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GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS.
by
LOUISE IMOGEN GUINEY.
Boston:
Roberts Brothers.
1885.
Copyright, 1885,
By Louise Imogen Guiney.
University Press:
John Wilson and Son, Cambridge.
TO
OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES
_THE LOVING HOMAGE_
OF
_This Book._
CONTENTS.
PAGE
ON THE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE 9
A HAND 16
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON 28
BRENTFORD PULPIT 39
NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY 56
ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS 74
OLD HAUNTS 82
FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS 89
A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL 98
VAGABONDIANA 104
MATHEMATICS 113
A CHILD IN CAMP 117
ON GRAVEYARDS 130
SOME GARDEN-FOLK 138
HOSPITALITIES 141
THE TWO VOICES 148
SWEETHEART 156
ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS 161
DE MOSQUITONE 166
ON THE GARRET 172
[Illustration]
GOOSE-QUILL PAPERS.
ON THE GOOD REPUTE OF THE APPLE.
FOR the sake of an apple Atalanta lost her nigh-won victory; and that
other apple, thrown for the fairest, moved all Olympus into discord.
Bragi, the north-god, and his peers renewed their youth with one
touch of its cool juices. Dragons circled it in the enchanted garden;
"the daughters three" stood about it in a sacred ring, and none but
Hercules was its captor. The renascent marbles of the Greeks are dug
out of earth,--"Praxitelean shapes!"--with its rounded beauty yet in
their outstretched hands. What a superb mythologic pedigree! What
noble mention (each worth an immortality) from old poets, romancers,
historians! All heterodoxy lauded thee, apple of mine eye. It was
reserved for true-church traditions to belie thee.
Thou who art full of virtue, what is this rumor of thy defection in
Eden, thy remote causing of all contemporaneous woe? Thou who art
fair without as a cherub's cheek, how couldst thou be abettor to the
treacherous spirit? Shall the fault of our frail ancestress rest upon
thy rosy head? "That the forbidden fruit of Paradise was an apple,"
saith a grave and learned author, "is commonly believed, confirmed by
tradition, perpetuated by writings, verses, pictures; and some are so
bad prosodians as thence to derive the Latin word _malum_, because
that fruit was the first occasion of evil: wherein, notwithstanding
determinations are presumptuous, many, I perceive, are of another
belief." Let the personal argument stand, in default of a bolder
plea. Mephisto, who hath had no chance of reformation, and who may be
supposed to keep his early leanings, is in modern times no frequenter
of orchards. Not by farmer, nor wayside knight, nor loitering
sweethearts at dusk, hath he ever been detected prowling about an
innocent apple-tree.
It hath, on the other hand, been affirmed by an ingenious clerk,
that apple-eating is a masculine passion, and that no woman hath
a dominating natural relish for this hearty fruit; which, proven,
would seem to indicate (as a burnt child dreads the fire, according
to the proverb) that Eve's mindful daughters shun by instinct the
immemorial enemy. If, indeed, it needs must be demonstrated by some
unborn logician, that our primal happiness was forfeited by nought
else, beyond the serpent's wiles, than a Gilliflower or a Greening,
hanging on the representative tree, and criterion of obedience,--then
there exist myriads of her descendants with the ancestral weakness,
who shall look on our abused common mother with new and tender
consideration, such as her disastrous connection with a plum, or a
currant, or a quince, could never have evoked.
The apple is the only fruit which deserveth the name of genial.
A peach is but a Capuan dish; the lime approacheth with cold
infrequency; the amiable pear hath too little character; the grape
is chiefly suggestive, anticipatory of its hereafter, as the larva
of the gorgeous butterfly. But Apple standeth on her own merits.
Tart, jelly, fritters, dumpling, enter not into the imagination
of her possessor. Nay, nor even cider, that fretful disempurpled
wine,--wine, as it were, with the bar sinister. Apple hath not
the flippant gayety of the cherry; her glad humor is somewhat
dashed with cynicism: she warmeth the heart, and trippeth up the
tongue, and is, in the accepted phrase of artists, "a good fellow;"
foe to unrighteous melancholy, as Laurentius writ, and frankly
compassionate. She should have had Horace for her court-poet. One
can conceive of poor, manly Fielding loving her at the modest ratio
of three dozen a day; and of little Mr. Pope brushing her aside with
fastidious petulance.
The friends of Apple, your sworn familiars, who offend not her
sun-mottled exterior with barbaric divisions of the knife, may be
known by their ready wit and their bright glances. Hath not the
wholesome autumn light, which filtered into the fruit they affect,
permeated their moral temperament? They must needs be sound,
consolatory, humane, and fit to wrestle with every wind that blows.
"Man is that he eats," we read among the bewilderments of German
speculation. But of her chaste and subtle cup, rimmed with gold or
crimson, as Nature willed, the elect drink invigoration.
"Encompass me about with apples," saith the Canticle, "for I am sick
with love;" which, driven to its bare and literal sense, implies that
apples are antidotes to languor and over-fondness. Apple, be it said,
is a Platonist.
Bake her not. Take her in her gypsy wildness, in the homespun,
lovelier so than pomegranates in their velvet: not too untimely,
either, lest she be vindictive, and become the apothecary's friend
rather than thine. Learn to trace her maiden growth among her cheery
sisters, from some gnarled seat. Deny her not the arm-chair with
thee before the flickering hearth-fire; and in thy most solitary
meditations, thy rapt brooding-hours, trust her that she shall not
distract thee. Out of celestial gardens, in the tender Cappadocian
legend, maid Dorothy's angel brought apples to Theophilus; to him,
indeed, the fruit of salvation. Yet, having lost the sweet symbolic
grace of yore, she comes ever benignly, and without malice. Lavish
October's legacy, foretelling to thy fancy other seasons yet to make
glad the earth, she, more than any other, is the staunch stand-by,
the winter friend. Her native orchards droop lifelessly in snows;
but, like a fair deed, she surviveth mortality, a kind and vital
influence still. Darling of the tourist and the huntsman that she is,
never was there creature so absolutely adapted to the student. Her
happy moisture fructifieth the brain.
Only our neighboring Concord sages, far back in the Athenian
beginnings of the present school, sought her intellectual aid in
vain. They, and the listening element, met for conversation,--Emerson,
Thoreau, Alcott, Curtis, even Hawthorne, with his sylvan shyness
about him. There were appalling breaks, pertinacious "flashes of
silence," such as were indigenous to Macaulay. The philosophers sat
erect, and struggled; then the narrator tells us how, with Olympic
sweetness, the host, Ralph Waldo Emerson, brought out a dish of
russets,--_magna spes altera_, genius having failed,--which were
consumed, unavailingly, in silence. The ally was wistfully courted on
after occasions; but the club solemnly dispersed on the third night.
If Apple, alas! hath her freaks, let them be expended on
philosophers. For her humbler adherents, she hath too constant a
good-will. To us, at least, she is faithful, recompensing our old
affection for every branch of her house. We are no specialist,
but cherish her to the twentieth remove: all her pale and soured
graftings, her pungent windfalls, her eccentric hangers-on, her
disregarded poor relations.
Yea, till our judgment and our gallantry forsake us, be thou our
deity, Pomona!
"Candles we'll give to thee,
And a new altar."
Nothing shall divert our vow. Wilfully and in cold blood, we
subscribe ourself thy pagan.
[Illustration]
A HAND.
IT would be a judicious pastime for some curious scholar to write up
the antecedents and traditions of these ten ubiquitous digits with
which Nature dowers most of us; a survey reaching from the crime
that darkened the morning of the world--the handiwork of Cain--to
the most delicate outcome of art, finished yesterday; a summary of
all the vicissitudes and symbolisms connected with the hand and
its doings; challenges, investitures, perjuries, salutations; the
science of chiromancy that the Romans loved; records made by chisel
or pen by Michael Angelo, Goethe, Palestrina; of gloves and rings
and falcon-jesses; of armor buckled on by saddened sweethearts,
and prizes bestowed at tourneys; of power in the soldier, and
persuasiveness in the fair lady; of Eastern juggling, and missal
illuminations in gray cells, and manuscripts folded and preserved
through centuries; of "pickers and stealers" and money-getting
associations, seizures, bestowals, and benedictions. The Dutch boy,
stopping the dyke with his frozen thumb in times of flood, shall not
be forgotten; nor that maid of honor who, with her slender wrist,
bolted the door against the raging mob of revolutionists, undauntedly
long, and at last vainly; and in the chapter of heroisms shall be
found the patient pyramid-builders, and Mucius Scævola, unflinching
in fire; how with his hand Attila made kings tremble, Xerxes scourged
the sea, and the saint of old Assisi won bird and beast from
solitude, to feed and be caressed. We bethink us lastly of antique
instruments, old tapestries, intaglios, and rare lamps; of the child
Christopher Wren, raising card-houses and forecasting the stone
glories of London; or of Petrarch, roving in a dusty world of books,
and so dying, suddenly and without pain, with his arm about them, as
of things among those which our historian shall touch.
Scarce any author, save Sir Thomas Browne, hath thought it worth
while to spend learned discussion on the right and the left hand.
Yet it is a peculiar schism we graft on a youngling's mind when we
teach it to discard the good service and ready offices of its honest
sinistral member; so that we may come to look upon a left-handed
neighbor as a sort of natural protest against an ill custom, and a
vindication of unjustly suppressed forces.
A hand clinched, a hand outstretched, have in them all of defiance
and supplication; hospitality shines in a hand proffered,--"a frank
hand," as the Moor saith. Like a shell turned from the light, but
with the tints of the morning not yet faded from it, is a babe's
hand, "tip-tilted," lovely, as if it should close on nothing ruder
than a flower. The bronzed hands of toil, the opaque hands of
idleness, differing even as life and death, the dear, remembered,
cordial hands of one's youth,--shall they not have their laureate
also in the commentator that is to be, this new philosopher in
trifles, this student of the furthest and subtlest bodily activities,
and chronicler, as it were, _in extremis_?
The hand betrays the heart; not to thee, obstreperous gypsy! with
thy sapient life-lines, but even to the unchrismed eye of the laity.
We detect good-nature in yon plump matron, because of that pudgy but
roseate part of her appended to her Tuscan bracelet; good-nature
and generosity and simple faith. We have close acquaintance with
courageous hands, melancholy hands, avaricious hands, compassionate
hands, fastidious hands, hands sensitive and fair, friends to all
things gentle, and pulsing with intelligence. We read in this hand
how it hath healed a bitter wound; and in that, how it hath locked
the door against a cry. Have we not known hands dark and shrunken
with age or suffering, instinct yet with so-called patrician blood?
The memory comes over us of the prince (such was verily his meek
title) from a far isle, the inscrutable Asiatic, acclimated in speech
and dress, whose chilling touch, recalling icicles in midsummer, we
superstitiously evaded at meeting and parting, and over whose origin
we sun-lovers made jests, in the halls of that dreaming heir of a
later dynasty, Madame B.
It was the boast of Job that he had not kissed his hand in sign
of worship to sun nor moon nor stars. Note the pertinent and
noble metaphor of Banquo, to express reliance and rest in time of
perplexity:--
"In the great hand of God I stand."
To what fopperies, what wild freaks of mediæval years, hath the
pliant hand lent itself! to the triangles, stars, portraits of
ancient caligraphic cunning; to the wig, shape facetious, embodying
a request to the barber, or the heart, dolphin, and true-love knot,
that revealed a swain's metrical sighs to the scrutinizing eyes of
Phyllis. Peace to those old minimizers! to him, the spider-worker,
whose elfin Iliad Cicero saw, packed miraculously in a nutshell; to
sturdy Peter Bales, "that did so take Eliza" with his infinitesimal
tracery, which the lion-queen delighted to read through a mighty
glass, holding his airy volume on her thumb-nail!
Disraeli the elder tells us of the pleasing origin of that modern
phrase,--"to write like an angel;" gracefully derived from one
Angelo Vergecio, a scribe who drifted to Paris under Francis I.,
and whose name became in time a synonyme for beautiful caligraphy.
To write like an angel! Now, with due allowance of the possession,
among celestial beings, of our poor terrene accomplishments, yet
may angels themselves most solemnly and securely preserve us from
the foregoing solecism! Saving the primordial Angelo, a legend
incorporated, none do so much write like angels as that slave-trader,
the writing-master, enemy and subjugator of the hand's natural
freedom. Handwriting, that should be matter of separate mental habit
and muscular action, as Hartley Coleridge averred, the writing-master
artificializes into a set form: a young lady is to write so; a clerk,
so. There is a rascally supposed respectability in keeping to this
masquerade, where revelations of individuality are never in order.
Spectre of our childhood, bugbear of ambrosial years, tyrant, nay,
what can we call thee worse than thou art in bare English, Copy-book!
the faithfullest vow of our life, religious as Hannibal's, was
against thee. We recall with unalterable haughtiness, that not for
one moment did we tolerate thee, save under burning protest; that
thy long-drawn _da capo_ moralities, all letter and no spirit, made
our soul shudder; that every hour at the desk of old, under thy
correct, staring eye, was an hour of scorn and insurrection; and that
we celebrate daily thine anniversary and thy festival, after our
own heart, in cherishing every irregularity that thy Puritan code
abhorreth. Aye, tails and quirks are dear to us, and we fear not to
send forth our _t_ without his bar, our _i_ without her dot, lest
we should seem reconciled to thine atrocious ritual. We shake our
enfranchised hand in thy face, thou stereotyped impostor!
We are not of misanthropic habit, but we reserve a sentiment warm
as York's against Lancaster, or a right Carlist's towards the mild
usurping race of Spain, for that fellow-mortal whose traceries in ink
and pencil are sealed with orthodoxy. By the accepted wretchedness
of their capitals, the moral depravity of their loop-letters, we
choose our friends,--the least erring the least dear. We cannot abide
Giotto, because of his _O_, that had no blemish. We take solace and
delight in that exquisite Janus-jest of the last Bourbon Louis,
who, re-entering his palace, the Imperial initial everywhere above
and beside him, said, with a light shudder, to one of his blood,
"_Voilà des ennemis autour de nous!_" Not for all the authority of
divine Prudence herself, shall we be mindful of our _P_'s and _Q_'s.
A flourish--not, indeed, the martial blare of trumpets, but the
misguided capers of a pen-point--we look upon as a cardinal, yea (if
we may proportion adjectives to our grade of feeling), a pontifical
sin.
Character demonstrates itself in trifles. Washington wrote with
clearness and deliberation, like a law-maker; Rufus Choate,
intricately and whimsically, like a wit. Oldys runs down the
list of English royal autographs, drawing no inferences, and set
solely on his fact. Cromwell's signature is paradoxically faint
and vacillating. "Elizabeth writ an upright hand,--a large, tall
character; James I., in an ungainly fashion, all awry; Charles
I., an Italian hand, the most correct of any prince we ever had;
Charles II., a little, fair, running, uneasy hand," such, adds a
commentator, as we might expect from that illustrious vagabond,
who had much to write, often in odd situations, and never could
get rid of his natural restlessness and vivacity. It goes somewhat
hard with us that Porson, Young, and especially Thackeray, wielded
a proper quill, and were prone to consider penmanship as one of the
fine arts. Nevertheless, we take it that Mr. Joseph Surface, in
the comedy, would write so as to gladden the "herte's roote" of a
school-mistress; as, likewise, might our honest friend Iago. Item,
that Homer's mark was but a hen-scratch, outdone, in his own day, by
the most time-out-of-mind stroller that sang, eyeless, with him.
No missionary, fretting over the innocent rascalities of Afric
tribes, burns with holier wrath than seizes us on beholding the
prospectus of the "Penman's Gazette." Hark to its beguiling
philippics: "Good penmanship hath made fortunes; every year thousands
are advanced by it to position and liberal salaries; students make
it a specialty. It is worth more than all the Greek and Latin,
the _antiquated rubbish_ of the higher schools and colleges, for,
('thine exquisite reason, dear knight?')--for it yields prompt and
generous returns in money, food, clothing, good associations, and
incentives to usefulness in the world!" The gentle reader is to
imagine MONEY in huge capitals, and the other rewards of
merit dwindling successively, till the incentives to usefulness
are scarce visible to the naked eye. And then, forsooth, one is
encouraged periodically by the fish-like portraits of Famous Penmen!
Have a care, have a care, little guileless abecedarian, lest thy
physiognomy, some black morning, should lend its beauty to the
procession of fiends who Write Like Angels!
Whom shall we hire to shout from the house-tops, vehemently, and
with Quixotic disinterestedness, that success should be won through
ambitions a trifle exclusive of money, food, and clothing; and that
this "new heraldry of hands, not hearts," is a monstrous error?
Who is there to heed that strange doctrine? Think into what grave
parley we might be drawn, even by the silken string of the "Penman's
Gazette;" into what resentment of an unheavenly lesson! But we
forbear.
A century closes at the finger-tips of two men of unequal age, and
every touch of palm to palm forges a link of the unseen social chain
which connects us with the father of our race. We take in ours,
with enthusiastic consciousness, a hand we honor, or a hand that by
representation has, perhaps, held cordially that of "the great of
old." So chance we to strike, across the gulf of time, into the
grasp of Caedmon, the Saxon beginner, or the real Roland of the horn,
or Plato, or Alcuin, or him of Salzburg, the sunniest-hearted maker
of music. Neither in our speculations can we forget that a Hand not
all of earth rested once upon childish heads in Galilee, and passed
among vast crowds, forgiving, healing, and doing good; and we know
not but that our meanest brother, coming as a stranger, may bring to
us, in more ways than one, its transmitted benediction.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
AN OPEN LETTER TO THE MOON.
"TO THE CELESTIAL AND MY SOUL'S IDOL, THE MOST
BEAUTIFIED:"--
IT might appear to us an imperative, though agreeable duty, most high
and serene Madame, to waft towards you, occasionally, a transcript
of our humble doings on this nether planet, were we not sure, in
the matter of friendly understanding, that we opened correspondence
long ago. You were one of our earliest familiars. You stood in
that same office to our fathers and mothers, back to your sometime
contemporary, Adam of the Garden; and while we are worried into
acquiescence with years, cares, wrinkles, and such inevitable designs
of age, we are more pleased than envious to discover that you grow
never old to the outward eye, and that you appear the same "lovesome
ladie bright," as when we first stared at you from a child's pillow.
You are acquainted, not by hearsay, but by actual evidence, with
our family history, having seen what sort of figure our ancestors
cut, and being infinitely better aware of the peculiarities of
the genealogical shrub than we can ever be. Therefore we make no
reference to a matter so devoid of novelty. But we do mean to frankly
free our mind on the subject of your Ladyship's own behavior. We take
this resolve to be no breach of that exalted courtesy which befits
us, no less than you, in your skyward station.
We have, in part, lost our ancient respect for you,--a sorry fact
to chronicle. There were once various statements floating about our
cradle, complimentary to your supposed virtues. You were Phoebe,
twin to Phoebus, "goddess excellently bright;" a queen, having a
separate establishment, coming into a deserted court by night, and
kindling it into more than daytime revelry. You were an enchantress,
the tutelary divinity of water-sprites and greensward fairies. Your
presence was indispensable for felicitous dreams. To be moon-struck,
then, meant to be charmed inexpressibly,--to be lifted off our feet.
Now, we allow that you may have suffered by misrepresentation, or
else are we right in detecting your arts; for, by all your starry
handmaidens, you are not what we took you to be. We are informed
(our quondam faith in you almost beshrews the day we learned to
read!) that you are a timid dependent only of the sun, afraid to show
yourself while he is on his peregrinations; that you slyly steal the
garb of his splendor as he lays it aside, and blaze forthwith in your
borrowed finery.
You are no friend to innocent goblins, but abettor to house-breakers.
You are conspirator in many direful deeds, attending base nocturnal
councils, and tacitly arraigning yourself against the law. "Let us
be Diana's foresters, gentlemen of the shade, ... governed, as the
sea is, by our noble and chaste mistress, the moon, under whose
countenance we--steal." Was it not well said, not frankly?
Your gossip is the ominous owl, and not Titania.
Your inconstancy, to come on delicate ground, shineth above your
other characteristics. Since we have seen your color come and go, we
surmise there is no dearth of intrigue and repartee up there; and
being, moreover, well acquainted with the texture of your red and
your gray veil, we infer that you masquerade periodically at very
unseasonable hours. Of painting your complexion we are disposed to
acquit you; yet it is a severe blow to us to learn from the most
trustworthy sources, that you wax.
Selene, Artemis! you are worldly beyond worldlings. We hear that you
have quarters, and that you jingle them triumphantly in the ears of
Orion, who is nobody but a poor hunter. Beware of the exasperation of
the lower classes! whose awakening is what we call below, a French
Revolution.
Who, indeed, that hath a mote in his eye, cannot still discern a huge
beam in yours? You are in grievous need of a resident missionary,
considering that you persist in obstinate schisms, and flaunt
that exploded Orientalism, the Crescent, in the face and eyes of
Christendom.
You are much more distant and reserved, O beguiler! than you pretend.
Your temper is said to be volcanic.
You that were Diana! who is this Falstaffian, Toby Belchian,
Kriss Kringlish person we see about your premises? He hangeth his
great, ruddy, comfortable phiz out of your casements, and holdeth
it sidewise with a wink or a leer. We look on him as an officious
rascal. He peereth where you only, by privilege, have permission
to enter. He hath the evil eye. He thinketh himself a proper
substitute for you, and King of the Illuminari; he reproduceth
your smile, and scattereth your largesses; he maketh faces--we say
it shudderingly--at your worshippers below. Frequently hath he
appropriated kisses that were blown to you personally, or consigned
to you for delivery from one sweetheart to another.
O Lady, O Light-dispenser! think, we hereby beseech you, of the
danger of his being taken for you! Picture the discomfiture of
your minstrel, who, intoning a rapturous recital of your charms,
and casting about for a sight of your delectable loveliness, is
confronted instead with that broad, ingenuous vagabond! In some such
despairing rage as the minstrel's must have been the inventor of the
German tongue, who discarded all other chances of observation after
once beholding this thing ycleped your MAN, and angrily insisted
on "Der Mond"--the Moon, he--as the proper mode of speech.
Get you straightway a more acceptable minion, one of more chivalric
habit, of more spare and ascetic exterior. Your credit and our
comfort demand it. "Pray you, remember."
Less know we of your interminable starry neighbors. Is Mars civil,
or heavy Saturn capable of laughter? Hath a comet vexed you,--that
tireless incendiary? Doth Leo roar too loudly on your sensitive
ear? We fancy that the Dipper is replenished frequently in your
Ladyship's court; that the Milky Way is pleasantest of your pastures;
that the Scorpion guardeth your palace gateway; and that Aquarius, be
he not delinquent, tendeth your flower-beds.
What scenes, Cosmopolite, Circumnavigator, Universalist, have you
beheld! What joy, what plenty; what riot and desolation! You are the
arch-spectator. Death sees not half so widely. He lurketh like an
anxious thief in the crowd, seeking what he may take away. But your
bland leisurely eye looketh down impartially on all.
Caravans rested a thousand years ago beneath you in the desert;
Assyrian shepherds chanted to you with their long-hushed voices;
the Euphrates, while the infant world fell into its first slumber,
leaped up and played with you in Paradise. You have known the chaos
before man, and yet we saw you laugh upon last April's rain. Are
there none for whom you are lonely through the ages? Are there not
centuries of old delight in your memory, unequalled now? faces fairer
than the lilies, on whose repose you still yearn to shine? Do you
miss the smoke of altars? Have you forgotten the beginners of the
"star-ypointing pyramid"? Can you not tell us a tale of the Visigoth?
How sang Blondel against the prison-door? How brawny was Bajazet? How
fair was Helen; Semiramis how cruel? Moon! where be the treasures of
the doughty Kidd?
Where, too, is the slow, mysterious evening of our childhood, or its
dawn, anticipating change, as you turned away? Or, rather, where is
the child that enjoyed them by your kindly ray,--retaining now, of
all which was its identity, only the dense sleep, the illimitable
dreams, of those intervening nights? Do you call to mind, you that
saw them often, its after-supper frolics; its Hallow-e'en captures,
despite tub and candle; its inopportune studies, stolen out of mere
greediness to know,--a fever long subsided? You were kind to that
something of yesterday, dead as Amenophis now. Gleam, in some recess
of the south, to-night, on bright-eyed F., who answered its young
jests, and journeyed with it over the icy river, arm-in-arm; and on
B.G., austere yet gentle, who played Brutus once to its Cassius; and
rise not, rise not too soon upon our Philippi!
You have been fed, O Cynthia! upon the homage of mortal lips: you
have had praises from the poets exquisite as calamus and myrrh. Many
a time have we rehearsed before you such as we recall, from the sigh
of Enobarbus,--
"O sovereign mistress of true melancholy!"
to the hymnal
"Orbèd maiden! with white fire laden,"
or the noble salutation of a mirthful-mournful spirit over seas:--
"Oh! thou art beautiful, howe'er it be,
Huntress or Dian, or whatever named;
And he the veriest pagan, that first framed
His silver idol, and ne'er worshipped thee!"
Drummond, Sidney, Milton, glorified your wanderings. And your truest
votary, one John Keats, spake out boldly that,
----"the oldest shade midst oldest trees
Feels palpitations when thou lookest in!"
You are an incorrigible charmer; but as you are likewise
----"a relief
To the poor, patient oyster, where he sleeps
Within his pearly house,"
we infer, with pleasurable surprise, that you are something better: a
humanitarian.
Now, we venture to assert that you remember compliments, meant to be
of this same Orphic strain, and inscribed to you, of which we are not
wholly guiltless. We have all but knelt to you. The primeval heathen
has stirred within us. We have been under the witchery of Isis. We
aspire to be a Moonshee, rather than any potentate of this universe.
We wound you not with the analytic eye, nor startle you with
telescopes. The scepticisms of astronomy enter not into our rubric.
Are you not comely? Do you not spiritualize the darkness with
one touch of your pale garment? Then what are they to us,--your
dimensions and your distances? Gross vanity of knowledge! Abuse of
earthly privileges!
If we affect the abusive, shy of more ceremonious forms of address,
forgive us, Luna! We make recantation, and disown our banter. We
extend the hand of cordiality even to your Man. How blithe and
beauteous he is! He is embodied Gentility. We bow to him as your
anointed Viceroy, your illustrious Nuncio. You know our immemorial
loyalty, nor shall our rogueries teach you so late to doubt it.
Forgive us, benignant, peaceful, affable, propitious Moon! Poet are
we not, nor lunatic, nor lover; "but that we love thee best, O most
best! believe it."
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
BRENTFORD PULPIT.
FROM a little church of some celebrity, and from a remote corner
in its quiet nave, come these rude bygone impressions, transcribed
faithfully, save in whatsoever is mainly personal and local. No
word is here of Brentford choir or Brentford pews; but a record,
strict and spare, of the now vanished figures who expounded texts
to the village folk. For the most part, they were but birds of
passage, seldom remaining long enough to lose the gloss of novelty,
or to escape the awakened scrutiny of young eyes. Two only of these
preachers were widely known; but each of them, on the other hand,
possessed a striking individuality. The "King of Brentford," as
readers of a certain swinging translation of Béranger will remember,
was something of an anomaly; and Brentford chaplains, at least in
their public career, were indubitably of his court.
First, shall we not recall the Reverend L., with his soft majesty
of speech, having in it an ever-recurring _sforzando_, peculiarly
impressive and overpowering,--L., with his benignity of soul and
his keen, evanescent smile, intellect flashing through it, like
lightning over a sombre waste of waters? He required the closest
attention of any speaker to whom we have listened. The following
must be incessant, the allegiance unabated, lest the Emersonian and
gossamer-like sequence of ideas, the swift beauty of phrase and
figure, elude you, never to reappear the same. His playfulness in the
pulpit was unique. Subdued it was, yet how potent! Humor has many
a fit abiding-place in this world, of which the pulpit seems last
to be chosen. But L.'s discretion was royally sure. His salutary
wit, felicitous in placing itself, and infrequent enough to rouse
attention always newly, went on angelic errands with its Puck's
wings. An apostolic purpose consecrated his airy thrusts at evil.
The hand of steel was present ever under his caressing touches.
We surmise that if there was anything connected with his
vocation which L. abhorred, it was the necessity of periodical
charity-sermons. When induced to appear as pleader on these
occasions, his conduct was amusingly characteristic. He played
hide-and-seek with his petition; he put it off, eyed it curiously,
fenced with it, and kept it at arm's length; then, beginning to
advocate its claims, he held it up for your inspection reluctantly,
as if it were no child of his, and his right were rather to befriend
it in private than thrust it into public notice. He would say a few
glowing words, making his fortitude under such an emergency as truly
a hint to your benevolence as his spoken plea. He would sum up for
you the misery of the poor, the lamentable differences in comfort,
the evils that spring from unalleviated poverty, the precept of
brotherly love, the imperative command of giving and sharing and
making glad; all this with an air of indifference over facts in
array, and of needless appealing to such hearts and such purses as
yours were sure to be! L. could have written noble charity-sermons
for another's delivery, but to ask in his own person was wellnigh
impossible. He seemed to rebel, not against the actual discomfort of
his position, but rather against the advisability of reminding you of
a duty you never could have forgotten. In his chivalrous dealing he
smote your sensibilities more surely than many a professional beggar
with seven small children; and the shekels leaped in a fountain from
you and from everybody else, until the alms-box overflowed. L.'s
utility in this strange office was quite wonderful, even to himself.
His very exordium, "Dear old friends!" was, though he knew it not,
irresistible. On the morrow, Workhouse Tommy with a new cap, or
barefooted Molly in the exhilaration of a sturdy dinner, must have
blessed the shy and half-resentful claim which a great heart put
forth as theirs.
L.'s preaching, for the most part, whether in its bright or solemn
phases, was best understood by those who best knew the man. Like
Walter Savage Landor, in whom he delighted, and whom he strongly
resembled, he required appreciators as well as hearers. He loved a
thoughtful audience, and to such spoke with all the outpouring of his
mightier self. There were minds of a certain cast, wholly foreign to
his sympathies, which were slow to be persuaded into a belief of his
accessibility. Yet a meeker and kinder heart than L.'s never beat.
Half the country knew him as a fine theologian, and scarce fifty for
the "sweet sociable spirit" that he was. A touch of the intolerance
of genius he had indeed, without which the symmetry of his character
would have been impaired.
D., with his active and high-strung temperament, was your
true conversational preacher, treating with glad and reverent
familiarity "thoughts beyond the reaches of our souls." Beneath
the sounding-board he was perpetually on the defensive. He was
always setting you straight, putting you in the way of seeing
good, reconciling you to your antipathies. If we may use the word
to signify a process so gentle, he _hammered_ his optimism into
you. You must be cheerful, you must be thankful, you must be
self-sacrificing; there was no escaping it. D., in his zeal and
his amiability, was a far-away echo of John the Evangelist; and
the phrase, "My little children," came with peculiar unction from
his lips. His voice was not powerful. It may have been a slight
hesitation and reluctance of speech which gave it an especial charm.
"Somewhat he lispèd," also, like Chaucer's Friar; if not
----"for his wantonnesse
To make his English sweete upon his tonge."
We remember that once, by some chance development of his favorite
topic, he came across a wayside tramp, and gave him an apotheosis
laughingly called to mind whenever one of that thenceforth respected
species lights upon our path.
"Here is a vagabond, an outcast of society," began the Reverend
D., with his usual high-bred gesture of expostulation,--"a
good-for-nothing beggar whom you brush as you pass; and drawing
aside, mayhap in your heart of hearts you despise him. You have
no right to despise him. Nothing has destroyed or will destroy
the eternal brotherhood between you. Despise him? Why, it is a
disloyalty to mankind. In the eye of Heaven sinlessness is the
criterion, not riches or health or intelligence. And he may stand
nearer to the Throne than you, because of a more repentant spirit.
Why should you despise him? It belongs to you rather to love and aid
him. He is a reflection of yourselves, distanced from you by the
mean formalities of the world, but fashioned like you without and
within, and co-heir of whatever has fallen to your share. What you
have been taught through the dignity of manhood and womanhood to
think yourselves--that is he. He is the Image of Uncreated Beauty. He
is the Wedding Guest in the palace of the King. He is the Mortal who
shall put on Immortality. He is the Son of the House of David, the
hope and joy of Israel. His head is like Carmel, and his form as of
Libanus, excellent as the cedars. Dare you despise him? Even as you
deal with him in your thought, should the Most High deal with you in
our great day forthcoming!"
This extraordinary burst was delivered with indescribable serenity.
We have but suggested the gorgeous language in which D. revelled when
he chose, nor hinted at the peculiarity of pose and intonation which
helped to make his words vital. To one hearer, at least, the effect
was superb, and the tramp was established in his native dignity
forever.
Dr. R. had the artistic temperament, being a poet of rare worth.
There was always a fine metaphoric haze about his sermons. He was
by nature diffident and somewhat listless; the effort of mounting
the pulpit stair must have been distasteful to him. His phrasing
was of extreme nicety and justness; and he spoke English pure and
simple. Yet his "Greek languor," his low, unobtrusive voice, served
to veil the excellence of his thoughts. He was shy of any display.
His Sunday efforts certainly did not become popular, in the Brentford
acceptance of that term. But while R., like the clouds, seemed gray
always to heedless eyes, to brighter perceptions he must have shown
the delicate, transitory tints of the rainbow. He had two great
merits: his quotations, scriptural and other, were exquisitely apt;
he likewise knew the value of sudden epilogues. You had not time to
suspect that the last rounded period was having its dying fall, before
"He straight, disburthened, bounded off as fleet
As ever any arrow from a cord."
Altogether another type of Levite was the Reverend M., of clear
Puritan descent. He had an expansive personality, and could rise
to any occasion, clothing what he had to say in easy and elegant
language. As a rule, his sermons, not to speak it profanely, were
pacifying as an opiate. But sometimes he stood before his astonished
hearers not wholly as a symbol of the peace-maker.
For his text, many years back, he once took the "abomination of
desolation, spoken of by Daniel the prophet," Matthew xxiv. The
awful sublimity of his reading prepared his auditors for what was to
follow. Hearts were stirred to the depths that day, with the measured
musical utterance, the dread and calm authority, such as fancy had
conceived proper to the Recording Angel. M. never seemed quite so
aerial and boyish in his proper person again. That one grand sermon
shed its supernatural light still over him, as he walked on Monday
and Tuesday in view of the laity. It seemed as if all his previous
and subsequent words and ways were a disguise, and that only on the
never-to-be-forgotten morning he had been revealed. None of his other
attempts were thereafter held in comparison with this, an advantage
not to be doubted. A magnificent prejudice in his favor would fain
have forced upon his every parley the beauty which the first had worn.
We last heard the Reverend M. (he was then nearing his sixtieth
year) on the evening of a Christmas day. We recall that he began by
poetically picturing the corresponsive hour of that primal Christmas
when the divine Child lay slumbering in His mother's arms, the hush
of the Bethlehem hills, the unconsciousness of the broad kingdom that
"knew him not." Little by little, the monotones of this tranquil
discourse fell, like so many snow-flakes, upon our eyelids. A
swinging festoon of smilax, stirred by chance beneath the pulpit
edge, charmed us deeper into oblivion. The light ran in eddies on the
faint gray walls. The visible, the palpable, were as if they had not
been. We had slipped from our moorings into the irresistible depth of
dreams.
Presently we heard anew, half-distinctly, half-confusedly, "_O
expectatio gentium!_" We looked towards the starting-point of that
Latin spray, but nothing followed upon our sudden rousing save the
burst of the organ. All about us was a rustling and a stirring, such
as the Ephesian sleepers might make at the awakening. Horrible!
Dreams were over for many others beside the solitary culprit we
had supposed ourself. Bonnets nodded; furs were smoothed; numbed
feet were tapped upon the carpet for resuscitation; and Chubbuck in
the next pew rubbed his eyes, to the imminent extinction of those
useful auxiliaries. Heaven forgive us our drowsiness! How much
æsthetic pleasure, how much spiritual profit Brentford missed that
night, befits us not to conjecture. Yet we palliate the disgraceful
circumstances, due in no wise to lack of virtue on our part, or of
eloquence on the Reverend M.'s, by surmising that the general slumber
was a tribute of itself; not, indeed, a protest of weariness, or
ungracious abstraction from duty, but rather an affiliation with the
time and the theme
----"made all of sweet accord."
Who shall gainsay it?
The like hap, we are sorry to state, never befell us under the spell
of that austere prelate, Theophilus A. One could as soon have grown
mindless of a Gatling gun in full activity. He was an ecclesiastical
thunderbolt. Ferdinand would have put him on the Inquisition. He
could have served the mediæval writs of excommunication on kings, or
stood with high-hearted Hildebrand to confront the German at Canossa.
A. was pale, but not weakly, with his dauntless eye, his luminous
front, his unrelaxed lips drawn like a bowstring. He was all
vehemence; his dearly-beloveds had scintillations to them; his very
firstlys and secondlys had the heroic ring.
Did he wear the armor of the ancestral Franks under his clerical
dress? Whence got he that tremendous vigor, that aptitude for great
and hazardous things? Apollyon could scarcely have lessened the
vitality of this Christian by any combat, however long and fierce.
You must have felt his presence helpful or harsh, as your
organization prompted. A harp will quiver with a concussion in its
vicinity. So with mortal men and women in juxtaposition with the
Reverend A. He had aroused splendid impulses, so it was said, in
many lands; but the ultra-sensitive soul was scarcely adapted to his
touch. He it was who could make Willard, serene as a child, shake
like an aspen-leaf at his mildest peroration.
More comfortably enchanting wert thou, O K.! whom every tongue
praised. Welcome was thy young cherubic countenance, dawning midway
between the roof and the aisles! Worthy of Talma was that shining
dramatic gift which brightened a hundred-fold the utterances of thy
manly piety! Who could make doubtful issues surer than thou, least
didactic, yet most practical of preachers? Who could so boldly
pursue a simile, eking analogies out of stones? Who so pitiless on
impostures and shams, when thy gallant oratory
"Blew them transverse, ten thousand leagues awry"?
Peter the Hermit, with his crusading spirit, would have loved thee.
It was the fashion at one time to classify K. along with Dr. S., of
a neighboring city, a gentleman with whom he had few mental traits
in common, outside of the gift of eloquence. S. was the inimitable
to his parishioners; and he had, like Bobadil, "most un--in one
breath--utterable skill, sir!" The matter of his sermons could have
been turned without alteration into blank verse, having cadences
manifold. He spoke rapidly and moved alternately from side to side
in lieu of gesticulation; he studied no opportunity, but lavished
his fine things, like an almoner at a coronation, here and there and
everywhere.
K., never a user of notes, and no less spontaneous than his famous
reputed rival, was habitually careful of detail. His imagination was
gorgeous. His activity ran to the verge of restlessness. Thoroughly
earnest and exhilarating, his large intelligence was cheery as a
breeze from the mountain-top.
Neither can we forget Brentford's Titanic visitor, magnificently
verbose, looming at his extraordinary height, with a fund of
simplicity and gentleness hidden somewhere beneath that generous
exterior. How guileless he was, how tender!--"invaluable at a
tragedy." The petition which Mr. Thomas Prince delivered in the Old
South would have fallen with equal grace from N.'s lips:--
"O Lord! we would not advise;
But if, in Thy Providence,
A tempest should arise
And drive the French fleet hence,
And scatter it far and wide,
And sink it in the sea,
We should be satisfied,
And Thine the glory be!"
With what fervor, two parts patriotism, one part innocence, would N.
have pronounced that mischievous supplication!
His conscientiousness carried him once a little too far; and the
sequel "dimmed these spectacles," as Thackeray used to say. It was to
us the funniest thing that ever happened in sacred precincts,--funny
beyond all power of endurance.
"When Solomon finished the Temple," said the Reverend N., in his
sonorous tones,--"when Solomon finished the Temple he sacrificed one
hundred and twenty thousand sheep and twenty-two thousand oxen." Now,
that was incontestable. But immediately a wretched little doubt crept
in upon his Biblical assertion. "Seventy thousand--ur--ur--twenty
thousand sheep," continued the Reverend N., "twenty hundred
thousand ox--ahem! I mean two hundred thousand, a hundred and
twenty--ur--[very slow and deliberate reiteration]: two and twenty
thousand oxen, one hundred and twenty thousand sheep." When the last
sheep came on the scene we were suffering from agonies of laughter.
Let us trust that they turned their meek and startled eyes another
way.
There was H., too, a white-haired logician who had proved everything,
from the Creation down to the principles of good and evil in the
most neglected "queer small boy;" E., drawing exquisite homely
illustrations from the sea; and gracious little B., the polished
rhetorician, most deferent in his manners of address, most
scrupulously reliant on the sense and rectitude of those around him.
"Honor and reverence and good repute" be with them all now,
wheresoever they may labor or rest. We think sometimes we have heard
Cyril and Polycarp among them.
Our incurable tendency towards observation--the fact of our having
been born in an Observatory, so to speak--stands as apology for
touching on the heaven-appointed mannerisms of Brentford Polycarps
and Cyrils.
[Illustration]
NOTES MADE BY TROILUS GENTLY.
GENTLY was a middle-aged, bookish friend of ours, in no way
remarkable save that he unconsciously nullified Emerson's smiling
prediction, and wore off a pencil-point in writing down the
disconnected fancies of a few days. Poor T.G. has long been gathered
to his fathers. In justice to the pencil, we transcribe some of his
memoranda:--
* * * * *
No pleasure or success in life quite meets the capacity of our
hearts. We take in our good things with enthusiasm, and think
ourselves happy and satisfied; but afterward, when the froth and
foam have subsided, we discover that the goblet is not more than
half-filled with the golden liquid that was poured into it.
* * * * *
Reciprocity of good-will, and not compatibility of tastes, is the
first requisite of friendship.
* * * * *