GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
Vol. XLI. December, 1852. No. 6.
Table of Contents
Pale Concluding Winter
A History of the Art of Wood-Engraving
Rivers
Were I But With Thee
Sonnet.--Iron.
Nineveh, and Assyrian Art
Fragment of a Poem
Monde Hedelquiver
Wellington
Sonnet.--Homer.
Grace Bartlett
Sonnet
Ups and Downs
Father Bromley’s Tale
Hours in August
Annie
The Useful Arts in Other Nations and Times
Blind Sight-Seeing
The Lucky Penny
The Topmost City of the Earth
Better Days
Review of New Books
Sips of Punch
Transcriber’s Notes can be found at the end of this eBook.
[Illustration: PAINTED BY F. ROCHARD ENG’D BY EZEKIEL TEEL
=THE FAIREST FLOWER.=
Engraved Expressly for Graham’s Magazine]
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[Illustration: =MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS ON HER WAY TO EXECUTION.=]
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[Illustration: =THE INUNDATION.=]
GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE.
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Vol. XLI. PHILADELPHIA, December, 1852. No. 6.
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[Illustration]
=“PALE CONCLUDING WINTER.”=
With howling fury Winter makes his bound
Upon us, freezing Nature at a look.
He dashes out the sweet and dreamy hues
Of Indian Summer, so that where the eye
The golden softness and the purple haze
Beheld at noon, at sunset sees the mist
Darken around the landscape, and the ear,
Nestling upon its pillow, hears the sleet
Ticking against the casement, whilst within
The silvery cracking of the kindling coal
Keeps merry chime. The morning rises up,
And lo! the dazzling picture! Every tree
Seems carved from steel, the silent hills are helm’d,
And the broad fields have breastplates. Over all
The sunshine flashes in a keen white blaze
Of splendor, searing eyesight. Go abroad!
The branches yield crisp cracklings, now and then
Sending a shower of rattling diamonds down
On the mailed earth, as freshens the light wind.
The hemlock is a stooping bower of ice,
And the oak seems as though a fairy’s wand
Had, the past night, transformed its skeleton frame
To a rich structure, trembling o’er with tints
Of rainbow beauty. . . . . . . A. B. Street.
* * * * *
=A HISTORY OF THE ART OF WOOD-ENGRAVING.=
=BY AN AMATEUR ARTIST.=
[Illustration]
With regard to the antiquity and origin of this most beautiful and most
important of the early Christian arts--most important, because to it can
be traced directly the invention of typography, as it now exists,
bringing knowledge and truth within the reach of all who desire to
attain them--there has been much difference and dispute among the
literati. After the second restoration of letters--I mean after the dull
and dreary interregnum between the era of the Stuarts and the Georgian
era of literature, dating from the commencement of the present
century--there seems to have arisen a strange habit of referring every
thing, the origin of which was not distinctly known, to eras the most
remote. Not to be able to say such a discovery was made by such a
learned German or Venetian, by such a celebrated Gaul or Briton, in such
a town, in such a year, of such a century, was sufficient cause for the
drivelers of the time--the best scholars of whom knew, like Shakspeare,
little Latin and less Greek, assuming, nevertheless, the possession of
the deepest classic lore--to assert point-blank that it was made by such
a wonderful Chinese philosopher during the reign of Wu-wang, emperor of
China, or such a remarkable Egyptian sage, in the reign of Tathrak or
Amenophis; or, that it was in common use in the days of Pericles, or
perhaps even of the later Roman emperors.
The general knowledge of the classic languages was then so rare even
among the authors of those days, that the _dictum_ of any dunce who
grossly misconstrued a Greek or Latin text, or of any rogue, who chose
to forge one in support of his theory--in those days a matter of daily
occurrence--was, so far from being questioned, detected, refuted, and
exposed, as would now be the case, within a week of its publication,
quoted and requoted by successive schools of dunces, until it was
received as a truth, and sent down as a grave authority to future
generations.
Though no author of this day, thanks to the number and acumen of the
literary and critical journals--we do not mean newspapers, which
promulgate, not correct falsehoods--could _originate_ a blunder, much
less a forgery, with a possibility of escaping detection; still,
careless and hasty compilers following what they deem authorities,
without themselves referring to the original authority cited, are
constantly reproducing falsehood, promulgating it, and giving to it
weight as truth, when nothing is more averse from their intention than
to do so.
In nothing is this more the case than in the very class of works in
which of all others accuracy and truth are most requisite--are, indeed,
indispensable--we mean what are now called juvenile books, school-books
for the use of the young. These works are, unfortunately, rarely or
never composed by men of science, men of historical knowledge, men of
high general information, or literary standing, although--embracing, as
they pretend to do, the whole range of human knowledge from astronomy
and the direct sciences, through universal history to political economy,
physical and moral philosophy, and philology--they, above all beside,
should be the work of men of unerring accuracy in the statement of
facts. Since it is easier to teach three new ideas to a mind
unimpressed, than to eradicate from it one preconceived opinion, false
or true.
It is enough to say in this connection, that out of all the modern
“histories for the young” we have ever seen--and we have seen scores, if
not hundreds--we never read six successive pages which did not contain
either a disgraceful blunder as to fact, or a more disgraceful
perversion of facts to meet popular prejudices or popular passions. In
the pseudoscientific text-books, sheer stupidity and ignorance produce
the same effects.
All this class of books, as a rule, are worse than worthless; and we had
far rather see the rising generation return to “Mother Goose,” “Little
Red Riding Hood,” and “Cinderella,” and thence to “Sandford and Merton,”
Mrs. Barbauld, Miss Edgeworth, and works and writers of the like
calibre, until fit to commence the real study of real history and real
science, than have them stuffed with such farragoes of imbecility,
reckless assertion, and plausible falsehood--under the plea of knowledge
made popular--as, for instance, most of “The Histories for the Young,”
which afford a perfect type of the class of works, to which we have just
alluded.
To this train of thought we have been led, by observing the pertinacious
and absurd folly, on the part of all the writers on the subject before
us, of ascribing the art of wood-engraving and printing, to every nation
which never possessed it, and the invention of it to none knows who.
It really seems that to these worthies it is quite argument enough to
say, because the Chinese, Egyptians, Phœnicians, Greeks, or Romans did
_not_ possess such an art, but _did_ possess such another, therefore
they _must_ have possessed that which they did not possess.
Thus--because the Egyptians made wooden moulds with reversed characters
or figures, wherein to make fictile bricks, jars, or other
implements--they possessed the art of wood-engraving and printing.
Because the Greeks and Romans used to engrave their laws and decrees on
stone or metal, both in intaglio and relief, and even colored the
depressed or prominent characters with various pigments, therefore the
Greeks and Romans made use of printing and wood or metallic
engraving--as understood in the present sense; that is to say, for the
purpose of taking reversed impressions on paper, parchment, or the like,
with ink or other pigments, from prepared blocks, or forms of movable
types--the impressions, not the blocks or forms, being legible in the
usual mode, from left to right, or the reverse, according to the nature
of the character or language.
It is, perhaps, scarcely necessary now to state, not only that there is
no reason for believing that any ancient nation was acquainted at all
with any thing in the least degree approaching to the modern art of
printing, but that there is a positive certainty that no people of
antiquity was so acquainted.
In the same manner may be dismissed the Chinese claim to originality in
this invention. So early as the 12th century, stamps, engraved with
monograms, or fanciful figures, assumed by individuals as their signs
manuals, wrought on them in relief, were in common use. They were made
of wood or metal, dipped in ink or paint, and impressed on any document
requiring signature; and they seem to have continued occasionally in use
so late as to the reign of King Henry VIII. of England, whose warrant
for the execution of the poet Surrey was signed by this method, and not
by royal sign manual; the king being then in _articulo mortis_, and
unable to sign his name.
At a much earlier period than this--so early, indeed, as the sixth
century--the Emperor Justin I., in signing documents, made use of what
is now called a stencil, a thin plate of wood or metal perforated with
figures, characters, or other designs, which, when applied to a surface
of blank paper or parchment, leaves the design on the exposed surface of
the paper, all else being covered, open to the operation of a brush or
pencil, which necessarily leaves the impress of the form invariably the
same on all occasions.
From this practice of stenciling, perhaps, or more probably from the
dipping of the signet-ring, which had been used for ages in impressing
wax and the like, into ink, and impressing it on paper, was derived the
idea of stamps engraved with monograms, and used as signatures--an
invention of vast practical utility in an age when not one man of five
hundred, even of kings and nobles, unless he were in holy orders, was
capable of signing, or even reading, his own name. One of the earliest
of these stamps is that of Gundisalvo Tellez, one of the Gothic invaders
of Spain, affixed to a charter bearing date A. D. 840; and the same
sign, after his death, was appended, by his widow, Flamula, to a grant
for the good of her husband’s soul.
Now it has never been asserted or pretended that the Chinese, even at a
much later period than this, had advanced beyond the use of monogram
stamps impinged by hand.
In lack, therefore, of more direct evidence, this is enough to justify
us in rejecting the claim put forward in behalf of the Chinese, to the
invention of the art of wood-engraving or typography, and the idea of
its having been imported from them into Europe.
But there is no lack of more direct evidence. For in the year of the
Christian era 1271, Marco Polo, a Venetian trader, voyaged from Venice
to Tartary and China, in the reign of the Emperor Rublai Khan, his uncle
and father having visited the same countries some quarter of a century
before. On his return, he published an account of his travels, very
copious and very full of marvelous truths and marvelous errors--most of
the latter having been since shown to be misconceptions of real truths,
not falsehoods. In this work, Marco Polo makes no mention of the use of
printing-blocks, or of cannon, or of the mariner’s compass by the
Chinese. Hence it is morally certain, either that the Chinese did not at
that period possess any one of these inventions-- all of which have been
attributed to them--at all, or that the people for whom Marco Polo
wrote, the Venetians in particular, and Europeans in general, possessed
them in the same degree of perfection with the Chinese, at the same or
at an earlier period.
It is, indeed, probable, that the Chinese claim was only put in by
favorers of the Venetian claim to the European invention or introduction
of this art, in order to account reasonably for their priority.
And it would be curious, were it not almost invariably the case, that
the forged legend introduced to support a false claim, when analyzed and
searched by a clear head, not only confutes itself, but that which it
was intended to establish.
It is very satisfactorily proved that previous to the fourteenth
century, although stencils and stamps had been in use for some time,
perhaps for some centuries, as means for securing the invariability of
monogram signatures, and of giving the power of signing papers to those
who could not write, no use whatever had been made or attempted of
either, for the purpose of reproduction from a single type and
indefinite multiplication of copies.
This is what we mean by printing and engraving; and until it be shown
that some nation of antiquity did invent and use such instruments for
such purposes, all discussion is absurd.
It were just as rational to argue, that, because the Chinese, Egyptians,
Greeks and Romans possessed boilers, and boiling water, and steam, with
which they might have propelled steamboats, had they known how,
therefore they _had_ steamboats--as to assert, that, because they
possessed reversed moulds and stamps, in relief or intaglio, for the
making of pottery, with which they might have produced colored
impressions on papyrus or linen, had they conceived the idea of doing
so, therefore they _did_ reproduce works of art from plates or types.
It appears most probable that the first direct approach to this art was
the practice, when playing cards were first introduced in Europe, of the
German card-makers, to use stencils in order to draw, accurately and
invariably, the outlines of the figures on their cards, which were then
filled in with color by the hand. This, though not originally intended
to facilitate multiplication so much as accuracy, would naturally
suggest that idea.
The next known step, in progress, was the use of monogrammatic stamps,
some of them of most elaborate and exquisite design and execution, for
the impression on illuminated manuscripts, such as missals, breviaries,
bibles and other religious works, of the large, beautiful and often
many-colored initial letters.
And these, there is much reason to believe, were more or less in use so
early as A. D. 1400.
The history of the first known wood-cut is as follows. From a convent
within fifty miles of Augsburgh, where in 1418 the first mention of a
kartenmacher, card-engraver, occurs, the earliest wood-cut known--the
St. Christopher, now in the collection of the Earl of Spencer--was
obtained. The outlines are engraved on wood, and thence taken off in
dark coloring matter, resembling printer’s ink, on the paper; after
which the impression appears to have been colored by means of a stencil.
This cut is extremely well-designed, as regards the principal figures,
which, with the exception of the extremities, are executed in such style
as would not disgrace Albert Durer himself. The perspective is--as
usual, in old wood-cuts even of a later date than this, and executed by
artists of high grade, such as Hans Burgmair and Hans Schaufflein,
nearly a century afterward--utterly disregarded. It was, indeed, scarce
understood.
The second and third cuts in existence, also in Lord Spencer’s
collection, are an “Annunciation” and “St. Bridget,” both similarly
printed in outline, and colored by stenciling, the last of these is
curious, as showing, on examination of the back of the plate--for it is
not, like the others, pasted into a book--that the impression was not
taken by means of a press, but by friction on the paper superimposed to
the block, by means of a burnisher or similar instrument, just as proofs
are now taken by engravers.
From this period, the succession and progress of the art is clearly to
be traced. First, through figure blocks, with letterings sculptured on
them in relief, to solid blocks carved in wood and printing off entire
pages, as is done by modern stereotypes, with or without pictures
attached. At this stage of the work the idea of reproduction and
multiplication had obtained as the primary objects of the art.
The next step was the invention of movable types capable of being
combined at will into words and sentences, braced into the form of
pages, and, the work completed, distributed, and combined anew for the
composition of other and different works. From this period,
wood-engraving proper, and type-cutting in wood, became separate arts;
and ere long--metallic types engraved at first, and afterward cast,
replacing the wooden letters--the latter passed into oblivion, while the
former has increased gradually and steadily, though with occasional
pauses and interruptions, until the present day; when it has attained
its highest known perfection, while it is still so far progressive, that
it is not easy to predict what may be expected of its future improvement
and excellence.
And here it may be well, since few persons comparatively speaking, even
of those who are admirers and more or less judges of the art, have a
distinct idea of its precise character and nature, to explain briefly in
what it consists and wherein it differs from engraving on copper or
steel.
All engraving consists of cutting with a sharp instrument into a hard
surface, whether of wood or metal, so that when the picture is perfected
on the wood or metal, ink may be applied to the surface, from which
fac-similies may be taken off by the impression of moistened paper on
the block or plate by means either of friction or pressure.
The practice thus far is identical whether steel, copper or wood is to
be the material engraved.
But with this all similarity ends.
In steel or copperplate-engravings the ink, when applied, is received
into the engraved lines, and is wiped off from the prominent portions;
so that, in the impressions taken on paper, the lines cut into the plate
communicate the shades, the portions left in relief on the plate remain
colorless and blank.
In wood-engravings, on the contrary, the ink, when applied, is taken up
by the parts left prominent, and never penetrates into the engraved
lines; so that, in the impressions taken on paper, the portions of the
wood less prominent communicate the shades, the portions cut away, on
the block, remain colorless and blank.
Thus the same process, pursued on the metallic plate, and on the
wood-block, produces effects diametrically opposite, and to produce the
same effects from the two materials converse processes must be pursued.
Thus we will engrave the word
[Illustration: =Printing=]
on a plate of metal, and on a block of wood, and let these two
engravings be perfect fac-similies, line for line alike, in form,
length, width and depth; then, the impression taken from the engraved
plate of metal, being derived from the depressed lines, filled with ink,
_into_ which the paper is forced by the action of the press, will
present the appearance shown above.
But, the impression taken from the engraved block of wood, being derived
from the elevated portions of the block, covered with ink, _upon_ which
the paper is impinged by the action of the press, will give the
appearance presented below.
[Illustration: =Printing=]
Observe, therefore, that as on the two engravings, the same work
produces results exactly the reverse, one of the other; so to produce
the same effect from each of the two engravings, we must have recourse
to two different processes.
The former of the above two cuts, is the effect produced on paper from a
metallic plate, into the surface of which the lines producing the shades
are engraved or cut in.
The same effects precisely may be produced on paper from a wood-block;
but, in order to produce it, all the portions of the wood-block, which
now give solid black upon the paper, must be cut out of the wood;
leaving the lines, which now give white on the paper, prominent, so as
to receive the ink and make their impression on the surface to be
printed.
The same end could be attained on the other side--that is to say, a
light lettering on a dark ground--by cutting away all the metal, except
the lines now producing dark impressions on a light ground, which would
then give light lines on a dark ground; but the labor of doing this
would be interminable, and the advantage gained, nothing.
This principle once understood, the whole system becomes comprehensible
at a glance. If, in an engraving on metal, all the lines cut into the
plate were of equal depth and capacity, all the impressions would be
equal as to shade, and the print would display an impression in pure
black and pure white only, without intermediate tints.
So, in cutting a wood block, if all the prominent parts be left equally
prominent, the quantity of ink deposited by each and all will be
identical, and the impression will be, as before, in simple black and
white.
To produce greater depth of shadow in one part of a metallic engraving
than in others, the lines must be cut deepest where the shadow is to be
the blackest, and thence graduated, less and less deep, to the plain
surface, which gives pure white.
To produce greater depth of shadows in one part of a wood-cut than in
others, the prominent lines must be left most prominent where the shadow
is to be the blackest; and thence shaved away more and more, as the
shadows are to be less intense, until no lines at all are left on which
the paper can impinge, and _there_ will be pure white.
The superiority of wood-blocks to metallic-plates consists in their
superior capacity for impressing broad, solid masses of pure black, as
contrasted with pure white. An effect which cannot be readily or
effectually given on metal. Since in intaglio engraving the nearest
approach to absolute blackness, extending over spaces, is obtained by
the continual crossing and recrossing of slender black lines, until the
white interstices become infinitesimal, and their effect is more or less
swallowed up and lost. The superiority of metal to wood, on the other
hand, consists in the greater readiness and facility with which it
transfers to paper the finest and most delicate hair-strokes, such as
could hardly be left to sustain themselves in wood when all surrounding
lights are cut away.
This leads to a different mode of _handling_ in the two materials.
Shadows in metallic engraving are produced, mainly, by what is called
cross-hatching, or cutting lines, intersecting each other diagonally,
with white, lozenge-shaped intersections between them. This method
cannot be resorted to with any facility on wood, as any one may
comprehend, who will consider, that in one case, on metal, the engraver
has only to cut long, continuous lines intersecting each other, each
line by a single stroke; leaving the interstices to take care of
themselves; while in the other, on wood, every separate lozenge-shaped
interstice has to be cut out in precise and regular form, and with such
nicety as to leave the intersections, often no wider than a hair, in
continuous and accurate lines.
The labor and waste of time in this method is enormous; and, although it
is adhered to by some artists, the better and, in our opinion, more
effective way of giving shadow is by leaving greater _breadth_ to the
prominent lines where the heavier shadows are required, and so
diminishing the size of the light spaces left, though in a different
direction, and by a different method.
The finest cross-hatched wood-cut in existence, probably the finest ever
executed, is a large cut of the death of Dentatus, engraved by Mr.
Harvey from the design of Mr. R. B. Haydon. But, though it is
unquestionably the most elaborately engraved large wood-cut that ever
has appeared, and though parts of it are better than any thing earlier
or later, in the same style, it cannot be regarded as a successful
specimen of the art. It is, in fact, an attempt to rival a
copperplate-engraving on wood; and, as such, has transcended the powers
of the art, and the capabilities of the material.
That Mr. Harvey has effected with wood all that could be effected on
wood in this manner, is undeniable; but that he could have produced much
more with wood, in a different manner, is equally certain.
If the _ne plus ultra_ of wood-engraving were to produce imitations of
metal-engraving of inferior effect, and with much greater labor, then
Mr. Harvey’s Dentatus were the _ne plus ultra_ of wood-engraving.
But wood, within its own legitimate bounds, is greater and more
effective, in some peculiarities, than copper. Just as copper, in other
peculiarities, is greater than wood. Neither was ever intended to clash
or contend with the other. Each in its own empire is supreme.
It should be added here, before quitting the technical portion of the
subject, that one advantage possessed by wood-cuts is this--that giving
their impression from the elevated surfaces precisely as metallic types,
the wood-blocks can be inserted in the same forms among the types; so
that the impressions can be worked by the same press, and printed on the
same pages, while the reverse sides can also be printed, either with
letter-press or other wood-cuts, so as to form part and parcel of one
continuous narrative. Metallic-plates, on the contrary, must be worked
by an entirely different press, and on separate pages, apart from the
letter-press, and on one side of the paper only.
This gives a great superiority for purposes of illustration, whether by
anagrams or slight sketches of things described in the body of the work,
to the wood-cut, above the copper-plate. And, indeed, this admitted
advantage, with the extreme comparative cheapness of wood-engraving, and
the rare delicacy and beauty which has been attained by the more modern
artists of the day, has led to the very general adoption of this style
of illustration for ornamented volumes.
It is, in fact, rapidly gaining the preference over metallic engraving;
the great expense and very inferior durability of copper, and the
coldness, hardness, and absence of richness which seem to be inherent to
steel, having gone far to banish both from general use as ornaments or
additions to printed books.
As the finest of all methods of reproducing large pictures and fine
productions of art; as affording exquisite adornments for the walls of
ornamented apartments--vastly superior, would people but believe it, to
second-rate oil-paintings--as the legitimate treasures of hoarded
portfolios, fine copperplate-engravings will and _must_ ever hold their
place. But for the illustration of books--as books must now
be--accessible to the million, we fully believe that wood is the best,
and soon to be almost the sole material.
The day of steel,[1] we think and hope, is already past, for though we
have seen good things executed on that most thankless and intractable of
substances, we never saw such that we did not regret the time, the
talent, and the toil, so comparatively wasted.
Now, to return to the history of wood-cutting proper, we find that but
little improvement was effected in the mechanical part, little filling
in, very slight efforts at representing texture, and scarcely any
chiaro-scuro having been attempted, previous to the invention of movable
types and the use of the press.
It is probable that Gutenberg first conceived the idea of movable types,
at Strasburg, in or about 1436; and that “with the aid of Faust’s money,
and Sheffer’s ingenuity,”[2] the art was perfected at Mentz in or about
1452. “In the first book which appeared with a date and the printer’s
name,” continues the author I have quoted above--“The Psalter printed by
Faust and Scheffer at Mentz, in 1457--the large initial letters,
engraved on wood, and printed in red and blue ink, are the most
beautiful specimens of this kind of ornament which the united efforts of
the wood-engraver and the pressman have produced. They have been
imitated in modern times but not excelled. As they are the first
letters, in point of time, printed with two colors, so are they likely
to continue the first in point of excellence.”
From this time the art made rapid progress, as connected with the press,
which in a very rude and primitive state now came generally into vogue,
though the machine of 1460 was as far different from one of Hoe’s
marvelous power-presses as is an Indian’s bark canoe from an Atlantic
steamer.
Between this date and the conclusion of the century, we find one
wood-engraving by an unknown author, the frontispiece of Breydenbach’s
Travels, so infinitely superior to every thing that succeeded it for
many years as to deserve special notice. It contains the first specimen
of cross-hatching known to exist, and attempts both shade and color, not
without considerable effect. It is said, by the author above quoted,
“not to be only the finest wood-engraving up to that date, but to be in
point of design and execution as far superior to the best cuts in the
Nuremberg Chronicle, as Albert Durer’s designs are to the cuts in the
oldest edition of the ”Poor Preacher’s Bible.“ The engraved
frontispiece, in question, bears the date 1486, the Nuremberg Chronicle
of 1493; and the _Biblia Pauperum_, as it is--probably
erroneously--called, in various editions from 1462 to 1475.”
The following cut is a representation of the press in use at this
period, and for some considerable time afterward. It is a fac-simile of
an engraving of “the press of Jodocus Badius Ascensianus, from the title
page of a book printed by him in 1498.”
[Illustration]
The above engraving, although it is not inserted here as a specimen of
the style of engraving at this date, but merely as a representation of
the machinery in use at the time, may be regarded, on the whole, as
about on an average with the ordinary work of the period, both as to
design and execution; it is vastly superior to the cuts of the “_Biblia
Pauperum_,” and “_Speculum Humanæ Salvationis_,” and yet more so to that
of the Nuremberg Chronicles; it is inferior to the frontispiece of
Breydenbach’s Travels, which, it has been stated above, is the
_chef-d’œuvre_ of this epoch; but, although slight and sketchy, it is in
all respects superior to the hideous monstrosities which disgrace, in
lieu of ornamenting, four-fifths of the cheap publications of the day.
We have now, however, arrived at a period when wood-engraving became not
merely a calling, but an art; when painters of the highest degree,
higher than ever before or since, were proud and pleased, and, what is
more, _able_ to be designers on wood for the engravers. From this date,
until the troubles of the civil war and commonwealth in England, and
religious conflicts on the continent of Europe, annihilated the arts,
put the muses to flight--with one sublime exception--and almost
overthrew society itself, such painters as Wolgemuth, and Pleydenwurth,
Cranach, and Burgmair, and more famous yet, Albert Durer and Hans
Holbein, became the chief patrons and promulgators of the art,
constantly themselves designing and completing drawings on wood, for the
engraver, although there is no reason for believing--but on the contrary
every reason for denying--that these illustrious men ever employed
themselves in actual cutting; which was then a process purely
mechanical, practiced by persons utterly devoid of all knowledge either
of composition or correct drawing. At this time, all the merit of the
wood-cut rested with the designer and artist, none with the wood-cutter.
Now it is shared by both alike, and to produce an excellent
wood-engraving, excellence both in the artist and the engraver is
indispensable. Of a bad or indifferent[3][3a] composition and design,
the best engraver that ever lived cannot make a good picture. And in no
smaller degree will the best picture ever composed and drawn by the best
artist be ruined, and prove an utter failure, if intrusted to the hands
of an ignorant, incompetent, or reckless engraver.
Albert Durer--of whom the following cut is a fac-simile likeness, from a
wood-engraving designed by himself--was born at Nuremburg, May 20, 1471,
the son of Albert Durer, a goldsmith by profession, a Hungarian by
birth.
In those days goldsmiths were artists of the highest order; necessarily
sculptors, designers and engravers--witness Benevenuto, Cellini, and
others, such as Bandinelli, and various great Italians, whom it would be
too long to note, scarcely inferior.
[Illustration]
Ambitious of greater things, Durer became apprentice to Michael
Wolgemuth, the principal painter of his age and country; and, after
having served his time, traveled, married unhappily, and died ere he
reached old age, but not before he obtained world-wide, and time-defying
renown, as a great painter, as more than a great
copperplate-engraver--for it is only the greatest of the present day who
are capable of producing fac-similes of his works--and, what most
concerns us, as a great patron and promoter of wood-engraving.
That he was no wood-engraver himself, is we consider certainly proved,
although by proofs negative.
They are briefly these.
The designs of the wood-cuts ascribed to Albert are in all respects
equal to the designs of copper-engravings, known to be both designed and
engraved by himself.
The execution and handling on his copperplates is superior to those of
any other artist of his day.
Of his wood-cuts, while the designs are transcendent, the execution is
ordinary; nor is there any perceptible variation between the execution
of the cuts attributed to him, and those known to have been cut by
Resch, from his designs.
The style of Durer’s drawing on wood shows the hand of a man used to
copper; and is not that the best calculated for producing effects on
wood.
Now it is scarcely credible, or even to be imagined, that an artist, who
should have attained, himself almost untaught--for whoever they were, he
manifestly surpasses all his teachers--such wonderful power and facility
in _engraving_ on one substance, should not, with equal practice on a
different substance, have evinced the same--or at least
_some_--superiority in handling it.
“There are about two hundred subjects, engraved on wood,” we quote, as
before, from Jackson’s History of Wood-Engraving, “which are marked with
the initials of Albert Durer’s name, and the greater part of them,
though evidently designed by the hand of a master, are engraved in a
manner which certainly denotes no very great excellence. Of the
remainder, which are better engraved, it would be difficult to point out
one which displays execution so decidedly superior as to enable any
person to say positively that it must have been cut by Durer. The
earliest engravings on wood with Durer’s mark are sixteen cuts
illustrative of the Apocalypse, first published in 1498; and between
that and 1528, the year of his death, it is likely that nearly all the
others were executed. The cuts of the Apocalypse generally are much
superior to all wood-engravings that had previously appeared, both in
design and execution; but if they be examined by any person conversant
with the practice of the art, it will be perceived that their
superiority is not owing to any delicacy in the lines, which would
render them difficult to engrave, but from the ability of the person by
whom they were drawn, and from his knowledge of the capabilities of the
art. Looking at the state of wood-engraving at the period when those
cuts were published, I cannot think that the artist who made the
drawings would experience any difficulty in finding persons capable of
engraving them.”
It matters not, however, to the history of the art, whether Durer
engraved, or did not engrave, with his own hand; it is sufficient for us
to know, that it was he, and his friends and successors, who raised it
to the position which it in their time occupied, and which, after a dark
interregnum, it now occupies again, how high to soar hereafter we know
not.
The works of Durer, “The Triumphal Procession of Maximilian,” in which
he was a collaborateur with Hans Burgmair, The “Dance Macaber,” ascribed
improperly to Hans Holbein, all executed nearly at this period, if they
did not attain the highest attainable pitch of perfection, fell not at
least far short of it. If, in after days, the skill of the manual
workman has increased, the excellence of the designer is less
marked--or, what amounts to the same thing, the best designers have not,
until within the last half century, applied their talents to this art.
At all events, and all things considered, we may assume with Mr.
Jackson, that “at no time does the art appear to have been more
flourishing, or more highly esteemed, than in the reign of its great
patron the Emperor Maximilian.”
From the date of the appearance of the Dance Macaber, which is
considered by good judges equal at least to any wood-cuts ever executed,
the art began to decline. In England--later, perhaps, to receive it than
the more early refined nations of the continent--it lingered through the
reign of Elizabeth; but during the reign of the bestial Scottish despot
who succeeded her, and his unhappy race, went out, like an exhausted
lamp, for want of nutriment. The Italian school yet for awhile clung to
existence, distinguished by inferior vigor, but by superior finish and
neatness both of drawing and workmanship, and then perished, effete
before mature, and never, we believe, has again revived.
How low the art of wood-engraving sunk after the commencement of the
seventeenth century, and how small appeared the chance of its ever
rising again from its ashes, may be seen at a glance; by comparing the
specimens above, none of them pretending to be exemplars of the _finest_
work of their several epochs, with the following miserable abortion,
than which, it needs not now to say, no tolerable apprentice, of one
year’s standing in a respectable office, could, unless he tried to do
so, produce any thing worse either in design or execution.
[Illustration]
And yet this is a very fair example of the style of wood-engraving from
the reign of Charles II. to that of George III., with few exceptions. In
a word, for some unaccountable reason, this noble art, as an art, had
fallen every where--though nowhere, as some persons have fancied, either
disused or forgotten--into desuetude, neglect, and contempt, from about
the year 1700, until near the close of the eighteenth century. This,
too, occurred at a period when, in many other sister branches, art stood
as high, perhaps higher than ever, when Antony Vandyke, and Peter Joly,
and Godfrey Kneller, and Joshua Reynolds painted, and copper-engraving
had shown no decadence, but the reverse, either on the Continent or in
England.
On the 10th of August, 1753, at Cherryburn, near Newcastle on Tyne, in
Northumberland, was born, the son of a poor owner of a small landsale
colliery, Thomas Bewick, who, by his own almost unassisted talents,
raised this art, single-handed, from utter disgrace, and all but
oblivion, to its very highest pitch of excellence--for in generic
drawing and engraving especially, he never has found, and probably never
will find, an equal. Designer, draughtsman, engraver, three in one, he
has produced wood-cuts which never have been approached, and of which it
has been said by competent authority, that “every line that is to be
perceived in this, is the best that could have been desired to express
the engraver’s perfect idea of his subject.”
It is said that as a boy this great man was employed as a laborer at his
father’s coal-pit; but this may be dismissed as improbable at least,
since he was early sent to school by his father at the Parsonage House
of Ovingham, in an adjoining parish, and was subsequently, in compliance
with his own desire, apprenticed to Mr. Beilly, an engraver at
Newcastle, where, having by a mere accident of the office been employed
to cut some mathematical diagrams on wood, he acquired a taste for the
art sufficient to urge him on, without much encouragement, to its
prosecution. Shortly after the expiration of his apprenticeship, he
returned to his father’s house, and there applied himself earnestly to
the study of the art in which he was ultimately to gain so much renown.
[Illustration]
In 1775, when he was twenty-two years old, he received a premium from
the Society for the Encouragement of Arts and Manufactures for a cut of
“the Huntsman and the Old Hound,” which was first printed in an edition
of Gay’s Fables, published by T. Saint, Newcastle, 1779--a fac-simile of
which is given below.
[Illustration]
Although this juvenile engraving of the great master in no respect
approaches the greatest, or even the average, of his mature works, it
yet exhibits great talent and greater promise. The whole later tendency
of wood-engraving, such as it was, had been toward conventional method,
not toward the study and imitation of nature; and here at once, in his
earliest success, we find the learner leaving all rules and precepts
behind him, and dashing at once into the bold, free, and irregular
imitations of nature, by which he was thereafter to achieve a
reputation, create a school, and redeem a noble art from the disrepute
into which it had fallen; not--as some foolishly have asserted--to
revive a lost or forgotten art; for wood-cutting never had been, even in
the worst times, _disused_, but only degraded from its high estate and
abused to base purposes.
It must be evident that within the limits of an article, such as this,
it must be impossible to enter fully into the merits and peculiarities
of all the wood-engravers of four centuries; when at the present day
alone there are living more than twenty, to each of whom more than an
equal space were fairly due, if we but had the space to bestow in
proportion to their deserts. As it is, even on Bewick, greatest, in our
opinion, most original, most truthful to nature, and least a mannerist
of all who have succeeded or preceded him, we can dwell long enough only
to speak of him generally as the founder of the modern school, superior
in delineation of texture, in force, in spirit, and in the true feeling
and genius of the art of wood-cutting, to all the world beside. To those
who are acquainted with his “British Birds,” we need only refer to his
“woodcock” and his “partridge,” more especially, in justification of our
unqualified praise and admiration; to those who are not, we can only
give our earnest advice to become acquainted with them as soon as may
be. Bewick had many scholars and pupils, who have brought down his
reputation and much of his skill to the present day. Mr. Harvey, one of
his most eminent successors, long considered his best pupil, has given
up engraving for designing, still maintaining high character for
ability; but, though a man of unquestioned talent, he is rather too much
of a mannerist greatly to delight ourselves. The delicious foliage of
Linton, king of all modern artists, is known to all our readers from the
fine wood-cuts in the illustrated London papers; as are the traits and
characteristics of Thompson, Foster, and half a dozen others, although
their names may not be so familiar as their works. Beyond all doubt, the
English school of wood-cutting, whether for loose, sketchy, landscape,
or elaborate portraiture, is now the finest, freest, simplest, and most
natural in the world; the French excel in a sort of bold pen and inky
style of character and caste delineation--but it is national, not
universal--tricky, not artistical, and lacking the “touch of nature
which makes the whole world kin.”
No country has, however, made such wonderful strides in this art as
America; for twenty years ago scarce twenty wood-engravings were
published annually in America; now we should be afraid to say how many
times twenty thousand.
Then, there were, to the best of our memory, but two wood-cutters of any
great note or merit--certainly in New York, we believe in America. Dr.
Alex’r. Anderson, supposed to be the first who produced any thing worthy
of note in this profession, commenced the business, which he still
pursues, in 1798 or 1799. Mr. J. A. Adams was the next, who applied
himself to the art in 1826. He has now retired, it is understood, on a
handsome competency earned by his talent and industry; chiefly, it is
said, through his engagement on Harper’s illustrated Bible, a work which
owes its celebrity to its prestige, as being the first thing of the kind
issued in the United States, and by no means to its merits as a work of
art. When issued, in the opinions of those who knew, it was barely
tolerable for this country, in which the art was nearly unknown; were it
to appear now, it would be merely contemptible.
Not to be over boastful of our own columns, we do not fear to challenge
comparison between the generic cuts of game, which have appeared in
Graham, within the last two years, from the gravers of Devereux and
Brightly, against any thing of their character since the days of Bewick.
The cuts of Orr--to whom we had intended to allude more fully--in this
paper, as well as those of Devereux generally, prove what we shall do
hereafter. But want of space, in this number, circumscribes much
complimentary mention of these and many other artists.
[Illustration]
Note.--The head and tail-pieces of this article, without assuming to be
splendid or unusual specimens of art, are given as characteristic
examples of the modern style in the treatment of foliage and
architecture.
-----
[1] It may not probably be known to ordinary readers that while a
copperplate-engraving begins to fail after two or three thousand copies
have been taken from it, and is worthless after six or eight thousand,
fifty or sixty thousand can be taken from wood-blocks, and yet more from
steel, without detriment.
[2] History Wood Engraving. Jackson. London.
[3] As an exemplication of the above statement, two wood-cuts are here
submitted, with the view of proving the absolute necessity of a good
artist-like drawing to enable the engraver to produce a handsome or even
creditable wood-cut. Both the following cuts are from one sketch, by the
great landscape-painter Morland--the one meagre, tame, unfilled, and
presenting nothing beyond a bare, cold outline; the other a remarkably
spirited and flowing sketch, not one of the extra or additional lines
being supernumerary, but each tending to give both effect and support to
the outline.
[Illustration]
[3a] And here it is well to point out to those seeking to obtain good
wood-engravings, for the illustration of works which they propose to
write or publish, that there are two absurdities, about equally great,
usually committed by persons in their position. The one of which is the
ordering and paying liberally for the work of a clever artist and
designer, and then mulcting the engraver one half the price he ought to
receive, if he do his duty and spend the requisite time on the work, and
wondering why the product is a wretched botch and not a fine work of
art. The other is the converse of this, paying an engraver well to cut,
and grudging the extra expense of a good artist. For it must be
remembered, that in wood-engraving the artist and designer, where they
are not one, as in the case of Bewick and a few others--and this is a
rare case--must work in unity of intent, with a perfect comprehension
of, and a full sympathy in, the meaning and genius each of the other.
* * * * *
=RIVERS.=
=BY THOMAS MILNER, M. A.=
(_Concluded from page 463._)
Many rivers are subject to a considerable elevation of the level of
their waters. This is periodical or irregular in its occurrence,
according to the nature of the producing cause. Casual temporary
floodings, as the effect of extraordinary rains, are common to the
streams of most countries, and sometimes occasion great changes of the
surface, and destruction of life and property. One of the most
remarkable instances of this kind in modern times, occurred on the 4th
of August, 1829, in Scotland, when the Nairn, Spey, and Findhorn rose
above their natural boundaries, and spread a devastating deluge over the
surrounding country. The rain which produced this flood fell chiefly on
the Monadhleadh Mountains, where the rivers in question have their
feeders, situated between the south of Loch Ness and the group of the
Cairngorums. Sir Thomas Dick Lauder, in his interesting account of this
inundation, considers the westerly winds, which prevailed for some time
previously, after a season of unusual heat, to have produced a gradual
accumulation of vapor, somewhere north of our island; and the column
being suddenly impelled by a strong north-easterly blast, it was driven
toward the south-west, till arrested in its course by the lofty
mountains upon which it discharged itself in torrents perfectly
unexampled. The rain fell occasionally in heavy drops, but was for the
most part broken by the blast into extremely minute particles, so thick
that the very air itself seemed to be descending in one mass of water
upon the earth. It deluged every house whose windows were exposed to the
south-east. The lesser animals, the birds, and especially game of all
kinds, were destroyed in great numbers, by the rain alone; and the
mother partridge, with her progeny and mate, were found chilled to death
amidst the drenching wet. At Huntly Lodge, according to an accurate
observation, between five o’clock of the morning of the 3d of August and
the same hour of the succeeding day there fell 3¾ inches of rain, or
about one-sixth of our annual allowance of rain descended there in
twenty-four hours. This was at a considerable distance from the
mountains--the central scene of the rain--where its quantity must have
been prodigiously greater, sufficient to account for the tremendous
flood that followed, far exceeding in its rise, duration, and havoc, any
other that ever affected the same locality. The Findhorn and Spey
assumed the appearance of inland seas; and, when the former began to
ebb, a fine salmon was driven ashore and captured at an elevation of
fifty feet above its ordinary level. Most of the rivers of the temperate
zones are subject to these irregular floodings from the same cause,
especially those which take their rise in high mountain regions, the St.
Lawrence being the most remarkable exception, the level of which is not
affected by either rains or drought. The vast lakes from which this
river issues furnish its channel with an inexhaustible supply of water,
and present a surface too extensive to be sensibly elevated by any
extraordinary rains. A strong westerly wind, however, will affect the
level of the St. Lawrence, and occasion a rise of six feet in the waters
to the eastern extremity of Lake Erie. An easterly wind also upon the
Orinoco will check its current, elevate the upper part of the stream,
and force its waters into the channels of its tributaries, giving them a
backward flow, and causing them to be flooded; and a northerly wind will
drive the Baltic up the mouths of the Oder, and raise its level for a
considerable distance. In a similar manner, the Neva rises when a strong
wind blows from the Gulf of Finland; and that occurrence--taking place
coincidently with high water and the breaking up of the ice, would
create an inundation sufficient to drown the whole population of St.
Petersburg, and convert that brilliant capital, with all its sumptuous
palaces, into a chaotic mass of ruins. We have the materials of this
statement from M. Kohl. The Gulf of Finland runs to a point as it
approaches the mouth of the Neva, where the most violent gales are
always those from the west; so that the mass of waters on such occasions
is always forcibly impelled toward the city. The islands forming the
delta of the Neva, on which St. Petersburg stands, are extremely low and
flat; and the highest point in the city is probably not more than twelve
or fourteen feet above the average level of the sea. A rise of fifteen
feet is therefore enough to place all St. Petersburg under water, and a
rise of thirty feet is enough to drown almost every human being in the
place. Hence the inhabitants of the capital are in constant danger of
destruction at the period referred to, and can never be certain that the
500,000 of them may not, within the next twenty-four hours, be driven
out of their houses to find, in multitudes of instances, a watery grave.
This is not a chimerical danger; for, during its short continuance, the
city of the Czar has experienced some formidable inundations. The only
hope of this apparently doomed city is that the three circumstances may
never be coincident, namely, high water, the breaking up of the ice, and
a gale of wind from the west. It is nevertheless true, that the wind is
very often westerly during spring, and the ice floating in the Neva and
the Gulf of Finland is of a bulk amply sufficient to oppose a formidable
obstacle to the egress of the water; so that it will not be surprising
if St. Petersburg, after suddenly rising like a meteor from the swamps
of Finland, should still more suddenly be extinguished in them.
[Illustration: =Valley of the Concon, Chili.=]
The periodical rise of rivers is either diurnal, semi-annual, or annual,
and proceeds from a variety of causes. Where streams descend immediately
from mountains covered with snow, the heat of the sun melting the snow
produces high water every day, the increase being the greatest in the
hottest days. In Peru and Chili there are small rivers which flow only
during the day, because they are fed entirely by the melting of the snow
upon the summit of the Andes, which takes place only when the solar
influence is in action. In Hindûstan, and some parts of Africa, rivers
exist, which, though they flow night and day, are, from the accession of
snow-water, the greatest by day. Those rivers also which fall into the
sea have their level daily varied by the tidal wave for some distance
from their mouths, the extent through which the influence of the tides
is felt being modified by the breadth and shape of their channels and
the force of their current. The wider and more direct the bed of a
stream communicating with the ocean, and the slower its motion the
farther the tide will penetrate; whereas a narrow and sinuous course,
and a great velocity, offer obstructions to its progress. The tide of
the Atlantic is perceived four hundred miles along the course of the
Amazon, and that of the German Ocean extends about seventy miles up the
Thames. Important facilities are afforded to the navigation of many
rivers by this circumstance, for they are only accessible to vessels of
large burden at high water. The rapid of Richelieu, on the St. Lawrence,
where the river contracts, and has its course obstructed by rocks,
impedes the navigation between Montreal and Quebec, except at high tide,
when the water rises fifteen or eighteen feet, and the rapid entirely
disappears. A semi-annual or annual rise alone distinguishes the rivers
of inter-tropical regions, and of countries bordering on the torrid
zone. The semi-annual rise is a feature of those rivers which drain high
mountain ranges, and proceeds from the two independent causes, of the
melting of the snows in spring or summer, and the great seasonal rains
to which such districts are subject. The rivers which have only one
annual rise are influenced by the latter cause alone, or by the two
acting coincidently, and producing a grand periodical flood. The Tigris
rises twice in the year--first, and most remarkably, in April, in
consequence of the melting of the snows in the mountains of Armenia; and
secondly, in November, through an accession from the periodical rains.
The Mississippi likewise is subject to two rises in the year--one about
January, occasioned by the periodical rains that fall toward the lower
part of its course; but the grand flood commences in March, and
continues till June, proceeding from the melting of the ice in the upper
part of the continent, where the Missouri and other tributary streams
have their origin. A very striking spectacle is exhibited by this river
in the season of inundation. It rises from forty to fifty feet in some
parts of its course, and is from thirty to a hundred miles wide, all
overshaded with forest, except the interior stripe consisting of its
bed. The water stands among the trees from ten to fifteen feet in
height, and the appearance is exactly that of a forest rising from a
lake, with its waters in rapid motion. For the protection of the
cultivated lands, and to prevent their conversion into permanent swamps,
an embankment, called the Levee, has been raised, which extends two
hundred miles on the eastern shore of the river, and three hundred on
the western. In Asia, the Ganges, Indus, and Euphrates exhibit
inundations upon a similarly great scale. The Euphrates slightly
increases in January, but the grand flood begins soon after the middle
of March. It attains its height about the 20th of May, after which it
falls rapidly till June. The decrease then proceeds gradually until the
middle of November, when the stream is at its lowest. The rise of the
water at Anah, above the site of ancient Babylon, occasionally amounts
to eighteen feet, sometimes entering that town, running with a velocity
exceeding five miles an hour. The moment that the waters of the river
recede, the rice and grain crops are sown in the marshes, and villages
of slightly made reed cottages are reared in their neighborhood. These
last, in consequence of being suffered to remain too long, are often
surprised by the returning inundation, and it is no uncommon spectacle
for their occupants to be seen following the floating villages in
canoes, for the purpose of recovering their property. But of all
inundations that of the Nile, if not the most extensive, is the most
regular, and has become the most celebrated, from the knowledge of it
going back to the earliest periods to which history recurs. The rise of
the river commences about the time of the summer solstice, attains its
maximum height at the autumnal equinox, remains stationary for some
days, and then gradually diminishes till the time of the winter
solstice. The ancients, unacquainted with the climate of the interior
country from which it descends, and not caring in general to inquire for
physical causes, possessing also a very limited knowledge of terrestrial
phenomena, deemed the annual overflow of the Nile a unique event, and
attributed it to the special interference of a supernatural power.
Lucretius, however, who soared in many respects above the prejudices of
his age concerning the natural world, assigned it to a proper cause;
though he ascribes too much influence to the Etesian wind, and shows his
imperfect acquaintance with the geography of the globe, by supposing the
occurrence without a parallel.
“The Nile now calls us, pride of Egypt’s plains:
Sole stream on earth its boundaries that o’erflows
Punctual, and scatters plenty. When the year
Now glows with perfect summer, leaps its tide
Proud o’er the champaign; for the north wind, now
Th’ Etesian breeze, against its mouth direct
Blows with perpetual winnow; every surge
Hence loiters slow, the total current swells,
And wave o’er wave its loftiest bank surmounts.
For that the fixed monsoon that now prevails
Flows from the cold stars of the northern pole
None e’er can doubt; while rolls the Nile adverse
Full from the south, from realms of torrid heat,
Haunts of the Ethiop tribes; yet far beyond
First bubbling, distant, o’er the burning line.
Then ocean, haply, by th’ undevious breeze
Blown up the channel, heaves with every wave
Heaps of high sand, and dams its wonted course;
Whence, narrower, too, its exit to the main,
And with less force the tardy stream descends.
Or, towards its fountain, ampler rains, perchance,
Fall, as th’ Etesian fans, now wide unfurled,
Ply the big clouds perpetual from the north
Full o’er the red equator; where condensed,
Ponderous and low, against the hills they strike,
And shed their treasures o’er the rising flood.
Or, from the Ethiop mountains, the bright sun
Now full matured with deep-dissolving ray
May melt th’ agglomerate snows, and down the plains
Drive them, augmenting hence th’ incipient stream.”
[Illustration: =The Nile at the Pyramids.=]
The annual overflow of the Nile is now well known to proceed from the
heavy periodical rains within the tropics. They fall in copious torrents
upon the great plateau of Abyssinia, which rises, like a fortress, 6000
feet above the burning plains with which it is surrounded on every side,
attracting the clouds, cold fogs, and tremendous showers, enveloping An
Rober, the capital, while, whenever the curtain of mist is withdrawn,
the strange contrast is presented of the sulphureous plains, visible
below, where the heat is 90°, and the drought excessive. A peculiar
character has been given to this district by the violence of the
periodical rains. Bruce speaks of the mountains of this table-land, not
remarkable for their height, but for their number and uncommon forms.
“Some of them are flat, thin, and square, in shape of a hearth-stone or
slab, that scarce would seem to have base sufficient to resist the
winds. Some are like pyramids, others like obelisks or prisms, and some,
the most extraordinary of all, pyramids pitched upon their points, with
their base uppermost.” Mr. Salt confirms this delineation in the main.
The peculiar shapes referred to have been formed by the action of the
torrents discharged from the clouds, which have, for ages, been
skeletonizing the country, dismantling the granite with its kindred
masses of the softer deposits, gradually wearing away also these harder
rocks, and carrying along the soil of Ethiopia, strewing it upon the
valley of the Nile, to the shores of the Mediterranean. When Bruce was
ascending Taranta, a sudden noise was heard on the heights louder than
the loudest thunder, and, almost directly afterward, a river, the
channel of which had been dry, came down in a stream several feet in
depth, and as broad as the whole bed. Hence the steeple and obelisk form
of the rocks, with their naked aspect--which has, not unaptly, been
compared to bones stripped of their flesh.
In the tropical countries of South America, the seasonal rains are,
perhaps, more intensely copious than in any other part of the torrid
zone, and the floods of its rivers are of corresponding magnitude. At
the mission of San Antonio de Javita, on the Orinoco, during the wet
season, the sun and stars are seldom visible, and Humboldt was told by
the padre, that it sometimes rained for four or five months without
intermission. The traveler collected there, in five hours, 21 lines of
water in height on the first of May, and 14 lines on the 3d, in three
hours; whereas at Paris there fall only 28 or 30 lines in as many weeks.
Humboldt traces the transition from the one great season of drought to
that of rain, which divides the year, in an interesting manner, with the
atmospheric phenomena which accompany the change. About the middle of
February in the valleys of Araqua, he observed clouds forming in the
evening, and in the beginning of March the accumulation of vesicular
vapors became visible. “Nothing,” he remarks, in beautifully graphic
style, “can equal the purity of the atmosphere from December to
February. The sky is then constantly without clouds, and should one
appear, it is a phenomenon that occupies all the attention of the
inhabitants. The breeze from the east and north-east blows with
violence. As it always carries with it air of the same temperature, the
vapors cannot become visible by refrigeration. Toward the end of
February and the beginning of March, the blue of the sky is less
intense; the hygrometer gradually indicates greater humidity; the stars
are sometimes veiled by a thin stratum of vapors; their light ceases to
be tranquil and planetary; and they are seen to sparkle from time to
time at the height of 20° above the horizon. At this period the breeze
diminishes in strength, and becomes less regular, being more frequently
interrupted by dead calms. Clouds accumulate toward the south-east,
appearing like distant mountains with distinct outlines. From time to
time they are seen to separate from the horizon, and traverse the
celestial vault with a rapidity which has no correspondence with the
feebleness of the wind that prevails in the lower strata of the air. At
the end of March the southern region of the atmosphere is illuminated by
small electric explosions, like phosphorescent gleams, confined to a
single group of vapors. From this period the breeze shifts at intervals,
and for several hours, to the west and south-west, affording a sure
indication of the approach of the rainy season, which, on the Orinoco,
commences about the end of April. The sky begins to be overcast, its
azure color disappears, and a gray tint is uniformly diffused over it.
At the same time the heat of the atmosphere gradually increases, and,
instead of scattered clouds, the whole vault of the heavens is
overspread with condensed vapors. The howling monkeys begin to utter
their plaintive cries long before sunrise. The atmospheric electricity,
which, during the period of the greatest drought, from December to
March, had been almost constantly in the day-time from 1·7 to 2 lines to
Volta’s electrometer, becomes extremely variable after March. During
whole days it appears null, and again for some hours the pith-balls of
the electrometer diverge from three to four lines. The atmosphere, which
in the torrid as in the temperate zone is generally in a state of
positive electricity, passes alternately, in the course of eight or ten
minutes, to a negative state. The rainy season is that of
thunder-storms. The storm rises in the plains two hours after the sun
passes through the meridian, and therefore shortly after the period of
the maximum of the diurnal heat in the tropics. In the inland districts
it is exceedingly rare to hear thunder at night or in the
morning--nocturnal thunder-storms being peculiar to certain valleys of
rivers which have a particular climate.” The substance of the
explanation of the preceding phenomena, by the philosophic writer of the
statement, may be briefly given:
The season of rains and thunder in the northern equinoctial zone
coincides with the passage of the sun through the zenith of the place,
the cessation of the breezes or north-east winds, and the frequency of
calms and furious currents of the atmosphere from the south-east and
south-west, accompanied with a cloudy sky. While the breeze from the
north-east blows, it prevents the atmosphere from being saturated with
moisture. The hot and loaded air of the torrid zone rises, and flows off
again toward the poles, while inferior currents from these last,
bringing drier and colder strata, take the place of the ascending
columns. In this manner, the humidity--being prevented from
accumulating--passes off toward the temperate and colder regions, so
that the sky is always clear. When the sun, entering the northern signs,
rises toward the zenith, the breeze from the north-east softens, and at
length ceases; this being the season at which the difference of
temperature between the tropics and the contiguous zone is least. The
column of air resting on the equinoctial zone becomes replete with
vapors, because it is no longer renewed by the current from the pole:
clouds form in this atmosphere, saturated and cooled by the effects of
radiation and the dilatation of the ascending air, which increases its
capacity for heat in proportion as it is rarefied. Electricity
accumulates in the higher regions, in consequence of the formation of
the vesicular vapors, the precipitation of which is constant during the
day, but generally ceases at night. The showers are more violent and
accompanied with electrical explosions, shortly after the maximum of the
diurnal heat. These phenomena continue until the sun enters the southern
signs, when the polar current is reëstablished, because the difference
between the heat at the equinoctial and temperate regions is daily
increasing. The air of the tropics being thus renewed, the rains cease,
the vapors are dissolved, and the sky resumes its azure tint.
The Orinoco, when in flood, inundates a vast extent of country, six
hundred miles in length, and from sixty to ninety in width. Its waters
cover the savannas along its banks to the depth of twelve or fourteen
feet, giving to them a lake-like appearance, in the midst of which
farm-houses and villages are seen rising on islands but little elevated
above the surface. The wild cattle perish in great numbers, and fall an
easy prey to the carrion-vultures and alligators. In one part of the
river Humboldt found marks of recent inundation at 45 feet above the
ordinary level; but above the greatest height to which its waters are
now elevated, he traced its ancient action at 106 or even 138 feet. “Is
this river, then,” inquires he, “the Orinoco, which appears to us so
imposing and majestic, merely the feeble remnant of those immense
currents of fresh water which, swelled by Alpine snows or by more
abundant rains, every where shaded by dense forests, and destitute of
those beaches that favor evaporation, formerly traversed the regions to
the east of the Andes, like arms of inland seas? What must then have
been the state of those low countries of Guiana, which now experience
the effects of annual inundations! What a prodigious number of
crocodiles, lamartines, and boas must have inhabited these vast regions,
alternately converted into pools of stagnant water and arid plains! The
more peaceful world in which we live has succeeded to a tumultuous
world. Bones of mastadons and real American elephants are found
dispersed over the platforms of the Andes. The megatherium inhabited the
plains of Uruguay. By digging the earth more deeply in high valleys,
which at the present day are unable to nourish palms or tree-ferns, we
discover strata of coal, containing gigantic remains of monocotyledonous
plants. There was therefore a remote period when the tribes of
vegetables were differently distributed, when the animals were larger,
the rivers wider and deeper. There stop the monuments of nature which we
can consult.”
The bifurcation of flowing waters is sufficiently illustrative of the
physics of the earth to justify a few words:--Europe presents two
instances of bifurcation--one in Italy, between the Arno and the Chiana;
the other in Germany, between the Haase and the Else, in Westphalia.
Asia also possesses, on the peninsula lying beyond India, two grand
examples. What we know about them is principally founded upon the
information gathered by Dr. Buchanan Hamilton, during his stay in Ava,
the capital of the Birman empire. But it is to be observed, that the
communications of these Indian rivers, at least as regards those in the
country of the Jun-Shan, appear doubtful. British travelers have
succeeded in penetrating, from Maulmain, at the mouth of the river
Saluan, into the interior of the country of the Shan, which has been so
long shut up; but Lieutenant M’Leod, who reached the river of Kambodja,
says nothing to confirm the information Dr. Buchanan gives us. The most
important of all known divisions in the form of a fork, however, is the
bifurcation of the Orinoco, which communicates through the Cassiquiare
with the Rio Negro, and through this river with the Amazon. It has
already been remarked, that the observations of A. von Humboldt have put
this bifurcation beyond a doubt; but the subject deserves a recurrence
to it, as presenting to our attention a singular physical feature, and
illustrating the energy of the great traveler of modern times.
He and Bonpland left Carracas in the year 1800, crossed the valleys of
Aragua, and the Llanos of Calabozo--excellent pastures, which separate
the cultivated part of Venezula from the region of the forests and
missions--and embarked at San Fernando, on the Rio Apure, to follow its
course downward to its discharge into the principal branch of Orinoco.
They then ascended the Orinoco, passing its two great cataracts of
Apures and Maypures, and reached the village of San Fernando de Atabapo,
situated at the junction of the Guaviare and Atabapo, and near lat. 4°
N. Here they left the river, and sailed up the Atabapo to the mouth of
the Rio Temi, which latter they followed as far as its confluence with
the Tuamini, and arrived at the village of San Antonio de Javita,
formerly mentioned as remarkable for its amount of rain. From this point
the Indians carried their boat across the isthmus which separates the
Tuamini from the Rio Pimichin, the travelers following on foot, passing
through dense forests, often in danger from the number of snakes that
infested the marshes. Embarking on the Pimichin, they came in four hours
and a half into the Rio Negro. “The morning,” says Humboldt, “was cool
and beautiful. We had been confined thirty-six days in a narrow canoe,
so unsteady that it would have been upset by any one rising imprudently
from his seat, without warning the rowers to preserve its balance by
leaning to the opposite side. We had suffered severely from the stings
of insects, but had withstood the insalubrity of the climate; we had
passed without accident the numerous falls and bars that impede the
navigation of the rivers, and often render it more dangerous than long
voyages by sea. After all we had endured, I may be allowed to mention
the satisfaction which we felt in having reached the tributaries of the
Amazon.” The Rio Negro, which flows into that river, was navigated
downward as far as San Carlos, then supposed to lie under the equator,
but actually about 2° N. From thence the travelers retraced the river,
passed from it into the Cassiquiare, and again entered the main channel
of the Orinoco, three leagues below the mission of Esmeralda; thus
demonstrating a junction between the two great floods of the Amazon and
Orinoco, which had been, in the year 1798, declared by Bauche to be a
geographical monstrosity. The bifurcation of the Orinoco takes place in
the following manner:--The river, issuing from among the mountains,
reaches the opening of a valley or depression which terminates at the
Rio Negro. Here it divides into two branches, the smaller, or the
Cassiquiare, turning off to the south, while the main stream continues
its original direction--west-north-west. A reference to Humboldt’s map,
of which we give a translated copy, will render further explanation
unnecessary.
The preceding notices refer to what have been appropriately styled the
“might rivers,” and the “great rivers,” none of which are to be found in
Europe. Its noblest running waters belong to a third grade. “These,”
says Inglis, “I would designate the large rivers; for great and large
are not entirely synonymous; and, to most minds, the term great river
and large river, will present a distinct image. The lower we descend in
the scale, the more numerous do we find the species. The continent of
Europe abounds with examples of the third class--such as the Rhine, the
Danube, the Rhone, the Elbe, the Tagus, the Ebro, and the Guadalquivir.
The fourth class is still more numerous; and of this class, which I
would call considerable rivers, we may find examples at home. Father
Thames takes the lead; and the Severn, and perhaps the Trent, the Clyde,
the Tweed, the Tyne, and the Tay, may be entitled to the same
distinction. On the continent, it would be easy to name a hundred such;
let me content myself with naming the Loire, the Meuse, the Soane, the
Garonne, the Adige, and the Maine. Fifthly, come the small rivers.
Multitudinous they are; but as examples, I may name the Wye, the Dart,
the Derwent, the Dee, the Aire, the Spey, the Ex, and a thousand such;
while on the continent, of the same class, may be mentioned the Gare,
the Seine, the Reass, or the Sombre. The word river can no longer be
employed, for now come the family of streams--nameless, except to those
who live upon their banks: the rivulets follow; and, lastly, we close
the enumeration with rills.” The small rivers, with the streams
subordinate to them, are especially rife in countries where there is the
vicinage of the sea, and high elevations on the land. This renders them
so abundant in such districts as the Greek peninsula. There, Alpine
tracts of territory collect from the atmosphere the vapors of the
contiguous sea, arrest the castellated glories of cloudland, and awaken
in the valleys and plains the refreshing music “of the voice of many
waters.” The commerce of kingdoms distinguishes not the rivers of this
classic soil, but they are familiar with the charms of nature, add
effect to the sublime and wild in its scenery, and clothe with
heightened grace the soft and pastoral. Following the course of the
Angitas up to its source, we come to one of the most picturesque sites
in Macedonia, supposed to be the nymphæum or grotto of Onocaris. Blocks
of marble, rudely piled, as if tossed together by an earthquake,
obstruct its entrance, which can only be passed in a crawling posture;
but these difficulties being overcome, a cave like a temple appears,
from the farther end of which runs the limpid stream, flowing silently
over a sand bed, but rippling when it escapes from the grotto. In a
recess, there are some remains of ancient masonry below an aperture,
through which a mysterious light finds its way.
“Pure element of waters! wheresoe’er
Thou dost forsake thy subterranean haunts,
Green herbs, bright flowers, and berry-bearing plants,
Rise into life, and in thy train appear.”
Upon the large circular valley-plain of Bœotia, the heights of Parnassus
on the west, Helicon on the south, and Cithæron on the east, send down
streams, covering the undulating surface of this Classic Land with a
life-sustaining vegetation.
The same physical causes--high lands and the contiguous sea--operate, in
Judea as in Greece, to render it a well-watered country--a “land of
brooks,” according to its Scripture designation. There are no
considerable rivers, owing to the scanty extent of its hydrographical
basins; but the melting of the snow on the high mountains of Syria, and
the periodical sound of an “abundance of rain,” contribute to furnish an
ample irrigation. Its principal stream--the Jordan--though only one of
the fifth class, and not remarkable for picturesque beauty except in the
upper part of its course, has a sacred and historic interest, which will
always strongly attract attention to it, while it exhibits a singular
physical peculiarity. This is the depression of the valley, in which it
flows, below the level of the Mediterranean, through the whole distance
between the Sea of Tiberias and the Dead Sea; and the great inclination
of its descent from the one to the other, amounting at a mean to very
nearly eighteen feet per mile. Hence the force of its current,
notwithstanding a comparatively small volume of water, and the few
windings that mark its channel. Speaking of its appearance near the site
of Jericho, Dr. Robinson states: “There was a still though very rapid
current. We estimated the breadth of the stream to be from eighty to one
hundred feet. The guides supposed it now to be ten or twelve feet deep.
The current was so strong, that even Komeh, a stout swimmer of the Nile,
was carried down several yards in crossing.” Upon the authority of some
phrases in the English version of the Scriptures, which, perhaps, do not
express the sense of the original Hebrew, it has been generally supposed
that the Jordan periodically inundated the country in its neighborhood,
at, and for some time after, the Israelitish conquest of it. If this
were so, either the river must have worn for itself a deeper bed, or the
quantity of rain in Palestine must have largely diminished, for there is
now no overflow of its banks. At present, the “swellings of Jordan”--one
of the phrases alluded to--amount only to a slight annual rise. Copious
rains descend upon the mountains round its sources, and the melting of
the snows of Lebanon supply numerous temporary torrents; but these
contributions are received into the capacious basins of the lakes Merom
and Tiberias, and are there spread over an extensive surface, so as to
prevent the level of the river from rising into inundation.
[Illustration: =Natural Bridge of Ain el Leban.=]
In exactly the same manner, the great Canadian lakes, prevent any rise
to the St. Lawrence, by the immense floods that rush into them in the
spring spreading over their vast beds, and producing only an almost
inappreciable elevation of their level. Lebanon, the feeder of the
Jordan from its internal reservoirs, along with “Abana and Pharpar,
rivers of Damascus,” and the Orontes, gives birth to many rapid and
brawling streams, and a thousand cascades, when its snows melt, which
strikingly display the erosive power of running water. Deep passages
have been cut in the rocks, bestrided by natural arches, like the
rock-bridge of Virginia. Of this description is the natural bridge over
the Ain el Leban, rising nearly two hundred feet above the torrent which
has gradually dug the excavation, as annually the spring has renewed its
strength. The brook flows into the Beyrout river, and its channel would
be quite dry in summer, were it not for the impediments its mountain
course presents. It was the spring season, the time of the melting of
the snow, when the monarch of Israel, during his temporary exile from
the throne, retreated for a refuge toward the fastnesses of Lebanon. He
saw the torrents falling from height to height into the valleys. He
heard the voices of the waters as they leaped from rock to rock. His
imagination converted this external scenery into a picture of the force
of his adversities; and hence the allusion, in the plaintive elegiac,
commemorative of his condition, to the “noise of cataracts,” and to
“deep calling unto deep.”
In advancing toward their termination, and at their embouchure, the
great rivers present several striking peculiarities. It has already been
remarked, that a junction of two large streams often occurs without any
expansion of the surface of their waters being the consequence, but a
greater velocity of current and depth of channel. In some cases, instead
of a wider course being created by increased volume of water, there is
actually a narrower bed. Thus the Mississippi is a mile and a half wide,
and the Missouri half a mile wide, at their confluence, yet from that
point to the mouth of the Ohio, the medium width of the united rivers is
but three-quarters of a mile, and through the lower parts of its course
the main stream has, if any thing, a less surface-breadth, though vast
accessions are made to it by the Arkansas, Red River, and others of
great depth and body of water. Most of the tributaries of the
Mississippi also, are wider a thousand miles apart from it than at the
point of junction, and the same feature is characteristic of other great
streams, that as they increase their volume of water and approach their
termination, they flow in narrower though deeper channels. The Nile is
not so broad at Cairo as at Siout, nor so broad at Siout as at Thebes.
At Assouan, high up the stream, it is 3900 feet wide; at Oudi, 36 miles
above Cairo, it is 2900; and at Rosetta, near its mouth, but 1800. This
is one of the many examples of benign adjustment with which the realms
of nature teem; for hereby a rich legacy of fertile soil, usually found
at the mouths of rivers, is saved from submergence, and becomes the
inheritance of man. In their junction with the sea, rivers display the
diversity of sometimes pouring forth their waters through a single
mouth, and distributing them into a variety of channels; circumstances
mainly dependent upon the country through which they flow being easily
susceptible of excavation or not, and upon the power of the stream. The
Ganges pours its flood through the many channels here represented.
[Illustration]
The Volga is celebrated for its seventy mouths; and the Ganges, the
Nile, Mississippi, and Orinoco pour out their current through several
branches. The space inclosed within these various channels is called a
delta, from its triangular form, and general resemblance to the shape of
the Greek letter Δ. So powerfully do many of the great rivers rush into
the ocean, that their waters are distinct from those of the briny deep,
when out of sight of the land. A British fleet lying opposite to the
mouth of the Rhone occasionally took up fresh water at a considerable
distance from the shore; and Columbus found his vessel in the fresh
water of the Orinoco before he discovered the continent of South
America. The collision of a great river current and the opposing tide of
the sea is sometimes so violent as to occasion an elevated ridge of
waters, heaving and tossing in a tremendous manner, shattering to pieces
the ill-fated vessel that comes into contact with it. The passage of the
Garonne into the Bay of Biscay, and of the Ganges into the Bay of
Bengal, exhibit this phenomenon.
In treating of the magnitude of rivers, some writers refer to the
elevation of the range of mountains from which they descend; and it is
obviously true, that the greater the height of the mountains, the more
extensive are their snows and glaciers, and the larger the supply of
water furnished by springs and torrents. But the magnitude of a stream
is more especially regulated by the extent of country which forms the
declivities of its basin, though there is no invariable proportion here,
for a small basin in a humid region will yield a greater quantity of
water than one much more considerable in a different situation. High
mountains, a humid climate, and a wide superficial drainage, are the
three physical circumstances which lead to the accumulation of vast
bodies of water, the magnitude of which will be proportionate to the
degree in which these causes are in combined operation. Upon the surface
of the New World, we have these causes acting with greater intensity
than upon that of the Old, which explains the superior character of the
streams of the western continent. The following exhibits the extent of
the hydrographical regions of the principal rivers of the globe, with
the proportionate quantity of their waters:
─────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
= Rivers.= │ = Area of │ =Proportional │ =Proportional
│ Basin in │size of Basin.=│ Quantity of
│English Miles.=│ │ Water
│ │ │ discharged
│ │ │ Annually.=
─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=Europe=:
─────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
Thames │ 5,500 │ 1 │ 1
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Rhine │ 70,000 │ 12½ │ 13
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Loire │ 48,000 │ 8½ │ 10
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Po │ 27,000 │ 5 │ 6
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Elbe │ 50,000 │ 9 │ 8
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Vistula │ 76,000 │ 13½ │ 12
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Danube │ 310,000 │ 56 │ 65
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Dnieper │ 200,000 │ 36 │ 36
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Don │ 205,000 │ 37 │ 38
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Volga │ 520,000 │ 94 │ 80
─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=Asia=:
─────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
Euphrates │ 230,000 │ 42 │ 60
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Indus │ 400,000 │ 72½ │ 133
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Ganges │ 420,000 │ 76 │ 148
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Yang-tse-kiang │ 760,000 │ 138 │ 258
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Amour │ 900,000 │ 164 │ 166
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Lena │ 960,000 │ 174 │ 125
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Obi │ 1,300,000 │ 236 │ 179
─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=Africa=:
─────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
Nile │ 500,000 │ 90 │ 250
─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
=America=:
─────────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────┬───────────────
St. Lawrence │ 600,000 │ 109 │ 112
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Mississippi │ 1,368,000 │ 249 │ 338
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Rio de la Plata │ 1,240,000 │ 225 │ 490
─────────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────┼───────────────
Amazon, not │ 2,177,000 │ 395 │ 1280
including Araguay│ │ │
─────────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────┴───────────────
Malte Brun estimates that, representing all the waters discharged by the
European rivers by unity, the Black Sea receives 0·273; the Caspian,
0·165; the Mediterranean, Sea of Marmora, and Archipelago, 0·144; the
Atlantic Ocean, 0·131; the Baltic, 0·129; the North Sea, 0·110; the
Arctic Frozen Ocean, 0·048. The annexed table has a character of
universal interest, and naturally finds a place here.
─────────────────┬────────────┬─────────────────┬──────────────┬─────
=RIVERS.= │=LOCALITY.= │=RISE.= │=DISCHARGE.= │=L’GTH=
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Amazon. │Brazil. │Andes. │Atlantic. │ 3200
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Amour. │Mongolia. │Khan Ola │Sea of Okotsk.│ 2240
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Brahmapootra. │Thibet. │Himalaya │Bay of Bengal.│ 1500
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Bravo del Norte. │Mexico. │Sierra Verde. │Gulf of │ 1250
│ │ │Mexico. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Colorado. │North │Unknown. │Gulf of │ 700
│America. │ │California. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Columbia. │North │Rocky Mountains. │Pacific Ocean.│ 1090
│America. │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Congo. │Africa. │Lake Aquilunda. │Atlantic │ 1400
│ │ │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Danube. │Germany. │Black Forest. │Black Sea. │ 1630
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Dnieper. │Russia. │Heights of │Black Sea. │ 1050
│ │Smolensk. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Dniester. │Russia. │Carpathian │Black Sea. │ 480
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Don. │Russia. │Lake Ivanhof. │Sea of Azof. │ 860
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Douro. │Spain and │Mountains of │Atlantic │ 455
│Portugal. │Sovia. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Dwina. │Russia. │Heights of │White Sea. │ 490
│ │Vologda. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Ebro. │Spain. │Mountains of │Mediterranean.│ 410
│ │Asturias. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
El Asi, the │Syria. │East side of │Mediterranean │ 225
ancient Orontes. │ │Anti Libanus. │Sea. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Elbe. │Germany. │Elb-brunnen, in │German Ocean. │ 770
│ │Bohemia. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Euphrates. │Asiatic │Mountains of │Persian Gulf. │ 1360
│Turkey. │Armenia. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Forth. │Scotland. │East side of Ben │German Ocean. │ 110
│ │Lomond. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Gambia. │Senegambia. │Plateau of Fouta │Atlantic │ 700
│ │Toro. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Ganges. │Hindustan. │Bed of snow │Bay of Bengal.│ 1350
│ │above │ │
│ │Gangoutri, in │ │
│ │the Himalaya. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Garonne. │France. │Valley of Aran, │Bay of Biscay.│ 400
│ │in Spain. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Glomman. │Norway. │Mountains │Baltic Sea. │ 400
│ │south-east of │ │
│ │Trondheim. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Godavery. │Hindustan. │Western Ghauts. │Bay of Bengal.│ 850
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Guadalquivir. │Spain. │Mountains on the │Gulf of Cadiz.│ 280
│ │frontiers of │ │
│ │Murcia and │ │
│ │Granada. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Guadiana. │Spain. │Pools of Ruideva │Gulf of Cadiz.│ 460
│ │in La Mancha. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Hoang-Ho. │China. │Koulkoun │Yellow Sea. │ 3000
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Hudson. │United │Marsh near Lake │Bay of New │ 325
│States. │Champlain. │York. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Humber (Trent │England. │Moorlands of │German Ocean. │ 230
Branch.) │ │Staffordshire. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Indus. │Hindustan. │Little Thibet, │Arabian Sea. │ 1700
│ │north of the │ │
│ │Himalaya │ │
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Irawady. │Birman │Mountains east │Bay of Bengal.│ 1200
│Empire. │of Assam. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Jaxartes, or │Turkestan. │Country of the │Sea of Aral. │ 1200
Sihoun. │ │Highland │ │
│ │Kirghiz. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
James River. │United │Alleghany │Chesapeake │ 500
│States. │Mountains. │Bay. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Jordan. │Palestine. │Mount Hermon. │Dead Sea. │ 100
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Jumnah. │Hindustan. │Himalaya │Ganges. │ 1600
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Kizil-Irmak, the │Asia Minor. │Frontiers of │Black Sea. │ 570
ancient Halys. │ │Sisas. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Krishna, or │Hindustan. │Western Ghauts. │Bay of Bengal.│ 650
Kistna. │ │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Kodos, or │Asia Minor. │Murad-tagh. │Gulf of │ 190
Sarahat, the │ │ │Smyrna. │
ancient Hermus. │ │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Kouban. │Russian │Valley near │Black Sea. │ 480
│Asia. │Mount Elburz. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Lawrence, St. │Canada. │River St. Louis, │Atlantic │ 1960
│ │east of Lake │Ocean. │
│ │Superior. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Lena. │Siberia. │Heights of │Arctic Ocean. │ 2500
│ │Irkutsk. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Loire. │France. │Mount Gerbier, │Bay of Biscay.│ 620
│ │in the Cevennes.│ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Mackenzie. │North │River Athabasca, │Arctic Ocean. │ 1600
│America. │in the Rocky │ │
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Mæander. │Asia Minor. │West side of │Archipelago. │ 180
│ │Central Plateau. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Magdalena. │South │Andes. │Caribbean Sea.│ 840
│America. │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
May-kuang. │Birman │Thibet. │Chinese Sea. │ 1700
│Empire. │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Meinam. │Birman │Yunnaw. │Gulf of Siam. │ 850
│Empire. │ │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Meuse, or Maas. │Holland. │Limburg. │German Ocean. │ 520
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Mississippi. │North │Lake Itaska. │Gulf of │ 3200
│America. │ │Mexico. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Missouri. │North │Rocky Mountains. │Gulf of │ 4500
│America. │ │Mexico. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Murray. │Australasia.│Australian Alps. │Encounter Bay.│ 3000
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Niger. │Soudan. │Base of Mount │Gulf of │ 2300
│ │Loma. │Guinea. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Nile. │Egypt and │Blue Nile, in │Mediterranean │ 2750
│Nubia. │the Plateau of │Sea. │
│ │Abyssinia; │ │
│ │source of the │ │
│ │White Nile │ │
│ │unknown. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Obi. │Siberia. │Altaian │Arctic Ocean. │ 2800
│ │Mountains. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Oder. │Germany. │Mountains of │Baltic Sea. │ 460
│ │Moravia. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Orange, or │South │Mountains N. W. │Atlantic │ 1050
Gareep. │Africa. │of Port Natal. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Orinoco. │South │Mountains of │Atlantic │ 1150
│America. │Spanish Guiana. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Oxus, or Jihoun. │Turkestan. │Siri-kol, a lake │Sea of Aral. │ 1300
│ │in Khunduz. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Plata, Paraguay │South │South-west of │Atlantic │ 2130
branch. │America. │Brazil. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Po. │Italy. │Crottian Alps. │Adriatic Sea. │ 500
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Potomac. │United │Great Back-bone │Chesapeake │ 400
│States. │Mountain. │Bay. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Rhine. │Germany. │Rhetian Alps. │German Ocean. │ 830
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Rhone. │France. │Glacier of Mount │Mediterranean │ 540
│ │Furca. │Sea. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Seine. │France. │Plateau of │British │ 480
│ │Langres. │Channel. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Senegal. │Africa. │Heights near │Atlantic │ 950
│ │Teembo. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Severn. │England. │East side of │Bristol │ 210
│ │Plinlimmon. │Channel. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Shannon. │Ireland. │Loch Allen. │Atlantic. │ 220
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Susquehanna. │United │Lake to the │Chesapeake │ 500
│States. │South of │Bay. │
│ │Ontario. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Tagus. │Spain and │Mountains of New │Atlantic │ 520
│Portugal. │Castile. │Ocean. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Terek. │Russian │Foot of Mount │Caspian Sea. │ 300
│Asia. │Kasibec. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Thames. │England. │Cotswold Hills. │German Ocean. │ 240
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Tiber. │Italy. │East border of │Mediterranean │ 210
│ │Tuscany. │Sea. │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Tigris. │Turkey in │Mountains of │Persian Gulf. │ 920
│Asia. │Armenia. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Vistula. │Poland. │Austrian Silesia.│Baltic Sea. │ 650
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Volga. │Russia. │Lake in the │Caspian Sea. │ 1900
│ │forest of │ │
│ │Volhonsky. │ │
─────────────────┼────────────┼─────────────────┼──────────────┼─────
Yang-tse-Kiang. │China. │Thibet. │Chinese Sea. │ 2700
─────────────────┴────────────┴─────────────────┴──────────────┴─────
The first place among the rivers of the globe is due to the Amazon, if
not for the length of its course, yet for the volume of its waters. It
traverses the equatorial regions of South America, chiefly in a
direction from west to east, and has its embouchure nearly under the
equator. Its mouth was discovered in the year 1500 by Pinzon, one of the
captains who sailed with Columbus on his first voyage; and thirty nine
years afterward, the stream was traced downward from Peru by Francisco
Orellana, whose name was given to the river by his countrymen, to
preserve the memory of his bold enterprise. But the Spaniard’s report of
having met with armed women on its banks, deprived him of the honor, for
it originated the common title of the river of the Amazon. Its principal
affluents rival the largest rivers of the Eastern continent, as appears
from the following statement of their supposed lengths--
Miles.
Ucayali 1350
Yutai 750
Jaura 750
Madeira 1800
Topayos 1000
Xingu 1080
Napo 800
Rio Negro 1400
The width of the Amazon averages from one to two miles in the upper
parts of its course, but toward its termination its opposite banks are
seen with difficulty, and it widens to between twenty and thirty miles,
which is about its breadth upon joining the Atlantic. For two thousand
miles in a direct line from the ocean, the river is navigable by vessels
of any burden; for, at the confluence of the Tunguragua and Ucayali,
where the Amazon--properly so called--commences, no bottom was found in
March, 1836, with a line of 35 fathoms, or 210 feet. The tide rushes up
its channel with immense violence at the period of the full moon, in
two, three and sometimes four successive waves, each presenting a
perpendicular front of from ten to fifteen feet. When the tide ebbs in
the rainy season, the liberated waters of the river rush out of their
channel with tremendous force, and create a current in the ocean, which
is perceptible five hundred miles from its mouth. It is difficult to
sound the river, owing to the rapidity of its current, which runs
commonly at the rate of from three to four miles an hour--a momentum not
arising from the inclination of its bed, the fall of which is very
gradual, but from the immense quantity of water which descends in it.
The climate of its basin is, perhaps, the most humid to which any
country is subject. The quantity of rain which annually descends upon
this region, has not been ascertained with precision; but taking that at
the town of Maranhão as a sample, which is not less than two hundred
inches, the amount of rain poured upon the district of the Amazon every
year must be prodigious. The heat also is excessive through the whole
year, the thermometer in the shade frequently rising to 106° when the
sun is near the line, a degree of heat not much inferior to that
experienced in the Sahara; and as moisture and heat are the most
efficient agents in promoting vegetation, hence the luxuriance and
energy of vegetable life in the fertile soil on the banks of the river,
where the noblest woodland scenery in the world is to be found.
Notwithstanding the rapid current of the Amazon, its navigation is easy
to vessels both descending and ascending its course, the ascent being
facilitated by the far-penetrating tide of the Atlantic, assisted by the
wind, which is always blowing from the east, a direction contrary to
that of the stream. But the effect of the presence and absence of
civilization is nowhere more strikingly exhibited than on the waters of
the South American river, and those of its rivals, the Mississippi, and
the Yang-tse-Kiang of the Chinese empire. The vessels that annually
appear upon the surface of the Amazon are, probably, not more than those
which monthly navigate the Mississippi, or daily pass along the course
of the Yang-tse-Kiang.
At the head of rivers, classed according to their length, the
Mississippi is to be placed, taking the Missouri branch, which ought to
be the name of the united stream, not only on account of its longer
course, but because it brings down a greater body of water, and imparts
its turbid character to its rival. Geographers have, however, given the
former name to the joint rivers, the “Father of Waters,” according to
its Indian signification, which may be aptly applied to the great
central valley of North America, furnishing the following streams, which
unite in the channel of the Lower Mississippi, and pour down through it
into the Gulf of Mexico--
Miles.
St. Peter’s 500
Penaca, or Turkey 200
Iowa 350
Chacaguar 200
Des-moines 600
St. Croix 300
Chippewa 300
Wisconsin 600
Rock River 450
Illinois 500
Salt 250
Missouri 3300
Yellow-stone 1000
Little Missouri 300
Shienne 300
Quicourt 500
Platte 1200
Kansas 800
Osage 500
Gasconade 300
Jacques 600
Sioux 500
Grand 500
Chariton 200
Kaskaskia 300
Maramec 200
St. Francis 450
White 600
Arkansas 2500
Canadian 1000
Neosho 800
Red River 2000
Washita 800
Ohio 1250
Alleghany 350
Monongahela 300
Kanawha 450
Kentucky 360
Green 300
Cumberland 600
Tennessee 1500
Muskingum 200
Scioto 200
Wabash 550
White River 200
Hatchy 200
Yazoo 300
Big Black 200
The most beautiful tributary of the Mississippi is the Ohio, the _Belle
rivière_ of the early French settlers, the only large river it receives
from the east. No stream rolls for the same distance so uniformly and
peacefully; its banks are adorned with the largest sycamores, its waters
clear, and studded with islands covered with the finest trees. All the
other great tributaries flow from the west: its confluence with the
Missouri, which enters it like a conqueror, and carries its white waves
to the opposite shore, presenting one of the most extraordinary views in
the world. The country around these vast watercourses is of the most
varied description, alternately exhibiting wild rice-lakes and swamps,
lime-stone bluffs and craggy hills, deep pine forests and beautiful
prairies, the prairies showing an almost perfect level, in summer
covered with a luxuriant growth of grass and flowers, without a tree or
a bush, the only tenants of which are elks and buffaloes, bears and
deer, and the savages that pursue them. The bluffs of the Mississippi
are for the most part perpendicular masses of limestone, often shooting
up into towers and pinnacles, presenting at a distance the aspect of the
battlements and turrets of an ancient city. In the season of inundation,
below the mouth of the Ohio, the river presents a very striking
spectacle. It sweeps along in curves or sections of circles, from six to
twelve miles in extent, measured from point to point, and not far from
the medial width of a mile. On a calm spring morning, and under a bright
sun, this sheet of water shines like a mass of burnished silver, its
edges being distinctly marked by a magnificent outline of cotton-wood
trees, at this time of the year of the brightest verdure, among which
those brilliant birds of the country, the black and red bird, and the
blue jay, flit to and fro, or wheel their flight over them, forming a
scene which has all of grandeur or beauty that nature can furnish, to
soothe or enrapture the beholder. The curvilinear course of the
Mississippi is one of its most striking peculiarities. It meanders in
uniform bends, which, in many instances, are described with a precision
equal to that obtained by the point of a compass. The river sweeps round
the half of a circle, and is then precipitated in a diagonal direction
across its own channel, to another curve of the same regularity upon the
opposite shore. Instead of calculating distances by miles or leagues,
the boatmen and Indians estimate their progress by the number of bends
which they have passed. This conformation, which distinguishes most of
the streams of the Mississippi valley, must have transpired under the
operation of some law; but hitherto no solution of the problem has been
given which is quite satisfactory. Geological appearances indicate that
this stream, like the Orinoco, had in former ages a much broader volume,
though a shorter course; that, in fact, it once found its estuary not
far below the present mouth of the Ohio; the alluvial country now
stretching from thence to the south, near a thousand miles, being then
an arm of the sea. “No thinking mind,” says Flint, “can contemplate this
mighty and resistless wave, sweeping its proud course from point to
point, curving round its bends through the dark forests, without a
feeling of sublimity. The hundred shores, laved by its waters; the long
course of its tributaries, some of which are already the abodes of
cultivation, and others pursuing an immense course without a solitary
dwelling of civilized man on their banks; the numerous tribes of savages
that now roam on its borders; the affecting and imperishable traces of
generations that are gone, leaving no other memorial of their existence,
or materials for their history than their tombs, that rise at frequent
intervals along its banks; the dim, but glorious anticipations of the
future--these are subjects of contemplation that cannot but associate
themselves with a view of this river.”
Though far inferior to these streams of the western world in point of
length and volume, the Nile of the ancient continent may be placed at
the head of remarkable rivers. One of its chief peculiarities is the
solitary grandeur of its flow; for not a single affluent enters it from
the junction of the Tacazze to the sea, a distance of 1500 miles--a
circumstance without a parallel in the physical condition of rivers.
Another of its striking features is its long course through a desert,
dry, barren, and hideous, depositing by its annual inundation the
richest soil on those portions of it which lie contiguous to its banks;
and hence has originated the apt comparison of its career to the path of
a good man amidst an evil generation. Egypt would be completely sterile
were it not for the periodical overflow of its only stream, which both
covers a large part of its surface with a layer of alluvion, and imparts
to it the requisite moisture.
“Rich king of floods! o’erflows the swelling Nile--
----glad to quit
The joyless desert, down the Nubian rocks
From thund’ring steep to steep he pours his urn,
And Egypt joys beneath the spreading wave.”
It requires the river to attain a medium rise in order to benefit the
country: too little, involving scarcity and famine; too much,
compromising the safety of the people and their dwellings. Wilkinson
calls a rise of 19 cubits, tolerable; 20, good; 21, sufficient; while a
rise of 22 cubits is abundant enough to fill every canal, and a rise of
24 cubits would overwhelm and ruin the villages. A cubit is rather more
than 21 inches; so that, in order fully to meet the wants of the
country, a perpendicular rise of 38 feet is necessary. The Nile is also
distinguished among rivers for the pleasant taste and salubrity of its
waters when not in flood; properties highly extolled by the ancients,
and acknowledged to belong to it by modern travelers. It is a common
saying with the Egyptians, that if Mahomet had tasted of its stream, he
would have sought a terrestrial immortality in order to enjoy it
forever. The physical circumstances of the river easily account for the
possession of this attribute. The air above is pure and serene. But
little rain falls upon the country through which the greater part of its
course is prosecuted, and no snow or hail. Hence there is little
drainage into it from the surrounding land, and its waters are kept free
from any noxious taint derived from earths and minerals, except from
those in its immediate channel. The same property of being remarkably
pure and salutary is ascribed by Herodotus to one of the Susianic
rivers, of which alone, according to tradition, none but the kings of
Persia drank.
“There Susa, by Choaspes’ amber stream,
The drink of none but kings.”
The Susianic streams, along with the Nile, may not improperly be styled
the oldest rivers of the globe, because of their place in its most
ancient traditions and histories; and however subordinate to the
gigantic currents of the western hemisphere, those of the eastern, in
general, present higher points of interest, in their long-known
identification with the destinies of mankind. If not the actual
birthplace of man, the great plains on the banks of the Tigris and the
Euphrates were the abode of the founders of the diluvian race. There,
the two greatest cities of the ancient world--Nineveh and Babylon--rose
into magnificence. There, a supernatural finger traced the doom of the
latter upon the palace wall of its trembling monarch, while an exiled
Jew, in the majesty of inspiration, gave him the interpretation of the
mystic writing. There, too, the splendid empire of the Medes and
Persians fell a prey to the Macedonian on the field of Arbela, while, in
later ages, the same neighborhood witnessed the catastrophe of Cunaxa,
and the bold bearing of the indomitable ten thousand--the defeat and
death of Crassus--the retreat of Mark Antony--the fall of the apostate
Julian--and the short-lived glory of Bagdad. How different the
associations connected with the Arkansas and the Osage to those of the
Euphrates and Tigris!
* * * * *
=WERE I BUT WITH THEE.=
=BY CAROLINE F. ORNE.=
Hours of lonely musing
Sometimes thou must have,
When, of toil a-weary,
Rest thy soul doth crave.
Then, if I were near thee,
Care would be forgot,
And obtrusive sorrows
Be as they were not.
Thoughts and themes of beauty,
Rising wild and free,
Would our converse gladden
Were I but with thee!
Thou wouldst bear my spirit
To thy shadow-land,
Where bright shapes of beauty
Spring, a glorious band.
Their harmonious motions,
As the wild waves free,
Would enchain our spirits
Were I but with thee!
I would bear thee onward
To my realms of life,
Where with joy transcendent
All the scenes are rife,
In that glorious dream-land,
On that magic sea,
It were nearer heaven
Were I but with thee!
* * * * *
=SONNET.--IRON.=
=BY WM. ALEXANDER.=
Thy worth, O Iron! can be never told!
Thou art the richest treasure of the mine!
By thee great nations polished are and shine,
And using thee contemn, may glittering gold--
Hail! ever useful one! Art were now dead
If wanting thee. Thou in our life-blood flowest;
Where run streams, fountains, there thou likewise goest;
War claims thee, for thy presence makes him red;
The mariner his needle forms of thee,
To guide him pilot-like across the main;
From thee old oaks solidity, too, gain;
In cinders, clay thou art found continually--
Earth’s mineral strata yield to thee the palm;
Thou canst make war--and mak’st the nations calm.
* * * * *
=NINEVEH, AND ASSYRIAN ART.=
=[WITH ILLUSTRATIONS.]=
Among the recent developments of the remains of ancient art, by far the
most important and interesting are those of Mr. Layard at the site of
Nineveh, a full account of which is given in the volumes recently
published by George P. Putnam, of New York, entitled “Nineveh and its
Remains; with an account of a visit to the Chaldean Christians of
Kurdiston, and the Yezidis, or Devil-Worshipers; and an inquiry into the
Manners and Arts of the Ancient Assyrians.”
Mr. Layard’s work contains an account of the labors carried on by him at
Nimroud, from November 1845 until April 1847; and also of the less
extensive excavations which he caused to be made at Kalah Sherghat and
Kouyunjik. The narrative has all the liveliness and glow of a romance;
the incidents are highly characteristic of oriental life; and many of
them are of tragic and thrilling interest. His account of the
difficulties which he had to overcome with the Arabs, Turks and
Chaldeans, in securing their aid toward the accomplishment of his grand
design, is very curious, and evinces a wonderful amount of coolness,
ability and tact. Not less remarkable are the energy and perseverence
which he exerted in conducting his noble enterprise to a successful
termination.
Toward the close of his book, Mr. Layard gives a summary of the result
of his investigations and of their bearing on the history of the
Assyrians. They add an immense amount of information, to that which was
already in possession of the learned world, respecting the progress of
art and civilization among this ancient people and dissipate many
errors. The discovery of the _arch_, of glass, and of the pulley, among
the mines, evince the high antiquity of these inventions, which have
been supposed to be of comparatively modern origin; and the very
remarkable fact that the most ancient among the Assyrian works of art
are by far the best executed, lead to the conviction that there is an
unwritten ancient history of far greater extent and interest than that
which has been preserved. All that portion of history which relates to
the origin and rise of Assyrian art of course remains unknown. This is
probably the case, too, with reference to Babylon and the other ancient
empires of Asia.
We proceed to give some extracts from Mr. Layard’s work, which, by the
courtesy of the publisher, we are permitted to illustrate with
engravings. We commence where he records some of his earliest operations
at the great mound of Nimroud:
“No sculptures had hitherto been discovered in a perfect state of
preservation, and only one or two could bear removal. I determined,
therefore, to abandon this corner, and to resume excavations near the
chamber first opened, where the slabs had in no way been injured. The
workmen were directed to dig behind the small lions, which appeared to
form an entrance, and to be connected with other walls. After removing
much earth, a few unsculptured slabs were discovered, fallen from their
places, and broken in many pieces. The sides of the room of which they
had originally formed a part could not be traced.
“As these ruins occurred on the edge of the mound, it was probable that
they had been more exposed than the rest, and consequently had sustained
more injury than other parts of the building. As there was a ravine
running far into the mound, apparently formed by the winter rains, I
determined to open a trench in the centre of it. In two days the workmen
reached the top of a slab, which appeared to be both well preserved, and
to be still standing in its original position. On the south side I
discovered, to my great satisfaction, two human figures, considerably
above the natural size, sculptured in low relief, and still exhibiting
all the freshness of a recent work. This was No. 30 of chamber B in the
third plan. In a few hours the earth and rubbish had been completely
removed from the face of the slab, no part of which had been injured.
The ornaments delicately graven on the robes, the tassels and fringes,
the bracelets and armlets, the elaborate curls of the hair and beard,
were all entire. The figures were back to back, and furnished with
wings. They appeared to represent divinities, presiding over the
seasons, or over particular religious ceremonies. The one, whose face
was turned to the East, carried a fallow deer on his right arm, and in
his left hand a branch bearing five flowers. Around his temples was a
fillet, adorned in front with a rosette. The other held a square vessel,
or basket, in the left hand, and an object resembling a fir cone in the
right. On his head he wore a rounded cap, at the base of which was a
horn. The garments of both, consisting of a stole falling from the
shoulders to the ankles, and a short tunic underneath, descending to the
knee, were richly and tastefully decorated with embroideries and
fringes, whilst the hair and beard were arranged with study and art.
Although the relief was lower, yet the outline was perhaps more careful,
and true, than that of the Assyrian sculptures of Khorsabad. The limbs
were delineated with peculiar accuracy, and the muscles and bones
faithfully, though somewhat too strongly, marked. An inscription ran
across the sculpture.
“To the west of this slab, and fitting to it, was a corner-stone
ornamented with flowers and scrollwork, tastefully arranged, and
resembling in detail those graven on the injured tablet, near entrance
_d_ of the S. W. building. I recognized at once from whence many of the
sculptures, employed in the construction of that edifice, had been
brought; and it was evident that I had at length discovered the earliest
palace of Nimroud.
“The corner-stone led me to a figure of singular form. A human body,
clothed in robes similar to those of the winged men on the previous
slab, was surmounted by the head of an eagle or of a vulture. The curved
beak, of considerable length, was half open, and displayed a narrow,
pointed tongue, which was still covered with red paint. On the shoulders
fell the usual curled and bushy hair of the Assyrian mages, and a comb
of feathers rose on the top of the head. Two wings sprang from the back,
and in either hand was the square vessel and fir cone.
“On all these figures paint could be faintly distinguished, particularly
on the hair, beard, eyes, and sandals. The slabs on which they were
sculptured had sustained no injury, and could be without difficulty
packed and moved to any distance. There could no longer be any doubt
that they formed part of a chamber, and that, to explore it completely,
I had only to continue along the wall, now partly uncovered.
[Illustration: =Eagle-Headed Figure. (N. W. Palace. Nimroud.)=]
“On the morning following these discoveries, I rode to the encampment of
Sheikh Abd-ur-rahman, and was returning to the mound, when I saw two
Arabs of his tribe urging their mares to the top of their speed. On
approaching me they stopped. ‘Hasten, O Bey,’ exclaimed one of
them--‘hasten to the diggers, for they have found Nimrod himself.
Wallah, it is wonderful, but it is true! we have seen him with our eyes.
There is no God but God;’ and both joining in this pious exclamation,
they galloped off, without further words, in the direction of their
tents.
“On reaching the ruins I descended into the new trench, and found the
workmen, who had already seen me, as I approached, standing near a heap
of baskets and cloaks. Whilst Awad advanced, and asked for a present to
celebrate the occasion, the Arabs withdrew the screen they had hastily
constructed, and disclosed an enormous human head sculptured in full out
of the alabaster of the country. They had uncovered the upper part of
the figure, the remainder of which was still buried in the earth. I saw
at once that the head must belong to a winged lion or bull, similar to
those of Khorsabad and Persepolis. It was in admirable preservation. The
expression was calm, yet majestic, and the outline of the features
showed a freedom and knowledge of art, scarcely to be looked for in the
works of so remote a period. The cap had three horns, and, unlike that
of the human-headed bulls hitherto found in Assyria, was rounded and
without ornament at the top.
“I was not surprised that the Arabs had been amazed and terrified at
this apparition. It required no stretch of imagination to conjure up the
most strange fancies. This gigantic head, blanched with age, thus rising
from the bowels of the earth, might well have belonged to one of those
fearful beings which are pictured in the traditions of the country, as
appearing to mortals, slowly ascending from the regions below. One of
the workmen, on catching the first glimpse of the monster, had thrown
down his basket and ran off toward Mosul as fast as his legs could carry
him. I learnt this with regret, as I anticipated the consequences.
“Whilst I was superintending the removal of the earth, which still clung
to the sculpture, and giving directions for the continuation of the
work, a noise of horsemen was heard, and presently Abd-ur-rahman,
followed by half his tribe, appeared on the edge of the trench. As soon
as the two Arabs had reached the tents, and published the wonders they
had seen, every one mounted his mare and rode to the mound, to satisfy
himself of the truth of these inconceivable reports. When they beheld
the head they all cried out together, ‘There is no God but God, and
Mohammed is his Prophet!’ It was some time before the sheikh could be
prevailed upon to descend into the pit, and convince himself that the
image he saw was of stone. ‘This is not the work of men’s hands,’
exclaimed he, ‘but of those infidel giants of whom the Prophet, peace be
with him! has said, that they were higher than the tallest date tree;
this is one of the idols which Noah, peace be with him! cursed before
the flood.’ In this opinion, the result of a careful examination, all
the bystanders concurred.
“I now ordered a trench to be dug due south from the head, in the
expectation of finding a corresponding figure, and before night-fall
reached the object of my search about twelve feet distant. Engaging two
or three men to sleep near the sculptures, I returned to the village,
and celebrated the day’s discovery by a slaughter of sheep, of which all
the Arabs near partook. As some wandering musicians chanced to be at
Selamiyah, I sent for them, and dances were kept up during the greater
part of the night. On the following morning Arabs from the other side of
the Tigris, and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages congregated
on the mound. Even the women could not repress their curiosity, and came
in crowds, with their children, from afar. My cawass was stationed
during the day in the trench, into which I would not allow the multitude
to descend.
“As I had expected, the report of the discovery of the gigantic head,
carried by the terrified Arab to Mosul, had thrown the town into
commotion. He had scarcely checked his speed before reaching the bridge.
Entering breathless into the bazars, he announced to every one he met
that Nimrod had appeared. The news soon got to the ears of the cadi,
who, anxious for a fresh opportunity to annoy me, called the mufti and
the elema together, to consult upon this unexpected occurrence. Their
deliberations ended in a procession to the governor, and a formal
protest, on the part of the Musulmans of the town, against proceedings
so directly contrary to the laws of the Koran. The cadi had no distinct
idea whether the bones of the mighty hunter had been uncovered, or only
his image; nor did Ismail Pasha very clearly remember whether Nimrod was
a true-believing prophet or an infidel. I consequently received a
somewhat unintelligible message from his excellency, to the effect that
the remains should be treated with respect, and be by no means further
disturbed, and that he wished the excavations to be stopped at once, and
desired to confer with me on the subject.
“I called upon him accordingly, and had some difficulty in making him
understand the nature of my discovery. As he requested me to discontinue
my operations until the sensation in the town had somewhat subsided, I
returned to Nimroud and dismissed the workmen, retaining only two men to
dig leisurely along the walls without giving cause for further
interference. I ascertained by the end of March the existence of a
second pair of winged human-headed lions,[4] differing from those
previously discovered in form, the human shape being continued to the
waist and furnished with arms. In one hand each figure carried a goat or
stag, and in the other, which hung down by the side, a branch with three
flowers. They formed a northern entrance into the chamber of which the
lions previously described were the southern portal. I completely
uncovered the latter, and found them to be entire. They were about
twelve feet in height, and the same number in length. The body and limbs
were admirably portrayed; the muscles and bones, although strongly
developed to display the strength of the animal, showed at the same time
a correct knowledge of its anatomy and form. Expanded wings sprung from
the shoulder and spread over the back; a knotted girdle, ending in
tassels, encircled the loins. These sculptures, forming an entrance,
were partly in full and partly in relief. The head and fore-part, facing
the chamber, were in full; but only one side of the rest of the slab was
sculptured, the back being placed against the wall of sun-dried bricks.
That the spectator might have both a perfect front and side view of the
figures, they were furnished with five legs; two were carved on the end
of the slab to face the chamber, and three on the side. The relief of
the body and three limbs was high and bold, and the slab was covered, in
all parts not occupied by the image, with inscriptions in the cuneiform
character. These magnificent specimens of Assyrian art were in perfect
preservation; the most minute lines in the details of the wings and in
the ornaments had been retained with their original freshness. Not a
character was wanting in the inscriptions.
“I used to contemplate for hours these mysterious emblems, and muse over
their intent and history. What more noble forms could have ushered the
people into the temple of their gods! What more sublime images could
have been borrowed from nature, by men who sought, unaided by the light
of revealed religion, to embody their conception of the wisdom, power,
and ubiquity of a Supreme Being? They could find no better type of
intellect and knowledge than the head of the man; of strength, than the
body of the lion; of rapidity of motion, than the wings of the bird.
These winged human-headed lions were not idle creations, the offspring
of mere fancy; their meaning was written upon them. They had awed and
instructed races which flourished 3000 years ago. Through the portals
which they guarded, kings, priests, and warriors had borne sacrifices to
their altars, long before the wisdom of the East had penetrated to
Greece, and had furnished its mythology with symbols long recognized by
the Assyrian votaries. They may have been buried, and their existence
may have been unknown, before the foundation of the eternal city. For
twenty-five centuries they had been hidden from the eye of man, and they
now stood forth once more in their ancient majesty. But how changed was
the scene around them! The luxury and civilization of a mighty nation
had given place to the wretchedness and ignorance of a few
half-barbarous tribes. The wealth of temples, and the riches of great
cities, had been succeeded by ruins and shapeless heaps of earth. Above
the spacious hall in which they stood, the plough had passed and the
corn now waved. Egypt has monuments no less ancient and no less
wonderful; but they have stood forth for ages to testify her early power
and renown; whilst those before me had but now appeared to bear witness
in the words of the prophet, that once ‘the Assyrian was a cedar in
Lebanon, with fair branches and with a shadowing shroud of a high
stature; and his top was among the thick boughs . . . . his height was
exalted above all the trees of the field, and his boughs were
multiplied, and his branches became long, because of the multitude of
waters when he shot forth. All the fowls of heaven made their nests in
his boughs, and under his branches did all the beasts of the field bring
forth their young, and under his shadow dwelt all great nations;’ for
now is ‘Nineveh a desolation and dry like a wilderness, and flocks lie
down in the midst of her; all the beasts of the nations, both the
cormorant and bittern, lodge in the upper lintels of it; their voice
sings in the windows; and desolation is in the thresholds.’[5]
[Illustration: =Winged Human-Headed Lion. (N. W. Palace, Nimroud.)=]
“Behind the lions was another chamber.[6] I uncovered about fifty feet
of its northern wall. On each slab was carved the winged figure with the
horned cap, fir cone, and square vessel or basket. They were in pairs
facing one another, and divided by an emblematic tree, similar to that
on the corner-stone in chamber B. All these bas-reliefs were inferior in
execution, and finish, to those previously discovered.”
The following extract shows the great variety of objects which present
themselves among the buried ruins of Nimroud, and the large scale on
which the Assyrian works of art were projected and executed.
“The change to summer had been as rapid as that which ushered in the
spring. The verdure of the plain had perished almost in a day. Hot
winds, coming from the desert, had burnt up and carried away the shrubs;
flights of locusts, darkening the air, had destroyed a few patches of
cultivation, and had completed the havoc commenced by the heat of the
sun. The Abou-Salman Arabs, having struck their black tents, were now
living in ozailis, or sheds, constructed of reeds and grass along the
banks of the river. The Shemutti and Jehesh had returned to their
villages, and the plain presented the same naked and desolate aspect
that it wore in the month of November. The heat, however, was now almost
intolerable. Violent whirlwinds occasionally swept over the face of the
country. They could be seen as they advanced from the desert, carrying
along with them clouds of sand and dust. Almost utter darkness prevailed
during their passage, which lasted generally about an hour, and nothing
could resist their fury. On returning home one afternoon after a tempest
of this kind, I found no traces of my dwellings; they had been
completely carried away. Ponderous wooden frameworks had been borne over
the bank, and hurled some hundred yards distant; the tents had
disappeared, and my furniture was scattered over the plain. When on the
mound, my only secure place of refuge was beneath the fallen lion, where
I could defy the fury of the whirlwind; the Arabs ceased from their work
and crouched in the trenches, almost suffocated and blinded by the dense
cloud of fine dust and sand which nothing could exclude.[7]
“Although the number of my workmen was small, the excavations were
carried on as actively as possible. The two human-headed lions, forming
the entrance _d_,[8] led into another chamber, or to sculptured walls,
which, as it will hereafter be explained, may have formed an outward
facing to the building. The slabs to the right and left, on issuing from
this portal, had fallen from their original position, and all of them,
except one, were broken. I had some difficulty in raising the pieces
from the ground. As the face of the slabs was downward, the sculpture
had been well preserved.
“On the slabs Nos. 2 and 3 was represented the king holding a bow in one
hand and two arrows in the other. He was followed by his attendant
eunuch, who carried a mace, a second bow and a quiver for his use.
Facing him was his vizir, his hands crossed before him, also followed by
an eunuch. These figures were about eight feet high; the relief very
low, and the ornaments rich and elaborately carved. The bracelets,
armlets, and weapons, were all adorned with the heads of bulls and rams;
color still remained on the hair, beard, and sandals.
“No. 1, forming a corner wall, was a slab of enormous dimensions; it had
been broken in two: the upper part was on the floor, the lower was still
standing in its place. It was only after many ineffectual attempts that
I succeeded in raising the fallen part sufficiently to ascertain the
nature of the sculpture. It was a winged figure, with a three-horned
cap, carrying the fir cone and square utensil; in other respects,
similar to those already described, except that it had two wings rising
from both sides of the back and inclosing the person. Its dimensions
were gigantic, the height being about sixteen feet and a half, but the
relief was low.
“The first slab on the other side of the entrance contained a vizir and
his attendant, similar to No. 3. The succeeding slabs were occupied by
figures, differing altogether in costume from those previously
discovered, and apparently representing people of another race; some
carrying presents or offerings, consisting of armlets, bracelets, and
ear-rings, on trays; others elevating their clinched hands, either in
token of submission, or in the attitude still peculiar to Easterns when
they dance. One figure was accompanied by two monkeys, held by ropes;
the one raising itself on its hind legs in front, the other sitting on
the shoulders of the man, and supporting itself by placing its fore-paws
on his head.[9] The dresses of all these figures are singular. They have
high boots turned up at the toes, somewhat resembling those still in use
in Turkey and Persia. Their caps, although conical, appear to have been
made up of bands, or folds of felt or linen. Their tunics vary in shape,
and in the fringes, from those of the high-capped warriors and
attendants represented in other bas-reliefs. The figure with the monkeys
wears a tunic descending to the calf of the leg. His hair is simply
fastened by a fillet. There were traces of black color all over the
face, and it is not improbable that it was painted to represent a negro:
it is, however, possible that the paint of the hair has been washed down
by water over other parts of the sculpture. These peculiarities of dress
suggest that the persons represented were captives from some distant
country, bringing tribute to the conquerors.
“In chamber B the wall was continued to the south, or to the left facing
the great lion,[10] by an eagle-headed figure resembling that already
described; adjoining it was a corner-stone, occupied by the sacred tree;
beyond, the wall ceased altogether. On digging downward, it was found
that the slabs had fallen in; and although they were broken, the
sculptures, representing battles, sieges, and other historical subjects,
were, as far as it could be ascertained by the examination of one or
two, in admirable preservation. The sun-dried brick wall, against which
they were placed, was still distinctly visible to the height of twelve
or fourteen feet; and I could trace, by the accumulation of ashes, the
places where beams had been inserted to support the roof, or for other
purposes. This wall served as my guide in digging onward, as, to the
distance of 100 feet, the slabs had all fallen in. I was unwilling to
raise them at present, as I had neither the means of packing nor moving
them.
“The first sculpture, still standing in its original position, which was
uncovered after following this wall, was a winged human-headed bull of
yellow limestone. On the previous day the detached head, now in the
British Museum, had been found. The bull, to which it belonged, had
fallen against the opposite sculpture, and had been broken by the fall
into several pieces. I lifted the body with difficulty; and, to my
surprise, discovered under it sixteen copper lions, admirably designed,
and forming a regular series, diminishing in size from the largest,
which was above one foot in length, to the smallest, which scarcely
exceeded an inch. To their backs was affixed a ring, giving them the
appearance of weights. Here I also discovered a broken earthen vase, on
which were represented two Priapean human figures, with the wings and
claws of a bird, the breast of a woman, and the tail of a scorpion, or
some similar reptile. I carefully collected and packed the fragments.
[Illustration: =Winged Human-Headed Bull. (N. W. Palace, Nimroud.)=]
“Beyond the winged bull the slabs were still entire, and occupied their
original positions. On the first was sculptured a winged human figure,
carrying a branch with five flowers in the raised right hand, and the
usual square vessel in the left. Around his temples was a fillet adorned
with three rosettes. On each of the four adjoining slabs were two
bas-reliefs, separated by a band of inscriptions. The upper, on the
first slab, represented a castle built by the side of a river, or on an
island. One tower is defended by an armed man, two others are occupied
by females. Three warriors, probably escaping from the enemy, are
swimming across the stream; two of them on inflated skins, in the mode
practiced to this day by the Arabs inhabiting the banks of the rivers of
Assyria and Mesopotamia; except that, in the bas-relief, the swimmers
are pictured as retaining the aperture, through which the air is forced,
in their mouths. The third, pierced by arrows discharged from the bows
of two high-capped warriors kneeling on the bank, is struggling, without
the support of a skin, against the current. Three rudely designed trees
complete the background.
“In the upper compartment of the next slab was the siege of the city,
with the battering-ram and moveable tower, now in the British Museum.
The lower part of the two slabs was occupied by one subject, a king
receiving prisoners brought before him by his vizir. The sculpture,
representing the king followed by his attendants and chariot, is already
in the national collection. The prisoners were on the adjoining slab.
Above their heads are vases and various objects, amongst which appear to
be shawls and elephants’ tusks, probably representing the spoil carried
away from the conquered nation.
“Upon the third slab were, in the upper compartment, the king hunting,
and in the lower, the king standing over the lion, both deposited in the
British Museum; and on the fourth the bull hunt, now also in England,
and the king standing over the prostrate bull.
“The most remarkable of the sculptures hitherto discovered was the lion
hunt; which, from the knowledge of art displayed in the treatment and
composition, the correct and effective delineation of the men and
animals, the spirit of the grouping, and its extraordinary preservation,
is probably the finest specimen of Assyrian art in existence.
“On the flooring, below the sculptures, were discovered considerable
remains of painted plaster still adhering to the sun-dried bricks, which
had fallen in masses from the upper part of the wall. The colors,
particularly the blues and reds, were as brilliant and vivid when the
earth was removed from them, as they could have been when first used. On
exposure to the air they faded rapidly. The designs were elegant and
elaborate. It was found almost impossible to preserve any portion of
these ornaments, the earth crumbling to pieces when an attempt was made
to raise it.”
Our next extract describes, in Mr. Layard’s graphic style, the discovery
of the beautiful obelisk, now in the British Museum.
[Illustration: =The Obelisk.=]
“It was in the centre of the mound, however, that one of the most
remarkable discoveries awaited me. I have already mentioned the pair of
gigantic winged bulls, first found there. They appeared to form an
entrance and to be only part of a large building. The inscriptions upon
them contained a name, differing from that of the king, who had built
the palace in the north-west corner. On digging further I found a brick,
on which was a genealogy, the new name occurring first, and as that of
the son of the founder of the earlier edifice. This was, to a certain
extent, a clue to the comparative date of the newly discovered building.
“I now sought for the wall, which must have been connected with the
bulls. I dug round these sculptures, and found no other traces of
building, except a few squared stones, fallen from their original
places. As the backs of the bulls were completely covered with
inscriptions, in large and well-formed cuneiform characters, I was led
to believe that they might originally have stood alone. Still there must
have been other slabs near them. I directed a deep trench to be carried,
at right angles, behind the northern bull. After digging about ten feet,
the workmen found a slab lying flat on the brick pavement, and having a
gigantic winged figure sculptured in relief upon it. It resembled some
already described; and carried the fir-cone, and the square basket or
utensil, but there was no inscription across it. Beyond was a similar
figure, still more gigantic in its proportions, being about fourteen
feet in height. The relief was low, and the execution inferior to that
of the sculptures discovered in the other palaces. The beard and part of
the legs of a winged bull, in yellow limestone, were next found. These
remains, imperfect as they were, promised better things. The trench was
carried on in the same direction for several days; but nothing more
appeared. It had reached about fifty feet in length, and still without
any new discovery. I had business in Mosul, and was giving directions to
the workmen to guide them during my absence. Standing on the edge of the
hitherto unprofitable trench, I doubted whether I should carry it any
farther; but made up my mind at last, not to abandon it until my return,
which would be on the following day. I mounted my horse, but had
scarcely left the mound when a corner of black marble was uncovered,
lying on the very edge of the trench. This attracted the notice of the
superintendent of the party digging, who ordered the place to be further
examined. The corner was part of an obelisk, about seven feet high,
lying on its side, ten feet below the surface.
“An Arab was sent after me without delay, to announce the discovery, and
on my return I found the obelisk completely exposed to view. I descended
eagerly into the trench, and was immediately struck by the singular
appearance, and evident antiquity, of the remarkable monument before me.
We raised it from its recumbent position, and, with the aid of ropes,
speedily dragged it out of the ruins. Although its shape was that of an
obelisk, yet it was flat at the top and cut into three gradines. It was
sculptured on the four sides; there were in all twenty small
bas-reliefs, and above, below, and between them was carved an
inscription 210 lines in length. The whole was in the best preservation;
scarcely a character of the inscription was wanting; and the figures
were as sharp and well defined as if they had been carved but a few days
before. The king is twice represented, followed by his attendants; a
prisoner is at his feet, and his vizir and eunuchs are introducing men
leading various animals, and carrying vases and other objects of tribute
on their shoulders, or in their hands. The animals are the elephant, the
rhinoceros, the Bactrian, or two-humped camel, the wild bull, the lion,
a stag, and various kinds of monkeys. Amongst the objects carried by the
tribute-bearers, may perhaps be distinguished the tusks of the elephant,
shawls, and some bundles of precious wood. From the nature, therefore,
of the bas-reliefs, it is natural to conjecture that the monument was
erected to commemorate the conquest of India, or of some country far to
the east of Assyria, and on the confines of the Indian peninsula. The
name of the king, whose deeds it appears to record, is the same as that
on the centre bulls; and it is introduced by a genealogical list
containing many other royal names.
“I lost no time in copying the inscriptions, and drawing the
bas-reliefs, upon this precious relic. It was then carefully packed, to
be transported at once to Baghdad. A party of trustworthy Arabs were
chosen to sleep near it at night; and I took every precaution that the
superstitions and prejudices of the natives of the country, and the
jealousy of rival antiquaries, could suggest.”
[Illustration: =The King. (N. W. Palace, Nimroud.)=]
Among the numerous other sculptures which Mr. Layard, with great trouble
and expense, succeeded in forwarding to England, was the figure of a
king, one of the most carefully executed and best preserved in the
palace. He is represented with one hand on the hilt of his sword, the
other being supported by a long wand or sword. It was found in the
north-west palace at Nimroud.
When Mr. Layard had expended the funds appropriated by the Trustees of
the British Museum for the excavations, and sent a large number of
sculptures down the Tigris to Busrah, to be shipped to England, he
caused the excavations to be carefully filled up, and leaving for a
season the scene of his labors, returned to England. Another expedition
has since been sent to Nimroud, further excavations have been made, and
Mr. Putnam will ere long publish their results. In the meantime, we feel
that we cannot too cordially commend to the reading public, the first
work of Mr. Layard, as affording the most interesting and important
revelations concerning the actual state of the ancient world, which have
been made public since the Egyptian discoveries of Champollion.
-----
[4] Entrance of chamber B, plan 3.
[5] Ezekiel, xxxi. 3, _etc._; Zephaniah, ii. 13 and 14.
[6] Chamber C.
[7] Storms of this nature are frequent during the early part of summer
throughout Mesopotamia, Babylonia, and Susiana. It is difficult to
convey an idea of their violence. They appear suddenly and without any
previous sign, and seldom last above an hour. It was during one of them
that the Tigris steamer, under the command of Colonel Chesney, was
wrecked in the Euphrates; and so darkened was the atmosphere, that,
although the vessel was within a short distance of the bank of the
river, several persons who were in her are supposed to have lost their
lives from not knowing in what direction to swim.
[8] Chamber B, plan 3.
[9] This bas-relief will be placed in the British Museum.
[10] Entrance A, chamber B, plan 3.
* * * * *
=FRAGMENT OF A POEM.=
=BY WM. ALBERT SUTLIFFE.=
It was the twilight, and we sat alone.
We sat alone beside the winter fire--
My friend and I--a fire that crackled well,
And sounded through the stillness as a flame
Shoots through the dark. The embers of the sun
Had died to ashes. While it sunk we talked
Of Love, of Beauty, Poetry and Hope,
Which are religion. For, is Beauty loved,
Then God is loved, and in our loving we
Do emulate his noblest attribute.
But all our words had failed to silentness,
And memories clustered in the heart’s twilight,
As shadows in a wood; and all was still.
But in the quietness there seemed to grow
A sympathetic mood, and we to look,
As through glass, into each other’s mind,
Calm reading, while our thoughts and feelings verged
In a soft sadness to one common point.
Then low I spoke:--“Were it not sweet and well
To die from out this chaos of a life
Into the waiting dark, and leave our toil
To stronger minds and hands? To spurn the clay,
And mount the crystal air in spiral gyre,
Glad-voiced, and angel-winged, like bird uncaged?
I think it sweet! or so it seemeth now,
When I look back, as down a charnel-vault,
Into the retrospect, and see it all;--
See every should-be that was never done,
And every would-be that has died its death,
And my hot dreams, and my distempered hopes,
Pictured in light and dark as on a wall.”
Then in the dusk I ceased, and so we sat,
With hearthward faces, but with upward thought.
I saw my words drop, pebble-like, down deep
Into his inmost mind, and there they lay,
While he, with careful quiet, shaped response,
And then, abstract, as to himself, replied:--
“’Tis speaking well, and yet not speaking well!
For in the web of life are golden threads--
And in the sky of life are brilliant stars--
And on the sea of life are favoring gales--
Or we should wither all as flowers in drought.
He who doth pilot the great universe,
Doth mete and parcel out the light and dark,
Strange, varicolored, like a wanderer’s dream;--
And He that made the man hath made his work.
And in the bark of life hath given the oar
At which to tug and toil until the death;
Nor yet all toil; for oft the summer sea
Ripples on bloomy shores, whence balmy winds
Bring a rich, spicy life to make one glad.
We thrid wild mazes not without a clue--
We sink again to soar as eagles do--
We deeply quaff at the rare desert founts,
And so plod on to fair oases green,
Where rustling palms nod to the welcome wind--
While with the sun of our own minds we shine
On planetary minds, and light, and cheer,
And lead then to a loftier, brighter end.
All this is well: So let the creature’s wish
Circle its scanty orbit round and round
With borrowed light from the Creator’s will.”
Then I again:--“We are but merest drops
That swell a deathward torrent, or as grains
Of sand, which make up a conglobéd sphere,
And he that is fore’er undoes the work
Of him that has been, through the whirl of time.
What profits it to weave a golden web
Which all our heirs may rend above our grave!
To pile our treasuries with yellow dust
That every reckless future wind may blow!
To think to be unthought in coming years!
To write to be the jest of fresher times!
All this is emptiness! I wish the end.”
What he had said I know not, for the wind,
Which had blown fitful since the red sun sunk,
Came in fierce gusts against the window now--
Bringing large drops that pattered chill and loud.
Then our talk changed to what might be afar--
To the rude ocean, and the mariners
Driven by windy war on unknown coasts,
To sin and sorrow in this poor, poor world,
And all those dreary themes akin to tears.
So mused we in the dusk a gentle space,
A cloudy dreamer I--my friend, that trod
The green hills of his own complacency
Like any king.
* * * * *
=MONDE HEDELQUIVER.=
=A TALE OF WINTER-LIFE IN NEW ENGLAND.=
=BY THE AUTHOR OF “SUSY L----’S DIARY.”=
CHAPTER I.
ROSAMONDE HEDELQUIVER TO EDITH MANNERS.
_Danville, December 2, 1851._
At last, I have found a spot where, for myself, there can be no want;
where I can sit and write in peace letters to you, my friend, and
stories for the magazines. By the last, I shall win money, and, perhaps,
laurels; although, I confess, I care little now for them--that is, for
the laurels--if I can earn money. If I have genius, this may truly seem
a poor aim; but, if I have genius, so have I along with it such a dread
of what is heavy, and sordid, and perpetually toilsome--of extreme
poverty; in short, so have I a longing for beauty, for ease, for a still
home of plenty, so that sometimes I could stretch out my hands and cry,
with an imploring voice--not as good Agar did, but--“Give me riches, oh!
give me riches.” Yet, Heaven knows that it is not to be greatly rich
that I desire; but to be so far supplied, that there need be no
forebodings whenever it is seen that my parents’ steps begin already to
be slow, and their eyes dull; so that there may be beautiful things in
our home, and land about it which is ours, on which we may tread with
independence, on which we may see the trees and the plants growing, on
which God’s sunshine shall fall, and His rain, and His dews, so that we
may feel him near, and know that our mother Earth is to us a good
mother.
This is what I long for, when shut up in our close rooms in the city,
morning, noon, and night. In the night, tears of yearning--mingled with
the fear that it is never to be satisfied--go drop, drop on my pillow,
until my head is ready to burst. Then I brush them away, and say--“God
forgive me, his poor child, if, in my longing for what I have not, I
forget the gratitude due for what I have.” Then come penitential
feelings and, again weeping, I say--“Father, do with me as seemeth good
in thy sight!” I would be able to say this at all seasons, working still
with cheerfulness and trust in God’s ways: but He knows I cannot; that
often when I would praise Him I can only pray, and beg Him to do that
for me which I _feel_ to be my great need.
But hear! I complain, I sigh. I sit here, buried in my own egotism,
while the bright sunshine lies on the pure white fields, hills, and
mountains, and the troops of merriest birds play with the new-fallen
snow. I shall go and see them, and feed them with crumbs, as once a
brown-haired boy, who now is gray-headed--my father--used to do.
* * * * *
_Evening._
Uncle Hedelquiver said this morning, as he folded his paper, after
breakfast was over--
“You had better ride this morning, Monde. Take Kate, she is hard on the
bit; but all the better. I like this grappling with tough-bitted
circumstances. It is exactly what you need to do. You have the name your
old grandmother Hedelquiver had in her day. You can see yourself that
you are like that portrait up there; and I want you to get hold of her
energy--her kind of life. You have been an idle child compared with her,
I fancy.”
“No doubt of it, uncle,” said I, with tears choking me. “But, because I
have been so penned up there in the city, and by our bad circumstances,
I could not do any thing but fold my hands and sigh, and long for better
things to come to me.”
“Well, well, there is room here you see,” tossing his hand a little
toward the window, through which we see the pine-covered Green Mountains
that are near, and the snowy White Hills that are far, but gigantic and
splendid to see. “You had better go the road we went yesterday,”
preparing to leave the room, “over the hills. It is stinging cold up
there, but all the better for that.”
Aunt dreaded the hills--
“I would let her go down the other way,” begged she.
“No--if she is wise, she will face the cold and wind--see the snow-birds
out there!--and you are a little bit wise aint you, Monde?” with a smile
the sweetest and most beaming one ever sees on mortal face. It is the
more enlivening to see, because his brow when he is grave is so dark,
heavy, and over-arching. It is pleasant therefore that he smiles often,
when he is talking--that is, if he talks of the things that he values.
“O, I don’t know, uncle,” I replied. “I fear I have little wisdom or
little any thing worth having. But I would like the bracing wind and
this gleaming sunshine on the hills, at any rate. It must be
glorious!--Is Kate fond of being mounted? Has any one ever rode her?”
“Many times. As I said before, she is hard-bited, but kind.” This is all
uncle would have said; for he looks forward, leaving the dead to bury
their dead. But aunt said, with drooping figure and dreamy voice--
“Poor Alice used to ride her very often when Alfred was here--at any
other time she was afraid. But, then, he used to ride John, and urge her
out. He was always anxious that she should ride often, although I am
sure I don’t know why.” No, aunt seldom knows why things are thus and
so, which is something of an annoyance to uncle, to whom most things in
physics and metaphysics are merest transparencies. “John was such a
headstrong horse,” resumed aunt, looking dreamily down on the crumb of
bread she was rolling along the table-cover; “he was so headstrong, and
Alfred not accustomed to the saddle--living in the city, as he has, for
so many years. I was never easy when they were gone. I was always
expecting that something bad would happen to them in some way.”
“There was never the least danger--not the least danger!” said uncle.
“They were much too cautious for this. It was laughable, seeing the
jog-trot they kept. Monde, your aunt will make a coward of you, if she
can. She, for her own part, gets ten thousand needless hurts as she goes
along in dread of their coming upon herself, or some of the rest of us.
Isn’t this true, Alice?”
“I don’t know, I am sure. Perhaps I do,” replied aunt.
“You certainly do. Say, Monde, will you ride?” with an impatient jerk of
his fine shaggy head.
“Yes, sir,” said I, springing promptly to my feet; for I felt, as I
often do when he speaks to me, as if the current of his own electrical
force ran through my brain and limbs--“over the hills, uncle mine, or
anywhere!”
“That’s sensible,” replied he, with a look of hearty approbation. “Put
on your things--I will have Kate at the door in five minutes.”
Heavens! how gorgeous is the winter landscape, when our sky is as blue
as Italy’s, when the sun is on hills and mountains, and the blue shadows
are in all the valleys and beside all the little knolls; when the dark
firs, and pines, and hemlocks, and the black-hazel-blossoms are fringed
and tufted with the new-fallen snow, and the crows and jays go
screaming, and the blood in all one’s veins is astir with the new life
that comes on every breath.
“Father,” I said, lifting reverently upward the eyes that had been
wandering over the beautified scene, “Father, accept Thou the love of
Thy child. Help her to be always thankful to Thee.”
But, directly, between me and the Father, between me and His glorious
earth came dark visions of my poor home, and of my parents, held back
from a clear strong life, by their shame-faced poverty and pride. For
you must be told, friend of mine, that we are much poorer than even you,
who have seen us all and our home many and many a time, believe; and
that we grow really poorer every day, because, with all our pains-taking
and studiously-contrived appearances of competency, my father makes no
head-way in engrossing popularity, and, therewith, the business that
pays liberally. We brush and brush--or papa and mamma do--to move the
dust and bring back the old polish and prime, and then go forth with
lofty heads and independent feet; and papa talks in a brisk way of “My
client A--; my clients, Messrs. B-- and C--;” of the case of D--
_versus_ E--, and F-- _versus_ G--. Meanwhile, you have seen what mamma
does--with what care she preserves her fine complexion, her natural
graceful curls, into which the threads of silver are already coming; her
cashmere long shawl and black silk gown, that were hers at her
marriage--they look no older than most shawls and gowns do after five
years’ service, and they have seen twenty-five. In these she goes out to
the shops, and looks at carpets and mirrors and _tête-à-têtes_, as if
she were a duchess. And she lets it be known, if it will come in
gracefully in any way, that she is Mrs. Hedelquiver, and that her
husband is Jerome Hedelquiver, Attorney at Law, V-- Street. My father
really did get a case, worth a hundred dollars to him, of a dealer, who
hoped that, in compliment thereto, my mother would spend all the fee and
other additional fees for his upholstery.
We laughed over it. My father called it “capital;” but he and my mother
both sighed after it. I presume their souls--so deep within them, so
gentle toned as seldom to be heard above the clamor that “the strong
circumstances” make in controlling the hands, the lips, and the
brain--spake then so as to be heeded, though not long. The hands, the
lips, and the brain soon took up again their worldly, time-serving ways.
My father talked again of his clients, my mother priced velvets and
Axminsters. I would not say this to you, dear Edith, but that you have
already seen the same when visiting us; and but that you are the friend
of my soul, to whom I must speak of that which is so poor and so
sorrowful to me, especially now that I have looked attentively upon
uncle’s sincere, manly life.
Uncle’s circumstances are very different to my father’s--this is true.
He is a very wealthy and distinguished man. Yet if he were as poor as my
father--he would never mind this--he would keep Truth close beside him
wherever he went, in whatever action he performed, in whatever words he
spake. This would make him free and strong, indeed; and the freedom and
strength would lay hold on success. Thus, in seeking first the kingdom
of heaven, all these things for which the poor man seeks now first, and
last, and at all times, would without pains-taking on his part, be added
unto him. Would that he could see it--would that he were more
quiet--happier! for I pity him so!
And I have seen men poorer than he, and less distinguished in learning
and in an agreeable exterior, whom I cannot, by any view of their
condition, bring myself to commiserate, any more than I can commiserate
Christ. And you know, dear Edith, we may look at his life on earth as we
will, at the hunger, the dusty journeyings, the thorns, the spear, the
bitter cup, the blind revilings that came with them all, and the death
of shame and lengthened agony, still it fills our hearts with praise--it
is the sublimest destiny ever fulfilled on the earth! I will tell you
what I desire more and more; what I desire now, at this still hour,
above every other thing--and this is, to be so much like Christ, as to
attain a _perfect_ mastery of myself, so that none of the outward things
shall move me. Christ’s excellence lay in this--did you ever think of
it? Proffered crowns and kingdoms, the trammels of time-honored usages,
threats at his side and a cross before him, all fell short of moving his
soul. This never swerved a hair’s breadth from its high purpose, from
beginning to end. And I would be able to look out from a quiet, inward
life, and say to the world--“Poor world! enslaved and enslaving!
Struggling, vain world; we love thee, we pity thee--poor world! We would
die for thee, if the time might come when our blood would have the
efficacy of a good martyr’s in healing thee. But we bow to thee, we
follow thee, take up thy mummeries no more. For within us, the life
breathed into us of God, the life that is divine and glorious--far
beyond all that thou hast to offer, comes gently forward for its
development into our daily thought and action. Poor world! _dear_ world!
after this, the God of the true life helping us, while with thee we are
above thee!”
But, my dear child Edith, I remember that you like short sermons, while,
on the other hand, tales may be ever so long, ever so often told. I have
no tale for you yet. We will wait and see what will come hereafter.
Thine, dear,
Monde Hedelquiver.
CHAPTER II.
MONDE HEDELQUIVER TO EDITH MANNERS.
_Danville, Dec. 15, 1851._
“Rosamonde,” said Aunt Alice one morning, as she sat stitching a
wristband; and her voice had an ominous cadence.
“What would you say to me, aunt?”
I looked up from my paper, but she had turned her face from me a little,
and bent it low over her work, as if what she was going to say had a
certain sort of wickedness in it that made her ashamed. “What would you
say, aunt?” I repeated.
“Why it isn’t much; but I was thinking that if Alfred Cullen comes up
while you are here--and I have an idea that he will--I hope you will try
to like him.”
“Or rather, aunt, you hope I will like him without trying, don’t you?”
By the way, I wonder if you remember that Alfred Cullen was the
betrothed of Cousin Alice. He still wears his weeds for her; still comes
up here every few months, and sits at her piano playing the airs that
she used to play most. Uncle and aunt say that he is very pale and very
noble, with the air of one who follows Christ close at his feet; that he
is gentle and loving like a child; always forgetful of himself, never
forgetful of others. You see he is quite a miracle of goodness. If he
comes, I fear I shall have a panic as long as he stays.
“That _would_ be better,” aunt replied; “I didn’t think of that. Yes, I
hope you will like him with ease--if poor Alice had lived, he would have
been her husband. As it is, I can’t wish him to be single always on her
account; and, somehow, when I think of his marrying another, I want it
to be one who would be a sort of daughter to me and your uncle as well
as a wife to Alfred.”
“Yes, that would be pleasant for you,” answered I, feeling something of
a panic beforehand. I feel the more of it, because aunt never sees
through things that go on clearly, or understands how they go, or how
they had best go. So she is always lending a word here and a word there
for their adjustment, according to her idea. I thought this all
over--covering a piece of waste paper with dashes, dots, and
initials--while she considered what must next be said.
She said next, that Alfred is attentive to every body, especially--as
she has sometimes thought--to Paulina Monroe, aunt’s niece, who lives in
the neighborhood, who was Cousin Alice’s dearest companion, and who is
now, as it were, a daughter in the house. Aunt’s “ideas,” of which she
has so much to say, are not clear on this head. She has thought that it
would not be strange if Alfred were to transfer his affections to
Paulina; but she is sure she don’t know how it will terminate. He
certainly sits by her a great deal; and when he is here, in summer,
walks with her a great deal in the roads and paths she and Alice used to
frequent--such as down the hill, through the back lane and the pasture
to the old, deserted Fifield house, by the brook, where, as aunt says,
the pinks and the roses still bloom, and the apples ripen, albeit the
old couple that used to look on their growth have been mouldering this
many a year under a hedge close by.
“If he does come while you are here,” again said aunt. “But you are done
thinking about it, Rosamonde, and going on with your writing.” She
looked as if she were deprecating some hurt I had given her.
“Oh, well, aunt, I am only writing a letter, and can write and talk at
the same time.”
“This is strange; but your uncle can do just so, while I can never think
of but one thing at a time. What I was going to say was, that you ought
to stay longer than you say. Alfred will surely be up in the spring, if
he don’t come this winter; and you ought to see our New England scenery
in the summer, now that you are old enough to appreciate it. ‘The
Switzerland of America’ you know our state has been called, although
your uncle says ‘Poh!’ to this. He and Alfred both seem to think New
England as good as Switzerland; or, at any rate, good enough without
borrowing names for it.”
“As it certainly is, aunt.”
Finding that this was all I had to say, that I had no remark to make
respecting Alfred Cullen, she added, hesitatingly--
“Paulina is, to be sure, my own niece--she and Alice were like twins,
almost. She is a good little girl as ever was; but, somehow, it seems to
me, ever since you came, that Alfred would like you best.” Again aunt’s
voice became a little husky, and again a little panic ran along my
nerves. “Still, I do think,” added aunt, “that he grows more particular
in his attentions to Paulina every time he comes up. And, lately, they
correspond occasionally, although Paulina keeps a close mouth about it,
so that neither her mother nor I know what it amounts to. Paulina is
reckoned very pretty.”
“She is very pretty, indeed, aunt, with a beautiful complexion.”
“Yes, this is true; but, somehow, her beauty is of a very common kind.
Alice’s wasn’t; yours isn’t. You and Alice are alike, or were, only you
have a better form for those who like dignity. And you have more
courage: you are all Hedelquiver; she was half Monroe.”
“You estimate me very kindly, dear aunt,” said I, grateful for the
cordial words and tones.
“Well, I like you, somehow, better and better every day. You are calm
and strong, like your uncle. I always like to have such people with me,
I suppose because I am so nervous and weak myself. Alfred is nervous,
too, I think, although he commands himself perfectly.”
Thus it was Alfred, Alfred, all day, and for, many days, until I was
quite tired of it; until I wished that there was no Alfred Cullen in the
universe. She said to me this morning, in a way as if she were doubtful
whether it would recommend him to me--“Alfred writes beautiful poetry,
they say. I saw a piece he wrote on ‘Night,’ and it was very beautiful I
thought.”
“Writes poetry, does he!” said I, determined to exorcise him and his
praises. “I am sorry! I can never bear a man to be always scribbling
poetry, whenever the moon shines, or any thing happens.”
Dismayed now, in her turn, aunt put in numberless disclaimers, which
amounted to this--Why, she has heard, to be sure, that he does sometimes
write very pretty poetry, and that some of it comes out in the
“Tribune;” that, in fact, she has seen one piece with her own
eyes--Paulina had it, she cut it out of the Tribune. But, for all that,
he has as much energy and manliness as those have who never touch a pen
but in keeping their accounts. She wouldn’t have me think, for a
thousand worlds, that he is an effeminate, moon-struck young man. She
hopes he will come up: she has no doubt he will while I am here, and
then I shall see with my own eyes!
Yes, then I shall see, Edith mine, and then you shall hear about it. One
thing troubles me--I fear aunt will be bumping our heads together every
five minutes, in the way of making us like each other; that is, if he
comes, as I presume he will by some device of aunt’s. If she does
manœuvre in a way the least bit gross, I foresee--that I can live
through it, to be sure, as one can live through every sort of vexation
and grievance if one will. But I shall be very still, and very tall;
and, moreover, so repulsive in various ways, that he will be propelled
with something of a shock to the far corners of the room, as often as he
meditates approach to me.
You should see how I thrive. The hardiest imp out at the red
school-house on the corner, who does not once cease to turn sommersets,
snow-ball, make pyramids and snow-images, and beat the snow from his
iron-like boots, is hardly stronger, browner, hungrier than I am. For
you see, I ride out often with uncle and aunt to call on substantial
families, where are warm fires in two or three rooms, where great red
and green apples and snapped-corn go round, if we can stay no more than
fifteen minutes, and where, at any rate, a few lively jokes fly right
and left, and a few earnest, friendly things are spoken, and promises of
an early “visit” interchanged. We meet other sleighs, we pass them; they
pass us, like lightning, with young village gents in them, and I am
ready to go over the moon at the sound of the merry bells. Kate and I go
up hill and down, let the weather be as it will. Yesterday, as if we
were one feature of the storm, we went on and on, chasing the
snow-clouds that were trooping over the fields and roads, and the
snow-clouds that were trooping, chasing us. This morning it was still
and splendid for a feathery hoar-frost clung to every branch and spray,
and glittered in the early sun. It was stinging cold, as aunt forwarned
me, the air “cut like a knife.” But I liked it--I felt it invigorate me
every moment and prepare me for the rest of the day--for the rest of
life; for I see it plainer and plainer, that every wholesome pleasure,
and every wholesome sorrow, not the less, is such a preparation.
Therefore, welcome all experiences, I will accept them as the loving
child of Him who metes them out.
I am up early. This is easy for me here, for kitchen, dining-room and
back-parlor are warm before six o’clock, and all in the house are
moving. So that I write a great deal, and write well, as I believe you
will say when you read what I have written. The publishers’ praise me
and--pay me. Twenty-five dollars came from Philadelphia yesterday. Every
cent of this (for I can have no wants of my own here) I shall send to my
dear father. If he has only a few bits of silver in his purse, and no
business, twenty-five dollars will go quite a long way in purchasing
comforts. I am thine, dearest,
Rosa.
CHAPTER III.
MONDE TO EDITH.
_Wednesday, Dec. 24th._
Blessed Edith! Guess who said this to-day, after I had been reading
aloud in the Westminster Review--“I don’t understand a word, hardly,
about this constructive policy and conservative elements, or what sort
of difference there is between them. It indeed, seems to me that they
must mean really the same thing. Don’t it to you?”
“Oh no, aunt.”
“No, I suppose not; for you are like your uncle. He talks about these
things a great deal, and about the political economists, too, as if they
were something like gods--or very mischievous men, for I am sure, now I
think about it, I can’t tell which it is--whether he approves them or
not. At any rate, if they are wise and good men, I think he is as good
as the best of them can be, I am sure”--with a long sigh, and listlessly
drawing the point of her needle along the hem she was making--“there
isn’t an hour, hardly, that I am not wondering at all he knows, and
wishing that I were a hundredth part as wise.”
“I wouldn’t mind this, aunt. You are good and kind, and everybody loves
you. Aunt! aunt! see! Ponto has upset your basket; he is eating your
spools, isn’t he? What a naughty dog.”
Ponto took the reproof for so much coaxing, and came scrambling over me.
Aunt half-sighed, half-laughed, and said--
“This is the way Ponto serves me, if I don’t see to him. And I never do
see to him, or any thing else, when I am talking or trying to think
closely, never; I am discouraged sometimes, especially when I think how
different you and your uncle are; and Mother Hedelquiver would see to
twenty things, as if they were but one--I would give all the world that
I could do the same. Ponto, Ponto, be still, or I will box your ears!”
But he didn’t be still, nor did aunt box his ears. He slipped off from
beneath her hand and ran over the carpet like a bewitched thing, with a
sleeve of the dress aunt was making in his mouth. He is a splendid
little spaniel, the pet of all in the house, and I believe the fellow
knows it.
I have had letters from home since I wrote before, and see what my
mother says--“You are right, my good Rosamonde, truth is best for us;
not only for its own great sake, but, as you, say, we feel so much
better and nobler every way when speaking and acting it; and, besides,
it serves us best in the end. It has been serving us a good turn, as you
shall hear presently.
“Mrs. Hayden called here the day that we got your last. You know I have
always tried to keep up appearances before her more than almost any
other, she has things in such style at home. If she has ever called when
I was feeling discouraged about our affairs I brushed the depression all
away, you know, and was as lively and full of this and that thing that
was going on, as if I hadn’t a care in the world. I was, in fact, never
myself for one minute in her company until that day. Well, when she came
in I was alone, your father was going here and there in the city, to
make it appear that he had a great deal on his hands I have no doubt,
and I was in tears over your letter--I brushed the tears off a little,
but they ran again as soon as she began to speak kindly to me; and she
was really as kind as a woman could be, Rose--so I told her all about
our discouragements, how long they have lasted, how they were growing
deeper, and all; and read her your letter and showed her the bank-bills.
She was very sober, and as I had never seen her so before, it didn’t
seem to me that it could be the same Mrs. Hayden that usually comes in
once in six months, and after sitting fifteen minutes, talking of the
weather, crotchet-work, her domestics and the like, goes out again as
cold and stately as she came. She sat close beside me, and threw off her
bonnet when she found the strings troublesome. She said she wished I had
spoken of these things before, for that your father might have been
helped to a good business in the first of it, as well as not. She told
me to be of good courage, to be thankful that I have such a daughter.
Here her tears started and mine ran again--she said she would speak to
her husband, his brother, and hers, and all would soon be right.
“And all _is_ right. Two retainers have already come in, one of fifty
dollars, another of twenty. Old Judge Bailey sent for your father the
other day--the judge is uncle to Mrs. Hayden; your father read with him
six months, but never had put himself in his way, and so the judge had
quite lost sight of him. He told your father that he would be in need of
him often, and that if he--the judge, I mean--does sometimes scold and
send the chairs against the wall when the gout is on him, your father
must let it go as if it were a little rain and hail; he will give him,
at the same time that he scolds, good work and good pay. I hope he wont
scold, for I think your father is too proud to bear much--he would
sooner sacrifice the work and the pay. I am afraid that nearly all these
energetic patrons are either cross or whimsical, or have some
troublesome fault. Your father says that, according to your Uncle
Frederick’s philosophy of compensation, they are likely to have. Well,
we must wait and see.
“P. S. I left this for your father to write a little, if he could find
time; but he can’t, as true as you live. He is busy early and late with
great books, and pens, and sheets of paper, and parcels of documents
tied up with red tape. You don’t know how good this seems. He is as
happy with it as a child, and proud of being all fagged out. You would
be delighted to see him; he looks younger by ten years than he did a
fortnight ago. He wants you to come home now. He says he couldn’t have
consented to your going to stay so long but that he thought it might be
pleasanter for you there. I couldn’t certainly. _I_ hope you will try to
come sooner, for, guess who comes in to inquire about you--Esquire
Charles Hayden; _our_ Mr. Hayden’s youngest brother, you know, just home
from California when you went away. He has established himself here; has
his office close by your father’s; was in last evening, and didn’t want
to talk of anybody but you. Mrs. Hayden had been telling him about you.
“Good-bye, dear. Mrs. Hayden has just sent me word that she will call in
an hour, with Charles, to take me out to ride with them. I believe it
more and more, that truth is best. Don’t you, Rose?”
No, my mother! I should believe it all the same, if, in following after
it, you had been led into countless difficulties and tribulations, I
should still believe it altogether best, because best for the soul, let
what will come--come to the body.
Mr. Marsden, one of the village merchants, went to Boston yesterday, and
aunt commissioned him to tell Alfred Cullen, with whom he deals largely,
to come up and spend New Year with her and uncle. Now heaven forbid!
Uncle says--“Come, Monde, come and hear what that rascally Louis
Napoleon is doing.” I go, for France is, as it were, our next door
neighbor in these days.
CHAPTER IV.
MONDE TO EDITH.
_Danville, Dec. 29, 1851._
Isn’t this outrageous bad, Edith? Mr. Marsden brought along, when he
came back, a note from Alfred Cullen, saying that he will come to D----;
a box of oysters from him for uncle, another of figs for aunt, (and she
wants to see me eat them every five minutes; I think it is much the same
as if she saw me eating the giver.)
Aunt is so glad to have him come that she hardly knows her head from her
feet. She is in danger of stumbling over Ponto, or a foot-cushion, at
every turn. She gives more directions to Bessy and Hamlet than ten
Bessys and Hamlets could follow. It is well for them that she revokes
half of them on the spot; that she modifies the rest according to their
liking, and ends with telling them both to go on and do just what they
see needs to be done, and to do it in the way they think best. She has
no doubt, she says, that it will be done better than she can advise. And
so it will assuredly. Bessy has been in the family ten years, Hamlet
three; they both have clear brains and strong hands, and, as Bessy says,
“have got the hang of every thing from garret to cellar.” This is no
light achievement, for one does not often see so large a house, or such
overflowing abundance. By the by, do you know that uncle has paid our
house rent for the last ten years, and given us money and other things
beside? I am thinking that, if you do not, you may be calling him “a
miserly old fellow.” He has offered my father land, but my mother dreads
leaving the city where she was reared. Now I hope you think, as Aunt
Alice and I do, that uncle is the best man on earth, except Kossuth--I
must say, except Kossuth always; for I believe he is the best man that
breathes, or that has breathed, since the days of Christ. Uncle and I
talk about him, we read his speeches, and I keep saying in my
heart--“the Christ of the nations! the Christ of the nations!” And often
a great fear comes over me, that, in another sense than his truth, his
self-immolating goodness, his destiny is to be like that of the Christ.
My heart is aching for him now--still I can put back the pain, and say,
“Father, let it be as seemeth good in Thy sight; for, whether he lives
or dies, in him the great cause of freedom and human progress shall be
glorified; and he is strong and patient to drink of the cup that Thou
givest him.”
* * * * *
_Tuesday, 30th._
I think this Alfred Cullen, who will come to D---- to-morrow or next
day, must be altogether precious. Even uncle is moved a little. He gives
Hamlet orders touching John, and John’s harness, and the oats John must
have, that he and his trappings may be in good condition for Alfred’s
use. Aunt looks at me and adds some suggestions about Kate. Kate must be
fed well and made sleek as can be; for--perhaps--. Aunt goes no further
than this “perhaps” of hers, lately--she has seen, I presume, that her
plans which embrace Alfred Cullen and me jointly, annoy me. Indeed, I
was quite savage over them before she gave them up. Bessy bakes pies,
and loaves of all sorts of cake and ginger-bread, without number, and
wipes the dust out of every corner. Aunt praises all that she does and
all that Hamlet does, puts her caps in order and sponges her dresses.
Paulina Monroe, meanwhile, comes in often to look at my collars,
under-sleeves and cuffs, that she may make her some like them. Her
dress-maker hurries her sewing on a brown Thibet like mine, made like
mine, that it may be finished before to-morrow night. Paulina smiles
incessantly, has flutter in her manner, and a red spot on each cheek; so
that Ponto and I are the only two who go our ways precisely in the usual
mode. In truth, I am not sure that Ponto and I are entirely unaffected;
we are out of doors more than heretofore, and when in the house are a
little less sedate; I can’t bring my mind to my writing as usual, and I
shall be glad when his face is set again toward Boston.
Good-night! I shall finish my letter after he comes. I shall tell you
now, however, what a beautiful gift I had yesterday from uncle--a plumed
Kossuth hat. This is for me to wear when riding. I wore it to-day, and
uncle walked round it and me, saying with kindling eyes--“That is
splendid! You never looked half so well, Monde, in any thing!” And
according to the revelations of the long mirror, I think I never did.
But it is a fact, Edith, my fair one, that I am as brown as a berry.
Good-bye.
* * * * *
_Wednesday, 31st._
Well! Alfred Cullen came this morning while I was gone to ride. We did
not expect him until evening, because it is a day’s journey from Boston.
But he stopped last evening at St. C----, where he had friends and
business, and this morning was brought over.
“Guess who’s in the sitting-room with your uncle and aunt,” said Hamlet,
with a broad smile, as he came to help me out of the saddle.
“Paulina, I dare say, Hamlet.”
“No. You go in an’ see who ’t is. Come, Katy.”
I came in straightway, expecting to see Hamlet’s pretty sister, Fanny;
but saw, instead, a man of about thirty years; by no means tall, (for a
man, that is; he is a little above me,) by no means large, but noble and
graceful, and with a look in the highest degree animated and gentle. He
and uncle stood face to face, talking energetically and laughing.
“Here she is!” said uncle, as soon as he saw me. “Here’s Monde. Monde,
our friend, Mr. Cullen. Our niece, Miss Hedelquiver, Alfred. Ponto, be
still; behave yourself, Ponto.”
Ponto wouldn’t behave himself at all, in the way uncle proposed; he was
quite too glad to see me. When I would have stepped forward a little to
meet Mr. Cullen, he was jumping on my long skirts and catching them in
his teeth; and when I would have shaken hands with him, he sprang up
between us, and was so unmanageable, that we were forced to dispense
with the hand’s-shaking altogether. We called him a vicious puppy and
boxed his soft ears a little; but, as we laughed all the while, he only
dragged my skirts the more pertinaciously and jumped the higher. And
judge you whether I was not glad that he did; glad that I must be busy
scolding him and getting my skirts and gloves and riding-stick away from
him; for uncle said, turning to Mr. Cullen--
“How do you like Monde’s hat, Alfred?”
“I was just thinking that it is the most becoming thing I ever saw,”
replied he.
“I think so,” said uncle.
I can’t very well bear having any thing about my person commended, you
know; especially if it brings such eyes as uncle’s and Mr. Cullen’s to
bear upon my figure; and so I was glad enough to have aunt come into the
room, and forward into our midst, that the survey might be broken.
But it was not long, for aunt looked down on my long train, and then
said:
“Paulina has been trying to persuade Rosamonde to put on a Bloomer with
her, she didn’t like to adopt it alone. But I think Rosamonde is wise in
clinging to the long skirts, especially for riding. Do you like the
Bloomers, Alfred?”
“Not at all! not at all!” and his eye ran over my figure again.
“Nor I,” said uncle. “To tell the truth,”--with his eyes on my
face--“Monde wrote us spirited letters; I remembered a certain sort of
dash and courage in her character, and I was more than half afraid that
she would come amongst us looking up out of a Bloomer, and that the
first thing she began to talk about would be Women’s Rights. Not, as
Heaven knows,” added uncle, with increasing seriousness, “because there
is not need of changes here, as every where else; but because the
changes proposed are, as it appears to me, poor, one-sided things. I
would not, therefore, like to hear so thoroughly sensible a girl as
Monde, clamoring for them.”
“You will make Monde blush,” said aunt.
“Not at all,” Aunt Alice, replied I, doffing my hat, “I can bear very
well having my brain praised, you know, at any time. Ponto--Ponto, bring
me my glove.”
“Yes, that is true,” said aunt. And added, after a moment’s pause--“_I_
can never make much out of this Woman’s Rights business. With sister
Eunice it is ‘equal rights, equal privileges, equal pantaloons,’ and
some more, I don’t know what else. I never pretend to understand a word
of it.”
This was cunning in aunt. We all had a hearty laugh over it. But
good-night, dearest; I will finish in the morning.
* * * * *
_Morning._
When I returned to the parlor, after changing my dress, yesterday, uncle
and Mr. Cullen sat in their arm-chairs, face to face, talking with
thoughtful eyes of Congress and Hungary. If Congress would do thus and
so, then Hungary could do so and thus, so and thus. If Congress would
not, then God help Hungary. They had their eyes on each other’s face;
they appeared as if they two could sit there and talk forever, never
once lacking themes of interest, never once tiring of each other’s
discourse. And uncle--dear, good man that he is!--let me have a part now
and then, by saying--“Yes, this is what I was saying to you yesterday,
you remember, Monde.” And then again--“And Monde, I see, thinks the
same.” So that he and Mr. Cullen soon came to speak as much to me as to
each other.
Aunt came in, in a jet black dress, and rich black lace cap, with
scarlet trimmings. She looked happy, and was as fresh and graceful as a
girl--only her cap and collar were both awry, and a lock of hair
straggled. Her eyes sought Mr. Cullen’s directly.
“Mother,” said he, answering her smile with one as genial, “I am as
hungry as a wolf. What are you going to have for dinner, I wonder.”
“Guess.”
“A chicken-pie.”
“Yes! as true as you live. I remembered how you liked them, and we made
this on purpose for you.”
“Thank you! you are always kind. What else have you? I am so hungry!”
“Pumpkin pies and toasted brown bread; it will be ready in less than
five minutes.”
“Ah, this is good! there is nothing I love so well. But, Ponto, let this
paper alone. Here, you little rascal!” (For Ponto was running off with
the “Era;” going sideways in a highly comical way, that he might not
step on it.) “Ponto grows more roguish: I am afraid you help to spoil
him, Miss Hedelquiver.”
And in all that he said and did--I mean Mr. Cullen, of course--he was
like a good son, running over with delight and sociability at finding
himself beneath the home-roof once more.
“The handsomest pie I ever saw,” said he, as uncle was beginning to
carve it.
I looked at aunt, but she would not look at me. She would say--“I think
so too. Rosamonde put on the cross and border. Neither Bessy nor I
should ever have thought of such a thing.”
Mr. Cullen looked up to me, I know, and uncle, too; but I was drinking,
and kept my eyes down in my tumbler of water. “I am vexed,” thought I,
for one moment, “for this is what she will keep doing.” But the next
moment I looked about me undauntedly, and thought--“Yet, if she does, I
wont be vexed. I will only do those things that I do in such a way that
she can’t hold me up for admiration. Good! I fancy Mr. Cullen will see
something not quite so pretty as that chicken-pie, before many days.”
And I was full of mirth at thought of the hodge-podge I will perpetrate
if I am troubled.
Mr. Cullen went over to Mr. Monroe’s after dinner, and brought Paulina
back with him to take her supper with us and spend the evening. She was
in the new Thibet, the new collar and under-sleeves, so that she was
rather stiff, rather careful about her ways, but pretty as a rose and
lily tied together, and Mr. Cullen evidently thought the same. He ate a
part of her Baldwin apple, when she complained of its being so large
that she could neither hold it with both her hands (and she spread them
before him to let him see how much too small they were for that) nor eat
it if she could hold it. She didn’t allow Ponto to come very near her
new Thibet, or new under-sleeves, and so Mr. Cullen let the little
fellow run over himself and me. He played backgammon with her, game
after game, as he talked with the rest, and allowed her to beat him in
every game; whereupon she patted his shoulder with her dice-box and
called him a careless goose.
“Rosamonde Hedelquiver,” said she to me, as she was putting on her furs
to go, “what made you keep on this common-looking dress, and these plain
duds,” touching her finger to my linen cuffs and collar. “I thought you
would be all dressed up in your best, and so I put these on. I was mad
with myself for my pains when I saw you.”
“Ah, this is nothing, any way, Paulina. Here is your hood; it is a
beauty.”
“Yes, I like it pretty well. I suppose you’ll ride every day on
horseback, just as you have done?”
“I presume so. Let me tie your hood for you. You can’t find the strings,
can you?”
“No, my fingers are all thumbs to-night. I suppose Alfred will ride with
you. Aunt will teaze him to. He used to ride with Alice; but he never
liked it so well as walking, or going in a carriage. But he is one of
those who will do every thing that is required of him.”
She was putting on her over-shoes, so that I could not see what sort of
expression accompanied these words.
“You needn’t expect to see him here again to-night, Aunt Alice,” said
she, hanging on his arm, at the parlor door. “I shall keep him. We’re
going to have something for breakfast that he likes best of any thing;
and I know he’ll stay for this, if not for any thing else. Wont you,
Alfred?”
“No, no, Paulina. Let him come back,” said aunt. “We want him here
to-night. Don’t stay, Alfred.”
“No, I will not, mother,” bowing to go.
“Then I will call you an obstinate and real cross pig, if you don’t,” I
heard Paulina say, in tones half-laughing, half-pouting, in the hall.
Uncle took up the Tribune; aunt and I drew near the stove to toast our
feet a little.
“I think he attends to her and humors her more and more,” said aunt at
length, in a dreamy tone. She had been watching a chink in the stove
where the flickering blaze was seen. “Don’t you think he does, Frederic?
Frederic, don’t you think Alfred really means to make a wife of
Paulina?”
“I think likely he does,” replied uncle, at the same time that he went
on with his reading, as if he had not spoken, or aunt either.
Aunt kept her eyes on the stove after this until I rose to leave the
room. “Good-night dear,” said she then, kissing me lovingly. She looked
as if the last of ever so many cherished hopes was on its flight.
I write in a little library that opens out of the back-parlor, and is
warmed by the book-parlor stove. Mr. Cullen has just entered the parlor;
where he talks softly to Ponto, and rummages the newspapers. Now aunt
comes in, and after the morning greetings, she says, clearing her
throat--“So you think Paulina improves?”
“In some respects; don’t you?”
“Yes, I suppose she does. But breakfast is quite ready, Alfred. Monde,
dear--” coming this way.
“Yes, dear aunt, I come.”
* * * * *
_Evening._
This has been the busiest day! I couldn’t even find time to get this
already longest of all letters ready for the mail. I will therefore sit
here, now that it is all over, now that all have gone to rest but me,
and tell you about it; and let me do it in little skirmishing scenes
like this.
Scene 1. _The Breakfast Table._
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “So Burchard & Bean are lending their interests to
the Nicaragua route?”
_Mr. Cullen._ “Yes; and so are Cornish & Brothers. They are much more
substantial.”
_Mrs. Hedelquiver._ “The Nicaragua route, the Panama rail-road, free
trade, and so on--Frederic and Rosamonde think that these are going to
do not a little toward making this world all over new. They think they
are going to do their part in putting down wars and every sort of thing
that isn’t brotherly and according to what the gospel enjoins. Monde,
have you water? Oh yes, I see. Now I’ve tried again and again to see
what connection there can possibly be between peace and the Panama
rail-road, for instance; and I can’t. I don’t half believe there is
any--do you, Alfred?”
_Mr. Cullen, laughing._ “Oh yes, mother?”
_Mrs. Hedelquiver._ “Yes, I suppose you do. You and Frederic, and Monde
think just alike about every thing, I see. Have some more chocolate,
Alfred.”
Scene 2. _The Hall._
_Mrs. Hedelquiver._ “What do you want to say to me, dear?”
_Monde._ “I want to tell you--why, aunt, you see I want to write
mornings, and then ride when I am tired of it--just as I have done all
along. And I have been thinking that Mr. Cullen may feel that it belongs
to him to--why, to see to me some, perhaps sometimes to ride with me.
But it don’t, you know. I would rather attend to myself, and go alone,
as I have done. So you wont let him think, will you, dear aunt, that it
is necessary for him on any account, or at any time, to go with me any
where.”
_Mrs. Hedelquiver._ “Why?”
_Monde._ “Because, if you do, aunt, it will put a disagreeable restraint
upon him, and make me very unhappy. I have always been used, you know,
to depending upon myself. I have never been a favorite of the gentlemen,
or of anybody, except a few kind people who would see that there was
something in me somewhere that deserved to be loved.”
_Mrs. Hedelquiver._ “And this has been a grief to you, dear, Monde? and
is at this minute, as I know by the sound of your voice.”
_Monde._ “Sometimes it grieves me; and then again I am thankful. For it
has made me self-reliant, and very loving toward Him who will always be
near His child, and love her. Aunt, dear, you will promise not to hint
it to him, in the remotest way, that he ought to ride with me, or wait
on me at any time?”
_Mrs. Hedelquiver, dreamily, and as if again hopes were flying._ “Yes, I
will promise. But I can’t see what objections you can have to his riding
with you. There’s John almost always, you know, in the stable. There is
nothing to hinder his going.”
_Monde._ “Nothing to hinder, if it is his own spontaneous will and wish;
otherwise, every thing, in my way of thinking. Come, aunt, you are
freezing.”
Scene 3. _Outside the Gate._
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “Ready, Monde?”
_Monde._ “Ready, uncle.”
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “Wait a moment. I want to tell you, Monde, that I
overheard what you said to your aunt in the hall, this morning.”
_Monde._ “Did you, uncle?”
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “Yes; but never mind it: It was only a new proof
that you are the most sensible girl in creation. It is just the way you
ought to feel about it. What he will do of his own accord, let him do;
but I will help you in this. I will take care that he don’t do any thing
for you because he sees you in need of him.”
_Monde._ “You are the dearest, best uncle that any poor child ever had!
Now, if you will help me.”
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “There you are! You mount as if you had some little
wings up there among the plumes of your hat. I will bet you have.”
_Mr. Cullen, appearing at the door with a book in his hand._ “What, are
you going to ride this morning, Miss Hedelquiver?”
_Monde._ “Yes, Mr. Cullen.”
_Mr. Cullen._ “And alone?”
_Monde._ “Yes, sir. Uncle, my stick, if you please.”
_Mr. Cullen, springing forward to pick up the stick._ “Now I protest
against this! I have been thinking that I wanted to ride--and (laughing
a little) that I wanted to ride with you. Let me help you off, now, for
a few minutes. I will have John ready in--John is in the stable, isn’t
he, judge?”
_Judge Hedelquiver._ “Yes, and at your service, if Monde will wait--if
she wants you to go. You haven’t asked her.”
_Mr. Cullen._ “No! presuming blockhead that I am! Do you want me to go
with you, Monde?”
_Monde._ “If you want to.”
_Mr. Cullen._ “As I most certainly do. Let me help you. Only I am sorry
to give you so much trouble. I am sorry I didn’t know, in the first of
it, that you were going. You will tell me next time, wont you?” (opening
the gate for Monde to pass in.)
_Monde._ “I--I believe I sha’n’t promise you.”
_Mr. Cullen._ “Promise at any rate to let me know it, whenever you are
willing to have me with you.”
_Monde, with the door half shut between her and him._ “I believe I
sha’n’t promise that either.”
_Mr. Cullen, on his way, with the Judge, to the stable._ “Then I will
always make you wait for me like this.”
Well, well! I see I might write all night, with my scenes first to
twentieth, inclusive. But I sha’n’t. I shall go to bed, after I have
told you that the morning ride was altogether delightful. I never knew
such a splendid morning. I never had so agreeable a companion in ride,
or ramble, or--I shall say it, Edith, for it is the truth--or any where.
And I fancy that he found me--quite tolerable. One could not well be
otherwise with him about.
We found company here when we returned--two of the professors from
Woodstock, together with Judge Brentwood, and his wife and daughter,
from Craftsburg. They all dined here; and things never went off so
strongly. I sat by aunt, and helped her serve the guests. When I do
this, and she can now and then look over the table into uncle’s always
clear, calm face, and listen to his manly expression, she can know
pretty well what she is doing, even if she does sometimes venture upon a
little conversation.
While we were giving them our adieus at the door, two other sleighs came
up with high-headed horses and loud-jingling bells, taking along fresh
visitors to spend the rest of the day and the evening with us. They were
wealthy farmers, who wanted to talk of horses and oxen, and different
breeds of sheep, with uncle; and farmers’ wives, who talked with most
interest with aunt, when it was upon butter and cheese, and preserves
and bread-making. This, as you must see, left Mr. Cullen and me pretty
much to ourselves. But we were at no loss. I can’t see how one can ever
be at a loss with him; for his vigorous and fresh thought readily
comprehends all the philosophy of nature, of morals, and of life; and he
communicates himself, as it were, and all that is in him, so magically
that--
But, see if I am going to write all night! A happy New Year, dearest.
Extend the greetings of the season to all in your house.
Thy Loving Monde.
CHAPTER V.
MONDE TO EDITH.
_Danville, Jan. 12, 1852._
Edith, dear, how often I write to you. But it relieves me to throw my
story by, and gossip in this careless way. And, moreover, I must be
telling somebody how happy I am; and how the days go, day after day, as
if on the wings of the morning. I would not have believed that there was
any thing like it on this earth; that I, or any one, could ever be so
thoroughly comfortable. I suppose it is because uncle and Mr. Cullen
talk so much of those excellent things that keep us close by Heaven. I
don’t suppose it is any thing else. Only it is pleasant riding every
day, sometimes twice a day; sometimes on Kate’s back, sometimes in a
sleigh; oftenest, of late, in a sleigh. It is good seeing aunt so kind,
so attentive to all our wishes, and so happy--and so facetious, too, in
her way. Hear what a curious thing she said to-day, when uncle and Dr.
Ponchard were discussing the medical systems. Uncle, by the by, is a
homoeopathist. “Husband seems to think, as you see, Dr. Ponchard, that
the practice of medicine must needs change with all other practices;
that the great pills, for instance, as large as bullets, belong to the
almost by-gone age of bullets. I don’t know, I am sure, but he believes
that people will be so refined by the time the transition state is
fairly over, that nothing but rarefied air will be thought of for
remedies. And if he does, I shall think he is right, doctor.”
“Ha! no doubt whatever of that,” said the doctor, who is a sort of witty
bear. “No doubt you will have implicit faith in the rarefied-air system,
if the judge ever comes to preach it. You’ll be found with a tube in
your mouth, breathing it whenever you have a little indigestion or
headache.”
Aunt laughed, and filled the huge pockets of the doctor’s fur overcoat
with apples for his wife and children.
Hear how diligent I am. I have been writing since five o’clock. I began
an hour earlier than usual, because we are to have visitors from Barnet
to spend the day, so that I must be hindered.
Mr. Cullen has been reading in the parlor since six; now it is almost
seven. He yawns, he moves about; I fancy he is tired of his books. I do
not allow him to come into the library in the morning, because then it
disturbs me having him near. After they are stirring in all the rest of
the rooms, I don’t mind it; and he sits here by the hour. He yawns
again, says, “Heigho!” and sees to the fire. “Monde!” he says, as if
there were something that he will no longer try to bear.
“What say, sir?”
“It is so hot and stupid here, a fellow can have no comfort.” (Shutting
the stove door.) “I am coming into your cool room. May I?”
“Yes.”
“Shall I disturb you?”--coming.
“No, sir.”
“‘No, sir!’ so I see. You can write, and talk, and have me about--it
isn’t so much as if Ponto had come into the room instead of me. I have a
good mind to try whether there is a way of disturbing you a little. I
shall sit here close by you, and keep scolding. Yes, I see. You only
smile quietly at this, and go on writing. I am provoked! I want you to
talk with me; want you to care more about me than about this old
‘commercial pen’ of yours. Will you?”
“I can’t,” laughing.
“Then I will steal your pen. I will hold your hand--thus--”
* * * * *
_Evening._
He stole my pen, and threw it to the other side of the table. He held my
hand, and called me “an obstinate thing! but a dear good girl--a _dear_
good girl, for all that.” He would keep my hand; and soon I ceased
trying to regain it--for he was telling me, in the dearest voice, what
he had been reading and thinking; so that I forgot every thing but that
I was happy enough to go straight away to Heaven. And I wish at this
moment, Edith, that I might die--for I cannot believe that such
happiness as this can last; and I would rather die than have it broken.
I know what you will say. You will say that I love Mr. Cullen; and I
expect that I do. I expect that I have loved him since the day that he
came. And I shall never regret this, even if I find that it is only
friendliness he feels for me, if I find that he loves and marries
another--for my life is enriched and beautified by the new emotions, by
the love of one so noble, so pure!
For the present, aunt looks smilingly on, takes Mr. Cullen’s part when
he and uncle are both going to ride, and both lay claims to my company.
She adjusts the matter by saying, “Frederic, let her go with Alfred! He
isn’t going to stay long, you know. And, besides, I want to go with you
myself. So just bring my hood and cloak in from the hall, while I am
finding the rest of my things.”
“Yes, ‘finding the rest of your things!’ this takes a week; and this is
why I like it best having Monde go with me.” But, notwithstanding uncle
contends I can see that he likes best seeing me go and come with Mr.
Cullen. Notwithstanding he and aunt send Mr. Cullen or me in every
morning to see how it is with Paulina’s neuralgia, they are neither of
them much sorry to be told that her face is still swelled out of all
comeliness of shape with it, so that she will not see either of us. Her
mother, by the way, says she took cold wearing such thin stockings over
here the day that Mr. Cullen came. She would wear them, she says,
because she wanted to pinch her feet up in her tight summer boots.
“A silly puss!” said uncle, when aunt told him about it. “I wonder how a
woman can imagine that any person of sense cares a fig whether her foot
is like an elephant or a mouse.”
We rode a long way to-day, for our visitors were old people, who cared
more for talking with uncle and aunt about their fathers and
grandfathers and great-uncles, than for all Mr. Cullen and I had to say
to them. And the day and the scenery were magnificent. I wonder if you
know, Edith, mine, that one never needs go to Italy because one is
longing to look upon deep blue skies, sunsets, and moonlights splendid
enough to bewitch one; and upon mountains, great and small, ranging off
like troops of living monsters. One needs only come to New England;
here, to this hilly town, Danville. And one should come, at least once
in one’s life, in the winter of the year; for the so much bepraised
summer glory must yield to the winter, if many mountains are in the
scene, and such noble ones as Mount Washington and its kindred. Their
snowy lights are softened by the distance, and their shades deepened, so
that, at midday, it is as if they were all of pearl. They lie along the
whole eastern horizon; and when the sun takes a golden setting, there
can hardly be any thing much finer of its kind in all Italy, in all
Switzerland, I imagine; for a reflected glory is upon the mountains as
varied nearly, nearly as intense as that which immediately surrounds the
sun.
We talked of Alice to-day as we rode; and Mr. Cullen had serious eyes
and hushed tones, as if he had infinite tenderness for her memory.
“I think as your uncle and aunt do, that you are like Alice in many
respects, dear Monde,” said he, leaning a little toward me, as if he
felt tenderness for me, in that he felt it for the dead Alice. “Only,”
he added, “as the judge says, you have much the superior character. You
have, I see, the pliancy of the reed, when you need to bend, and the
consistency of the oak, when you need to stand erect. I like the way you
bear praise,” added he, after a little pause. “I suppose you would bear
the same amount of fault-finding as quietly.”
“Try me, and see.”
“Yes; for instance, if I tell you that you have a certain obstinate
self-reliance, piquant to see.”
“Well?”
“And then if I were to tell you that I like the little wickedness, like
to close hands with it, and master it.”
“Then I would tell you that you are downright vicious! But you don’t
master it; you never can!”
“Yes; you ride with me when you have just been saying that you certainly
will stay at home. I throw away your pen and hold you fast, when you
have just been saying that you will write, that you care less for me
than for your old pen. Don’t you remember it?”
“Yes.”
“So do I. I like to remember it, because, for some reason, it is better
mastering you once, than any other woman that I know ten times.”
I turned the conversation by showing him the beautiful little brook that
went leaping and tinkling amongst the rocks, and icicles, and fairy-like
frost-work close by the road. One finds such little brooks at every turn
among the hills here at Danville. He looked at the brook, calling it
“beautiful!” He took my hand into his, and kept it until we reached
home.
He must go home in a few days; he has stayed already twice as long as he
intended when he came. I wonder how I can get along without him. I
foresee that I shall want him as a child wants its mother.
I will write again soon after he goes. Heigho! says
Your Loving Monde.
CHAPTER VI.
MONDE TO EDITH.
_Danville, Jan. 20, 1852._
He went yesterday morning early; and since that time I go from one chair
to another, or from one window to another, sighing, and with untold
quantities of lead in my heart. I am disposed not to write, not to talk,
or do any thing, but turn my eyes Boston-ward, and think of him.
But I shall not be so stupid! I shall put a little stiff barrier--my own
flinty will, of course--between me and him, so that he shall be there at
Boston, and I here, following diligently my duty. I shall lay this
letter by, and finish my story for Mr. S----. Then I shall ask uncle to
ride with me over to see Bessy’s feeble sister, Mrs. Thornton, who has a
whole roomfull of little children to see to; and to whom an hour’s
service, now and then, at making or mending, is a blessed godsend. Then
I will take my sewing in, and sit a few hours with Paulina, whose
neuralgia still afflicts her. I will stay and take supper with her; and
if she is cross, as she is often of late, it shall not hurt me, since I
will be good-natured.
In the long evening I will be here; I will snap corn, pass round apples;
sit now at aunt’s feet, help her in her sewing-plans, and then at
uncle’s, talking with him of Kossuth, Clay, Cass, and Webster.
When they go, if I am in wakeful mood, I will write here until I am in a
drowsy one, and then go to my rest, humbly commending myself to God as
his servant, his follower; not the servant, not the follower of any
mortal idol whatever. Thus shall my soul be kept loyal unto itself and
unto Him--and not the less loyal unto the good one who has chosen me.
* * * * *
_Ten o’clock, evening._
Uncle set us and our great basket, full of good things, down at the door
of the Thorntons, and himself rode on to Hardwick, where he had business
that must keep him until after dinner, as he believed. The pale mother
was “glad and thankful to see us,” but a little flurried to have us find
her children in such disorderly array; and her house, too--it is a bit
of a house to hold ten people, and made of logs. But we took the
children to us, gave them apples and doughnuts, and soon had Mrs.
Thornton’s great work-basket between us. We finished off three little
garments that were on the way, and put on ten patches here and there;
Alice, aunt’s bright-eyed namesake, counted them. We cut off the long
hair of the girl’s, and made the short hair of the boys shorter; and
then, when they had all been washed and combed, saw that there is
nowhere a prettier, brighter family of children. Aunt, meantime, was
like a bee, dipping into this and into that; dragging roll after roll of
pieces from her basket, whenever a patch was needed; and helping Mrs.
Thornton warm up the pudding and the pies we had brought, and fry the
sausages and broil the steak.
Mr. Thornton and his eldest boy came in from the woods just at the right
moment--just as all the steaming dishes were ready to go to the table.
Uncle, too, came in the right time; in fact there was never so lucky a
day; every thing happened at the right time, and in the right way. There
was never so good a dinner; or, at any rate, this was what we all said,
smacking our lips a little, and holding out our plates for more.
“This will do us all a great deal of good,” said Mrs. Thornton, when we
were putting on our things.
“And us, too, Mrs. Thornton!” said aunt; in a hearty way. “I havn’t had
a pleasanter time for many a day. And I don’t believe Monde has.”
“No, aunt, I havn’t.”
And it was the truth, Edith. Happy as I have been with Alfred Cullen, I
was as happy without him--just thinking of him now and then, as I sat
there putting on patches, and doing with right good will whatever came
into my way to do.
Let me tell you a little story, dear Edith, and then I am done. Two or
three days ago, at about this time of the evening, there sat on this
spot, a gentleman of fine features, of easy, manly bearing, and a lady.
The lady was not beautiful. The best that could be said of her on the
score of beauty, her sincere friend, Edith Manners, had said to her one
day; “You are not so homely as you think, Miss Monde. You have beautiful
hair, beautiful teeth--and I think a great deal of one’s having pretty
teeth. Your form is excellent; and your ways have an abundance of grace
and ease in them.”
This was all Edith Manners could say to her friend; and more than many
others would have said, who knew her less familiarly; for she had, in
truth, grace and ease in her manners only when she had grace and
quietness in her soul; that it was sometimes said of her by those she
would gladly have pleased, “I don’t fancy her; she has a hard manner.”
Well, they sat here, those two, in their easy-chairs, and rocked and
talked, with their eyes steadily on each other’s face. He held her hand
in his, and kissed the fingers ever and anon as he talked and listened.
At length he folded her close to his heart, and, with his lips on hers,
called her--his “beloved!”
The next morning, when they met here, on the spot so sacred and dear to
them both now, he took her to him once more, and said, “When will my
Monde be _all_ my own?”
She, “pliant as a reed,” and with her arms clinging to him, answered,
“Any time, dear Alfred--any time!” because, you see, she felt then,
Edith, that she could not well live without him a day.
But it seems to have been demonstrated that she can--for he left her the
following morning, after it had been agreed that they will both write
immediately to her parents; that, their replies being propitious, he
will accompany her to them in one month, and, in six months more, he
will receive her at their hands; that, after two or three weeks spent
there, he will bring her to his own home, to pass the rest of her happy
life by his side.
And here ends my story. Only I must tell you how good uncle and aunt
are. Aunt wept for joy, as if she would suffocate, when Alfred, standing
close before me, with my hand in his, told her and uncle our resolves.
Uncle, also, had moist eyes. He stood one moment near us, the next he
walked the floor. I presume he thought of the dear Alice. I did; and
longed that the blessings of her glorified spirit might be upon our
union.
“You shall be as a daughter to me in all respects, Monde,” said uncle,
speaking with difficulty. “I have loved you as if you were my daughter,
ever since you came. Whatever you need to have done, I shall attend
to--if you will come to me always, as though I were your father. And you
will, Monde?”
I answered the imploring voice, the imploring eyes, by catching the hand
extended to me in both my own, and covering it with grateful tears and
kisses.
I have had letters from home within a few days. And mother wrote--“You
will feel quite lost when you come. We’ve moved into a large and
beautiful tenement on B. street, close by the Haydens, and fitted the
front parlor all up new, taking the old parlor furniture for the
sitting-room. I hope you’ll like these changes better than poor Kit
does. Your father brought her over here in a basket, covered, that she
might not see the way and be running back. But we missed her, and your
father went over to see if he could find her at the old rooms, and there
the poor creature was, prowling about the open cellar window, as lean
and hungry-looking as a wolf. Your father worries half of his time about
her, when he is in the house. I really think he wishes he had stayed
there too. Now that it is becoming an old thing, I see that he is often
tired of so much to do. He gets the best of business, I mean business
that pays the best; but his responsibilities wear him, and he has
trouble with some of his clients. When he has been working day and night
for them, they are as likely as any way to think that he hasn’t done
enough.
“I have my troubles, too. I ought to be ashamed to complain, I suppose,
now we are doing so well, but when you come you will see, as I do, that
there are vexations for those who have enough of every thing, as well as
for the poor. Perhaps you will think, as your father and I are sometimes
inclined to, that it isn’t worth while to look for much real, lasting
happiness in this world, or for any benefit that hasn’t its tax.”
Yes, one sees how it is with my poor parents; poor in their adversity,
poor now in their prosperity. They look to the _outward_ conditions of
their lot for a great good that shall be final; for a life serene and
well-satisfied that shall make its way into them, from without; from the
new friends, the fast-filling purse, the freshly adorned home. Would
that they and all the world could know that every good, every real
enjoyment of life, is born of God _in the soul_. There Love, the Divine
Life, the Artist-Life, the Blessed Life, whatever we call it, has its
genial, its beloved home. Ah, Heaven! to have this love within us, so
that we must burst forth into singing; to have it beaming thence upon
our friends, our home, upon the earth, crowning them all with glory and
light!--this is to know how good God is, in that He made and endowed us
specially for this kind of life. Only we have sought out many
inventions; have picked up one thing and another on our right hand and
on our left, calling the laborious, unseemly patch-work we have in this
way made up, Life. That we _must_ pay a tax grievous to be borne on
this, is one of the merciful dispensations, for it brings us to look for
that to come, which will come without price, which will surely come, if
we will accept nothing else, if we will wait for it, and receive it like
little children.
Thine, dear,
Monde Hedelquiver.
* * * * *
=WELLINGTON.=
=A MILITARY BIOGRAPHY.=
=BY WILLIAM DOWE.=
Le tambour d’en Haut a bat le rappel. Soult, Duke of Dalmatia.
There’s a lean fellow beats all conquerors. Dekkar.
The last survivor of those celebrated chieftains who flashed their
swords and waved their crests on the great battle-field of Europe in the
Napoleonic war, has gone to his place. Half a pound of indigestible
venison has done what the hostile bayonets and bullets of the French and
the Mahrattas failed to do, in a military career of twenty years.
Arthur, Duke of Wellington, born in the same year with the greater
Corsican, outlived him over thirty years, and died at Walmer Castle, on
the 14th of September last. He witnessed a great many of the most
extraordinary doings of the last half century, and was, himself--a great
portion of them--_quorum pars magna fuit_. He hurried on the current of
events which led to the fall of the great Mongol throne of Tamerlane and
Arungzebe; and his hand gave the last bloody stroke which overthrew that
of Napoleon.
Arthur Wesley or Wellesley--for the name seems to have been elongated,
as a matter of dignity, like that of Abram of old--was born at Dangan,
in Ireland, on the first of May, 1769--a fortnight before Bonaparte saw
the light upon the sheet of Gobelin tapestry which represented “the tale
of Troy divine.” His grandfather was Garret Wesley, an Irish gentleman
of good family, made Baron of Mornington by George II., in 1747. The
Wesley family has given the world another great man. It is stated that
John Wesley, the preacher, belonged to it; a man whose evangelical
renown is as immortal as that of the soldier. The earldom of Mornington
was not a wealthy one; and, after the death of her husband, the
countess--mother of the British Gracchi (for the Marquis Wellesley was
also famous)--brought up her four children, of whom Arthur was the
youngest, in very narrow circumstances.
At an early age the latter, not having benefited much from his
education, said he would be a soldier, and was sent to Angiers in
France, where he studied the science of military engineering, under the
famous Pignerol, about the time Napoleon was doing the same at Brienne.
Great elements of future storms were at that moment fomenting in the
kingdom of France! At the age of eighteen, Arthur Wellesley having
returned home, got his ensigncy. By purchase and quick promotion, he was
lieutenant-colonel in his twenty-fourth year. The first campaign he
engaged in was as disastrous as his last was fortunate. The enemy was
the same. In 1794 he joined the army of the Duke of York, then striving
to drive the French republicans out of the Netherlands. But his royal
highness was driven out himself in 1795. The soft young bishop of
Osnaburg was not the man to cope with the fiery generals of the
Convention. Thus ended Arthur Wellesley’s first campaign.
The scene now changes to India. From a mere foothold and factory, on the
shore, the English had in half a century won, thanks to Lord Clive, a
vast extent of territory round the three Presidencies of Bombay, Madras
and Calcutta. A company of merchants had done all this--the East India
Company--whose chartered monopoly existed up to 1814. At the close of
the last century the empire of the Mongols had dwindled away, and the
Mahrattas, a wild people who rose fifty years before, possessed a large
portion of the appanage of the Great Mogul. This last was dozing out his
life in the palace of his renowned ancestors at Delhi. His empire in
falling had broken into pieces. The Mahrattas formed one of these, and
another, was the kingdom of Mysore, made so famous by the usurpation and
bravery of Hyder Alee and his son, the Sultaun Tippoo Saib.
In 1798 the Earl of Mornington went out to India as governor-general,
and his brother, the colonel, accompanied him. Their earliest attention
was given to Tippoo, who, from the table-land of Mysore made the
Carnatic tremble at the name of his formidable cavalry. He was also in
close connection with the French, and had given them repeated assurances
that he would join his forces with theirs and annihilate the British
power in India. Therefore, in March 1799, the Anglo-Indian army under
General Harris, 37,000 strong, marched toward Tippoo, fully determined
to put him out of the way. The advance was fiercely obstructed by the
spahis of Mysore till, manœuvring and skirmishing repeatedly, the
invading army had reached the walls of Tippoo’s capital, Seringapatam.
Between the British camp and the city lay some ruined villages, an
aqueduct and a grove of cocoas and bamboos, which were desperately
defended, and taken with great difficulty and loss. After a month’s
delay outside the city, the besiegers prepared to get into it, by storm,
through a breach made in the wall. French troops and engineers in the
pay of Tippoo made the siege of Seringapatam a formidable undertaking.
But a forlorn hope, crossing a ditch under fire, scrambled into the
breach, and, other troops following, Seringapatam was taken, resisting
furiously. Tippoo had gone out early in the morning to the outer
rampart, to look at the camp. While there, he was surprised to hear that
the English were entering the breach. Calling for his carbine, he
hurried with his guard to the place, and on the rampart met his soldiers
running before the stormers. He bid them stop, with a loud voice, and
ordered them to rush back again; at the same time he fired his carbine
repeatedly on the English. But the fugitives went by, and left him with
a small body of officers and attendants, still firing on the assaulters.
At last he turned to fly from the rampart to the gate of the inner fort.
Hurrying through this he saw the English within and received two balls
in the breast. He fell from his horse, and was then dragged from the
crowd and put upon a palanquin. The Europeans soon rushed in, and a
soldier laying hold of the diamond-studded sword-belt worn by the
sultaun, attempted to drag it off. A servant, as he was making his
escape, turned and saw Tippoo make a sweep of his sword at the man and
cut him on the knee, whereupon the latter put his piece to his shoulder
and shot the sultaun dead through the temple. More carnage followed in
this spot till at last the fort was won. When Tippoo’s palace and his
sons were taken, the conquerors sought the chief himself; the cry went
that he was dead; and that night, by torchlight, General Baird and his
officers proceeded to search for the body in the gateway. About three
hundred dead bodies were dragged away, and then the _killedar_ of the
palace recognized the half-stripped body of Tippoo. His splendid turban,
jacket and sword-belt were gone. When dragged out, the body was so warm,
and the open eyes looked so life-like, that Colonel Wellesley laid his
hands on the heart and the wrist before he could believe it was a
corpse. An officer present cut off from the right arm a _talisman_ in
fine flowered silk--inclosing an amulet of a silvery substance, and a
piece of parchment with Persian and Arabic words. Napoleon also wore an
amulet, said to be that of Charlemagne.
After the fall of Tippoo, the little grandson of the rajah whom Hyder
Alee had deposed, forty years before, was put in his place, and held his
throne in subserviency to the English. A Mysore chief named Doondhia
still attempted to hold out, but Colonel Wellesley defeated and killed
him.
Next came the Mahratta war. The chief of the Mahratta confederacy--the
Peishwa--resided at Poonah, his capital; acknowledging, in a shadowy and
nominal way the supremacy of the shadowy Mogul emperor, Shah Allum, who
dozed away his life at Delhi. But the peishwa’s authority was
over-shadowed by his powerful subject, Ras Scindiah, who wielded the
military power of the Mahrattas to make war or peace with the English.
The latter, now, either thought he had been assisting Tippoo, or feared
he might be a troublesome neighbor in connection with the French; so
they prepared to take advantage of events. Holkar, another Mahratta
chief, having gone to war against Scindiah and thrown the kingdom into
confusion, the poor peishwa ran away from Poonah and put himself under
British protection. The case was therefore a clear one. In 1803 General
Wellesley proceeded, at the head of an army, into the Mahratta territory
and restored the peishwa. In the same year, Lord Lake marched northward
to Delhi, drove out the French, who had there exercised a certain
influence over Shah Allum and bringing forth that poor, blind monarch
(one of his Mahratta rebels had scooped out his eyes with a dagger!)
placed him on the imperial _musnud_ of India, under British protection!
Meantime, the Mahratta chiefs who would not submit to the Anglified fled
pieshwa, were to be punished. Wellesley marched against Scindiah and the
Rajah of Berar, and overthrew them at Assaye; and Lord Lake demolished
the armies of Holkar. The whole peninsula of India was now virtually
subject to the British.
The East India Company gave Wellesley a sword worth one thousand
guineas, for his services, and William Pitt made him a knight. In 1805
he returned to England with his brother, now _Marquis_ Wellesley. In
that year he became a member of the House of Commons. In 1806 he was
again engaged in hot work. He married Elisabeth Pakenham, daughter of
Lord Longford and sister of the general who fell at New Orleans; and was
then sent on the Copenhagen expedition. England, dreading that Napoleon,
who now bestrode Europe like a colossus, would lay hands on the fleet of
Denmark for the purposes of invasion, resolved, with the promptness and
decision which distinguish her in difficult emergencies, to lay hands on
it first. An armament under Lord Cathcart and Admiral Gambier went for
the ships, and receiving a refusal bombarded Copenhagen in the most
terrible manner; while Sir Arthur Wellesley manœuvred and beat the Danes
on shore. In the midst of a general conflagration of the city the fleet
was surrendered and carried away. All Europe--Napoleon and the French
particularly--cried out against this high-handed business. It is still a
great theme of discussion at historical societies in England, where it
is not yet decided.
We have now come to the Peninsular War. Napoleon had declared all Europe
in a state of blockade and forbade the nations to trade with England.
But they would trade. He then resolved to take the coast kingdoms of
Spain and Portugal into his own power; and seized his opportunity. In
1807, in consequence of the household quarrels of the imbecile Spanish
Bourbons, he marched his troops into Spain under pretence of assisting
Charles IV. against his son Ferdinand. Charles was induced to abdicate.
Napoleon sent for Ferdinand; and in April 1808, Charles, his queen,
Ferdinand, Don Carlos and Godoy were together, in a room at Bayonne, in
presence of Napoleon; all the family in his clutches! The queen abused
Ferdinand in the most shocking manner for his conduct to his father,
who, she said, was not his father, after all! The interview was a
terrible one--the calm, imperturbable face of Napoleon looking sternly
on. Modern annals do not furnish the painter with a finer historic
subject. Napoleon took the father and son, sent them to separate prisons
in France, and put his brother Joseph on the throne. But, as Delavigne
says:
“The hope was vain: stoled priests and belted chiefs
Roused each the other up, and proudly woke
To loftier thought the popular beliefs,
And fired a nation’s spirit as they spoke.”
The haughty people of Spain ran to arms to expel the foreign garrisons.
England loudly cheered on the furies of insurrection in the Peninsula,
and sent Sir Arthur Wellesley, in 1808, with an army of 9000 men to
coöperate with the Spaniards. When he reached Corunna he found that the
Junta, relying upon the strength of the patriots, were not desirous to
receive the troops. But they advised the general to proceed to Portugal
and attempt to drive the French from that country, which they had
likewise occupied. Sir Arthur proceeded to Mondego Bay, a little to the
north of Lisbon, then garrisoned by the French. It was of this landing
that Sir Walter Scott sung, in his “Vision of Don Roderick:”
“It was a dread, yet spirit-stirring sight:
The billows foamed beneath a thousand oars,
Fast as they land, the red-cross ranks unite,
Legions on legions brightening all the shores.
Then banners rise, the cannon-signal roars,
Then peels the warlike thunder of the drum,
Thrills the loud fife, the trumpet’s flourish pours,
And patriot hopes awake and doubts are dumb,
For, bold in Freedom’s name, the bands of ocean come.”
Sir Arthur repulsed the French in the engagement of Rolica. He also beat
them at the battle of Vimiera, during which Sir Harry Burrard, his
superior in command, arrived on the ground; but left the honor of the
day to Wellesley. Junot, Duke of Abrantes, then sent a flag of truce and
offered to evacuate Portugal. The convention of Cintra followed, signed
by Sir Hew Dalrymple, Sir H. Burrard and Wellesley, on the part of
England; and the French army was sent home in British vessels. This
treaty was vehemently denounced in England, and public opinion pelted
the three generals. Byron alludes to the matter in Childe Harold:
“Convention is the dwarfish demon styled
That foiled the knights in Marialva’s dome
Of brains, if brains they had he them beguiled
And turned a nation’s shallow joy to gloom.”
Byron was mistaken in supposing the treaty was signed in the house of
the Marquis of Marialva. Another and a greater disaster was mourned,
soon after, in England. Sir John Moore who had marched, at the close of
1808, at the head of a small army into the heart of Spain, where he was
disappointed in the Spanish assistance he expected, and threatened with
destruction by the victorious French armies who had taken Madrid, began
his disastrous retreat of 250 miles toward the sea, and arrived, at
last, at Corunna, where his harassed and tormented spirit found rest.
“Slowly and sadly they laid him down
From the field of his fame fresh and gory;
They carved not a line, they raised not a stone,
But they left him alone with his glory.”
A couple of months after this event--in April 1809--Sir Arthur Wellesley
was at Lisbon, in command of the British and Portuguese armies. Marching
rapidly northward he made the passage of the Douro in face of the
enemy--one of the most remarkable achievements of the war--and entered
the city of Oporto. The French fled away in such a hurry that Sir Arthur
ate the dinner cooked for Marshal Soult. Following up his success
immediately, he drove the marshal precipitately out of Portugal. In
July, he crossed the frontier into Spain; where, having formed a
junction with Cuesta--a respectable old general who always moved about
in a carriage--he marched to Talavera. Here the allied armies met the
French, under King Joseph, Jourdain, Victor and Sabastiani. The latter
were the assailants in a series of brilliant and desperate movements;
but they were boldly confronted and baffled by the admirable strategy of
the English commander. The French fell back on the night of the battle.
But Sir Arthur fell back in a week, and left all his wounded to the care
of Mortier, at Talavera. Dreading that the junction of Soult and Ney
might cut off his communication with Portugal, he retired to the
frontiers of Spain by the Tagus.
Byron has celebrated or satirised Talavera in Childe Harold:
“Three hosts combine to offer sacrifice;
Three tongues prefer strange orisons on high;
Three gaudy standards flout the pale blue skies;
The shouts are, France, Spain, Albion, Victory!
The foe, the victim, and the fond ally
That fights for all, but ever fights in vain,
Are met, as if at home they could not die,
To feed the crow on Talavera plain
And fertilize the field that each pretends to gain!”
Sir Arthur was now created Lord Wellington--though the English did not
like to hear of the retreating movements. The French generals were
victorious in Spain, and the year 1809 closed darkly on the hopes of the
junta.
In the beginning of 1810, they were almost driven into the sea. Upon the
shore of it the enemy besieged them in Cadiz. Lord Wellington was with
the allied army on the frontiers of Portugal; and when Massena, having
taken Ciudad Rodrigo and Almeida, advanced upon the latter kingdom, the
English general retired, but with his face to the marshal. In this
attitude, he hurled back the French, in the brilliant affair of Busaco;
and so continued to retire till he reached the sea, which, every where
seems to wear a friendly face for the English. Here Wellington fortified
himself within the impregnable mountain lines of Torres
Vedras--extending thirty miles along the coast, from the Tagus to the
mouth of the Sissandro. In this position he had the English fleet at his
back. During his retreat he had laid waste Portugal--cleared the country
of every thing that could support or assist Massena. The sufferings of
the poor Portuguese--burghers and peasantry--were pitiable. But the
French army suffered most. At the close of the year, weakened by want of
provisions and desertion, Massena struck his camp and retired. In the
beginning of March, Wellington quitted his mountain fortress and
followed him. The country was extensively wasted by Massena in his
retreat, and in April, 1811, the French were forced out of Portugal.
This year was consumed in a series of bloody and fruitless movements.
In the beginning of 1812, Wellington besieged and took Ciudad Rodrigo,
and, on the 6th of April, he stormed Badajos--one of the most sanguinary
affairs of the kind in modern warfare. Soult, who was advancing to
relieve that fortress, retired on hearing of its fall, and, being
followed by the allies, the great battle of Salamanca was fought in
July. Marmont was defeated and lost his right arm; his dispatches to the
minister at war were signed with his left hand. The blockade of Cadiz
was now raised, at the end of twenty-one months, and the junta felt more
at ease. Lord Wellington made a splendid entry into Madrid, and was
hailed as the deliverer of the Peninsula. But it was not yet delivered.
He pursued the French northward as far as Burgos, which place he
besieged and tried to take by assault. But hearing that the French were
greatly reinforced and fearing his communication with Portugal might be
cut off, he raised the siege and retraced his steps in October, pursued
in turn by Soult.
Then began the English retreat to the Douro; disgraceful as well as
disastrous. The confusion, bad conduct, and insubordination of the army
were extraordinary; it seemed completely demoralized by the reverse. The
soldiers thought they were advancing to the French frontiers; instead of
which, they were carried back again across Spain and Portugal. Thousands
of the men deserted; and Wellington said his troops were “more
ill-behaved and undisciplined than any army he ever read or heard of.”
At the same time the Spanish general, Ballasteros, refused to listen to
or obey him--a heretic foreigner--for which, on Wellington’s complaint,
the Cortes cashiered and imprisoned him. The English general, leaving
his army in Portuguese cantonments, went down to the junta at Cadiz, and
there made such representations of the evils of a divided command, and
told them so plainly his determination not to act without receiving the
plenary powers he needed, that he was made generalissimo of the united
armies of England and the Peninsula.
In 1813 the terrible effects of the Russian campaign began to be felt in
Spain. French armies were withdrawn to fill the place of “those veteran
hearts that were wasted” beside the Berezina. Wellington, the supreme
chief, again advanced, and for the last time, from his base of
operations in Portugal. But for this sea-washed position, he would have
been driven out of the Peninsula long before. The giant Antreus, when
overthrown, instantly recovered when he touched mother earth.
Wellington, in his defeats, recovered whenever he touched the sea. He
now turned his back upon it, and marched for the Pyrenees. From the
frontiers of Portugal he followed the French, who retreated on Burgos.
In June he beat King Joseph at Vittoria, and following the French to
Pamplona, forced them to enter France by the Bidassoa and other points.
But France was not to be invaded without a bloody struggle. Soult, who
had received reinforcements from those terrific conscriptions with which
Napoleon was decimating France, once more turned upon Wellington. He
attacked and beat the English generals in several desperate engagements
in the defile of Puerto Maya, and the pass of Roncesvalles.
Where Charlemagne with all his peerage fell,
By Fontarrabia.
The French fought desperately--as they were doing at the same moment, to
protect the German frontiers of France against the Russians and
Austrians. At the close of 1813, San Sebastian was besieged and taken;
and the English soldiery rioted over the fallen city, with the most
horrible brutality and license.
Napoleon now seeing his affairs desperate, took Ferdinand of Spain out
of prison, and made a treaty of peace and friendship with him. But the
Cortes refused to sanction it. In the beginning of 1814 Lord Wellington
entered France, and dispatched General Beresford to Bourdeaux, which
city he entered in triumph, accompanied by the Duc d’Angouleme. On the
14th of April was fought the battle of Thoulouse, in which Soult
endeavored to oppose the progress of Wellington.
In the meantime, Napoleon, who had fought like a wild animal at bay,
against the advance of the allies, was forced to abdicate at
Fontainbleau, and go away to Elba. Returning thence to Paris, in the
beginning of 1815, by one of the most daring and brilliant marches ever
made by any soldier, he reached the Thuilleries, while the French
princes hurried in consternation along the road to Ghent. At the end of
three months the French emperor proceeded into Belgium to annihilate the
nearest of his enemies--the Anglo-Belgian and Prussian armies, before
the others should come up. It has been said Wellington was taken by
surprise. This might have been so--as regarded the exact hour of
Napoleon’s coming; but he was not disconcerted. He and many of his
officers were at the Duchess of Richmond’s ball, in Brussels, when they
heard of the sudden advance of the French.
And then was mounting in hot haste; the steed,
The mustering squadron, and the clattering car,
Went pouring forward with impetuous speed,
And swiftly forming in the ranks of war;
As the deep thunder, peal on peal afar,
And near, the beat of the alarming drum
Roused up the soldier ere the morning star;
While thronged the citizens, with terror dumb,
Or whispering with white lips, the foe, they come, they come!
Meantime, the emperor, moving rapidly on Brussels, drove in the English
at the battle of Quatre Bras, on the 10th, and the Prussians, at Ligny,
on the 17th of June. But, on the 18th, he was checked by the memorable
hollow squares of Waterloo. On that day was fought one of the most
renowned battles of the world--the most decisive of modern times. In
antiquity, the battles most resembling it seem to have been Platæa,
where Mardonius and the Persians were overthrown, and the fight of
Cannæ, in Italy, where the Napoleon of the Punic War prostrated the
military strength, but not the republican courage of Rome. For nearly
the entire day the British squares withstood the vehement cavalry
charges of the French, and so rough-handled and weakened them, that
when, toward evening, the Prussians came up in great force, the
emperor’s army was wearied, and ready for a repulse. He ordered one more
charge in column--that of his Young Guard--(the Old Guard was asleep in
Russia)--headed by Ney. But it was broken by the firmness of the English
guards. Wellington himself was with these last, and doubtless his
presence gave them increased spirit and steadiness. The column--the last
forlorn hope of empire--was struck and scattered by the musketry in
front, and the flank charges of cavalry; and then the career of Napoleon
was at an end. And, for one great tyrant beaten down, a dozen others,
great and small, reigned in his stead--their unholy alliance sitting
like an incubus on the rights and hopes of exhausted Europe.
After the return of the Bourbons, the Duke of Wellington remained for
three years in France, at the head of the Army of Occupation. His
residence in Paris was the Elysee Bourbon--that lately occupied by Louis
Napoleon. He has been blamed for not saving the life of Marshal Ney, who
had in 1814 sworn fidelity to the Bourbons, and, in 1815, gone back to
the emperor. Byron, who was always fierce on the duke, says, addressing
him,
Glory like yours, should any dare gainsay,
Humanity would rise and thunder, _Nay_!
Wellington, when speaking to his intimate friends concerning the
execution of Marshal Ney--which he undoubtedly could have
prevented--merely said, “It was no concern of his.” It never was part of
Wellington’s character to give way to any sentimental feeling. In 1818
his army left Paris; which occasion Beranger has signalised in one of
the finest of his lyrics: _La Sainte Alliance des Peuples_:
O peoples! forgetting all by-gone defiance,
Join hands, for yourselves, in a Holy Alliance!
The renown of Wellington was now only inferior to that of the late
emperor: He was a prince, a noble, or a knight, in almost all the
European codes of honor;
His honorable titles
Would crack an elephant’s back,
as Shirley says. Thenceforward he sat in the English House of Peers--a
moderate politician, and a wealthy man. He had got a dukedom, and nearly
a million and a half pounds sterling from parliament, and his pensions
and other emoluments from successive offices he held were not less than
£15,000 a year. In 1819, being First Lord of the Treasury, in Peel’s
ministry, he advised that the Catholics should be emancipated--as they
were insisting on it so furiously. For this a good many Tory missiles
were sent rattling about his laureled head. But he did not mind them; he
had heard the rattling of more deadly things. During the agitation for
reform, to which he had opposed himself, the London mob, in 1831, pelted
Apsley House, situated at the corner of Hyde Park, and broke several of
his windows. Instead of mending them he got iron shutters to them, and
they have remained closed ever since--a tacit reproach to the
commonality of the capital. But that gust soon blew over, and, latterly,
Englishmen of all classes were proud of the old duke--such a
distinguished champion and evidence of their military glory. Wherever he
went, he was stared at or cheered. Riding along the streets of the West
End, followed by a single groom, his stooping figure and white head were
well known. Hats would fly off as he passed, and he always raised his
finger to the rim of his own in return. He was one of the most regular
attendants on his duties in Parliament, and mingled in all the
amusements and ceremonies of the aristocracy, as if he was no more than
one of themselves. His growing years seemed to trouble his mind very
little. Like Frederick the Great, he appeared to put aside all thoughts
of senility and death, by the closeness of his attention to his daily
duties and occupations of all sorts. He did not ponder on that “fell
sergeant;” or, if he did, he probably thought of him as an old
acquaintance he had seen somewhere in either of the two peninsulas--the
Indian or the Iberian; a sergeant, in fact, who did duty under himself,
along with the rest of the sergeants! Latterly, his son, Lord Charles,
and his daughter-in-law, kept house for him in Piccadilly; and thus left
the _insouciant_ old militaire at liberty to attend all the galas of the
court, and all the balls and reunions of Belgravia. On great court
occasions, the stooping old Warrior would be seen--something like
Achilles in the disguise--dressed in the showy ceremonial costume of his
rank or office, in the midst of all the pageantries of royalty. At
festive parties he would generally remain among the latest guests, enjoy
himself with as much apparent cheerfulness as any body present, and go
home to bed, like an old rake, in the small hours of the morning. He
liked the gayeties of fashionable life. He would stand godfather for
noble infants at the font, and give away noble brides at the altar. He
would also go to christenings, and eat caudle with infinite good nature;
gratified, doubtless, by the homage that awaited him everywhere.
On the 18th of June, he gave yearly, at Apsley House, a grand
entertainment to all those officers who had been at Waterloo. People
said he should have discontinued it--seeing it tended to keep up
ill-feeling between England and France. But the feelings of the French
were not worth respecting. They have as much levity and slavishness as
their ancestry in the time of Louis Quatorze; a sad thing to say. The
duke would interest himself in every thing considered important to
society; and from his high character and his supposed influence with the
ruling powers, at all times, he had crowds of volunteer correspondents
in his time, asking all sorts of questions, and begging all sorts of
interferences and favors. The first general sensation created by the
Irish starvations at Skibbereen, in 1847, was produced by a letter
addressed to the duke, and printed in the London _Times_. He almost
invariably sent an autograph answer to his correspondents, beginning:
“F. M. the Duke of Wellington presents, etc.” His replies were succinct
and _ad rem_; some very trenchant, and some, which we have seen, very
courteous.
Wellington was a man of cold thought and calculation. There was very
little generous impulse or fine feeling in his character. Any thing like
sentimental talk of glory he would smile at as stuff and nonsense. He
knew that all the British glories of the Peninsula were won by the
greatest scamps and blackguards in the three kingdoms, who composed the
strength of the regiments. He was simple and matter-of-fact; his
thoughts were subdued and hardened by the drilling of a lifetime. His
style of writing was as disciplined and calm as his mind. He could never
have written any of those bulletins with which Napoleon used to fire the
blood of his soldiers, and in which he could show himself as impassioned
as Mirabeau, as condensed as Tacitus. It is said Wellington cried out:
“Up, guards, and at them!” when Ney had climbed the ridge at Waterloo.
But on being asked about it, by a painter to whom he sat for his
portrait, the duke smiled, and said he did not remember saying any such
thing. He did not understand any melo-dramatic un-British balderdash! He
loved the simple vernacular, and even slang of old England. At
Salamanca, he turned to General Leith, and pointing to a height, said,
“Push on, and drive them to the devil!” O Sallust, Tacitus, Polybius,
how should you have got over the battle-speeches of such a man! After
the battle of Salamanca, he said: “Marmont has forced me to lick him.”
At Waterloo, with his watch in his hand, and his keen, cold glance bent
through the rolling smoke, in the direction of Warre, he said: “This is
hard pounding, gentlemen; we must only see who will pound the longest!”
using, in that sublime and trying moment, the language of a London prize
ring! Thus, cool and courageous as a steel blade, he never exhibited any
of that glowing, impressible temperament, so characteristic of his
native isle. He had, in fact, very little sympathy with Ireland in any
thing, and seemed to forget he was ever born there. He never came
forward in Parliament, or out of it, with any motion respecting its
distress, or the relief of it, and, indeed, showed himself undeserving
of any attachment on the part of Irishmen. Ireland had no sympathy with
him, nor prided herself in him; which, seeing how forgivingly grateful
she always was for the slightest show of kindness, speaks very
unfavorably for the heart of the Duke of Wellington.
Wellington was a great general--not a great man. His was far inferior to
the comprehensive, imperial genius of Napoleon, who, though a
thorough-paced homicide, yet possessed the broad vision and faculty
which distinguish the mightier rulers of men. In the latter years of his
life, the emperor exchanged his soldierly statesmanship for
fatalism--goaded to this by the fierce opposition of legitimacy--and
that renounced and falsified the glorious _prestige_ of his early
career. But, take him all in all,--looking at the astonishing picture of
his life, in all its breadth and all its magnificent effects of light
and shadow--we feel that the Corsican was of a higher order of spirit
than the renowned and admirable soldier whose obituary we write.
The duke’s decease was caused by apoplectic fits; and took place at
Walmer Castle, where he was attending his duty as Warden of the Cinque
Ports. On Sunday, 12th September, he felt very well, and dined heartily
on venison. On Tuesday morning he seemed to feel the effects of
indigestion, and had an apothecary sent for. He spoke to the latter on
his arrival; but afterward lost the power of speech, and died
imperceptibly at three o’clock. Wellington was of low stature, like
Napoleon; as for his aspect, there is as little need to describe it as
that of the emperor. He was simple in his habits, and economic in his
household, and usually slept on a little hard camp bed. A friend of his
once complained that he had not room to turn in his bed. “Sir,” said the
duke, “when a man begins to think of turning in his bed, it is high time
for him to turn out of it.” He survived his duchess about twenty years.
He has been succeeded by Arthur, Marquis of Douro, born in 1807, and
married in 1839 to the lady Elisabeth Hay, daughter of the Marquis of
Tweedale. He has no children. We believe Lord Charles Wellesley has a
son. But the English apprehend a failure of the heirs male, and wish to
have the dukedom entailed on the issue of the females of the family.
* * * * *
=SONNET.--HOMER.=
=BY WM. ALEXANDER.=
Great Melesigenes! erst, poor and blind,
A wanderer didst thou sing thy Epic verse,
Which peasants, princes equally rehearse,
And act thy characters of lofty mind--
War’s trump Calliope aloud doth blow,
When telling of fair Ilium’s famous towers,
Which Greece beleaguered with her mighty powers,
Led by Pelides, Hector’s sternest foe--
Fair Helen’s beauty thou dost there portray,
Whom gallant, bold old generals admire;
Speaking, too, of his rovings wild and ire,
Whose bended bow doth the wild suitors slay--
The story of thy heroes; scenes of old,
Demands, by right, a shining case of gold.
* * * * *
=GRACE BARTLETT.=
=AN AMERICAN TRADITION.=
=BY MARY J. WINDLE.=
CHAPTER I.
Light of the new-born verdure!
Glory of the jocund May!
What gladness is out in leafy lanes!
What joy in the fields to-day!
W. C. Bennet.
Sunshine and storm--the alternate checker-work
Of human fortune! Shelley.
A lover of the picturesque, whether poet, painter, or simply an enjoyer
of Nature’s works, may be justified, perhaps, in extending his quest
after the sublime and beautiful beyond the rich and varied landscapes of
New England. Yet it is in this unpretending region that we are about to
lay the opening incidents of our tale, rather than amid the cloud-capt
rocks of Niagara, or upon the indented shores of our romantic lakes.
In the early days of our pilgrim forefathers, ere luxury and fashion had
tarnished with their deceptive but defacing touch the primitive customs
of the land--and, at the crisis referred to, neat but unpretending
villages were beginning to dot at intervals the surface of the adopted
country.
It is to the heart of one of these models of rural beauty that we now
invite the attention of the reader. The immediate location of the
village was in a sort of valley, close within the verge of an immense
forest, and surrounded by an intervening underwood, which Nature had
fashioned as a sort of defensive barrier. The cottages were without the
underwood, and thickly distributed on that side of the forest which
skirted the open country, forming, as it were, a slight chain of
protection against the inroads of the Indians. So much in the light of a
defensive fortress had these indeed come to be regarded by the dusky
tribes, that latterly their invasions in the place had been few and far
between. Even these occasional attacks had at length seemed completely
repressed through the energetic measures of one of the colonists, who
had acted on each occasion of surprise with a firmness and
self-possession that at once overpowered and dispelled the savages.
This man, Deacon Winthrop, had, however, by the strenuous efforts
referred to, incurred the revengeful feelings of the adjacent tribes,
and an impending evil at this moment hung over him, unsuspected by
himself or any of the villagers.
The beautiful English custom of celebrating the first of May, by a
festival of roses, had been preserved in the colonies. To the morning of
as lovely a day as ever ushered in that month of flowers, we now revert.
It was a day of days--not a cloud to alarm even the most fearful, and
holyday dresses were donned without the slightest dread lest they should
be spoiled. The weather was neither too hot nor too cold; the old failed
to anticipate coughs, and the young anticipated pleasures innumerable. A
poetic fancy might have deemed that the trees, the flowers, the grass,
were endowed with a brighter beauty in honor of the day. This festival,
though nominally and by custom given to children, was witnessed and
enjoyed, we may say fairly participated in, by those of older growth. At
almost every cottage door might be seen some grandmother singing to the
crowing infant in her lap, and old men leaning on their sticks peering
out to catch a share of the general joy.
Opposite the pastor’s dwelling was reared the May-pole, gay with flowers
and streaming with ribbons, while around it was collecting the limited
juvenile population of the little place.
The lively ceremonies of the occasion formed no pompous pageant nor idle
mockery--the smiles of the children alone shed a glow over the spot, and
their merry peals of laughter rendered their sports hilarious and
exhilarating to the more sober and advanced inhabitants, who acted only
as spectators of this portion of the festivities.
Several hours passed thus in sportive amusements and in the crowning of
the May Queen, Grace Bartlett, the pastor’s only child, who was elected
by the unanimous voice of her companions to the honors of the occasion.
A banquet followed, spread upon the grass, and composed of contributions
from every cottage matron. When this was ended, the long train of
youthful forms, each garlanded with a trimming of flowers, swept up a
vast avenue of beech to the village church. There the oration of the day
was pronounced by one of their number robed in white. It was a simple
and heart-touching sentence that last came from those childish lips--a
word of faith to be preserved when all the bright twisted garlands of
the day should be withered; when that last tribute, a chaplet bound by
cypress leaves, should be laid upon each bier.
Hark! now from the young circle before the low pulpit arise the simple
tones of a psalm, swelling on the air in rich gradations, interrupted
only by the throbbing of those tender hearts, in the fullness of their
innocent joy. Their rosy cheeks and glistening eyes at that moment, what
need have these of record? Are they not written still in the memories of
the surviving throng? The gushing melody from those infantile voices at
length ceased, and the assemblage dispersed from the building.
Again out in the open air, again on the broad common, again scattered
hitherward and thitherward, the children sought their homes, many of
them possibly regretting that the festival of roses had not to begin
again, but all solaced by the thought that it had become for once more
an event in their personal history. And so to all intents the events of
the day seemed ended. Several of the children had lingered in the
meeting-house, after the general crowd had left it. By degrees, however,
these few loiterers all departed, either singly or by pairs, excepting
young Frank Winthrop and Grace Bartlett, who lingered to collect and
garner up a few of those perishable wreaths that garlanded and adorned
the modest sanctuary.
The platform in front of the pulpit, erected for the accommodation of
the children, was completely hidden in leaves and flowers. Laurel
branches as graceful as stooping seraphims swept over the surface of the
clerk’s desk; the supporters of the pulpit lifted to its floor long,
slender lines of jessamine; while from the rafters of the roof hung rich
festoons of daffodil--making altogether a completely new interior; the
high-backed chair of the clerk beneath was so richly adorned with roses
that one kneeling before it might, without any great effort of
imagination, have been mistaken for a votary of Flora.
For some time our young pair amused themselves tripping from spot to
spot, their sweet, childish voices waking the echoes of the humble
building. At length, tired of the day’s exertion, little Grace Bartlett
threw herself into the huge arm-chair behind the desk. She was a lovely
child, with large, soft eyes, and fair hair, which fell in light waves,
rather than curls, nearly to her waist. Although the special pet of the
whole settlement, she was not spoiled, owing to the remarkable sweetness
of her disposition, which caused her to receive indulgence as the flower
drinks dew, only to become more light and fragrant from the rich
overflow of nutriment. Oh! if you could have seen her sitting in that
old chair, raised some three feet above the floor, her petite figure
vainly endeavoring to accommodate itself to the stiff, high back, one
bare arm dimpling its dark covering, as if like some pleasant old
gentleman, it could not help laughing at so dainty a thing, and the tips
of her tiny fingers finding themselves an agreeable resting-place upon
the soft coloring of her cheek.
Her male companion, Frank Winthrop, was a laughing boy, who was two
years her senior. He was a plump urchin, welcome to the hearts and arms
of all. His life was one long holyday of fun and frolick. He was ever
fain to chat with the old, laugh with the young, nor was there even a
dog in the village that did not wag its ears knowingly as the pretty
fellow drew near.
From under a rude, arched porch outside, the clear laugh and ringing
shout of a troop of happy children, who still loitered near, might be
heard. One was romping in baby-frock and pinafore among the trees, now
thrusting his arm in the leaves to grasp the bared shoulder of a little
sister, then, creeping away under the green shadows, as a hare will hide
itself, and raising his ringing voice to challenge pursuit, clapping his
hands and laughing--scampering off finally on his chubby little feet, to
plunge headlong in the fragrant grass, with a happy joyousness truly
refreshing. At the farthest extremity of this rustic shed, three or four
were playing, with noise enough for Christmas holydays; two boys at
football, while the rest were testifying their feelings by sporting
around them with the extremest merriment. One of the girls, at a little
distance, was going through the A, B, C-dom of a mimic school, now
kissing one, patting another, coaxing a third, crying “Oh, for shame!”
to a fourth, and then dismissing with gravity the geography and history
classes. Although some of the young rebels were larger than she was, and
though they did mischievously contrive to loosen the comb with which she
had tucked up her tresses, until the whole glittering mass came sweeping
round her dimpled shoulders; and though some of the lesser girls would
pelt her with clover tops, yet for all that she was as demure as a
kitten--not a muscle moved. Ah, childhood! beautiful spring-time of the
heart, when deception and suspicion are alike unknown, while yet the
flowers of trustfulness bloom side by side with budding hope and
fancy--ere the germs of envy and selfishness have come to shadow this
bright little Eden of life’s imaginings--how lovely thou art in thy
freshness and purity!
Little dreamed the guileless young gambolers at this moment that a
savage eye was peering upon them from behind the eves of the
meeting-house. An enemy was lurking near, unknown to those innocent
hearts, who, ere the village clock should have pointed to the hour of
nightly repose succeeding that day of glee, was destined to shed a gloom
over the late happy region.
The pretty May Queen, Grace Bartlett, tired at length of her seat in the
tall chair under the pulpit and jumping down with a bound and a run, was
soon out upon the green amidst the merry group we have described. Frank
Winthrop, the other little loiterer, had fallen asleep in one of the
high pews, with a large Psalm-book for his pillow, and consequently he
took no heed of her departure. There he lay in the calm, beautiful sleep
of his young time of life, a model fit for the painter’s or the
sculptor’s hand. How beautiful that boyish dreamer looked!--the round,
fair outline, the fresh bloom of the features--his dark hair falling
aside from his forehead, leaving its surface visible, and bland and
fair.
Meantime, the shades of evening drew on, and the pennon of the hour
began to bestar the heavens. A signal from the parents now brought the
truant children to their homes--all but this reposing boy. It was the
moment looked for by the lurking foe. Stealthily emerging from his
retreat, he gazed around a moment to convince himself that his way was
clear, and then advanced softly to the door of the meeting-house. From
his late place of secretion he had caught a glimpse, through the window,
of the sleeper, thus opportunely for his purpose, left alone in the
building, and he deemed that his moment of revenge had come.
An instant he stood at the threshold--then advanced with measured tread
along the aisles. So light were his footsteps, that the very scattered
garlands and stray flowers of the late pageant rebounded unharmed
beneath his moccason tread.
The space which divided him from the slumberer was soon past, and he
stood before the child’s smiling and outstretched form. For a moment a
compunctious feeling stole over the warrior. He held his breath as he
gazed, and his heart swelled with love and pity. It was an evanescent
feeling, however, for in another instant he had raised the boy in his
arms, and bearing him gently away, he retraced his steps to the green
sward. Another moment, and his retreating feet pressed an opening in the
underwood bordering the forest, and in a moment more he was lost in the
densely-wooded scenery.