolling along lovely river-banks. Chalons had nothing for Elizabeth;
only one green nook of all the world had anything for her,--an
island in the sea,--a prison on that island,--and there work to do
worthy of Gabriel.
But--wonder of wonders!
Paul and Silas sang songs in their prison, and the jailer heard them;
then there came an earthquake.
Who was he that found his cell-doors opened suddenly, and a
messenger from out the courts of heaven there to guide his steps?
History is full of marvellous records; I add this to those. The
eleventh hour goes always freighted with the weightiest events.
On board the vessel that carried Elizabeth and her charge back to
Foray went a messenger commissioned of the king. He took from court
to prison the partial pardon of Cordier. Liberty, but banishment
henceforth. Stephen Cordier should be constrained to faithfulness
towards his new love. Doomed to perpetual exile, he should be
tempted by no late loyalty to Madeline Desperiers. The new acts of
his drama should have nought to do with her. Justice forever!
Rascal that he was, according to the word of General Saterges, it
was rascality which the General could pardon. He had gained many a
victory in desperate strife,--now one other, the last and most
complete: the kingdom's fairest star to shine among his honors! The
proclamation of Stephen Cordier's pardon would instantly make broad
the way to Château Desperiers. She came of a proud race, and he
reckoned on her pride.
Let us not glory in that old man's defeat,--for he died ere his
enemy received, through Elizabeth Montier, life, and the joy of life.
Let us not call him by an evil name to whom the nation gave so fine
a funeral,--but rather pause to listen to the music that comes forth
in royal glory from the harmonious world of Adolphus,--and turn to
look with loving reverence, not with doubt or wonder, and surely not
with pity, on the serene face of Her Grace, the Drummer's Daughter.
WORK AND REST.
What have I yet to do?
Day weareth on,--
Flowers, that, opening new,
Smiled through the morning's dew,
Droop in the sun.
'Neath the noon's scorching glare
Fainting I stand;
Still is the sultry air,
Silentness everywhere
Through the hot land.
Yet must I labor still,
All the day through,--
Striving with earnest will
Patient my place to fill,
My work to do.
Long though my task may be,
Cometh the end.
God 'tis that helpeth me,
His is the work, and He
New strength will lend.
He will direct my feet,
Strengthen my hand,
Give me my portion meet;--
Firm in his promise sweet
Trusting I'll stand.
Up, then, to work again!
God's word is given
That none shall sow in vain,
But find his ripened grain
Garnered in heaven.
Longer the shadows fall,--
Night cometh on;
Low voices softly call,
"Come, here is rest for all!
Labor is done!"
COLIN CLOUT AND THE FAËRY QUEEN.
EDMUND SPENSER IN A DOMESTIC POINT OF VIEW.
HIS MISTRESS AND HIS WIFE.
PART I.--HIS MISTRESS.
The "Faëry Queen" of Edmund Spenser is before us,--a vast and
glittering mausoleum, in which the purpose of the constructor has
long been entombed, we fear without hope of a happy resurrection.
Nevertheless, into this splendid ruin, hieroglyphed with the most
brilliant images the modern mind has yet conceived, we are about to
dig,--not with the impious desire of dragging forth the intellectual
tenant, now in the fourth century of its everlasting repose, but,
haply, to discover in the outer chambers and passages of the pyramid
some relics of the individual architect, his family and mode of life.
In fact, we are anxious to make the acquaintance of Mistress Spenser
and introduce her to the American public. A slight sketch of the
poet's life, up to the period of his marriage, may afford us some
clue to the quarter from which he selected his bride; we shall
therefore give what is known of him in the fewest possible words.
Edmund Spenser, by family, was English, and by birth a cockney. In
his "Prothalamion" he thus pleads guilty to the chime of Bow-bells
in his infant ear:--
"At length they all to merrie London came,
To merrie London, my most kindly nurse,
That to me gave this life's first native source;
Though from another place I take my name
And house of ancient fame."
At what time of his life he became connected with Ireland is very
uncertain; it was probably early. At or about the time of Sir Henry
Sidney's vice-royalty, or in the interval between that and the
lieutenancy of Lord Grey De Wilton, there was a "Mr. Spenser"
actively and confidentially employed by the Irish government; and
that this may have been the poet is, from collateral circumstances,
far from improbable. Spenser was the friend and _protégé_ of Sir
Philip Sidney, (son of the before-named Sir Henry,) and of his uncle,
the Earl of Leicester. Lord Grey De Wilton was by marriage connected
with both, and lived with them on terms of the closest intimacy,
social, literary, and political. In choosing an officer, then, for
so important a post as that of secretary, whom would the one select
or the others more confidently recommend than a young man of genius,
known to all the parties, and who already had some knowledge and
experience of Irish affairs? Be this as it may, we know that in 1580,
Spenser, then in his twenty-seventh year, accompanied Lord Grey De
Wilton into Ireland as secretary; and that he had been there before,
in some official capacity not undistinguished, is evidenced by the
fact, that the Lord Justice, previously to his arrival, speaks of
him as "having many ways deserved some consideration from her Majesty."
We do not care to inquire into the peculiar services for which he
was so speedily favored with a large grant of lands forfeited by the
Desmonds. Such official transactions, we fear, would reflect little
credit on the poet; no doubt he was a good man--according to the
morality of his age; and if he did suggest the poisoning of a few
thousand human beings of all ages and both sexes, (some go so far as
to allege that his fervid imagination contemplated the utter
extermination of the race,) he merely acted up to the opinions
prevalent in the time and polished court of "Good Queen Bess." The
beings were "mere Irishry,"--a stumbling-block in the path of British
civilization, and therefore to be removed, _per fas et nefas_.
Spenser took up his residence on the forfeit lands in Cork; there
married, and reared a family which inherited his estate; that he
subsequently died in England was as mere a casualty as that by which
Swift was born in Ireland. Certain it is that the greater and the
better portion of his works in prose and verse was composed during
his residence in the land of his adoption. Thus, in the sonnets
appended to the "Faëry Queen," the poem on which his celebrity rests,
he addresses this Earl of Ormond:--
"Receive, most noble lord, a single taste
Of the wilde fruit which savage soyle hath bred;
Which, beeing through long wars left almost waste,
With brutish barbarisme is overspred."
Again, addressing himself to his patron, Lord Grey, he says,--
"Rude rimes, the which a rustick nurse did weave
In savage soyle, far from Parnasso Mount."
Several other of the finest productions of his brain owe their birth
to the "savage soyle" of Ireland; his descriptions of the country,
his dialogue on Irish affairs, his "Amoretti" and "Colin Clout's come
home again," belong confessedly to this category.
Having discovered thus much about the poet, we now strike out in a
new direction in search of his better half. Upon this point,
unfortunately, there hangs a mist,--not impenetrable, as we conceive,
but yet impenetrated,--a secret to which the given clue has been
neglected, and which remains to the present day the opprobrium of a
careless biography. The fact and the date of his marriage in Ireland
are obtained from his own writings; but, further than that her name
was Elizabeth,--a fact recorded by himself,--the lady of his choice
remains unknown, her maiden name and family. Mere trifles these, to
be sure,--but interesting in an antiquarian point of view,--and
valuable, perhaps, should the inquiry hereafter lead some more than
usually acute bookworm into the real mystery and meaning, the main
drift of that inexplicable "Faëry Queen."
One difficulty in the matter is, that Edmund appears to have been a
"susceptible subject." He was twice attacked with the tender malady,
and records, in glowing numbers, his passion for two mistresses. One
he calls _Rosalinde_, and celebrates in the "Shepherd's Calendar";
the other, _Elizabeth_, to whom he was undoubtedly married, is the
theme of admiration in his "Amoretti." Rosalinde was his early love;
Elizabeth, the passion of his maturer years. When six-and-twenty,
hopeless of Rosalinde, he wound up his philomel complainings of
her cruelty by a formal commission to his friend Gabriel Harvey
(_Hobbinoll_) to declare his suit at an end:--
"Adieu, good Hobbinoll, that was so true;
Tell Rosalinde her Colin bids adieu."
It took him fourteen years--surely a sufficient time!--to recover
from this disappointment; for he is in his forty-first year, when,
in his Sixtieth Sonnet, he represents himself as having been then
one year enamored of Elizabeth:--
"So since the winged god his planet cleare
Began in me to move, one yeare is spent;
The which doth longer unto me appears
Than all those fourty which my life outwent."
That Rosalinde was not, as has been somewhat rashly conjectured, the
poetic name of Elizabeth, is conclusively established by a poem
written between 1591 and 1595, in which he speaks of some
insurmountable barrier between them, why "her he might not love."
[1] The wife he loved, and the mistress between whose love and him
there existed such a barrier, could not have been the same person,
it is evident. But who this fair and false Rosalinde was, though
known to many of his contemporaries, has become a mystery. That she
was a real personage is placed beyond cavil by "E.K.," the
ostensible editor of the "Shepherd's Calendar"; and he has given us
a clue to her name, if we have but the wit to follow it. Now
"E.K." we more than shrewdly suspect to have been either Spenser
himself, or his friend Gabriel Harvey, or both together. Two more
egregious self-laudators are not to be found in the range of English
literature: Spenser loses no opportunity of puffing "Colin Clout";
and Harvey was openly charged by Thomas Nash with having forged
commendatory epistles and sonnets in his own praise, under the name
of _Thorius_ etc. "E.K.," therefore, must be considered as pretty
high authority; and what says "E.K."? Why, this: "Rosalinde is also
a feigned name, which, being well ordered, will bewray the verie
name of his love and mistresse." By "well ordering" the "feigned name"
E.K. undoubtedly means disposing or arranging the letters of which
it is composed in some form of anagram or metagram,--a species of
wit much cultivated by the most celebrated poets of the time, Spenser
included, and not deemed beneath the dignity of the learned Camden to
expound.
A few examples of this "alchemy of wit," as Camden calls it, will
reconcile our modern notions of the [Greek: to trepon] with the
puerile ingenuity thought graceful, at that unripe period of our
literature, by some of the most accomplished writers and readers of
the day. Let us take an extravagant instance. Sir Philip Sidney,
having abridged his own name into _Phil. Sid._, anagrammatized it
into _Philisides_. Refining still further, he translated _Sid_.,
the abridgment of _sidus_, into [Greek: astron], and, retaining
the _Phil_., as derived from [Greek: philos], he constructed
for himself another pseudonym and adopted the poetical name of
_Astrophil_. Feeling, moreover, that the Lady Rich, celebrated
in his sonnets, was the loadstar of his affections, he designates her,
in conformity with his own assumed name, _Stella_. Christopher Marlow's
name is transmuted into _Wormal_, and the royal Elizabetha is
frequently addressed as _Ah-te-basile!_ Doctor Thomas Lodge,
author of "Rosalinde; or Euphues, his Golden Legacy," (which
Shakspeare dramatized into "As you like it,") has anagrammatized his
own name into _Golde_,--and that of Dering into _Ringde_. The author
of "Dolarney's Primrose" was a Doctor _Raynolde_. John Hind, in his
"Eliosto Libidinoso," transmutes his own name into _Dinchin_ Matthew
Roydon becomes _Donroy_. And Shakspeare, even, does not scruple to
alchemize the Resolute John, or John Florio, into the pedantic
_Holofernes_ of "Love's Labor's Lost." A thousand such fantastic
instances of "trifling with the letter" might be quoted; and even so
late as the reign of Queen Anne we find this foolish wit indulged.
The cynical Swift[2] stoops to change Miss Waring into _Varina_;
Esther (_quasi_ Aster, a star) Johnson is known as _Stella_; Essy
Van-homrigh figures as _Vanessa_; while Cadenus, by an easy change
of syllables, is resolved into _Decanus_, or the Dean himself
_in propriâ personâ_ and canonicals.
In the "Shepherd's Calendar," the very poem in which Spenser's
unknown mistress figures as Rosalinde, the poet has alchemized
Grindal, Archbishop of Canterbury, into _Algrind_, and made Ellmor,
Bishop of London, _Morell_, (it is to be hoped he was so before,) by
merely transposing the letters. What wonder, then, if, complying
with an art so general and convenient, he should be found contriving,
in the case of both his mistresses at once, to reveal his passion
and conceal the name of his enslaver from the public gaze?
The prolific hint of "E.K." set the commentators at work,--but
hitherto without success. The author of the life prefixed to
Church's edition conjectures Rose Linde,--forsooth, because it
appears from Fuller's "Worthies," that in the reign of Henry the
Sixth--only eight reigns too early for the birth of our rural
beauty--there was one John Linde, a resident in the County of Kent!
Not satisfied with this conjecture, Malone suggests that she may
have been an Eliza Horden--the _z_ changed, according to Camden's
rules, into _s_, and the aspirate sunk. Malone's foundation for this
theory is, that one Thomas Horden was a contemporary of John Linde,
aforesaid, and resided in the same county! Both these conjectures
are absurd and unsupported by any collateral evidence. To have given
them the remotest air of probability, the critics should have proved
some acquaintance or connection between the parties respectively,
--some courtship, or contiguity of residence, which might have
brought the young people within the ordinary sphere of attraction.
Wrong as they were in their conclusions, the search of these
commentators was in the right direction. The anagram, "well-ordered,"
will undoubtedly bewray the secret. Let us try if we may not follow
it with better success.
_Rosalinde_ reads, anagrammatically, into Rose Daniel; for,
according to Camden, "a letter may be doubled, or rejected, or
contrariwise, if the sense fall aptly"; we thus get rid of the
redundant _e_, and have a perfect anagram. Now Spenser had an
intimate and beloved friend and brother-poet, named Samuel Daniel,
author of many tragedies and comedies, an eight-canto poem called
"The Civil Wars of England," "A Vision of Twelve Goddesses," a prose
history of England, and "Musa," a defence of rhyme. Spenser alludes
to his poetic genius with high praise in his "Colin Clout." This
Daniel had a sister named Rose, who was married in due time to a
friend of her brother's,--not, indeed, to Spenser, but to a scholar,
whose eccentricities have left such durable tracks behind them, that
we can trace his mark through many passages of Spenser's love
complaints, otherwise unintelligible. The supposition that Rose
Daniel was Rosalinde satisfies every requisite, and presents a
solution of the mystery; the anagram is perfect; the poet's
acquaintance with the brother naturally threw him into contact with
the sister; while the circumstance of her marriage with another
justifies the complaint of infidelity, and accounts for the
"insurmountable barrier," that is, a living husband. Daniel was the
early _protégé_ of the Pembroke family, as was Spenser of the house
of Leicester. The youthful poets must often have met in the company
of their mutual friend, Sir Philip Sidney,--for the Countess of
Pembroke was the "Sidney's sister, Pembroke's mother," celebrated by
Ben Jonson, and consequently niece, as Sir Philip was nephew, of
Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Rose and Edmund were thus thrown
together under circumstances every way favorable to the development
of love in a breast so susceptible as that of the "passionate
shepherd."
Other circumstances in the life of Rose Daniel correspond so
strikingly with those attributed to Rosalinde, as strongly to
corroborate the foregone conclusion.
Rosalinde, after having given encouragement to her enamored shepherd,
faithlessly and finally deserted him in favor of a rival. This is
evident throughout the "Shepherd's Calendar." The First Eclogue
reveals his passion:--
"I love thilk lass, (alas! why do I love?)
And am forlorne, (alas! why am I lorn?)
She deigns not my good will, but doth reprove,
And of my rural music holdeth scorn."
Her scorn, however, may have meant no more than the natural coyness
of a maiden whom the learned Upton somewhat drolly designates as
"a skittish female." [3] Indeed, Spenser must have thought so himself,
and with reason, for she continues to receive his presents,
"the kids, the cracknels, and the early fruit," sent through his
friend Hobbinoll (Gabriel Harvey).
We hear of no alteration of his circumstances until we reach the
Sixth Eclogue, in which the progress and utter disappointment of his
suit are distinctly and bitterly complained of. "This eclogue," says
the editorial "E.K.," "is wholly vowed to the complaining of Colin's
ill-success in love. For being (as is aforesaid) enamoured of a
country lass, Rosalinde, and having (as it seemeth) found place in
her heart, he lamenteth to his dear friend Hobbinoll that he is now
forsaken unfaithfully, and in his stead _Menalcas_, another shepherd,
received disloyally: and this is the whole argument of the eclogue."
In fact, she broke her plighted vow to Colin Clout, transferred her
heart to Menalcas, and let her hand accompany it.
Now, from this and the preceding circumstances, the inference
appears inevitable that, at or about the time of the composition of
this Sixth Eclogue, the Rosalinde therein celebrated was married, or
engaged to be married, to the person denounced as Menalcas.
Whether the ante-nuptial course of Rose Daniel corresponded with the
faithlessness ascribed to Rosalinda we confess we have no
documentary evidence to show: but this much is certain, that Rose
was married to an intimate friend of her brother's; and, from the
characteristics recorded of him by Spenser, we shall presently prove
that that friend, the husband of Rosalinde, is no other than the
treacherous rival denounced as Menalcas in the "Shepherd's Calendar."
Who, then, is Menalcas?
Amongst the distinguished friends of Samuel Daniel was a man of much
celebrity in his day,--the redoubted, or, as he chose to call himself,
the "Resolute" John Florio (Shakspeare's _Holofernes_). This
gentleman, an Italian by descent, was born in London in the same year
with Spenser, and was a class-fellow with Daniel at Oxford. He was
the author of many works, well received by the public,--as his
"First Fruits," "Second Fruits," "Garden of Recreation," and so forth;
also, of an excellent Italian and English dictionary, styled
"A World of Words,"--the basis of all Anglo-Italian dictionaries
since published. He was a good French scholar, as is proved by his
translation of Montaigne; and wrote some verses, highly prized by
Elizabeth and her successor, James I. Indeed, his general learning
and accomplishments recommended him to both courts; and, on the
accession of James, he was appointed classical tutor to Prince Henry,
and reader of French and Italian to the Royal Consort, Anne of
Denmark; he was also a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, and Clerk of
the Closet to his Majesty; and, finally, it was chiefly through his
influence that Samuel Daniel was appointed Gentleman Extraordinary
and Groom of the Privy Chamber to Queen Anne.
Long prior to this prosperous estate, however, his skill as a
linguist had recommended him to the patronage and intimacy of many
of the chief nobility of Elizabeth's court; and at an early period
of his life, we find him engaged, as was his friend Daniel, as tutor
to some of the most illustrious families,--such as Pembroke, Dudley,
Essex, Southampton, etc.; [4] all which, together with his friendship
for Daniel, must needs have brought him into the acquaintance of
Edmund Spenser, the friend of Sidney and his relatives. He was also
on the most friendly terms with Gabriel Harvey, and a warm admirer
(as his works attest) of the genius of Daniel. We have thus gathered
our _dramatis personae_, the parties most essentially interested in
Spenser's unlucky passion, into one familiar group.
Of Rose Daniel's marriage with the "Resolute John Florio" there is
no manner of question. It is recorded by Anthony á Wood in his
"Athenæ Oxonienses," acknowledged by Samuel Daniel in the
commendatory verses prefixed to Florio's "World of Words," and she is
affectionately remembered in Florio's will as his "beloved wife, Rose."
[5] Thus, if not Spenser's Rosalinde, she was undoubtedly a
Rosalinde to John Florio.
We shall now proceed to gather some further particles of evidence,
to add their cumulative weight to the mass of slender probabilities
with which we are endeavoring to sustain our conjectures.
Spenser's Rosalinde had at least a smattering of the Italian. Samuel
Daniel was an Italian scholar; for his whole system of versification
is founded on that model. Spenser, too, was well acquainted with
the language; for, long before any English version of Tasso's
"Gerusalemme" had appeared, he had translated many passages which
occur in the "Faëry Queen" from that poem, and--without any public
acknowledgment that we can find trace of--appropriated them to
himself.[6] What more natural than that Rose should have shared her
brother's pleasant study, and, in company with him and Spenser,
accepted the tuition of John Florio?
The identity of Florio's wife and Rosalinde may be fairly inferred
from some circumstances consequent upon the lady's marriage, and
otherwise connected with her fortunes, which appear to be shadowed
forth with great acrimony in the "Faëry Queen," where the Rosalinde
of the "Shepherd's Calendar" appears before us again under the
assumed name of _Mirabella_. Lest the ascription of these
circumstances to particular parties may be imputed to prejudice or
prepossession for a favorite theory, we shall state them on the
authority of commentators and biographers who never even dreamed of
the view of the case we are now endeavoring to establish.
The learned Upton, in his preface to the "Faëry Queen," was led to
observe the striking coincidence, the absolute similarity of
character, between Spenser's Rosalinde and his Mirabella. "If the
'Faëry Queen,'" quoth he, "is a moral allegory with historical
allusions to our poet's times, one might be apt to think, that, in a
poem written on so extensive a plan, the cruel Rosalinde would be in
some way or other typically introduced; and methinks I see her
plainly characterized in Mirabella. Perhaps, too, her expressions
were the same that are given to Mirabella,--'the _free lady_,' 'she
was born free,'" etc.[7]
"We are now come," says Mr. G.L. Craik, by far the most acute and
sagacious of all the commentators on Spenser, "to a very remarkable
passage. Having thus disposed of Turpin, the poet suddenly addresses
his readers, saying,--
'But turn we back now to that _lady free_
Whom late we left riding upon an ass
Led by a _carle and fool_ which by her side did pass.'
"This is the 'fair maiden clad in mourning weed,' who, it may be
remembered, was met, as related at the beginning of the preceding
canto, by Timias and Serena. There, however, she was represented as
attended only by a _fool_. What makes this episode especially
interesting is the conjecture that has been thrown out, and which
seems intrinsically probable, that the 'lady' is Spenser's own
Rosalinde, by whom he had been, jilted, or at least rejected, more
than a quarter of a century before. His unforgetting resentment is
supposed to have taken this revenge."
So far with Mr. Upton and Mr. Craik we heartily concur as to the
identity of Rosalinde and Mirabella; and feel confident that a
perusal and comparison of the episode of Mirabella with the whole
story of Rosalinde will leave every candid and intelligent reader no
choice but to come to the same conclusion: We shall now collate the
attributes assigned in common to those two impersonations in their
maiden state, and note the correspondence.
Both are of humble birth,--Rosalinde being described in the
"Shepherd's Calendar" as "the widow's daughter of the glen"; her low
origin and present exalted position are frequently alluded to,--her
beauty, her haughtiness, and love of liberty. Mirabella is thus
described in Book VI. "Faëry Queen," Canto vii:--
"She was a lady of great dignity,
And lifted up to honorable place;
Famous through all the land of Faërie:
Though of mean parentage and kindred base,
Yet decked with wondrous gifts of Nature's grace."
"But she thereof grew proud and insolent,
And scorned them all that lore unto her meant."
"She was born free, not bound to any wight."
Of Rosalinde we hear in "Colin Clout" that her ambition is
"So high in thought as she herself in place."
And that she
"Loatheth each lowly thing with lofty eye."
Her beauty, too, is dwelt upon as a "thing celestial,"--her humble
family alluded to,--the boasted freedom of her heart; and upon
Rosalinde and Mirabella an affectation of the demigoddessship, which
turned their heads, is equally charged. In all essential
characteristics they are "twin cherries growing on one stalk."
Of Rose Daniel's life so little is known, particularly during her
unmarried years, that we are unable to fasten upon her the unamiable
qualities of the allegorical beauties we assume to be her
representatives; but if we can identify her married fortune with
theirs,--then, in addition to the congruities already mentioned, we
can have no hesitation in imputing to _her_ the disposition which
brought down upon _them_, so bitterly and relentlessly, the poetic
justice of the disappointed shepherd. We may thus dispose of them in
brief.
Mirabella's lot was severe. She was married (if we rightly interpret
the language of the allegory) to a "_fool_,"--that is to say, to a
very absurd and ridiculous person, under whose conduct she was
exposed to the "whips and scorns," the disdain and bitter retaliation,
natural to the union of a beautiful and accomplished, though vain
and haughty woman, with a very eccentric, irritable, and bombastic
humorist.
Rosalinde was married--with no better fate, we fear--to the vain and
treacherous Menalcas.
And Rose Daniel became the wife of the "Resolute John Florio."
We shall commence with the substantial characters, and see how their
histories fall in with the fortunes attributed to the allegorical.
Rose Daniel's husband, maugre his celebrity and places of dignity
and profit, was beset with tempers and oddities which exposed him,
more perhaps than any man of his time, to the ridicule of
contemporary wits and poets. He was, at least in his literary career,
jealous, envious, irritable, vain, pedantic and bombastical,
petulant and quarrelsome,--ever on the watch for an affront, and
always in the attitude of a fretful porcupine with a quill pointed in
every direction against real or supposititious enemies. In such a
state of mental alarm and physical vaporing did he live, that he
seems to have proclaimed a promiscuous war against all gainsayers,--
that is, the literary world; and for the better assurance to them of
his indomitable valor, and to himself of indemnity from disturbance,
he adopted a formidable prefix to his name; and to "any bill, warrant,
quittance, or obligation," to every address, prelude, preface,
[8] introduction, or farewell, accompanying any of his numerous works,
he subscribed himself the Resolute,--"Resolute John Florio."
Conduct so absurd, coupled with some personal defects, and a
character so petulantly vainglorious, exposed the "Resolute" to the
bitter sarcasm of contemporary writers. Accordingly we find him
through life encompassed by a host of tormentors, and presenting his
_chevaux-de-frise_ of quills against them at all and every point.
In the Epistle Dedicatory to the second edition of his Dictionary,
we find him engaged _morsu et unguibus_ with a swarm of literary
hornets, against whom he inveighs as "sea-dogs,--land-critics,
--monsters of men, if not beasts rather than men,--whose teeth are
cannibals',--their tongues adders' forks,--their lips asps' poison,
--their eyes basilisks',--their breath the breath of a grave,--their
words like swords of Turks, which strive which shall dive deepest
into the Christian lying before them." Of a verity we may say that
John Florio was sadly exercised when he penned this pungent paragraph.
He then falls foul of the players, who--to use the technical phrase
of the day--"staged" him with no small success. "With this common
cry of curs" in general, and with _one poet_ and _one piece_ of said
poet's handiwork in particular, he enters into mortal combat with
such vehement individuality as enables us at a glance to detect the
offence and the offender. He says, "Let Aristophanes and his
comedians make plays and scour their mouths on Socrates, these very
mouths they make to vilify shall be the means to amplify his virtues,"
etc. "And here," says Doctor Warburton, "Shakspeare is so clearly
marked out as not to be mistaken." This opinion is fortified by the
concurrence of Farmer, Steevens, Reid, Malone, Knight, Collier, and
Hunter; and, from the additional lights thrown upon this subject by
their combined intelligence, no doubt seems to exist that Holofernes,
the pedantic schoolmaster in "Love's Labor's Lost," had his
prototype in John Florio, the Resolute.
"Florio," according to Farmer, "gave the first affront by asserting
that 'the plays they play in England are neither right comedies nor
tragedies, but representations of histories without any decorum.'"
We know that Shakspeare must, of his own personal knowledge of the
man, have been qualified to paint his character; for while the great
dramatist was the early and intimate friend of the Earl of
Southampton, the petulant lexicographer boasts of having for years
been domesticated in the pay and patronage of that munificent patron
of letters. Warburton thinks "it was from the ferocity of his temper,
that Shakspeare chose for him the name which Rabelais gives to his
pedant of Thubal Holoferne." Were the matter worth arguing, we
should say, it was rather from the proclivity with which (according
to Camden's rules) the abbreviated Latin name Johnes Florio or
Floreo falls into Holofernes. Rabelais and anagrammatism may divide
the slender glory of the product between them.
But neither Shakspeare's satire nor Florio's absurdities are
comprehended within this single character. Subsequent examination
of the text of "Love's Labor's Lost" has enabled the critics to
satisfy themselves that the part of _Don Adnano de Armado_, the
"phantastical courtier," was devised to exhibit another phase in
the character of the Resolute Italian. In Holofernes we have the
pedantic tutor; in Don Adriano a lively picture of a ridiculous
lover and pompous retainer of the court.
By a fine dramatic touch, Shakspeare has made each describe the other,
in such a way that the portrait might stand for the speaker himself,
and thus establishes a dual-identity. Thus, Armado, describing
Holofernes, says, "That's all one, my fair, sweet, honey monarch;
for I protest the schoolmaster is exceeding fantastical,--too, too
vain,--too, too vain; but we will put it, as they say, to _fortuna
della guerra_";--whilst Holofernes, not behind his counterpart in
self-esteem, sees in the other the defects which he cannot detect in
himself. "_Novi hominem tanquam te_" quoth he;--"his humor is lofty;
his discourse peremptory; his tongue filed; his eye ambitious; his
gait majestical; and his general behavior vain, ridiculous, and
thrasonical. He is too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as
it were; too peregrinate, as I may call it; he draweth out the
thread of his verbosity finer than the staple of his argument. I
abhor such fanatical phantasms," etc.
Should further proof be needed that Florio, Holofernes, and Armado
form a dramatic trinity in unity, we can find it in the personal
appearance of the Italian. There was something amiss with the
_face_ of the Resolute, which could not escape the observation of
his friends, much less his enemies. A friend and former pupil of his
own,--Sir Wm. Cornwallis, speaking in high praise of Florio's
translation of Montaigne, observes,--"It is done by a fellow less
beholding to Nature for his fortune than to wit; yet lesser for his
_face_ than his fortune. The truth is, he looks more like a good
fellow than a wise man; and yet he is wise beyond either his fortune
or education." [9] It is certain, then, that, behaving like a fool in
some things, he looked very like a fool in others.
Is it not a remarkable coincidence, that both his supposed dramatic
counterparts have the same peculiarity? When Armado tells the
'country lass' he is wooing, that he will 'tell her wonders,' she
exclaims,--'skittish female' that she is,--'What, with that _face_?'
And when Holofernes, nettled with the ridicule showered on his
abortive impersonation of Judas Maccabaeus, says, 'I will not be put
out of countenance,'--Byron replies, 'Because thou hast no face.'
The indignant pedant justifies, and, pointing to his physiognomy,
inquires, 'What is this?' Whereupon the waggish courtiers proceed to
define it: it is 'a cittern-head,' 'the head of a bodkin,' 'a
death's-face in a ring,' 'the face of an old Roman coin, scarce seen,'
and so forth.
The satire here embodied is of a nature too personal to be
considered the mere work of a riotous fancy. It is a trait
individualizing and particularising the person at whom the more
general satire is aimed; and, coupled with the infirmities of the
victim's moral nature, it fastens upon poor Florio identity with
"the brace of coxcombs." Such satire may be censured as ungenerous;
we cannot help that,--_litera scripta manet_,--and we cannot rail
the seal from the bond. Such attacks were the general, if not
universal, practice of the age in which Shakspeare flourished; and we
have no right to blame him for not being as far in advance of his age,
morally, as he was intellectually. A notorious instance of a
personal attack under various characters in one play is to be found
in Ben Jonson's "Bartholomew Fair," wherein he boasts of having,
under the characters of Lanthorn, Leatherhead, the Puppet-showman,
and Adam Overdo, satirized the celebrated Inigo Jones,--
"By all his titles and whole style at once
Of tireman, montebank, and Justice Jones."
It was probably to confront and outface "Aristophanes and his
comedians," and to "abrogate the scurrility" of the "sea-dogs" and
"land-critics," that our Resolute lexicographer prefixed to the
Enlarged Edition of his Dictionary and to his translation of
Montaigne, his portrait or effigies, engraved by Hole. This portrait
would, to a person unapprised of any peculiarity in the original,
present apparently little or nothing to justify the remark of
Cornwallis. But making due allowance for the address, if not the
flattery, of a skilful painter, it were hardly possible for the
observer, aware of the blemish, not to detect in the short and
close-curled fell of hair, the wild, staring eyes, the contour of
the visage,--which, expanding from the narrow and wrinkled forehead
into cheek-bones of more than Scottish amplitude, suddenly contracts
to a pointed chin, rendered still more acute by a short, peaked beard,
--not to detect in this lozenge-shaped visnomy and its air, at once
haggard and grotesque, traits that not only bear out the remark of
his pupil, but the raillery also of the court wits in Shakespeare's
dramatic satire.
Whatever happiness Rose Daniel may have had in the domestic virtues
of her lord, his relations with the world, his temper, eccentricities,
and personal appearance could have given her little. That he was an
attached and affectionate husband his last will and testament gives
touching _post-mortem_ evidence.
Let us return to the fortunes of the faithless Rosalinde. It appears
she married Menalcas,--the treacherous friend and rival of the
"passionate shepherd." Who, then, was Menalcas? or why was this name
specially selected by our poet to designate the man he disliked?
The pastoral name Menalcas is obviously and pointedly enough adopted
from the Eclogues of Virgil; in which, by comparing the fifteenth
line of the second with the sixty-sixth of the third, we shall find
he was the rival who (to use the expression of Spenser) "by treachery
did underfong" the affections of the beautiful Alexis from his
enamored master. In this respect the name would well fit Florio, who,
from his intimacy with the Daniels and their friends, could not but
have known the passion of the poet, and the encouragement at one
time given him by his fickle mistress.
Again, there was at this time prevalent a French conceit,--"imported,"
as Camden tells us, "from Calais, and so well liked by the English,
although most ridiculous, that, learned or unlearned, he was nobody
that could not hammer out of his name an invention by this wit-craft,
and _picture_ it accordingly. Whereupon," he adds, "who did not
busy his braine to hammer his devise out of this forge?" [10] This
wit-craft was the _rebus_.
Florio's rebus or device, then, was a Flower. We have specimens of
his fondness for this nomenclative punning subscribed to his portrait:
--
"Floret adhue, et adhue florebit: floreat ultra
Florius hae specie floridus,--optat amans."
And it was with evident allusion to this conceit that he named his
several works his "First Fruits," "Second Fruits," "Garden of
Recreation," and so forth. Spenser did not miss the occasion of
reducing this figurative flower to a worthless weed:--
"Go tell the las her flower hath wox a weed."
In the preceding stanza we find this weed distinctly identified as
Menalcas:--
"And thou, Menalcas! that by treachery
Didst underfong my lass to wax so light."
Another reason for dubbing Florio _Menalcas_ may be found in the
character and qualities ascribed to the treacherous shepherd by
Virgil. He was not without talent, for in one of the Eclogues he
bears his part in the poetical contention with credit; but he was
unfaithful and fraudulent in his amours, envious, quarrelsome,
scurrilous, and a braggart; and his _face_ was remarkable for its
dark, Italian hue,--"_quamvis ille fuscus_," etc. Compared with the
undoubted character of John Florio, as already exhibited, that of
Menalcas so corresponds as to justify its appropriation to the rival
of Spenser.
There is a further peculiarity in the name itself, which renders its
application to John Florio at once pointed and pregnant with the
happiest ridicule. Florio rejoiced in the absurd prefix of Resolute.
Now Menalcas is a compound of two Greek words ([Greek: menos] and
[Greek: ulkm]) fully expressive of this idea, and frequently used
together in the sense of RESOLUTION by the best classical authorities,
--thus, "[Greek: menos d'ulkmd te lathpsmat]." [11] Again, in Liddell
and Scott's Greek-English Lexicon [Greek: menos] in composition is
said to "bear always a collateral notion of _resolve_ and firmness."
And here we have the very _notion_ expressed by the very word we
want. Menalcas is the appropriate and expressive _nom de guerre_ of
the "Resolute."
Every unprejudiced reader will admit, that in emblem, name, character;
and appearance, John Florio and Menalcas are allegorically identical;
and it follows, as a consequence, that Rosalinde, married to the
same person as Rose Daniel, is one and the same with her
anagrammatic synonyme,--and that her sorrows and joys, arising out
of the conduct of her husband, must have had the same conditions.
Having identified Rosalinde with Rose Daniel, it may be thought that
nothing further of interest with respect to either party remains,
which could lead us into further detail;--but Spenser himself having
chosen, under another personification, to follow the married life of
this lady, and revenge himself upon the treachery of her husband, we
should lose an opportunity both of interpreting his works and of
forming a correct estimate of his character, if we neglected to
pursue with him the fortunes of Mirabella. Like her type and
prototype, we find that she has to suffer those mortifications which
a good wife cannot but experience on witnessing the scorn, disdain,
and enmity which follow the perversity of a wayward husband. Such,
at least, we understand to be the meaning of those allegorical
passages in which, as a punishment for her cruelty and pride, she is
committed by the legal decree of Cupid to the custody and conduct of
Scorn and Disdain. We meet with her for the first time as:
"a fair maiden clad in mourning WEED,
Upon a mangy JADE unmeetly set,
And a leud fool her leading thorough dry and wet."
Again she is:
"riding upon an ass
Led by a carle and fool which by her side did pass."
These companions treat her with great contempt and cruelty; the
Carle abuses her:
"With all the evil terms and cruel mean
That he could make; and eke that angry fool,
Which followed her with cursed hands uncleane
Whipping her horse, did with his smarting-tool
Oft whip her dainty self, and much augment her dool."
All this, of course, is to be understood allegorically. The _Carle_
and _Fool_--the former named Disdain, the latter Scorn--are
doubtless (as in the case of Holofernes and Armado) the double
representatives of the same person. By the ass on which she rides is
signified, we suppose, the ridiculous position to which marriage has
reduced her haughty beauty; the taunts and scourges are,
metaphorically, the wounds of injured self-respect.
The Carle himself is extravagantly and most "Resolutely" painted as
a monster in nature,--stern, terrible, fearing no living wight,--his
looks dreadful,--his eyes fiery, and rolling from left to right in
search of "foeman worthy of his steel"; he strides with the
stateliness of a crane, and, at every step, rises on tiptoe; his
dress and aspect resemble those of the Moors of Malabar, and remind
us forcibly of the swarthy Menalcas. Indeed, if we compare this
serio-comic exaggeration of the Carle with the purely comic picture
of Don Armado given by Holofernes, we shall see at a glance that
both depict the same object of ridicule.
That Mirabella is linked in wedlock to this angry Fool is nowhere
more clearly depicted than in the passage where Prince Arthur,
having come to her rescue, is preparing to put her tormentor to death,
until his sword is arrested by the shrieks and entreaties of the
unhappy lady that his life may be spared for her sake:--
"Stay, stay, Sir Knight! for love of God abstain
From that unwares you weetlesse do intend!
Slay not that carle, though worthy to be slain;
For more on him doth than himself depend:
My life will by his death have lamentable end."
This is the language of a virtuous wife, whom neither the
absurdities of a vainglorious husband, nor "the whips and scorns of
the time," to which his conduct necessarily exposes her, can detach
from her duties and affections.
Assuming, then, that the circumstances of this allegory identify
Mirabella with Rosalinde, and Rosalinde with Rose Daniel, and, in
like manner, the Fool and Carle with Menalcas and John Florio, have
we not here a thrice-told tale, agreeing so completely in all
essential particulars as to leave no room for doubt of its original
application to the early love-adventures in which the poet was
disappointed? And these points settled, though intrinsically of
trivial value, become of the highest interest, as strong
corroboration of the personal import of all the allegorical
characters introduced into the works of Spenser. Thus, in the
"Shepherd's Calendar," the confidant of the lover is Hobbinoll, or
Gabriel Harvey; and in the "Faëry Queen," the adventurers who come
to Mirabella's relief are Prince Arthur, Sir Timias, and Serena, the
well-known allegorical impersonations of Spenser's special friends,
the Earl of Leicester, Sir Walter Raleigh, and Elizabeth Throckmorton,
to whom Sir Walter was married. Are not these considerations, added
to the several circumstances and coincidences already detailed,
conclusive of the personal and domestic nature of the history
conveyed in both the poetical vehicles? And do they not amount to a
moral demonstration, that, in assigning the character and adventures
of Mirabella and Rosalinde to the sister of Samuel Daniel, the wife
of John Florio, we have given no unfaithful account of the first
fickle mistress of Edmund Spenser?--We shall next ascertain the
name and history of his wife from the internal evidence left behind
him in his works.