stirrings of spring are in the blood, or when a hearty October
morning tempts idle feet afar, myself and one other seize on a
map of the adjacent country, and push over hill and dale into
some unexplored solitude. We make heroic efforts to appreciate
a landscape. Was it not yesterday, thou best Bostonian! that we
accomplished our showery pilgrimage across the Middlesex Fells, now
drenched, now dried, by fickle skies, to sniff the young violet, and
to pluck the silvern willow-tufts ere they had paled? or marched
nigh six leagues of an Arcadian afternoon to front the gleaming
waters at Ponkapog, the purple crests of Milton Hill? Vainly! Never
saw we a Nereid along a pebbly margin, nor caught the cadence of a
Hamadryad's footfall, as she hurried back to her old woods. The curse
is upon us, as saith the problematical Lady of Shalott. What business
have we in the country? Where is the plant that will teach us its
name? Not green fields, but bricks and mortar are our affinity; and
the ears that delight in the familiar roar of a crowd barely attend
by courtesy to the madrigals of thrushes.
Rivers I can put up with. I can keep pace with Charles from Hopkinton
to the sea. Neponset is a dear good prattler. Musketaquid, with his
two exquisite parental streams, is mine old familiar. So with a pine
grove, where one can watch the tardiest star arise, and the earliest
daybeam break over its dark summits. But these everlasting downs and
scrubby wildernesses, these formal, vacant pastures, with little
white houses at chilling distances! it is not in me, by nature or
by grace, to take kindly to the things. The spirit moveth me to look
down on cows, hens, and cabbages, and to question the beauty of that
manner of life where there is scarce a ratio of one fellow-creature
to an acre. How shall your country folk learn to jostle and be
jostled? Do they know a pick-pocket when they see him? Are they
easy in their minds when street-bands are due? Have their unhappy
progeny never spelled out a circus-bill's gorgeous charactery of blue
and red, nor leaped into the jaws of a watering-cart, nor licked a
lamp-post for a wager on a frosty night?
No, my masters: let Damætas and Daphnis sing at each other, over
the heads of their woolly cohorts; I yearn for the whoop of the
contemporaneous newsboy, and for the soul-satisfying thunder of
wagons. I hasten back to the knee of mine illustrious mother-city,
as a Peri to Paradise, or as a convict (we must have comparisons to
suit all tastes) to that agreeable castle in which the State formerly
entertained him. I am let loose anew on her historic thoroughfares.
For her sake, I subsist, in no gastronomical sense, on dates, and
pay court to hoary tombs and spectres of long-supplanted buildings.
Her story is the kaleidoscope to charm my idle hours. Her ancient
magistrates I behold in their portentous wigs. Her little maids
rustle by in stomacher and kirtle. Jovial laughter floats out from
the unlatched door of the Green Dragon; the aroma of venison betrays
itself at the Cromwell's Head. I look upon sorrowful Quakers boarding
the transportation ships, or at the beacon-light flaring out upon
the bay; at Paddock, planting his memorial trees; at Mather Byles
jesting among a crowd, under the Province House eaves; at Philemon
Pormort shaking the birch at little Ben Franklin on the sunny side of
School Street; at the chivalry of France riding twenty deep behind
the drawn sword in thy gallant hand, Vioménil! Over all the shifting
and confused panorama the great bells of Christ's--"Abel Rudhall cast
them all"--are ringing the remembered chimes of home.
"The things to be seen and observed," said Bacon, "are the courts of
princes, the courts of justice, consistories ecclesiastic, churches,
monasteries, monuments; walls and fortifications, havens, harbors,
antiquities, ruins, libraries, colleges, shipping, gardens, arsenals,
burses." Rather than sigh for Cisalpine revelations, shall I not
gloriously disport myself in following the fortunes of a local Punch
and Judy show, such as our kind civic nurse hath provided for us?
Perhaps elsewhere I should miss the white-bearded orange-vender
dozing in the sun, and the sparrows fighting on the sombre steps
of St. Paul's, and seedy students migrating from stack to stack of
Elizabethan books in the tranquil lane that Uriah Cotting built.
Dearer than coffers of gold are the old cherished places from which
my rooted affections cannot stray. Their inviolate memories and their
hopes are mine; and the city of my content is the loop-hole through
which I gaze and wonder at the universe.
I wear out my restlessness circling round about her shining height,
and breaking ever and anon momentarily from her fostering hand,
to cling to it again with laughter, and so move on. Is it a braver
sentiment to fret after reported continents? I would follow the
moon around the untried earth, for the asking; and yet, and yet, O
"three-hilled rebel town"! hate my own free spirit did it not thirst
for thee on a ship that sailed against the Golden Horn, between
Caucasus and the pinnacles of Greece.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
FREE THOUGHTS ON BOOKS.
THE passion for collecting books, beginning with the Greeks, passed
to the Roman senators and patriots, and thence to every corner of the
civilized earth. A philosopher might sigh, like Omar at Alexandria,
over the thousand thousand superfluities, whose survival embitters
the thought of the lost volumes of Varro and Livy, the wellnigh
inaccessible tomes of Al Farabi of Farab ("who knew or wrote so much
as he?"), of Berni, of Martorell; or of those princely libraries
instanced by Irish antiquarians, which were swept away by Noah's
flood!
A line of shelves, throne by throne, filled with illustrious figures,
what else is that but a presence-chamber kinglier than a king's, the
Temple of Wisdom, more reverend than the altars of Pallas? Men have
lived and died, like motes of the air, hovering about this hoarded
preciousness of ages, and forgetful ever of the awakened world, with
its exquisite outlook into the future. In the pathetic companionship
of books lived Southey, long after their beauty was shut out from
him, passing his trembling hand up and down their ranks, and taking
comfort in the certainty that they had not forsaken him.
Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures,
the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual
individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they
proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an
auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest
things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in
numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of
bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances
of trade. A second-hand book is verily a pitiful thing. It is broken
down by adversity, and ready to meet your advances half-way. It
appreciates care of any sort, poor waif that it is! lacking attention
so long in the dingy precincts of a shop. Nothing is more gratifying
to the eye searching for tokens of humanity, like a shipwrecked
sailor along the sands of a lonely island, than its curled edges,
"bethumbed horribly," especially if the author thereof be dear to
you. What a precious, homely tribute! What delicater flattery, than
to catch sight of a modest volume, supposing you take some parental
interest in it, in a condition which, _à posteriori_, does _not_
suggest soap and water?
Certain books, which we handle for the first time, we cannot for
the life of us lay down again, without vehement infringements on
that edict forbidding envy and covetousness. We yearn for such a
bit of property. Our pocket seems predestined to filch it. We love
it much better than its proprietor, who never had the spirit to
give it cordial abuse. We would not endure that paper cover veiling
its genial face. We would scorn to divorce it from any dusty nook
it chose to frequent. If we abduct it, it would be a great deal
happier. On the same principle, it requires an impulse of Spartan
righteousness to return a book to the civic library with the proper
dispositions. It is heart-rending to make over a used and shaken
veteran to the custody of the public, anew. We know well enough that
it shall collapse utterly ere we shall have the virtue to borrow it
a second time. Or we speculate on an inestimable octavo, readerless
on the shelf for scores of years, till our mark is set over against
it, and doomed to deeper than Abyssinian solitude when we loosen
its clinging hold; and wonder if what a townsman and a wit called
"bookaneering" would not be a chivalric pursuit for us to follow.
Uniform sets of any author, save a historian, are terrors to the
discriminating eye. When we buy the Works even of one C. Dickens,
we shall stipulate that the "Tale of Two Cities" (never to be named
without reverence) shall get its just due of difference in size
and hue, from any of its admirable kindred. Who wants Beaumont
and Fletcher in sombre cloth, or in anything out of folio, or
Jeremy Taylor in red morocco and gilt? Prefaces are not ill things
in their places; but what has a preface got to do with jolly,
self-explanatory Pepys; or a table of notes with Walton the Angler;
or a glossary--fancy the pert thing!--with Philip Sidney's sonnets?
Illustrations to some tales are insufferable. Picture a menagerie
let loose on the seventh or eighth page of Rasselas, to bear out the
diverting Johnsonian description of the sprightly kid bounding on
the rocks, the subtle monkey frolicking among the trees, the solemn
elephant reposing in the shade!
"A big book," said Myles Davis, "is a scarecrow to the head and
pocket of author, student, buyer, and seller." That depends. The
virile poets, like Burns, cannot be got into sylph-like draperies.
Nobody could abide a prose Milton less than three and a half inches
thick. Froissart, even, must be taken solid. We own up to loving
our stumpy Don Quixote, with its print of beauteous Dorothea laving
her impossible feet, although it be egregiously fat, and elbow its
comelier neighbors right and left.
The fashion of including the productions of two or three
contemporaneous writers in one volume is happily past, and may not
revive. What dreary comradeship! like that of the ghosts driven
together on the blast, in Dante's wonderful fifth canto. Why should
Coleridge the dreamer, and Campbell the planner, be lashed so, wrist
to wrist; or Waller's sweet dallying verse classed with Denham's
sagacious strophes? What joint mundane sin warranted this posthumous
halving of their immortal fortunes? If the trade must economize, and
readers must needs get their literature in bunches, let the coupling
be done on a saner basis, and arise from the affiliations, not of
time or place, but of genius solely. We confess we should like to see
Sheridan and Farquhar amicably sharing applause, within the compass
of one lively-colored quarto; some of the singing-birds of the second
and third Stuart courts caged with Gay, Matt Prior, and a few modern
bardlings; Keats close to his loved Spenser; and Irving familiarly
fixed by Addison and Goldsmith, the barriers of centuries between
them broken down.
Family traits, like murder, will out. Nature has but so many moulds;
and however unique and quaint a writer may be to his own circle,
look up his intellectual pedigree, and you shall recognize the
ancestral quality astray in him, on an altered world; the voice of
Jacob, indeed, appealing through all disguises. What should Poe be
like,--Poe the one and only,--but a blended brief echo of Marlowe
and of Dryden? Whence came Charles Lamb, even, in great part (and
Hazlitt and Leigh Hunt besides, in the collateral line), but from
golden-hearted Sidney and Sir Thomas Browne? Pages and pages of his
that recall them! every tone of their old sedater voices prophetic of
his sweet laughter, his fine, grave reasonings to be!
My young lord is spirited, but unlike his father or mother in
feature, as in character: ah! go to the remotest corner of the
portrait-gallery, and brush away the damp from the dark face of
that Henry who fell at Crécy, and you shall read the mystery of
transmission. A poet tries his morning lay, to a continent's delight,
and after years of joy and triumph it shall be revealed to him how
the self-same music fell from long-silent lips in a land across the
sea. The unaltered radiance of an inspiration streams yesterday on
one, to-morrow on another, as moving sunshine visits the hundred
panes of a cathedral window; and that elusive thing which we name the
originality of any artist resembles little else but the kaleidoscopic
newness of color thrown hourly along the aisles.
So much have books wrought, to the confusion of the proud. The
child's early, unconscious preference for authors of his choosing,
urges itself upon him when he, too, shall write, and softly hoodwinks
his imagination. Has he a sensitive pen, jealous of its rectitude,
true as the magnet-lured steel to what he believes to be his frank,
unshared fancies? How shall that affect the immutable law? For the
very blood in his veins is not all his own; and though, for honor's
sake, he would change the erect port, the persuasive speech, the
innermost personal charm which was called his, and which he finds,
later, to have been but a legacy,--yet, in places where his detecting
conscience cannot follow, the hereditary principle will grow to
blossom, and bespeak him, blamelessly, to be what the centuries have
made him.
It was feelingly said by one of the gentle English essayists last
named: "How pleasant is the thought that such lovers of books have
themselves become books!" and do so become evermore, beginning and
ending with a secluded library shelf, planting the seed of kindly
influences close to the noble shade which sheltered them in youth,
and under which they slumbered many a summer's day.
[Illustration]
[Illustration]
A NOVEMBER FESTIVAL.
HERE it is, the old bright day, the day fragrant of home, brought
about once again by the whirligig of time. The New England snows
are deep beneath the windows in the house where I was born, and
iridescent icicles hang over the door; the city that is beyond is
given up to joy and plenty,
"And all that mighty heart is lying still."
I sit quite solitary among you in a far-away corner, forgetfully
turning the pages of a book, and letting my thoughts take wing for
other scenes and other years. In memory there arises a succession of
Thanksgivings, long gone into dust and ashes, so different from this,
so careless and kind and merry, that it seems like wronging them to
be sad for them even at this distance. Then all the world was golden,
and our wilful, loving lives were jewels set in the heart of it.
Then the air tingled, and the sun was jolly as Harlequin. Then there
was a little brook in those familiar fields, delicately sheathed in
ice every Thanksgiving morning, and lending itself to a childish
holiday frolic just in the nick of time; and a stone, squirted along
its surface, made the daintiest bird-like sound imaginable, and
died into silence so delightfully that you sent innumerable pebbles
after it, to see if they could sing as sweetly as the first. Then
everybody was so considerate and tender that poor people could not
want or suffer on that day, if they tried; then grown people were
indulgent, and wee people docile and frisky as lambs. Then we used to
have pop-corn and ginger-snaps and chestnuts and ruddy apples--and
turkey! Well, we can have turkey yet, on any Thanksgiving, a sort of
_in memoriam_ turkey, eaten in foreign lands, and made melancholy
with recollections and vain wishes; so, of course, it is not the same
turkey at all.
What a hospitable, social old festival it was! How gentle we tried
to be, that not one harsh word should spoil it! We were taught
to make out of the severely pious Thanksgiving of the Puritans,
their dismal, unpicturesque opposition-Christmas, a day lovely and
blithe and helpful beyond any in the calendar. There was a great
halloo going on the whole time in the cheerful rambling old house,
quartering an army of children: merry-making in the pantry, in
the corridors, in the porches, where hungry sparrows gathered to
squabble over hundreds of crumbs; and in the lively fire that winked
and sputtered, and tossed the pans and kettles, and nearly burst
a-laughing over the fat plum-pudding. As for the other Lords and
Ladies of Misrule, you could not swing your arm anywhere without
brushing a little boy or a little girl. You heard the patter of
their tireless feet, the noise of their drums and doll-carriages,
and the echo of their shrill voices upstairs and down,--some of
them rolling about on the rugs in the sunny room, where the bare
elms, with their battered nests, rattled against the pane on windy
days; some strumming on the venerable piano in the hall, just at
the balustrade's foot, and singing a little Tyrolese catch they had
learned together; some grouped in the shadowy and quiet library
(where the ceiling shone blue with its myriad stars, like a real
summer's sky), telling over how good a king King Arthur was, or how
queer was the Old Man of the Sea, or how sad and strange were the
adventures of dear Sintram, ever and ever so long ago. Now other
children fill those neglected places, and beautify the hours with
associations fresh and fair as ours,--
"And year by year our memory fades
From all the circle of the hills!"
I must not forget the races, and the games, and ninepins on the
frosty balcony; the ice-forts, puny for lack of material, and the
Trojan war, re-fought in snow-balls; and the dinner! The table-cloth
was very pretty, with sprays of evergreen festooning it here and
there. Silver mugs looked particularly shiny. I can see yet, beyond
the great steaming dishes, the celery towering with its delicate
green; cider sparkling; grapes and oranges crowding one another
over the rim; olives floating in colored bottles; jelly clearer
than crystal; funny little crackers in funnier shapes, and the ring
of hearty faces framing the picture in. Near the end, the majestic
pudding made his appearance, crowned with blue flame; and blazed
away so pompously for a minute that the youngest baby cried, and
the boys clapped their hands, and curly-haired Helen leaned over
against Bessy to get out of its way. Then came the final jingling
of the water-glasses, when the household drank Grandmother Drapow's
health, amid enthusiasm and tears and laughter and rustle of words.
It was quite in order to wear your tissue-paper cap, which fell out
of the candy-packet, whether it was quaint and odd as could be, or
conventional as a beaver. When presently, with all conceivable glee,
the whole twenty-six rose to their feet, the chairs and stools made
volcanic noises, and the scene looked precisely like the Carnival.
Then a sudden hush fell; and one of the several tall gentlemen who
answered to the name of Papa, glanced at a certain child at the other
end of the table. So the child dropped its bonbons, and gravely took
off its gay cocked hat, and folded its brown hands, and lisped the
words of the grace, while Eugene and little Georgie bobbed their
innocent heads in cadence at its shoulder. Everybody answered "Amen!"
very loud and clear. And everybody slipped forthwith through the
door, like the tide, and left the sunny dining-room deserted.
Those Thanksgivings will never return. The caps are torn now, and the
heads that wore them would fit them no more. We could not meet to be
happy again, if we tried, because of the vacant places. The rogue who
was made parson would not be present either,--which of us, outside
Paradise, is quite the same after so many years?--having vanished
just as surely as the old friends, and the dear kindred, who have
died. For, in your own phrase, little folk, that was _me_. At least,
I like to think it was. Perhaps this is all a make-believe story; but
if you doubt it, go and ask somebody else who was there.
[Illustration]
VAGABONDIANA.
CERTAIN words sound like caresses. "Thou vagabond!" must have been
at some time or other a gentler appellation than our rude transition
would make it. Why not? "Rogue" and "truant" have yet their playful
uses. Though we translate illy such endearments of antiquity, we may
read in Gascoigne:--
"O Abraham's _brats_! O brood of blessèd seed!"
The "goodly and virtuous young imps" of old citation, we should also
construe but saucily. Besides, "vagabond" lendeth itself gracefully
to the affectionate diminutives of alien tongues, which, to a
philologist, may be as good as an argument: what can be tenderer
than _vagaböndchen_, _vagabondellino_, and a like musical play of
syllables over the solid English rock?
The vagabond is the modern representative of the knight-errant, shorn
of his romance, inasmuch as both fall neatly under the definition of
a stroller, a free lance, whom the domestic Lar does not allure or
attach to any one fireside. The immortal Don of la Mancha, revived in
this age, should figure as a tramp in the police station, before he
had adorned public life twenty-four hours. But the vagabond proper
has an Asiatic cousin, who gets princelier treatment. The Rônin of
chivalrous Japan is a gentleman of leisure, who, not averse to a
chance of seasonable employment, roams at large, settling his private
differences, and serving Heaven unmolested, according to his lights.
Vagabonds are legally denominated "such as wake on the night, and
sleep on the day; and haunt customable taverns and ale-houses, and
rout about; and no man wots whence they come nor whither they go:"
a comprehensive statement in three parts, which has, moreover, a
covert whimsical reference categorically to actors, politicians,
and bank-clerks. A vagabond, primarily, was merely an idle person;
and if his name has come to imply variations of decorum, and a
questionable standing in polite circles, it is to be accounted for
only on the worn adage that Satan takes personal care of undedicated
energies.
Our friend is vagrant as the swallow, "born in the eighth climate,
and framed and constellated unto all." He is the world's freeman. He
strays at his fancy, sign-boards and mile-stones his only ritual,
and changes of weather the sole political economy of his study, by
which he abides. Everybody's property is his in fief. Terminus and
his stakes were never set up for him. He has no particular reason
for moving on the first of May, nor for passing the winter in warm
quarters. When he is very weary, since he has no tent to strike,
nor bed to make, he unconcernedly "lays his neck on the lap of his
mother." Neither landlord nor tenant is he; and never has he known
a spring-cleaning, nor packed a trunk, nor priced a door-plate. He
trolls out that joyful strophe which Richard Brome wrote for his
forefathers, as he swings past inland villages:
"Come away! why do we stay?
We have no debt or rent to pay,
No bargains or accompts to make,
Nor land nor lease, to let or take:
Or if we had, should that remore us,
When all the world's our own before us,
And where we pass and make resort,
There is our kingdom and our court!"
He has his choice of professions: he may have a natural disposition
to beg, yet, on the whole, consider it genteeler to steal. He is
exempt from Adam's curse. Nobody expects him to work, save in a
moment of inspiration. When he has no funds, he travels on his
dignity. There is that in his eye which awes the merchantman, and
mesmerizes the maid at the hostel gate.