Avenue; and by the time I reach the famous old tavern, not far from the
station, it is a Sunday morning of early summer, and the yellow sunlight
falls upon a body of good comrades who are grooming a marvelous
number of piebald steeds about the stable-doors. By token of these
beasts--which always look so much more like works of art than of
nature--I know that there is to be a circus somewhere very soon; and the
gay bills pasted all over the stable-front tell me that there are to be
two performances at the Port on the morrow. The grooms talk nothing and
joke nothing but horse at their labor; and their life seems such a low,
ignorant, happy life, that the secret nomad lurking in every respectable
and stationary personality stirs within me and struggles to strike hands
of fellowship with them. They lead a sort of pastoral existence in
our age of railroads; they wander over the continent with their great
caravan, and everywhere pursue the summer from South to North and from
North to South again; in the mild forenoons they groom their herds,
and in the afternoons they doze under their wagons, indifferent to
the tumult of the crowd within and without the mighty canvas near
them,--doze face downwards on the bruised, sweet-smelling grass; and
in the starry midnight rise and strike their tents, and set forth again
over the still country roads, to take the next village on the morrow
with the blaze and splendor of their “Grand Entree.” The triumphal
chariot in which the musicians are borne at the head of the procession
is composed, as I perceive by the bills, of four colossal gilt swans,
set tail to tail, with lifted wings and curving necks; but the chariot,
as I behold it beside the stable, is mysteriously draped in white
canvas, through which its gilding glitters only here and there. And does
it move thus shrouded in the company's wanderings from place to place,
and is the precious spottiness of the piebalds then hidden under envious
drapery? O happy grooms,--not clean as to shirts, nor especially neat in
your conversation, but displaying a Wealth of art in India-ink upon
your manly chests and the swelling muscles of your arms, and speaking
in every movement your freedom from all conventional gyves and shackles,
_“seid umschlungen!”_--in spirit; for the rest, you are rather too damp,
and seem to have applied your sudsy sponges too impartially to your
own trousers and the horses' legs to receive an actual embrace from a
_dilettante_ vagabond.
The old tavern is old only comparatively; but in our new and changeful
life it is already quaint. It is very long, and low-studded in either
story, with a row of windows in the roof, and a great porch, furnished
with benches, running the whole length of the ground-floor. Perhaps
because they take the dust of the street too freely, or because the
guests find it more social and comfortable to gather in-doors in the
wide, low-ceiled office, the benches are not worn, nor particularly
whittled. The room has the desolate air characteristic of offices which
have once been bar-rooms; but no doubt, on a winter's night, there is
talk worth listening to there, of flocks, and herds and horse-trades,
from the drovers and cattle-market men who patronize the tavern; and
the artistic temperament, at least, could feel no regret if that
sepulchrally penitent bar-room then developed a secret capacity for
the wickedness that once boldly glittered behind the counter in rows of
decanters.
The house was formerly renowned for its suppers, of which all that
was learned or gifted in the old college town of Charlesbridge used to
partake; and I have heard lips which breathe the loftiest song and the
sweetest humor--let alone being “dewy with the Greek of Plato”--smacked
regretfully over the memory of those suppers' roast and broiled. No such
suppers, they say, are cooked in the world any more; and I am somehow
made to feel that their passing away is connected with the decay of good
literature.
I hope it may be very long before the predestined French-roof villa
occupies the tavern's site, and turns into lawns and gardens its
wide-spreading cattle-pens, and removes the great barn that now
shows its broad, low gable to the street. This is yet older and
quainter-looking than the tavern itself; it is mighty capacious, and
gives a still profounder impression of vastness with its shed, of which
the roof slopes southward down almost to a man's height from the ground,
and shelters a row of mangers, running back half the length of the
stable, and serving in former times for the baiting of such beasts
as could not be provided for within. But the halcyon days of the
cattle-market are past (though you may still see the white horns tossing
above the fences of the pens, when a newly arrived herd lands from the
train to be driven afoot to Brighton), and the place looks now so empty
and forsaken, spite of the circus baggage-wagons, that it were hard to
believe these mangers could ever have been in request, but for the fact
that they are all gnawed, down to the quick as it were, by generations
of horses--vanished forever on the deserted highways of the
past--impatient for their oats or hungering for more.
The day must come, of course, when the mangers will all be taken from
the stable-shed, and exposed for sale at that wonderful second-hand shop
which stands over against the tavern. I am no more surprised than one
in a dream, to find it a week-day afternoon by the time I have crossed
thither from the circus-men grooming their piebalds. It is an enchanted
place to me, and I am a frequent and unprofitable customer there, buying
only just enough to make good my footing with the custodian of its
marvels, who is, of course, too true an American to show any desire to
sell. Without, on either side of the doorway, I am pretty sure to find,
among other articles of furniture, a mahogany and hair-cloth sofa, a
family portrait, a landscape painting, a bath-tub, and a flower-stand,
with now and then the variety of a boat and a dog-house; while under an
adjoining shed is heaped a mass of miscellaneous movables, of a heavier
sort, and fearlessly left there night and day, being on all accounts
undesirable to steal. The door of the shop rings a bell in opening, and
ushers the customer into a room which Chaos herself might have planned
in one of her happier moments. Carpets, blankets, shawls, pictures,
mirrors, rocking-chairs, and blue overalls hang from the ceiling, and
devious pathways wind amidst piles of ready-made clothing, show-cases
filled with every sort of knick-knack and half hidden under heaps of
hats and boots and shoes, bookcases, secretaries, chests of drawers,
mattresses, lounges, and bedsteads, to the stairway of a loft similarly
appointed, and to a back room overflowing with glassware and crockery.
These things are not all second-hand, but they are all old and equally
pathetic. The melancholy of ruinous auction sales, of changing tastes
or changing fashions, clings to them, whether they are things that have
never had a home and have been on sale ever since they were made, or
things that have been associated with every phase of human life.
Among other objects, certain large glass vases, ornamented by the
polite art of potichomanie, have long appealed to my fancy, wherein they
capriciously allied themselves to the history of aging single women in
lonely New England village houses,--pathetic sisters lingering upon the
neutral ground between the faded hopes of marriage and the yet unrisen
prospects of consumption. The work implies an imperfect yet real love of
beauty, the leisure for it a degree of pecuniary ease: the thoughts of
the sisters rise above the pickling and preserving that occupied their
heartier and happier mother; they are in fact in that aesthetic, social,
and intellectual mean, in which single women are thought soonest to
wither and decline. With a little more power, and in our later era, they
would be writing stories full of ambitious, unintelligible, self-devoted
and sudden collapsing young girls and amazing doctors; but as they are,
and in their time, they must do what they can. A sentimentalist
may discern on these vases not only the gay designs with which they
ornamented them, but their own dim faces looking wan from the windows of
some huge old homestead, a world too wide for the shrunken family. All
April long the door-yard trees crouch and shudder in the sour east, all
June they rain canker-worms upon the roof, and then in autumn choke the
eaves with a fall of tattered and hectic foliage. From the window the
fading sisters gaze upon the unnatural liveliness of the summer streets
through which the summer boarders are driving, or upon the death-white
drifts of the intolerable winter. Their father, the captain, is dead;
he died with the Calcutta trade, having survived their mother, and left
them a hopeless competency and yonder bamboo chairs; their only brother
is in California; one, though she loved, had never a lover; her sister's
betrothed married West, whither he went to make a home for her,--and
ah! is it vases for the desolate parlor mantel they decorate, or funeral
urns? And when in time, they being gone, the Californian brother sends
to sell out at auction the old place with the household and kitchen
furniture, is it withered rose-leaves or ashes that the purchaser finds
in these jars?
They are empty now; and I wonder how came they here? How came the
show-case of Dr. Merrifield, Surgeon-Chiropodist here? How came here yon
Italian painting?--a poor, silly, little affected Madonna, simpering
at me from her dingy gilt frame till I buy her, a great bargain, at a
dollar. From what country church or family oratory, in what revolution,
or stress of private fortunes,--then from what various cabinets of
antiquities, in what dear Vicenza, or Ferrara, or Mantua, earnest
thou, O Madonna? Whose likeness are you, poor girl, with your everyday
prettiness of brows and chin, and your Raphaelesque crick in the neck?
I think I know a part of your story. You were once the property of that
ruined advocate, whose sensibilities would sometimes consent that a
_valet de place_ of uncommon delicacy should bring to his ancestral
palace some singularly meritorious foreigner desirous of purchasing from
his rare collection,--a collection of rubbish scarcely to be equaled
elsewhere in Italy. You hung in that family-room, reached after passage
through stately vestibules and grand stairways; and O, I would be
cheated to the bone, if only I might look out again from some such
windows as were there, upon some such damp, mouldy, broken-statued,
ruinous, enchanted garden as lay below! In that room sat the advocate's
mother and hunchback sister, with their smoky _scaldini_ and their
snuffy priest; and there the wife of the foreigner, self-elected the
taste of his party, inflicted the pang courted by the advocate, and
asked if you were for sale. And then the ruined advocate clasped his
hands, rubbed them, set his head heart-brokenly on one side, took you
down, heaved a sigh, shrugged his shoulders, and sold you--you! a family
heirloom! Well, at least you are old, and you represent to me acres of
dim, religious canvas in that beloved land; and here is the dollar now
asked for you: I could not have bought you for so little at home.
The Madonna is neighbored by several paintings, if the kind called
Grecian for a reason never revealed by the inventor of an art as old as
potichomanie itself. It was an art by which ordinary lithographs were
given a ghastly transparency, and a tone as disagreeable as chromos; and
I doubt if it could have been known to the Greeks in their best age.
But I remember very well when it passed over whole neighborhoods in
some parts of this country, wasting the time of many young women, and
disfiguring parlor walls with the fruit of their accomplishment. It was
always taught by Professors, a class of learned young men who acquired
their title by abandoning the plough and anvil, and, in a suit of
ready-made clothing, travelling about the country with portfolios under
their arms. It was an experience to make loafers for life of them: and
I fancy the girls who learnt their art never afterwards made so good
butter and cheese.
“Non-ragioniam di lor, ma guarda e passa.”
Besides the Grecian paintings there are some mezzotints; full length
pictures of presidents and statesmen, chiefly General Jackson, Henry
Clay, and Daniel Webster, which have hung their day in the offices
or parlors of country politicians. They are all statesmanlike and
presidential in attitude; and I know that if the mighty Webster's lips
had language, he would take his hand out of his waistcoat front, and say
to his fellow mezzotints: “Venerable men! you have come down to us from
a former generation, bringing your household furniture and miscellaneous
trumpery of all kinds with you.”
Some old-fashioned entry lanterns divide my interest with certain old
willow chairs of an hour-glass pattern, which never stood upright,
probably, and have now all a confirmed droop to one side, as from
having been fallen heavily asleep in, upon breezy porches, of hot summer
afternoons. In the windows are small vases of alabaster, fly-specked
Parian and plaster figures, and dolls with stiff wooden limbs and
papier-maché heads, a sort of dolls no longer to be bought in these
days of modish, blue-eyed blondes of biscuit and sturdy india-rubber
brunettes. The show-case is full of an incredible variety, as photograph
albums, fishing-hooks, socks, suspenders, steel pens, cutlery of all
sorts, and curious old colored prints of Adelaide, and Kate, and Ellen.
A rocking-horse is stabled near amid pendent lengths of second-hand
carpeting, hat-racks, and mirrors; and standing cheek-by-jowl with
painted washstands and bureaus are some plaster statues, aptly colored
and varnished to represent bronze.
There is nothing here but has a marked character of its own, some
distinct yet intangible trait acquired from former circumstances; and
doubtless all these things have that lurking likeness to former owners
which clothes and furniture are apt to take on from long association,
and which we should instantly recognize could they be confronted with
their late proprietors. It seems, in very imaginative moments, as if the
strange assemblage of incongruities must have a consciousness of these
latent resemblances, which the individual pieces betray when their
present keeper turns the key upon them, and abandons them to themselves
at night; and I have sometimes fancied such an effect in the late
twilight, when I have wandered into their resting-place, and have beheld
them in the unnatural glare of a kerosene lamp burning before a brightly
polished reflector, and casting every manner of grotesque shadow upon
the floor and walls. But this may have been an illusion; at any rate I
am satisfied that the bargain-driving capacity of the storekeeper is not
in the least affected by a weird quality in his wares; though they have
not failed to impart to him something of their own desultory character.
He sometimes leaves a neighbor in charge when he goes to meals, and
then, if I enter, I am watchfully followed about from corner to corner,
and from room to room, lest I pocket a mattress or slip a book-case
under my coat. The storekeeper himself never watches me; perhaps
he knows that it is a purely professional interest I take in the
collection; that I am in the trade and have a secondhand shop of my
own, full of poetical rubbish, and every sort of literary odds and
ends, picked up at random, and all cast higgledy-piggledy into the same
chaotic receptacle. His customers are as little like ordinary shoppers
as he is like common tradesmen. They are in part the Canadians who work
in the brickyards, and it is surprising to find how much business can
be transacted, and how many sharp bargains struck without the help of a
common language. I am in the belief, which may be erroneous, that nobody
is wronged in these trades. The taciturn storekeeper, who regards his
customers with a stare of solemn amusement as Critturs born by some
extraordinary vicissitude of nature to the use of a language that
practically amounts to deafness and dumbness, never suffers his
philosophical interest in them to affect his commercial efficiency;
he drops them now and then a curt English phrase, or expressive Yankee
idiom; he knows very well when they mean to buy and when they do
not; and they equally wary and equally silent, unswayed by the glib
allurements of a salesman, judge of price and quality for themselves,
make their solitary offer, and stand or fall by it.
I am seldom able to conclude a pedestrian tour without a glance at the
wonderful interior of this cheap store, and I know all its contents
familiarly. I recognize wares that have now been on sale there for
years; I miss at first glance such accustomed objects as have been
parted with between my frequent visits, and hail with pleasure the
additions to that extraordinary variety. I can hardly, I suppose,
expect the reader to sympathize with the joy I felt the other night, in
discovering among the latter an adventurous and universally applicable
sign-board advertising This House and Lot for Sale, and, intertwined
with the cast-off suspenders which long garlanded a coffee-mill pendent
from the roof, a newly added second-hand india-rubber ear-trumpet. Here
and there, however, I hope a finer soul will relish, as I do, the poetry
of thus buying and offering for sale the very most recondite, as well
as the commonest articles of commerce, in the faith that one day the
predestined purchaser will appear and carry off the article appointed
him from the beginning of time. This faith is all the more touching,
because the collector cannot expect to live until the whole stock is
disposed of, and because, in the order of nature, much must at last fall
to rein unbought, unless the reporter's Devouring Element appears and
gives a sudden tragical turn to the poem.
It is the whistle of a train drawing up at the neighboring station that
calls me away from the second-hand store; for I never find myself able
to resist the hackneyed prodigy of such an arrival. It cannot cease
to be impressive. I stand beside the track while the familiar monster
writhes up to the station and disgorges its passengers,--suburbanly
packaged, and bundled, and bagged, and even when empty-handed somehow
proclaiming the jaded character of men that hurry their work all day
to catch the evening train out, and their dreams all night to catch the
morning train in,--and then I climb the station-stairs, and “hang with
grooms and porters on the bridge,” that I may not lose my ever-repeated
sensation of having the train pass under my feet, and of seeing it rush
away westward to the pretty blue hills beyond,--hills not too big for
a man born in a plain-country to love. Twisting and trembling along the
track, it dwindles rapidly in the perspective, and is presently out of
sight. It has left the city and the suburbs behind, and has sought the
woods and meadows; but Nature never in the least accepts it, and rarely
makes its path a part of her landscape's loveliness. The train passes
alien through all her moods and aspects; the wounds made in her face by
the road's sharp cuts and excavations are slowest of all wounds to heal,
and the iron rails remain to the last as shackles upon her. Yet when
the rails are removed, as has happened with a non-paying track in
Charlesbridge, the road inspires a real tenderness in her. Then she
bids it take or the grace that belongs to all ruin; the grass creeps
stealthily over the scarified sides of the embankments; the golden-rod,
and the purple-topped iron-weed, and the lady's-slipper, spring up in
the hollows on either side, and--I am still thinking of that deserted
railroad which runs through Charlesbridge--hide with their leafage the
empty tomato-cans and broken bottles and old boots on the ash-heaps
dumped there; Nature sets her velvety willows a waving near, and lower
than their airy tops plans a vista of trees arching above the track,
which is as wild and pretty and illusive a vista as the sunset ever
cared to look through and gild a board fence beyond.
Most of our people come from Boston on the horse-cars, and it is only
the dwellers on the Avenue and the neighboring streets whom hurrying
homeward I follow away from the steam-car station. The Avenue is
our handsomest street; and if it were in the cosmopolitan citizen of
Charlesbridge to feel any local interest, I should be proud of it.
As matters are, I perceive its beauty, and I often reflect, with a
pardonable satisfaction, that it is not only handsome, but probably the
very dullest street in the world. It is magnificently long and broad,
and is flanked nearly the whole way from the station to the colleges by
pine palaces rising from spacious lawns, or from the green of trees or
the brightness of gardens. The splendor is all very new, but newness is
not a fault that much affects architectural beauty, while it is the only
one that time is certain to repair: and I find an honest and unceasing
pleasure in the graceful lines of those palaces, which is not surpassed
even by my appreciation of the vast quiet and monotony of the street
itself. Commonly, when I emerge upon it from the grassy-bordered,
succory-blossomed walks of Benicia Street, I behold, looking northward,
a monumental horse-car standing--it appears for ages, if I wish to take
it for Boston--at the head of Pliny Street; and looking southward I see
that other emblem of suburban life, an express-wagon, fading rapidly
in the distance. Haply the top of a buggy nods round the bend under the
elms near the station; and, if fortune is so lavish, a lady appears from
a side street, and, while tarrying for the car, thrusts the point of her
sun-umbrella into the sandy sidewalk. This is the mid-afternoon
effect of the Avenue; but later in the day, and well into the dusk, it
remembers its former gayety as a trotting-course,--with here and there
a spider-wagon, a twinkling-footed mare, and a guttural driver. On
market-days its superb breadth is taken up by flocks of bleating sheep,
and a pastoral tone is thus given to its tranquillity; anon a herd of
beef-cattle appears under the elms; or a drove of pigs, many pausing,
inquisitive of the gutters, and quarrelsome as if they were the heirs of
prosperity instead of doom, is slowly urged on toward the shambles. In
the spring or the autumn, the Avenue is exceptionally enlivened by the
progress of a brace or so of students who, in training for one of the
University Courses of base-ball or boating, trot slowly and earnestly
along the sidewalk, fists up, elbows down, mouths shut, and a sense of
immense responsibility visible in their faces.
The summer is waning with the day as I turn from the Avenue into Benicia
Street. This is the hour when the fly cedes to the mosquito, as the
Tuscan poet says, and, as one may add, the frying grasshopper yields to
the shrilly cricket in noisiness. The embrowning air rings with the
sad music made by these innumerable little violinists, hid in all the
gardens round, and the pedestrian feels a sinking of the spirits not
to be accounted for upon the theory that the street is duller than the
Avenue, for it really is not so.
Quick now, the cheerful lamps of kerosene!--without their light, the
cry of those crickets, dominated for an instant, but not stilled, by the
bellowing of a near-passing locomotive, and the baying of a distant dog,
were too much. If it were the last autumn that ever was to be, it could
not be heralded with notes of dismaller effect. This is in fact the hour
of supreme trial everywhere, and doubtless no one but a newly-accepted
lover can be happy at twilight. In the city, even, it is oppressive; in
the country it is desolate; in the suburbs it is a miracle that it
is ever lived through. The night-winds have not risen yet to stir the
languid foliage of the sidewalk maples; the lamps are not yet lighted,
to take away the gloom from the blank, staring windows of the houses
near; it is too late for letters, too early for a book. In town your
fancy would turn to the theatres; in the country you would occupy
yourself with cares of poultry or of stock: in the suburbs you can but
sit upon your threshold, and fight the predatory mosquito.
BY HORSE-CAR TO BOSTON
At a former period the writer of this had the fortune to serve
his country in an Italian city whose great claim upon the world's
sentimental interest is the fact that--
“The sea is in her broad, her narrow streets
Ebbing and flowing,”