Amid this "heavy change" she is unchanged and unchangeable. _Goose-Quill Papers

pure serenity was a sharp rebuke to our doubting, when we first

gathered around her, after the dread of missing the charm which had

made her dear. We had known many of her kindred, and each of them,

howsoever lovely, seemed coarsened and cheapened to the sensitive

eye, by over-much familiarity with crowds. But our celestial lady

moves like Penelope, amid throngs of her false suitors, with thoughts

disentangled from their clamor, in forbearance and patience and hope

and honor, the ineffable depths of her nature evermore unjarred.

Long ago, and in the beginning of our affection for her, we twain

found her asleep in the flooded noonday sunshine, having at her

feet and at her head a sombre guard of pines; and behind them, the

vagrant "glad light green" of spring; and again, above their topmost

pennon, irregular amethystine clouds, visionary mountain-ranges, that

climbed, peak on peak, to front

"Thee, Lincoln, on thy sovereign hill."

We flung ourselves in the young grass, and delayed there, lest our

footsteps should break that exquisite slumber; and so awed, and

so rejoicing, looked upon her whom we had travelled far to see.

It was her exceeding comeliness that made the responsive gleam

dance from eye to eye; but it was her sanctity, virginal as when

the Spirit first breathed upon it and bade it be, that held our

lips hushed then, our memory secure and deferent ever after. Over

this unforgotten glory of ours, Saint Francis of Assisi might have

breathed his soft hymn of thanksgiving for "my sister, who is very

humble, useful, precious, and chaste." Crime should be wary of her

bright presence; weariness should forget its landmarks, dreaming

beside her; nobleness overwrought and embittered should take courage,

and trust the world anew, as by a miracle, for her sake.

Many, many times, but especially at the breaking of the frosts,

when sap begins to thrill in the naked boughs, comes the desire to

approach her peaceful abiding-place, and learn, by moon or sun, what

more of winsomeness or splendor one year hath brought her. What more

can it ever bring? For her soul is crystalline and candid, and on

her forehead shines perpetual youth. She is one of the touch-stones

of our finer selves. Verily, with this secluded friend of friends,

"in profanity, we are absent; in holiness, near; in sin, estranged;

in innocence, reconciled." Her history is in hearts rather than in

books; her unprofanable beauty is the special care of heaven; and we

New Englanders that love her, and sometimes come about her, harping

her praises with sweet extravagance, have no name for her which men

shall recognize but that of WALDEN WATER.

[Illustration]

ON THE BEAUTY OF IDLENESS.

IDLENESS is harder to distinguish than the philosopher's stone.

Stupidity you can put your finger on; and so with sullenness,

day-dreaming, or bovine lassitude. But idleness may link itself with

any, all, or none of these. It is the will-o'-the-wisp among human

characteristics. You avoid it, being hoodwinked as to its presence

in your vicinage; you bear with it in others, when your tolerance is

veritably bestowed on something very different. Small wonder if you

wax so wise and so finical that you shall swear, sooner or later,

in the phrase of a certain friend of ours, that "there never was no

sich" a thing!

What astronomy is to astrology, or chemistry to the alchemy of old

times, that is idleness, so called, the most useful and edifying

spectacle in the world, to idleness criminal. Idleness, simon-pure,

from which all manner of good springs like seed from a fallow

soil, is sure to be misnamed and misconstrued, even when it is

stuck, like a bill-post, in the public eye. A thinking person, the

schoolmaster will allow you, is barely to be called idle; but for

that exaggeration of thought, the almost tidal stand-still between

activities, which belongs to Dunce on the back bench, he has no

more respect than can fit in the circumference of his rod. Dunce,

nevertheless, may grow up to be called Oliver Goldsmith, or Arthur,

Duke of Wellington. Tommy, who stops on his way to market, to sit

on a stone wall and plan a nest-robbing, indulgent passers-by shall

consider busy, though misguided; but young Galileo or Columbus,

planning nothing whatsoever, drifting into the mental hush and

stillness whence astonishing ideas arise, are sure to be set up as

a couple of intolerable wool-gatherers. A boy may crouch before

the fire, looking through the kettle steam at "one far-off divine

event," and be complimented on his prospective value to society, or

ironically offered a penny for the contents of his ridiculous head.

Thoreau put his own case, in the illustration of the man who roves

all day through a pine-forest, rejoicing in its height and shade and

fragrance, and is heralded far and wide as a lazy good-for-nought,

as opposed to the sober and industrious citizen who betakes himself,

axe in hand, to hew the giants down. Every township has its business

men, but Mr. Henry Thoreau was, without exception, the best American

idleness-man on record. He floated about in his dory, the breathing

reflection of Nature in its wealth of detail, inflated with pride

because he had not ever chosen to stand behind a counter! Yet he

"got his living by loving," and may be suspected of having grained

his name, diamond-like, on that window which looks out eastward on

the Atlantic. How else was half the wisdom of the Orient cradled,

but in the solemn Buddhist, coiled up, with his sealed eyelids, his

shut teeth, and parted lips, contemplating nothing with tremendous

suavity? The secret of handsome leisure is a fast secret now, indeed.

The ancients have not transmitted it. Who can think of a breathless

Athenian, save in the hour of battle, or of manly sport? Pericles

laid the fold of his garment, so, deliberately over his arm, and

steadied himself against some calm assurance, "marchyng," as the old

chronicler said of Queen Bess, "with leysure." Repose is stamped

on every statue the Greeks left us. It is in their lyrics, however

joyous; in their large drama; in their golden history. They did

nothing in feverish haste. Perhaps it may not be rash to acknowledge

that they were reasonably clever, and managed their terrene concerns

with some intelligence. There is over-much stir around us: mountains

heaving, cities building, seasons racing by, governments shifting

and turning at the four corners of the earth. It is the modern

miracle that the contemporaneous growing lilies have not lost their

blessedness, in striving to toil and spin.

Wherever a soul keeps energy in reserve, and a little healthful

languor dominant, a patch of Arcadia is yet to be found.

"Oblivion here thy wisdom is,

Thy thrift, the sleep of cares;

For a proud idleness like this

Crowns all thy mean affairs!"

When the familiar Yankee angel, Nervous Prostration, brushes you with

his wing, Arcadia withers away. Your holiday siesta, after that, is

not genuine. Of idleness you cannot be conscious, even as innocence

is no longer itself when it knows its name. Therefore no week-day

preacher need exhort you to be idle, ladies and gentlemen, as often

as you can afford it. He can only cast an eye along your ranks, and

discovering one or two of the elect, who shall remind him of boats

swinging gently at their moorings, piously hold his tongue and go on

his way with thanksgiving.

[Illustration]

DE MOSQUITONE.

IF the Bruce loved his instructive spider, for which history does

not vouch, why should not the public mosquito be dear to desponding

minds, as a yet more victorious exponent of the value of perseverance

and a set purpose? Who hath circumvented her? She laughs at all

dissuasion. She evades the soldier's gun, the physician's potion; the

Sophi with his fleet cannot drive her away, nor the Czar impale her

in any dungeon. What the mosquito came hitherward to do, that she

does. The "moral runs at large."

It is all very well to abuse her; one gets a poor, childish

satisfaction out of such terms of endearment as can be readily

bestowed: unfledged Tamerlane! disturber of the sanctities of night!

Satan of summer joys!--and so on. What avails all that? We have to

bow our necks, and endure her diabolics. She is an evil which the

Constitution cannot remedy; and as we are given to understand that

she does not speak English, no protest formulated in that tongue can

pierce her horny and tyrannical heart.

The believing soul may picture her primarily in some sweet, decorous

frolic through the glades of Eden (for charity would even accord to

her the possibility of a state of first innocence), frisking airily

with birds-of-Paradise, and given wholly to honorable practices. Ah!

but what man is proof against violent thoughts of Father Noah, who,

when she had already entered on her vein-glorious, flesh-loving,

back-biting, and peace-disturbing career, gave her the shelter

of his house through troublous days, and, like the short-sighted

philanthropist that he was, cursed the four continents in befriending

two obstreperous insects?

I cannot consider any cosmic force more eminently practical. The

poet lauds a river-bank, and sheds on a grove the starry fascinations

of rhetoric; it is none other than Mosquito who induces you to hate

and shun what you would fain be persuaded to consider fair. She it

is who can make the greenest landscape odious, and the calm haunts

of trees vociferous as if all Bedlam were let loose under their

outspread arms. She is your best circumnavigator. I cannot picture

to my wildest speculations a place where she is not. Nowhere is she

an exile, but hath her native bog all over Christendom. She holds

her cannibalistic orgies wherever human foot hath trodden. In that

Land which, geographically, is No Man's, methinks she prowleth

still, looking for him. Howsoever arrant a folly it be to ignore so

great an influence on our personal behavior, so huge a factor in the

reckoning of men's woes, little enough is recorded of this wretched

anthropophaginian. Dante did weakly, inasmuch as she figured not as

chief tormentor among his perpetually condemned. The cricket, the

glow-worm, the ant, the mole, long since found their bards, but no

prophetic malediction has fallen from Parnassus on their evil-minded

cousin. There must needs be a greater than Milton to pronounce her

anathema.

The immense malignity of her disposition is, with superlative

cunning, cloaked under her bodily slenderness and aerial grace. What

monstrous discrepancy betwixt her and her doings! By what unheard-of

perverseness in the natural order is she framed delicately as a

kind sunbeam, or a fragment of sea-foam? On the theory of physical

degeneracy, we may consider her in the archetypal plan to have been

a grim enormity, like Regulus's Bagrada serpent, a candidate of

yore for the attentions of some Jack-the-Giant-Killer, who, should

he arise to-day, might prove but a clumsy blunderer in face of her

impish agilities.

Helpless victim that I am, I look at Mosquito with unmixed awe. I

harbor grotesque superstitions, and build up romances in her name.

Why not metempsychosis? This marvellous restlessness,--might it not

once have been a human thing? What if some world-scourge, like

Attila, were pent in these narrow bounds, and sent whirring through

space again, on the old, colossal mission of annoyance? Involuntarily

I scan Mosquito with no humbler glass than a telescope. Even to the

dignity of a malignant planet hath she attained in mine unjaundiced

eye. Straightway, as fear building on fear, mount my fancies,

memories, speculations, till on their topmost pinnacle flashes the

saying of the liberal philosophers, that the immortal principle

may not be lacking in the "meanest thing that feels;" and my sole,

honest, overwhelming impulse is to forswear the pious Sunday-school

hope of becoming an angel, that is, a winged creature, lest in any

phase of untried being, Mosquito! I should bear affinity to that

which thou art.

----"Execrable shape,

That dar'st, tho' grim and terrible, advance

Thy miscreated front across my way!"

Is it not an apostrophe to thee? What fiend was it yesterday moved my

shuddering lips to quote that gentlest strophe over thy flattened

corpusculum, meant, peradventure, for a kindlier spirit?--

"My sprightly neighbor! gone before

To that unknown and silent shore,

Shall we not meet as heretofore

Some summer morning?"

Such is the irony of revenge.

Dread Reminiscence! appalling Probability! disconcerting and

inescapable Fact! thou art the Inscrutable, the Unattainable, the

Never-Reached, I take it, of the metaphysical circle. In deference to

thee, I salute the hem of a mosquito-net.

In the watches of the night, my soul shall rejoice to behold thy

wrathful eye outside.

[Illustration]

ON THE GARRET.

"I scorn your land,

So far it lies below me; here I see

How all the sacred stars do circle me."

HENRY VAUGHAN.

THERE survives in certain men a climbing instinct, a persistence,

dating from Babel days, which keeps them to the belief that they

were meant to be, in Spenser's phrase, "neighbors to the sky."

Put them down in a city, and they mount, by choice, as by force

of circumstances, oil-like, over the gross mass. These are the

garret-dwellers, disburdened, for the most part, of the money-bags

of capitalists. Surely, the more a creature is denuded of riches

and responsibilities, the lighter his spiritual weight, the fitter

he is for nearing the unembarrassed planets. He is no underling.

His poverty literally raises him up. He marches, like a conqueror

towards some fine, deserted city, into the high places; his castle is

over against the morning; and his bare forehead is reared above the

hereditary crowns of Europe.

That the rich should be the groundlings, after all, is one of the

diverting sarcasms and counter-turns of society. Who would not,

rather, stand play-fellow to the sun, and consider the moon's light

nothing less familiar than a beneficent household elf, and suffer the

companionship of the rainbow and of snows? Distant and faint sounds

the thunder of the streets; Teufelsdröckh, and such as he, "sit

above it, alone with the stars." Nethermost darkness cannot overtake

the denizen of the garret. His matins are over and done while

candles still flicker below. The wail of the Banshee reaches not his

far-removed ear. No flood in civic highways appalls him; the tramp

of armies, likewise, is beneath him, and he overlooks revolutions,

undisturbed. For him, perpetually, are ultra-mundane joys, the

_choragium_ of the spheres, and the revelations of the shifting air.

The conjurer and the astronomer alike love the "high lonely tower."

The painter goes thither for light, the student for contemplation.

There, according to international traditions, is the Poor Author

perennially to be found,--

"Lulled by soft zephyrs thro' the broken pane."

The Poor Author! The saving leaven of literature! Here is his native

heather, and not elsewhere. Here his latitude must be taken. If

ghosts revisit their whilom kingdoms, here Otway, Addison, Dryden,

Chatterton, Hood, Béranger, flock some time or other. Here you shall

brush against the shade of Marvell, who dwelt thus high and thus

solitary, when the king's deputies came with unavailing gifts in

their hands, to buy his favor; and presently dear Oliver Goldsmith

shall turn his homely face upon you, and tell you, in his delightful

voice, as he once blurted it out before the elegant circles at Sir

Joshua's, how he lived happily among the beggars in Axe Lane! In a

garret sat Tasso, whimsically beseeching his cat to lend to his

nocturnal labors the guiding radiance of her eyes, having no candle

whereby to write his verses. Dickens, who was never a Poor Author,

caught, at least, something of his privilege in his "sky-nest," with

the clouds and the birds shadowing his study windows in their passage.

As the dwellers in the Happy Valley were daily entertained with tales

and songs which treated of their own felicity therein, so we know of

nothing more judicious than to sound the praises of the ever-noble

garret to the Poor Author, who has an eternal patent on its worth and

beauty. The least that can be said of it is that it engenders the

philosophy of comment. Its kind soil fosters the spectator and the

observer, in default of commoner weed. The Muse, traditionally coy,

can be caught there, if anywhere. She has been known to neglect her

votaries in proportion to the fattening of their purses and their

proximity to the first-floor drawing-room. A poet himself has marked

it as a warning:--

"A man must live in a garret aloof ...

To keep the goddess constant and glad."

Long residence in its precincts, howbeit, may tend to produce a

haughty disregard of the brethren acclimated to lower levels. Your

roof-perching hermit, whose lungs are inflated with rude health,

scoffs at the genteel ailments accruing below from the largesses of

carbonic acid gas. His own dais-like elevation breeds arrogance in

him, and patrician scorn; his descent to the vantage-ground of the

majority is palpable indeed. He cannot, at most, walk their paths,

save, metaphorically, on stilts, like the shepherds of the Landes.

He is accustomed to live cheek-by-jowl with Arcturus. A kite or a

balloon he acknowledges, but no terrene mail-service or horse-car.

Valleys and cellars distress him. He cannot lie on the grass of a

summer's day, to watch a colony of ants. He is of a loftier cast

of mind, and sighs rather for the shining motes of the Milky Way,

"scattered unregarded upon the floor of heaven." We have known him to

refuse a June cherry, plucked only amidmost of the tree. What is such

a bigot to do, but thrust his tall head back, out of alien air, into

his sixth-story Arcady where the Muse sits, waiting for him, on a

collapsing chair?

"Dans un grenier qu'on est bien à vingt ans!"

So have we sought the heights, and clove unto them, in orthodox

privacy, though lacking our just deserts of the aforesaid lady's

favor. Yet do we in nothing reproach thee, eyry of our youth! with

thy beloved townish outlook and undusted shelves, save that the

tutelary pages born of thee are scarce of so Attic a flavor as our

sense of the due sequence of things hath led us to desire.

[Illustration]

University Press: John Wilson & Son, Cambridge.

A SELECTION FROM

Messrs. ROBERTS BROTHERS'

Amid this "heavy change" she is unchanged and unchangeable. Her