of waters over a rocky bed, or the bird-chorus of a May morning. His
melodies and those of Nature have always some subtle association. It
is as if we knew the noble mother, and walked often by her side, and
some fine day we meet the intelligent and sportive child, finding in
his voice, his gestures, his salutation, something foreshadowed to us
in that other, and beautiful in both.
* * * * *
Life is a breathing-space between two eternities, a holiday with
appalling realities behind and before.
* * * * *
Barbarians "speak with naked hearts together:" we have polite
conversation.
* * * * *
I am fond of smelling the spring,--detecting growth before it shows
itself by the delicious damp odor in the fields. Snow and rain have
their separate fragrance. I know at a distance the aromatic pine, the
eatable whiff of birch-bark, the oily sweetness of sappy maples, the
tart goodness of a sorrel-patch, and the scent of crushed tansy.
* * * * *
The Chinese countenance is impassive, as if the old, old weight of
Asiatic civilization had blunted and oppressed it.
* * * * *
Vandyck deified his sitters. He is like the sun in Shakespeare's
line,--
"Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy."
* * * * *
A good dinner is not to be despised. It paves the way for all the
virtues.
* * * * *
B. knew a little French girl who always insisted, with a pretty
extravagance of intonation, that pigs in their grunt were saying,
"Nous aurons congé."
* * * * *
When a soul finds nothing to reverence among its common surroundings,
it is blind indeed.
* * * * *
The beauty of youth is inconstant and shifting as the tint at
the heart of a rose, not two mornings the same; or the fall of
snow-flakes, blown by every wind into new and airy relationships.
* * * * *
The Brook Farmer is extinct now as the dodo. It would be a delight to
come across one who is sensitive yet on the subject of that Arcadian
failure.
* * * * *
When genius seems to work disregarding rule, we may be sure that it
has assimilated to itself whatever is best in every rule.
* * * * *
The undertaker ostensibly reverses the venerable truism that "the
young may die, the old must," by thrusting forward the smaller
coffins in his awful windows, and keeping the others (in the
subjunctive mood, as it were) well in the background.
* * * * *
The mind is fearless so long as there is no reproach of conscience.
When that comes, come breakage and bondage and a host of terrors.
* * * * *
Shelley was all fire and air. His eye had perpetually the fixed
light of a day-dreamer's. There is a marked resemblance between the
portrait of him taken at Rome in 1819, by Miss Curran, and that
of Sir Philip Sidney, engraved from the original and prefixed to
Grosart's edition,--a resemblance not astonishing save to those
unacquainted with both mild and "heroick spirits."
* * * * *
It seems a little difficult to discern clearly the happiness or
misery of those very near to us in affection. Souls have their
perspective, and need to be removed from the eye, that it may scan
them justly.
* * * * *
Sickness is such a humiliation that some cannot survive its first
infliction.
* * * * *
We try hard to cure superstition, which has been defined as the
surplus of faith, the mere foam and scum of what is valuable.
Over-confidence and enthusiasm, which are in the same degree the
excess of hope and love, we do not try to cure at all.
* * * * *
Thomson, the poet, was so lazy that he used to eat peaches off the
trees, standing with his hands contentedly plunged in his pockets.
* * * * *
Would not the weather hang itself in despair if no notice were taken
of it, and if every man, woman, and child forbore to speak of it for
three successive days?
* * * * *
"Frostling" used to signify a bough, blossom, or fruit nipped by
the cold; and "windling" one blown from its natural support; two
sweet and expressive words, now obsolete and without synonymes. It
is hard to account for their being left behind in the race for the
development of our English.
* * * * *
W., whose beliefs are quite fixed, vacillates nobly in matters of
opinion. In a group of debaters he holds with no one long, but must
needs jump at a conclusion so liberal and sure that it reconciles all
hostilities.
* * * * *
All lovers are bewitched, steeped in illusions, versed in the
oracles,--the riddle themselves of the whole world.
* * * * *
"Ye smiler with ye knif under ye cloke!" What a picture in that line
of Chaucer!
* * * * *
The Puritan was a man of severities. He never forgot that God struck
Oza and buried Pharaoh in the sea. He went through the world wearing
his creed, like a sword, solely for aggressive purposes.
* * * * *
The deficiency of gentle manners, in one not bred to their practice,
can nearly always be supplied by sensibility or by tact.
"Take them, O great eternity!
Our little life is but a gust
Which bends the branches of thy tree
And trails its blossoms thro' the dust."
I never knew a critic to note the metaphor in these musical lines of
Longfellow, but it seems to me quite haunting and overpowering, and
of extraordinary beauty.
* * * * *
When you wear your old and shabby coat, anticipating a continued
storm; and the sun shines, making you out of place with your
ill-chosen garb, how natural it is to trace the analogy from dress to
manners, and to reflect how poor a show premeditated surliness and
sourness make in the broad light of the world!
* * * * *
We die and are forgotten; but must we forget?
* * * * *
The Greek pastoral compliment, "Thou singest better than a cicada,"
would do very well now-a-days for an amiable old lady to address to
her tea-kettle on the hob.
* * * * *
Thoreau greatly rejoiced in what he called his "invisible suit," a
sort of mottled brown-and-green stuff in which he could cross a field
undetected.
* * * * *
There was once a golden age because golden hearts beat in it. If it
come again, it will scarcely be through scientific progress.
* * * * *
What an excellent, high-minded motto would the last words of Walter
Raleigh make: "So the heart be straight, it matters nought how
the head lieth." It is an echo of that celestial text, "Be ye not
solicitous," and implies serene disregard of all but things essential.
* * * * *
It may be exacting, but not a whit so beyond justice, when I feel
that if I serve the king, he must repay me in love and trust, or my
allegiance cannot thrive.
* * * * *
I came of late across a newly told jest of C. Lamb's concerning
Stilton cheese, which pleased me tremendously, having the indubitable
flavor of his wit, and being (what is rarely the case with floating
anecdotes of him) unmistakably his.
* * * * *
I cannot recall faces or forms that I have seldom met, or recognize
them again with ease, unless some revealed trait or expression of
soul has made gait, contour, and presence memorable.
* * * * *
Pride is the distorter of souls; cheerfulness the helper; love the
beautifier; sorrow the redeemer.
* * * * *
If I ever had the heroic strain, it has receded beyond my own
perception; and like an athlete out of practice, I have to "brace"
before doing that which is right, in defiance of inclination.
* * * * *
"The pure in heart shall see God,"--severe and lovely touchstone for
mankind.
* * * * *
I saw once two sisters, the younger resembling the other as the
translation of a poem does its original, moving by the same laws of
beauty, yet inevitably lacking something of the earlier grace and
flavor.
* * * * *
Twenty-third May, 1881. Hawthorne buried seventeen years ago to-day.
"Who henceforth shall sing to thy pipe, O thrice-lamented? Who shall
set mouth to thy reeds?"
* * * * *
How very considerate of the failings of others must that man be who
remembers constantly the Infinite Mercy he himself needs!
* * * * *
A good temper is a jewel extraordinary, and a worker of wonders. One
of the old chroniclers tells of an irresistibly amiable monk who for
some misdemeanor was sent to hell and released again, because Satan
could not provoke or torment him.
* * * * *
The sight of a hearse against the joyous streets is always
depressing: a dark line drawn through thoughtless festivity, like the
dread writing on the wall at Belshazzar's feast.
* * * * *
C.'s poetry has much simplicity, calmness, pastoral sense, and
beauty; his prose is jerky and barbaric. He is a sort of medal having
the king's head finished on one side, the rough uncouth surface
wanting a stamp on the other.
* * * * *
An odd and good resolve,--to carry the right hand always ungloved,
lest one should meet a friend, and be off one's cordiality, so to
speak; or a foe, and be off one's self-defence.
* * * * *
Reserve is made sometimes of chain-mail, sometimes of solid plate
steel. One is as good armor as the other, though not so obvious.
* * * * *
Some people wear out everything quickly and naturally,--clothes,
acquaintanceship, books, pleasures, even dear life itself.
* * * * *
I am delighted at Lowell's saying that our modern terms, "the deuce"
and "Old Scratch," were evidently derived from _dus_ and _scrat_,
hairy wood-demons among the Celts and Teutons.
* * * * *
The best of everything is the only individual of that thing. We
should ignore the rest.
* * * * *
I think one of the drollest stories I ever heard of
absent-mindedness, is this of old P., the barrister. He and his
friend M. were sitting close together about the hearth of a winter
night. There was no light; they were alone and silent. Suddenly
P. got thinking of some project, and according to his villanous
and immemorial habit, meditatively began to scratch his cranium.
He came to a pause; but recovering the sequence of his thoughts,
felt compelled likewise to resume the physical operation. But this
time P. wildly clutched not his own, but M.'s profuser locks, and
furiously recommenced. M. stood it for a moment, inwardly convulsed
with laughter, then lightly removed the offending hand; and P.
roared out angrily, faltering in the middle of his speech with a
bewilderment beautiful to see: "Great George! don't you suppose I
have a right, a right to-- to-- You don't mean to say that wasn't my
own head!"
* * * * *
Standing is the most royal and natural pose. I have a sympathy for
that Roman emperor who sprang to his feet to meet the quick death
that came upon him.
* * * * *
Spenser: "The noblest mind the best contentment has." Thoreau, by
way of exemplification: "I shall not fret to be a giant, but be the
biggest pygmy that I can."
* * * * *
Hawthorne wrote with his conscience. It was a sort of
celestial-colored ink which he kept by him, and into which ever and
anon he dipped his pen.
* * * * *
I was struck anew, of late, with the complete ideality of the
Venus of Melos, its charm of detail, out-naturing Nature: the head
so delicately moulded, the neck so slender yet so strong, the
scarce-deviating outline from shoulder to hip; the very apotheosis
of health and beauty, with a spirituality over all that sets you
thinking of a sweet and ample heart within.
* * * * *
There is scarcely a blow in after life comparable to that first sad
intimation (perhaps in early youth), that human nature is not what we
thought it, not the thing of our dreams; little else than a tissue of
frailties woven together.
* * * * *
Shakespeare's "Rosalind" is not very dissimilar to the best type of
the much-maligned American girl. She is full of "frolic parley,"
self-reliant, tender, womanly.
* * * * *
"Old hushed Egypt." Put down that golden phrase, along with many
another, to Leigh Hunt. When a delightsome author threatens to be
forgotten, credit him at least with what he has added to the soul of
literature, and let him be buried "with all his travelling glories
round him."
* * * * *
The French language is _eau sucré_; the German "A cup o' thy small
beer, sweet hostess."
* * * * *
If I have a friend, though absent many years, I hold a true treasure
with fear and trembling, knowing that whatever losses come, I have
been blessed beyond measure with the wealth no chance can take away.
* * * * *
Love is unlike the bow of Ulysses, in that it can be drawn to its
full capacity of magnificence or destruction not only by the greatest.
* * * * *
I know a man who looks like Boccaccio, and does not appreciate it.
* * * * *
Genius, like the lowly insect having prophetic stirrings of the
beauty it is to evolve, needs solitude, and must build it unaided for
itself. If it come forth in due time winged and lovely to the sun,
or if it die in the dark, unsuspected of its aim, either end will be
found best relatively to the life it affects.
* * * * *
There is no participator who serves so well in any conversation as an
adept in commonplaces and "words, words, words."
* * * * *
Milton's "charm of half-awakened birds" means _charm_ in the pretty
old English sense of "twittering," "piping softly and confusedly."
* * * * *
Much of Thomas Hood's more serious work is overlooked by the public
eye. Some one will be obliged to come forth by and by to say, and to
say truly, that nobler poems than the "Haunted House," the "Poet's
Portion," and "Death" were never written.
* * * * *
In the matter of reform, I should choose often to be a crab-reformer,
and to move backward after many wish-worthy things of yesterday.
* * * * *
Thackeray says somewhere that "we see the world, each of us, with our
own sight, and make from within us the world we see."
* * * * *
By way of experiment, a youngling of scholarly race might be kept
wholly from books, etc., to see if the ancestral learning would not
revive of itself.
* * * * *
It pains me to see coarseness predominant in the human
countenance,--a thing so ethereal and divine of itself. Think of the
forerunning wrongs back in the generations which have prompted and
helped it to its present degradation!
* * * * *
The poets, in chronicling strong emotion over things actual or
imagined, must frequently outgo the force of the emotion in the
expression of it, so that they have the power of draining off the
whole supply and depth of their feeling.
* * * * *
Coleridge should have lived in the times of the oracles. He would
have "drawn," as we say, better than Delphi.
* * * * *
At the funeral of a celebrated artist, wherein I took no part
whatever, and had only a genuine sorrow for the public loss to
excuse my slipping into the church, the sexton wanted to seat me
conspicuously, taking me for a chief mourner, for a relative _at
least_, he said. I was pleased at the limiting clause.
* * * * *
Children are born optimists, and we slowly educate them out of their
heresy.
* * * * *
We are stricken mute by an heroic death. Praise is poor and vain if
the life forerunning it was heroic too; and if it was not, love and
forgiveness seem not half good enough to offer at the ruined shrine,
where at last a divinity has descended.
* * * * *
In sensitive natures, just as the ordinary blessings of life cast an
aggrandized shadow and result in supreme pleasure, so their denial
becomes a matter of deep pain, equally disproportionate to the cause.
* * * * *
It is better to fall into added disrepute with an enemy than to
alienate a would-be friend.
* * * * *
Frankness prevents troubles that only time can cure.
* * * * *
A good and worthy life cannot be detached or wholly useless, because
unfinished. When you throw a number of broken rings on the floor, on
lifting one you find it casually joined with another, and each, in
turn, with many more. So must a man's endeavor co-operate with a
predecessor's, and be linked again with some life-work to be ended
to-morrow, in beautiful, enduring sequence; though to outward vision
all three were but severally a fragment and a failure.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
ON TEACHING ONE'S GRANDMOTHER HOW TO SUCK EGGS.
IN the days of the schoolmen, when no vexed question went without its
fair showing, it seems incredible that the proposition hereto affixed
as a title provoked no labyrinthine reasoning from any of those
musty and hair-splitting philosophers. Aristotle himself overlooked
it; Duns Scotus and the noted Aureolus Philip Theophrastus Bombast
de Hohenheim Paracelsus were content to repeat his sin of omission.
Even that seventeenth-century English essayist and scholar, "whose
understanding was wide as the terrene firmament," neither unearthed
the origin of this singular implied practice, nor attempted in any
way to uphold or depreciate it. The phrase hath scarce the grace of
an Oriental precept, and scarce the dignity of Rome. It might sooner
appertain to Sparta, where the old were held in reverence, and where
their education, in a burst of filial anxiety, might be prolonged
beyond the usual term of mental receptivity.
It is reserved, therefore, for some modern inquirer to fix it, for
certain, whether the strange accomplishment in mind was at any time,
in any nation, barbarous or enlightened, in universal repute among
venerable females; or else especially imparted, under the rose, as
a sort of witch-trick, to conjurers, fortune-tellers, Pythonesses,
Sibyls, and such secretive and oracular folk; whether the initiatory
lessons were theoretical merely, and at what age the grandams (for
the condition of _hypermaternity_ was at least imperative) were
allowed to matriculate themselves in the precincts of this lost art.
It is a partial argument against the antiquity of the custom, and
against the supposition of its having prevailed among old Europe's
nomadic tribes, that several of these are accused by historians
of having destroyed their progenitors so soon as the latter became
idle and enfeebled; whereas it is reasonably to be inferred that the
gentle process of ovisugescence, had such then been invented, would
have kept the savage fireside peopled with happy and industrious
centenarians. After the arduous labor of their long lives, this new,
leisurely, immeasurably mild and genteel trade could be acquired
with imperceptible trouble. Cato mastering Greek at eighty, Dandolo
leading hosts when past his nonage, are kittenish and irreverend
figures beside that of a toothless Goth grandmother learning, with
melancholy energy, to suck eggs.
We know not why the privilege of education, if granted to them
without question, should have been withheld from their gray spouses,
who certainly would have preferred so sociable an industry to
whetting the knives of the hunters, or tending watch-fires by night.
But no one of us ever heard of a grandfather sucking eggs. The gentle
art was apparently sacred to the gentle sex, and withheld from the
shaggy lords of creation, until the fierce creatures, ignorant of
the innutritious properties of the shell, took to devouring them
whole.
By what means was the race of hens, for instance, preserved?
Statistics might be proffered concerning the ante-natal consumption
of fledglings, which would edify students of natural history.
One bitterly disputed point the noble adage under consideration
permanently settles; a quibble which ought to have
----"staggered that stout Stagyrite,"
and which has come even to the notice of grave, inductive
theologians: _videlicet_, that the bird, and not the egg, may
claim the priority of existence. For had it been otherwise, _one's
grandmother_ would have been early acquainted with the very article
which her posterity recommended to her as a novelty, and which, with
respectful care, they taught her to utilize after a fashion best
adapted to her time of life.
Fallen into desuetude is this judicious and salutary custom. There
must have been a time when a yellowish stain about the mouth denoted
an age, a vocation, a limitation, effectually as the bulla of the
youth, the maiden's girdle, "the marshal's truncheon, or the judge's
robe," or any of the picturesque distinctions now crushed out of the
social code. Let a cynic add, who does not fear to chase a trope
beyond bounds, that though certain misguided ancient ladies may
lapse, contemporaneously, into the burlesque and parody of suction,
and draw towards themselves some yet coveted fooleries, compliments,
gallantries,--alas! anachronisms both; yet the orthodox sucking of
eggs, the innocent, austere, philosophic pastime, is no more, and
that the glory of grandams is extinguished forever.
The dreadful civility of our Western woodsmen, the popular
dissentient voice alike of the theatre and of the political meeting:
the casting of eggs wherefrom the elements of youth and jucundity are
wholly eliminated, affords a speculation on heredity, and appears
as a faint echo of some traditional squabble in the morning of the
world, among disagreeing kinswomen, the very primordial Battle of
Eggs! where reloading was superfluous, where every shell told; whose
blackest spite was spent in a golden rain and hail! What havoc over
the face of young creation; what coloring of pools, and of errant
butterflies! What distress amid the cleanly pixies and dryads, whose
shady haunts trickled unwelcome moisture! terror not unshared even in
the recesses of the coast:--
"Intus aquae dulcis, vivoque sedilia saxo,
Nympharum domus!"
One can fancy the younglings of the vast human family, the success of
whose lesson to their elders was thus over-well demonstrated, marking
the ebb and flow of hostilities, like the spirits of Richelieu and of
the superb fourteenth Louis eying the great Revolution. What marvel
if, struck with remorse at the senile strife of them whom old Fuller
would name "she-citizens," they vowed never, never, to teach another
grandmother to suck eggs. So was it, maybe, that the abused art was
lost from the earth.
Nay, more, its remembrance is perverted into a taunt more scorching
than lightning, more silencing than the bolt of Jove. "Teach your
grandmother to suck eggs!" Is not the phrase the "scorn of scorn,"
the catchword of insubordination, the blazing defiance of tongues
unbroken as a two-years' colt? It grated strangely on our ear. We
grieved over the transformation of a favorite saw, innocuous once,
and conveying a meek educational suggestion. We came to admit that
the Academe where the old sat at the feet of their descendants, to
be ingratiated into the most amiable of professions, was nothing
better in memory than an impertinence. And we sadly avowed, in the
underground chamber of our private heart, that, as for worldly
prospects, it would be fairly suicidal, all things considered, to
aspire to the chair of that professorship.
Let some reformer who cherishes his ancestress, and who is not averse
to break his fast on an omelet, dissuade either object of his regard
from longer lending name and countenance to a vulgar sneer. Shall
such be thy mission, reader? We would wish thee extended acquaintance
with that mysterious small cosmos which suggests to the liberal
palate broiled wing and giblets _in posse_; and joy for many a year
of thy parent's parent, who is in some sort thy reference and means
of identification, the hub of thy far-reaching and more active life;
but, prithee, wrench apart their sorry association in our English
speech. Purists shall forgive thee if thou shalt, meanwhile, smile in
thy sleeve at the fantastic text which brought them together.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
OLD HAUNTS.
I SOMETIMES whimsically liken myself to that pursued bird, who,
according to naturalists, spends her fine speed and strength in
racing in a circle about her nest, until overtaken and overborne. She
may be said to travel a great deal, yet her steps tend nowhere, and
despite her coming and going, she is indubitably at home.
I betake me, with all the exhilaration of a tourist, into an
adjacent county, and after experiencing the forlornness proper to a
forty-years' exile, board the railway train, and throw myself into
the arms of my native town. My wildest perambulations are but twenty
miles away. I set out, with vehement desires to behold the world,
and threading the narrow highways known of mine infancy,--
----"downwards to the sea
Or landwards to the west,"
return to look the stoutest navigators and explorers in the
eye. My change of scene is mainly from Bromfield Street (what a
green-and-golden westerly prospect it has!) to the Ridge Path of the
Common; my perilous adventures are on side-walks; my discoveries, in
omnibuses and the windows of shops.