that has ever come upon this nation has been that of unclean journalism.
It has its victims in all occupations and departments. It has helped to
fill insane asylums and penitentiaries, and alms-houses and dens of
shame. The bodies of this infection lie in the hospitals and in the
graves, while their souls are being tossed over into a lost eternity, an
avalanche of horror and despair. The London plague was nothing to it.
That counted its victims by thousands; but this modern pest has already
shoveled its millions into the charnel-house of the morally dead. The
longest rail train that ever ran over the Erie or the Hudson tracks was
not long enough or large enough to carry the beastliness and the
putrefaction which have gathered up in the bad books and newspapers of
this land in the last twenty years. Now, it is amid such circumstances
that I put the questions of overmastering importance to you and your
families: What can we do to abate this pestilence? What books and
newspapers shall we read? You see I group them together. A newspaper is
only a book in a swifter and more portable shape, and the same rules
which apply to book-reading will apply to newspaper-reading. What shall
we read? Shall our minds be the receptacle of every thing that an author
has a mind to write? Shall there be no distinction between the tree of
life and the tree of death? Shall we stoop down and drink out of the
trough which the wickedness of men has filled with pollution and shame?
Shall we mire in impurity, and chase fantastic will-o'-the-wisps across
the swamps, when we might walk in the blooming gardens of God? O, no.
For the sake of our present and everlasting welfare, we must make an
intelligent and Christian choice.
Standing, as we do, chin-deep in fictitious literature, the first
question that many of the young people are asking me is, "Shall we read
novels?" I reply, there are novels that are pure, good, Christian,
elevating to the heart, and ennobling to the life. But I have still
further to say, that I believe three-fourths of the novels in this day
are baneful and destructive to the last degree. A pure work of fiction
is history and poetry combined. It is a history of things around us,
with the licenses and the assumed names of poetry. The world can never
repay the debt which it owes to such fictitious writers as Hawthorne,
Mackenzie, and Landor and Hunt, and others whose names are familiar to
all. The follies of high life were never better exposed than by Miss
Edgeworth. The memories of the past were never more faithfully embalmed
than in the writings of Walter Scott. Cooper's novels are healthfully
redolent with the breath of the seaweed and the air of the American
forest. Charles Kingsley has smitten the morbidness of the world, and
led a great many to appreciate the poetry of sound health, strong
muscles, and fresh air. Thackeray did a grand work in caricaturing the
pretenders to gentility and high blood. Dickens has built his own
monument in his books, which are an everlasting plea for the poor and
the anathema of injustice. Now, I say books like these, read at right
times and read in right proportion with other books, can not help but be
ennobling and purifying. But, alas! for the loathsome and impure
literature that has come upon this country in the shape of novels like a
freshet overflowing all the banks of decency and common sense. They are
coming from some of the most celebrated publishing houses in the
country. They are coming with the recommendation of some of our
religious newspapers. They lie on your center-table, to curse your
children and blast with their infernal fires generations unborn. You
find these books in the desk of the school-miss, in the trunk of the
young man, in the steamboat cabin, and on the table of the hotel
reception-room. You see a light in your child's room late at night. You
suddenly go in and say: "What are you doing?". "I am reading." "What are
you reading?" "A book." You look at the book. It is a bad book. "Where
did you get it?" "I borrowed it." Alas! there are always those abroad
who would like to loan your son or daughter a bad book. Everywhere,
everywhere an unclean literature. I charge upon it the destruction of
ten thousand immortal souls; and I bid you this morning to wake up to
the magnitude of the theme. I shall take all the world's
literature--good novels and bad; travels, true or false; histories,
faithful and incorrect; legends, beautiful and monstrous; all tracts,
all chronicles, all epilogues, all family, city, state, national
libraries--and pile them up in a pyramid of literature; and then I shall
bring to bear upon it some grand, glorious, infallible, unmistakable
Christian principles. God help me to speak with reference to the account
I must at last render! God help you to listen.
I charge you, in the first place, to stand aloof from all books that
give false pictures of human life. Life is neither a tragedy nor a
farce. Men are not all either knaves or heroes. Women are neither angels
nor furies. And yet if you depended upon much of the literature of the
day, you would get the idea that life, instead of being something
earnest, something practical, is a fitful and fantastic and extravagant
thing. How poorly prepared are that young man and woman for the duties
of to-day who spent last night wading through brilliant passages
descriptive of magnificent knavery and wickedness! The man will be
looking all day long for his heroine in the tin-shop, by the forge or in
the factory, in the counting-room, and he will not find her, and he will
be dissatisfied. A man who gives himself up to the indiscriminate
reading of novels will be nerveless, inane, and a nuisance. He will be
fit neither for the store, nor the shop, nor the field. A woman who
gives herself up to the indiscriminate reading of novels will be
unfitted for the duties of wife, mother, sister, daughter. There she is,
hair disheveled, countenance vacant, cheeks pale, hands trembling,
bursting into tears at midnight over the woes of some unfortunate. In
the day-time, when she ought to be busy, staring by the half-hour at
nothing; biting her finger-nails to the quick. The carpet that was plain
before will be plainer after having through a romance all night long
wandered in tessellated halls of castles, and your industrious companion
will be more unattractive than ever now that you have walked in the
romance through parks with plumed princesses or lounged in the arbor
with the polished desperado. O, these confirmed novel-readers! They are
unfit for this life, which is a tremendous discipline. They know not how
to go through the furnaces of trial where they must pass, and they are
unfitted for a world where every thing we gain we achieve by hard, long
continuing, and exhaustive work.
Again, abstain from all those books which, while they have some good
things about them, have also an admixture of evil. You have read books
that had the two elements in them--the good and the bad. Which stuck to
you? The bad! The heart of most people is like a sieve, which lets the
small particles of gold fall through, but keeps the great cinders.
Again, abstain from those books which are apologetic of crime. It is a
sad thing that some of the best and most beautiful bookbindery, and some
of the finest rhetoric, have been brought to make sin attractive. Vice
is a horrible thing, anyhow. It is born in shame, and it dies howling in
the darkness. In this world it is scourged with a whip of scorpions, but
afterward the thunders of God's wrath pursue it across a boundless
desert, beating it with ruin and woe. When you come to paint carnality,
do not paint it as looking from behind embroidered curtains, or through
lattice of royal seraglio, but as writhing in the agonies of a city
hospital. Cursed be the books that try to make impurity decent, and
crime attractive, and hypocrisy noble! Cursed be the books that swarm
with libertines and desperadoes, who make the brain of the young people
whirl with villainy. Ye authors who write them, ye publishers who print
them, ye book-sellers who distribute them, shall be cut to pieces; if
not by an aroused community, then at last by a divine vengeance, which
shall sweep to the lowest pit of perdition all ye murderers of souls. I
tell you, though you may escape in this world, you will be ground at
last under the hoof of eternal calamities, and you will be chained to
the rock, and you will have the vultures of despair clawing at your
soul, and those whom you have destroyed will come around to torment you
and to pour hotter coals of fury upon your head and rejoice eternally in
the outcry of your pain and the howl of your damnation! "God shall wound
the hairy scalp of him that goeth on in his trespasses." The clock
strikes midnight, a fair form bends over a romance. The eyes flash fire.
The breath is quick and irregular. Occasionally the color dashes to the
cheek, and then dies out. The hands tremble as though a guardian spirit
were trying to shake the deadly book out of the grasp. Hot tears fall.
She laughs with a shrill voice that drops dead at its own sound. The
sweat on her brow is the spray dashed up from the river of Death. The
clock strikes four, and the rosy dawn soon after begins to look through
the lattice upon the pale form, that looks like a detained specter of
the night. Soon in a mad-house, she will mistake her ringlets for
curling serpents, and thrust her white hand through the bars of the
prison and smite her head, rubbing it back as though to push the scalp
from the skull, shrieking, "My brain! my brain!" O, stand off from that.
Why will you go sounding your way amidst the reefs and warning buoys,
when there is such a vast ocean in which you may voyage, all sail set?
There is one other thing I shall say this morning before I leave you,
whether you want to hear it or not; that is, that I consider the bad
pictorial literature of the day as most tremendous for ruin. There is no
one who can like good pictures better than I do. But what shall I say to
the prostitution of this art to purposes of iniquity? These
death-warrants of the soul are at every street corner. They smite the
vision of the young with pollution. Many a young man buying a copy has
bought his eternal discomfiture. There may be enough poison in one bad
picture to poison one soul, and that soul may poison ten, and the ten
fifty, and the hundreds thousands, until nothing but the measuring line
of eternity can tell the height and depth and ghastliness and horror of
the great undoing. The work of death that the wicked author does in a
whole book the bad engraver may do on half a side of pictorial. Under
the disguise of pure mirth the young man buys one of these sheets. He
unrolls it before his comrades amid roars of laughter; but long after
the paper is gone the results may perhaps be seen in the blasted
imaginations of those who saw it. The Queen of Death every night holds a
banquet, and these periodicals are the printed invitations to her
guests. Alas! that the fair brow of American art should be blotched with
this plague spot, and that philanthropists, bothering themselves about
smaller evils, should lift up no united and vehement voice against this
great calamity! Young man, buy not this moral strychnine for your soul!
Pick not up this nest of coiled adders for your pocket! Patronize no
news-stand that keeps them! Have your room bright with good engravings,
but for these iniquitous pictorials have not one wall, not one bureau,
not one pocket. A man is no better than the picture he loves to look at.
If your eyes are not pure, you heart can not be. One can guess the
character of a man by the kind of pictorial he purchases. When the devil
fails to get a man to read a bad book, he sometimes succeeds in getting
him to look at a bad picture. When Satan goes a-fishing he does not care
whether it is a long line or a short line, if he only draws his victim
in.
If I have this morning successfully laid down any principles by which
you may judge in regard to books and newspapers, then I have done
something of which I shall not be ashamed on the day which shall try
every man's work, of what sort it is. Cherish good books and newspapers.
Beware of the bad ones. One column may save your soul; one paragraph may
ruin it. Go home to-day and look through your library, and then look on
the stand where you keep your pictorials and newspapers, and apply the
Christian principles I have laid down this morning. If there is any
thing in your home that can not stand the test do not give it away, for
it might spoil an immortal soul; do not sell it, for the money you get
would be the price of blood; but rather kindle a fire on your kitchen
hearth, or in your back yard, and then drop the poison in it, and keep
stirring the blaze until, from preface to appendix, there shall not be a
single paragraph left.
Once in a while there is a mind like a loadstone, which, plunged amidst
steel and brass filings, gathers up the steel and repels the brass. But
it is generally just the opposite. If you attempt to plunge through a
hedge of burs to get one blackberry, you get more burs than
blackberries. You can not afford to read a bad book, however good you
are. You say: "The influence is insignificant." I tell you that the
scratch of a pin has sometimes produced the lock-jaw. Alas, if through
curiosity, as many do, you pry into an evil book, your curiosity is as
dangerous as that of the man who would stick a torch into a gunpowder
mill, merely to see whether it would blow up or not. In a menagerie in
New York a man put his hand through the bars of a black leopard's cage.
The animal's hide looked so slick and bright and beautiful. He just
stroked it once. The monster seized him, and he drew forth a hand, torn,
and mangled, and bleeding. O, touch not evil, even with the faintest
stroke; though it may be glossy and beautiful, touch it not, lest you
pull forth your soul torn and bleeding under the clutch of the black
leopard. "But," you say, "how can I find out whether a book is good or
bad, without reading it?" There is always something suspicious about a
bad book. I never knew an exception. Something suspicious in the index
or the style of illustration. This venomous reptile almost always
carries a warning rattle.
Again, I charge you to stand off from all those books which corrupt the
imagination and inflame the passions. I do not refer now to that kind of
a book which the villain has under his coat, waiting for the school to
be out, and then looking both ways to see that there is no policeman
around the block, offers the book to your son on his way home. I do not
speak of that kind of literature, but that which evades the law and
comes out in polished style, and with acute plot sounds the tocsin that
rouses up all the baser passions of the soul. Years ago a French lady
came forth as an authoress, under the assumed name of George Sand, She
smoked cigars. She wore gentlemen's apparel. She stepped off the bounds
of decency. She wrote with a style ardent, eloquent, mighty in its
gloom, horrible in its unchastity, glowing in its verbiage, vivid in its
portraiture, damning in its effects, transfusing into the libraries and
homes of the world an evil that has not even begun to relent, and she
has her copyists in all lands. To-day, under the nostrils of your city,
there is a fetid, reeking, unwashed literature enough to poison all the
fountains of public virtue and smite your sons and daughters as with the
wing of a destroying angel, and it is time that the ministers of the
Gospel blew the trumpet and rallied the forces of righteousness, all
armed to the teeth, in this great battle against a depraved literature.
Why are fifty per cent of the criminals in the jails and penitentiaries
of the United States to-day under twenty-one years of age? Many of them
under seventeen, under sixteen, under fifteen, under fourteen, under
thirteen. Walk along one of the corridors of the Tombs Prison in New
York and look for yourselves. Bad books, bad newspapers bewitched them
as soon as they got out of the cradle. "O," says some one, "I am a
business man, and I have no time to examine what my children read. I
have no time to inspect the books that come into my household." If your
children were threatened with typhoid fever would you have time to go
for the doctor? Would you have time to watch the progress of the
disease? Would you have time for the funeral? In the presence of my God,
I warn you of the fact that your children are threatened with moral and
spiritual typhoid, and that unless this thing be stopped, it will be to
them funeral of body, funeral of mind, funeral of soul, three funerals
in one day.
Against every bad pamphlet send a good pamphlet; against every unclean
picture send an innocent picture; against every scurrilous song send a
Christian song; against every bad book send a good book. The good
literature, the Christian literature, in its championship for God and
the truth, will bring down the evil literature in its championship for
the devil. I feel tingling to the tips of my fingers, and through all
the nerves of my body, and all the depths of my soul, the certainty of
our triumph. Cheer up! O men and women who are toiling for the
purification of society. Toil with your faces in the sunlight. If God be
for us, who can be against us?
Ye workers in the light,
There is a grand to-morrow,
After the long and gloomy night,
After the pain and sorrow
The purposes of God
Do not forever linger;
With peace and consolation shod,
Do ye not see the finger
Which points the way of life
To all down in the valley?
Then gird ye, gird ye for the strife;
Against the darkness rally.
The victory is yours,
And ye are God's forever;
For all things He for you secures
Through brave and right endeavor.
* * * * *
XX.
SATISFIED
AND OTHER POEMS.
Sleeping, waking, on we glide,
Dreamful, and unsatisfied,
In the heart a vague surprise,
Master of the thoughtful eyes.
What though Spring is in the air,
And the world is bright and fair?
Something hidden from the sight
Dashes fullness of delight.
Soothed are we in duty done,
And in something new begun,
Like a kissed and flattered child
To denial reconciled;
Yet the something unattained
Keeps us like Prometheus chained,
And our hearts intenser grow
As the vultures come and go.
Sleeping, waking, on we glide,
Dreamful and unsatisfied,
Pilgrims on a foreign shore,
Wanting something evermore,
All the shadow in our eyes,
All the substance in the skies.
By and by another sleep,
Angels watch and ward to keep.
By and by, from wakeful eyes,
Nothing of the old surprise,
All pure dreams of earth fulfilled,
Every sense with gladness thrilled.
Then are we, no more denied,
_With Thy likeness satisfied_.
* * * * *
SACRIFICE
Sacrifice! therein
I find no superstition of the past,
But one of Truth's great words, all life within,
As into chaos cast.
God, God put it there,
A trumpet-note to every living soul,
A prophecy of all that is most fair
Through darkness to the goal.
I can not efface
The record of this wonder-working Word,
Nor in my memory but faintly trace
Stern voices I have heard.
Voices come by day
Between life's lightning-flash and thunder-peal,
And sooner heaven and earth shall pass away
Than what they there reveal.
Voices come at night
Amid the silence of deluding cares,
And pain flows through the darkness and grows bright,
And knowledge unawares.
Voices fill the strife
To which I give the beauty of my days,
And testify that sacrifice is life,
Availing prayer and praise.
Life retained is lost,
The tocsin of interminable war;
And life relinquished is of life the cost,
Which shineth as a star.
Tongue can never tell
God's revelations in this mighty Word,
Nor how the mystery of life they spell,
With which all hearts are stirred.
I continue mute,
In joyful awe before the Infinite,
Until at length eternity transmute
My darkness into light.
I can only speak
An earth-born language, that does not reveal
The infinitude of duty which I seek
To utter and but feel.
Duty! heart of joy!
Which giveth strength to suffer and endure,
Till self-forgetfulness in God's employ
Enthrones a life secure.
Shepherd of the sheep,
To whom God gives the universal charge,
I think of Thy devotion and I weep,
Thy love appears so large!
And I think of all
The grief which strengthened Thy exalting hand,
Until great tears of Easter gladness fall,
To think in Thee I stand,
Out of whose great heart
So glorious is death's sacrificial knife--
To think I know Thee now somewhat, who art
The way, the truth, the life;
Who art with Thine own,
Where Thou hast been through immemorial years,
In every touch of consolation known,
In every flood of tears.
* * * * *
The Way of the Lord.
I cast my lot with the surging world,
To find out the way of the Lord;
A pebble hither and thither hurled,
To find out the way of the Lord.
I sought where the foot of man was unknown,
To find out the way of the Lord;
In the desert alone, alone, alone,
To find out the way of the Lord.
I bowed my heart to the voice of the sea,
To find out the way of the Lord;
To the sob of unuttered mystery,
To find out the way of the Lord.
I went down into the depths of my soul,
To find out the way of the Lord;
Down where the years of eternity roll,
To find out the way of the Lord.
Ah, me! I had no interpreter
To tell me the way of the Lord;
For Nature, it was not in her
To tell me the way of the Lord.
I heard of One who came out from God
To show me the way of the Lord;
I entered the path which here He trod
To show me the way of the Lord.
I walked the way of humility
To find out the way Of the Lord;
It turned to the way of sublimity,
To show me the way of the Lord.
From grief and loss came joy and gain,
To show me the way of the Lord;
And the dead came back to life again,
To show me the way of the Lord.
Yea, into the heaven of heavens He went,
To show me the way of the Lord;
And the Comforter from the Father He sent,
To show me the way of the Lord.
I learned how for me He lived and died,
To show me the way of the Lord;
And bearing the cross, which He glorified,
_I found out the way of the Lord_:
* * * * *
Via Crucis.
Cross uplifted, clouds are rifted,
Vision clearer, God grown dearer!
_Via crucis via lucis_.[1]
Cross, thy way is where the day is;
Thy surprises sweet sunrises!
_Via crucis via lucis_.
Life eternal, fair and vernal,
Is the glory of the story,
_Via crucis via lucis_;
Dawns in beauty, born of duty,
Joins thereafter Heaven's sweet laughter--
_Via crucis via lucis_;
Finds probation tribulation,
Onward presses and confesses,
_Via crucis via lucis_;
Bursts the fetter of the letter,
Reckons sorrow joy to-morrow--
_Via crucis via lucis_;
To the Master in disaster
Bravely clinging, journeys singing,
_Via crucis via lucis_;
Ranges crownward, never downward,
Always loving, always proving,
_Via crucis via lucis_;
Drinks forever from the river
Everlasting, still forecasting,
_Via crucis via lucis_;
And presages all the ages,
Light-enfolden, growing golden,
_Via crucis via lueis_.
O the shinings and refinings!
O the sweetness of completeness!
_Via crucis via lucis_!
* * * * *
XXI.
HEROES OF SCIENCE.
MICHAEL FARADAY--SIR WILLIAM SIEMENS--M. PASTEUR.
The loftiest class of scientists pursue science because they love truth.
They derive no animation from the thought of any practical application
which they can make from their scientific discoveries. They have no
dreams of patents and subsequent royalties, although these sometimes
come. They enter upon their work, smit with a passion for truth. If to
any one of them it should happen to be pointed out--as Sir Humphrey Davy
showed the ardent young Michael Faraday--at the beginning of his career,
that science is a hard mistress who pays badly, they are so in love with
science that, really and truly, they prefer from their very hearts to
live with her on bread and water in a garret to living without her in
palaces in which they might fare sumptuously every day.
There are others by whom science is regarded only in the measure of its
fruitfulness in producing material wealth. Their great men are not the
discoverers of principles, but the inventors, the men who can apply the
discoveries of others to supplying such wants as men are willing to pay
largely to have satisfied. As has been said--
"To some she is the goddess great;
To some the milch-cow of the field;
Their business is to calculate
The butter she will yield."
Our highest admiration must be for the discoverers; but we may do well
to remind ourselves, from time to time, that to such men we are indebted
not only for thrilling insight into the beautiful mysteries of nature,
and for the withdrawal of the veil which shuts out from ordinary sight
the august magnificences of nature, but also for the discovery of those
principles which can be turned to the best practical account,
ministering to us in our kitchens and bed-chambers and drawing-rooms and
factories and shops and fields, filling our nights with brilliancy and
our days with potencies, giving to each man the capability of
accomplishing in one year what his ancestors, who lived in unscientific
ages, could not have achieved in twenty; not only exhibiting the forces
of nature as steeds, but also showing how they may be harnessed to the
chariots of civilization.
To keep us in healthful gratitude to the men who, having turned away
from the marts of the money-makers, have unselfishly set themselves to
discover what will enrich the money-makers, and, content to live in
simple sorts of ways, have sent down beauty and comfort into the homes
of rich and poor, it is well to make an occasional _résumé_ of the
results of the work of useful scientists, and ponder the lessons of
their single-mindedness.
FARADAY.
Few names on the roll of the worthies of science are better known
through all the world than that of Michael Faraday, who was born in
England in 1791 and died in 1867. Rising from poverty, he became
assistant to Sir Humphrey Davy, in the Royal Institution, London, where
he soon exhibited great ability as an experimenter, and a rare genius
for discovering the secret relation of distant phenomena to one another,
which gave him his skill as a discoverer, so that he came to be
regarded, according to Professor Tyndall, "the prince of the physical
investigators of the present age," "the greatest experimental
philosopher the world has ever seen."
His greatest discoveries may be stated to have been magneto-electric
induction, electro-chemical decomposition, the magnetization of light,
and diamagnetism, the last announced in his memoir as the "magnetic
condition of all matter." There were many minor discoveries. The results
of his labors are apparent in every field of science which has been
cultivated since his day. Indeed, they made a great enlargement of that
field. His life of simple independence was a great contribution to the
highest wealth of the world. He might have been rich. He lived in
simplicity and died poor. It is calculated that, if he had made
commercial uses of his earlier discoveries, he might easily have
gathered a fortune of a million of dollars. He preferred to use his
extraordinary endowments for the promotion of science, from which he
would not be turned away by honors or money, declining the presidency of
the Royal Institution, which was urged upon him, preferring to "remain
plain Michael Faraday to the last," that he might make mankind his
legatees.
While Faraday does not claim the parentage of the electric telegraph, he
was among the earliest laborers in the practical application of his own
discoveries, without which the telegraph would probably never have had
existence. It was on his advice that Mr. Cyrus W. Field determined to
push the enterprise of the submarine cable. His labors were essential to
the success of the efforts of his friend Wheatstone in telegraphy. It
was his genius which discovered the method of preventing the
incrustation by ice of the windows of light-houses, and also a method
for the prevention of the fouling of air in brilliantly lighted rooms,
by which health was impaired and furniture injured. He discovered a
light, volatile oil, which he called "bicarburet of hydrogen." It is now
known to us as benzine, which is so largely employed in the industrial
arts. Treated by nitric acid, that has produced a substance largely used
by the perfumer and the confectioner. From that came the wonderful base
aniline, which was not only useful in the study of chemistry, as
throwing light on the internal structure of organic compounds, but has
come also into commerce, creating a great branch of industry, by giving
strong and high colors which can be fixed on cotton, woolen, and silken
fabrics. It may be worth while to notice what gratifying beauty was
provided for the eye, while profitable work was afforded to the
industrious.
It is not to be forgotten that, whatever we have of magneto-electric
light, in all its various applications, is due to Faraday's discoveries.
Faraday's distinguished successor, Professor Tyndall, in his admirable
and generous tribute to his famous predecessor, says: "As far as
electricity has been applied _for medical purposes_, it is almost
exclusively Faraday's." How much of addition to human comfort that one
sentence includes, who can estimate? And who can calculate the
money-value to commerce in the production of instruments used in the
application of electricity to medicine? Professor Tyndall continues:
"You have noticed those lines of wire which cross the streets of London.
It is Faraday's currents that speed from place to place through these
wires. Approaching the point of Dungeness, the mariner sees an unusually
brilliant light, and from the noble Pharos of La Hève the same light
flashes across the sea. These are Faraday's sparks, exalted by suitable
machinery to sunlight splendor. At the present moment (1868), the Board
of Trade and the Brethren of the Trinity House, as well as the
Commissioners of Northern Lights, are contemplating the introduction of
the magneto-electric light at numerous points upon our coast; and future
generations will be able to point to those guiding stars in answer to
the question, what has been the practical use of the labors of Faraday?"
SIEMENS
One of the most useful of modern men was Sir William Siemens, who was
born in 1823 and died in 1883. The year before his death he was
president of the British Association, and was introduced by his
predecessor, Sir J. Lubbock, with the statement that "the leading idea
of Dr. Siemens's life had been to economize and utilize the force of
Nature for the benefit of man." It is not our purpose to give a sketch
of his life, or a catalogue of his many inventions, all of which were
useful. It was his comprehensive and accurate study of the universe
which led him to discover, as he thought, that it is a vast regenerative
gas furnace. The theory has been that the sun is cooling down; but Dr.
Siemens saw that the water, vapor, and carbon compounds of the
interstellar spaces are returned to the sun, and that the action of the
sun on these literally converted the universe into a regenerative
furnace. On a small scale, in a way adapted to ordinary human uses, and
by ingenious contrivances, he produced a regenerative gas furnace which
so utilized what had hitherto been wasted that, in the last lecture
delivered by Michael Faraday (1862) before the Royal Society, he praised
the qualities of the furnace for its economy and ease of management; and
it soon came into general use. It is probably impossible to calculate
the amount of saving to the world due to his practical application of
the theory of the conservation of force to the pursuits of industry. It
has changed the processes for the production of steel so as to make it
much cheaper, and so revolutionized ship-building. The carrying power of
steel ships is so much greater than that of iron ships that the former
earn twenty-five per centum more than the latter. So great a gain is
this, that one-fourth the total tonnage of British ship-building in 1883
consisted of steel vessels.
Sir William Siemens's name is popularly associated with electric light.
Perhaps it can not be claimed that he was the sole inventor of it, since
Faraday had discovered the principle, and at the meeting of the Royal
Society, in 1867, at which Siemens's paper was read, the same
application of the principle was announced in a paper which had been
prepared by Sir Charles Wheatstone, and a patent had been sought by Mr.
Cromwell Varley, whose application involved the same idea. But it is
believed that Sir William did more than any other man to make the
discovery of wide and great practical benefit. His dynamo machine is
capable of transforming into electrical energy ninety per cent of the
mechanical energy employed. His inventions for the application of
electricity to industry are too numerous to mention. He has made it a
hewer of wood and a drawer of water and a general farm-hand, and has
shown how it can be applied to the raising and ripening of fruits. He
has shown us how gas can be made so that its "by-products" shall pay for
its production, and demonstrated that a pound of gas yields, in burning,
22,000 units, being double that produced by the combustion of a pound of
common coal. He has put the world in the way of making gas cheap and
brilliant. His sudden death prevented the completion of plans by which
London will save three-fourths of its coal bill by getting rid of its
hideous fog. His suggestions will, undoubtedly, be carried out. He was
also the inventor of the "chronometric governor," an apparatus which
regulates the movements of the great transit instruments at Greenwich.
These are some of the practical benefits bestowed upon mankind by Sir
William Siemens. He did much, by stimulating men, to make science
practically useful, and has left suggestions which, if followed out with
energy and wisdom, will add greatly to the comfort of the world. He
calculated that "all the coal raised throughout the world would barely
suffice to produce the amount of power that runs to waste at Niagara
alone," and said that it would not be difficult to realize a large
proportion of this wasted power by-turbines, and to use it at greater
distances by means of dynamo-electrical machines. Myriads of future
inhabitants of America are probably to reap untold wealth and comfort
from what was said and done by Sir William Siemens.
PASTEUR.
M. Pasteur, now a member of the French Academy, after years of
scientific training and study and teaching, began a career of public
usefulness which has been a source of incalculable pecuniary profit to
his country and to the world.
He began to study the nature of fermentation; and the result of this
study made quite a revolution in the manufacture of wine and beer. He
discovered a process which took its name from him; and now
"pasteurization" is practiced on a large scale in the German breweries,
to the great improvement of fermented beverages.
This attracted the attention of the French Government. At that time an
unknown disease was destroying the silk-worm of France and Italy. It was
so wide-spread as to threaten to destroy the silk manufacture in those
countries. M. Pasteur was asked to investigate the cause. At that time
he had scarcely ever seen a silk-worm; but he turned his acute, and
practical intellect to the study of this little worker, and soon
detected the trouble. He showed that it was due to a microscopic
parasite, which was developed from a germ born with the worm; and he
pointed out how to secure healthy eggs, and so rear healthy worms. He
thus gave his countrymen the knowledge necessary to the saving of the
French silk industry, and to a very large increase of the value of the
annual productiveness of the country.
Of course, a man who had gone thus far could not stop. If he «could save
the silk-worm, he might save larger animals. France was losing sheep and
oxen at the rate of from fifteen to twenty millions annually. The
services of M. Pasteur were again in demand. Again he discovered that
the devastator was a microscopic destroyer. It was anthrax. The result
of his experimenting was the discovery of an antidote, a method of
prevention by inoculation with attenuated microbes. Similar studies and
experiments and discoveries enabled him to furnish relief to the hog, at
a time when the hog-cholera was making devastations. As he had
discovered a preventive remedy for anthrax, he also found a remedy for
chicken-cholera, to the saving of poultry to an incalculable extent.
Having thus contributed more to the material wealth of his country than
any other living Frenchman, M. Pasteur naturally turned his discovery of
the parasitic origin of disease toward human sufferers. A man of
convictions and of faith, he has had the courage to ask the French
minister of commerce to organize a scientific commission to go to Egypt
to study the cholera there under his guidance.
M. Paul Best, who was M. Pasteur's early rival in scientific discussion,
paid a generous tribute to his great ability and services, and declared
that the discovery of the prevention of anthrax was the grandest and
most fruitful of all French discoveries. M. Pasteur's native town, Dole,
on the day of the national _fete_ last year (1883), placed a
commemorative tablet on the house in which he was born. The government's
grant of a pension of $5,000 a year, to be continued to his widow and
children, was made on the knowledge that if M. Pasteur had retained
proprietary right in his discovery, he might have amassed a vast
fortune; but he had freely given all to the public. According to an
estimate made by Professor Huxley, the labors of M. Pasteur are equal in
money value alone to the _one thousand millions of dollars_ of indemnity
paid by France to Germany in the late war. It is also to be remembered
that M. Pasteur's labors imparted stimulus to discovery in many
directions, setting many discoverers at work, who are now experimenting
on the working hypothesis of the parasitic origin of all other
infectious diseases.
Now here are three men, to whom the world is probably more indebted than
to any other twenty men who have lived this century; indebted for
health, wealth, comfort, and enjoyment; indebted in kitchen, chamber,
drawing-room, counting-house; at home and abroad, by day and by night,
for gratification of the bodily and aesthetic taste. They were the
almoners of science. Practical men would have no tools to work with if
they did not receive them from those who, in abstraction, wrought in the
secluded heights of scientific investigation. It is base to be
ungrateful to the studious recluses who are the devotees of science.
These three men were Christians--simple, honest, devout Christians.
Faraday was a most "just and faithful knight of God," as Professor
Tyndall says. Sir William Siemens, it is said, was a useful elder in the
Presbyterian Church, and M. Pasteur, still living, is a reverent Roman
Catholic. Surely, when we find these men walking a lofty height of
science, higher than that occupied by any of their contemporaries, and
when we find these men sending down more enriching gifts to the lowly
sons of toil, and all the traders in the market places, and all seekers
of pleasure in the world, than any other scientific men, we must be safe
in the conclusion that to be an earnest Christian is not incompatible
with the highest attainments in science; and we can not find fault with
those who look with contempt upon the men who disdain Christianity, as
if it were beneath them, when it is remembered that among the rejecters
of our holy faith are no men to whom we have a right to be grateful for
any discovery that has added a dollar to the world's exchequer, or a
"ray to the brightness of the world's civilization."--DR. DEEMS, _in the
New York Independent_.
* * * * *
XXII.
MY UNCLE TOBY
ONE OF THE BEAUTIFUL CREATIONS OF A GREAT GENIUS.
"If I were requested," says Leigh Hunt in his "Essay on Wit and Humor,"
"to name the book of all others which combines wit and humor under their
highest appearance of levity with the profoundest wisdom, it would be
'Tristram Shandy,'" the chief work of Laurence Sterne, who was born in
1713, and died in 1768. The following story of LeFevre, drawn from that
unique book, full of simple pathos and gentle kindness, presents,
perhaps, the best picture of the character that names this chapter:
It was some time in the Summer of that year in which Dendermond was
taken by the allies--which was about seven years before my father came
into the country, and about as many after the time that my uncle Toby
and Trim had privately decamped from my father's house in town, in order
to lay some of the finest sieges to some of the finest fortified cities
in Europe--when my uncle Toby was one evening getting his supper, with
Trim sitting behind him at a small sideboard, the landlord of a little
inn in the village came into the parlor, with an empty phial in his
hand, to beg a glass or two of sack. "'Tis for a poor gentleman, I
think, of the army," said the landlord, "who has been taken ill at my
house four days ago, and has never held up his head since, or had a
desire to taste any thing till just now, that he has a fancy for a glass
of sack and a thin toast. 'I think,' says he, taking his hand from his
forehead, 'it would comfort me.'"
"If I could neither beg, borrow, nor buy such a thing," added the
landlord, "I would almost steal it for the poor gentleman, he is so ill.
I hope in God he will still mend," continued he; "we are all of us
concerned for him."
"Thou art a good-natured soul, I will answer for thee," cried my uncle
Toby; "and thou shalt drink the poor gentleman's health in a glass of
sack thyself--and take a couple of bottles, with my service, and tell
him he is heartily welcome to them, and to a dozen more if they will do
him good."
"Though I am persuaded," said my uncle Toby, as the landlord shut the
door, "he is a very compassionate fellow, Trim, yet I can not help
entertaining a very high opinion of his guest, too; there must be
something more than common in him, that in so short a time should win so
much upon the affections of his host." "And of his whole family," added
the corporal, "for they are all concerned for him." "Step after him,"
said my uncle Toby; "do, Trim; and ask if he knows his name."
"I have quite forgot it, truly," said the landlord, coming back into the
parlor with the corporal, "but I can ask his son again." "Has a son with
him then?" said my uncle Toby. "A boy," replied the landlord, "of about
eleven or twelve years of age; but the poor creature has tasted almost
as little as his father; he does nothing but mourn and lament for him
night and day; he has not stirred from the bedside these two days."
My uncle Toby laid down his knife and fork, and thrust his plate from
before him, as the landlord gave him the account; and Trim, without
being ordered, took them away without saying one word, and in a few
minutes after brought him his pipe and tobacco.
"Stay in the room a little," says my uncle Toby. "Trim," said my uncle
Toby, after he had lighted his pipe and smoked about a dozen whiffs.
Trim came in front of his master and made his bow; my uncle Toby smoked
on and said no more. "Corporal," said my uncle Toby. The corporal made
his bow. My uncle Toby proceeded no farther, but finished his pipe.
"Trim," said my uncle Toby, "I have a project in my head, as it is a bad
night, of wrapping myself up warm in my roquelaure, and paying a visit
to this poor gentleman." "Your honor's roquelaure," replied the
corporal, "has not been had on since the night before your honor
received your wound, when we mounted guard in the trenches before the
gate of St. Nicholas; and, besides, it is so cold and rainy a night,
that what with the roquelaure and what with the weather, 't will be
enough to give your honor your death, and bring on your honor's torment
in your groin." "I fear so," replied my uncle Toby; "but I am not at
rest in my mind, Trim, since the account the landlord has given me. I
wish I had not known so much of this affair," added my uncle Toby, "or
that I had known more of it. How shall we manage it!" "Leave it, an 't
please your honor, to me," quoth the corporal; "I'll take my hat and
stick, and go to the house, reconnoitre, and act accordingly; and I will
bring your honor a full account in an hour." "Thou shalt go, Trim," said
my uncle Toby, "and here's a shilling for thee to drink with his
servant." "I shall get it all out of him," said the corporal, shutting
the door. My uncle Toby filled his second pipe; and, had it not been
that he now and then wandered from the point, with considering whether
it was not full as well to have the curtain of the tennaile a straight
line as a crooked one, he might be said to have thought of nothing else
but poor LeFevre and his boy the whole time he smoked it.
My uncle Toby had knocked the ashes out of his third pipe, when Trim
returned and gave the following account:
"I despaired at first," said the corporal, "of being able to bring back
your honor any kind of intelligence concerning the poor sick
lieutenant." "Is he in the army, then?" said my uncle Toby. "He is,"
said the corporal. "And in what regiment?" said my uncle Toby. "I'll
tell your honor," replied the corporal, "every thing straight forward,
as I learnt it." "Then, Trim, I'll fill another pipe," said my uncle
Toby, "and not interrupt thee till thou hast done; so sit down at thy
ease, Trim, in the window-seat, and begin thy story again." The corporal
made his old bow, which generally spoke as plain as a bow could speak
it. "Your honor is good," and, having done that, he sat down as he was
ordered, and began the story to my uncle Toby over again, in pretty
nearly the same words.
"I despaired at first," said the corporal, "of being able to bring back
any intelligence to your honor about the lieutenant and his son; for
when I asked where his servant was, from whom I made myself sure of
knowing every thing which was proper to be asked"--"That's a right
distinction, Trim," said my uncle Toby. "I was answered, an please your
honor, that he had no servant with him; that he had come to the inn with
hired horses, which, upon finding himself unable to proceed (to join, I
suppose, the regiment), he had dismissed the morning after he came. 'If
I get better, my dear,' said he, as he gave his purse to his son to pay
the man, 'we can hire horses from hence.' 'But, alas! the poor gentleman
will never get from hence,' said the landlady to me, 'for I heard the
death-watch all night long; and when he dies, the youth, his son, will
certainly die with him, for he is broken-hearted already.'
"I was hearing this account," continued the corporal, "when the youth
came into the kitchen to order the thin toast the landlord spoke of;
'but I will do it for my father myself,' said the youth. 'Pray let me
save you the trouble, young gentleman,' said I, taking up a fork for the
purpose, and offering him my chair to sit down upon by the fire, whilst
I did it. 'I believe, sir,' said he, very modestly, 'I can please him
best myself.' 'I am sure,' said I, 'his honor will not like the toast
the worse for being toasted by an old soldier.' The youth took hold of
my hand and instantly burst into tears."
"Poor youth," said my uncle Toby, "he has been bred up from an infant in
the army, and the name of a soldier, Trim, sounded in his ears like the
name of a friend; I wish I had him here."
"I never, in the longest march," said the corporal, "had so great a mind
to my dinner as I had to cry with him for company. What could be the
matter with me, an' please your honor?" "Nothing in the world, Trim,"
said my uncle Toby, blowing his nose; "but that thou art a good-natured
fellow."
"When I gave him the toast," continued the corporal, "I thought it was
proper to tell him I was Captain Shandy's servant, and that your honor
(though a stranger) was extremely concerned for his father; and that if
there was any thing in your house or cellar, ('and thou mightst have
added my purse, too,' said my uncle Toby,) he was heartily welcome to
it. He made a very low bow (which was meant to your honor), but no
answer--for his heart was full--so he went upstairs with the toast. 'I
warrant you, my dear,' said I, as I opened the kitchen door, 'your
father will be well again.' Mr. Yorick's curate was smoking a pipe by
the kitchen fire, but said not a word, good or bad, to comfort the
youth. I thought it was wrong," added the corporal. "I think so, too,"
said my uncle Toby.
"When the lieutenant had taken his glass of sack and toast, he felt
himself a little revived, and sent down into the kitchen to let me know
that in about ten minutes he should be glad if I would come upstairs. 'I
believe,' said the landlord, 'he was going to say his prayers, for there
was a book laid upon the chair by his bedside; and as I shut the door I
saw his son take up a cushion.'
"'I thought,' said the curate, 'that you gentlemen of the army, Mr.
Trim, never said your prayers at all.' 'I heard the poor gentleman say
his prayers last night,' said the landlady, 'very devoutly, and with my
own ears, or I could not have believed it.' 'Are you sure of it,'
replied the curate. 'A soldier, an' please your reverence,' said I,
'prays as often (of his own accord) as a parson; and when he is fighting
for his king and for his own life, and for his honor too, he has the
most reason to pray to God of any one in the whole world.'" "'Twas well
said of thee, Trim," said my uncle Toby. "'But when a soldier,' said I,
'an' please your reverence, has been standing for twelve hours together
in the trenches up to his knees in cold water, or engaged,' said I, 'for
months together in long and dangerous marches; harassed, perhaps, in his
rear to-day; harassing others to-morrow; detached here; countermanded
there; resting this night upon his arms; beat up in his shirt the next;
benumbed in his joints; perhaps without straw in his tent to kneel on,
he must say his prayers how and when he can, I believe,' said I, for I
was piqued," quoth the corporal, "for the reputation of the army. 'I
believe, an't please your reverence,' said I, 'that when a soldier gets
time to pray, he prays as heartily as a parson, though not with all his
fuss and hypocrisy.'" "Thou shouldst not have said that, Trim," said my
uncle Toby, "for God only knows who is a hypocrite and who is not. At
the great and general review of us all, corporal, at the day of judgment
(and not till then), it will be seen who has done their duties in this
world and who has not; and we shall be advanced, Trim, accordingly." "I
hope we shall," said Trim. "It is in the Scripture," said my uncle Toby,
"and I will show it thee to-morrow. In the meantime, we may depend upon
it, Trim, for our comfort," said my uncle Toby, "that God Almighty is so
good and just a governor of the world, that if we have but done our
duties in it, it will never be inquired into whether we have done them
in a red coat or a black one." "I hope not," said the corporal. "But go
on, Trim," said my uncle Toby, "with thy story."
"When, I went up," continued the corporal, "into the lieutenant's room,
which I did not do till the expiration of the ten minutes, he was lying
in his bed with his head raised up on his hand, with his elbow upon the
pillow, and a clean white cambric handkerchief beside it. The youth was
just stooping down to take up the cushion upon which I supposed he had
been kneeling; the book was laid upon the bed, and as he rose, in taking
up the cushion with one hand, he reached out his other to take it away
at the same time. 'Let it remain there, my dear,' said the lieutenant.
"He did not offer to speak to me till I had walked up close to his
bedside. 'If you are Captain Shandy's servant,' said he, 'you must
present my thanks to your master, with my little boy's thanks along with
them, for his courtesy to me, if he was of the Leven's,' said the
lieutenant. I told him your honor was. 'Then,' said he, 'I served three
campaigns with him in Flanders, and remember him; but 't is most likely,
as I had not the honor of any acquaintance with him, that he knows
nothing of me. You will tell him, however, that the person his good
nature has laid under obligations to him, is one LeFevre, a lieutenant
in Angus's; but he knows me not,' said he a second time, musing.
'Possibly, he may my story,' added he; 'pray tell the captain I was the
ensign at Breda whose wife was most unfortunately killed with a
musket-shot, as she lay in my arms in my tent.' 'I remember the story,
an't please your honor,' said I, very well.' 'Do you so?' said he,
wiping his eyes with his handkerchief; 'then well may I.' In saying
this, he drew a little ring out of his bosom, which seemed tied with a
black ribbon about his neck, and kissed it twice. 'Here, Billy,' said
he. The boy flew across the room to the bedside, and, falling down upon
his knee, took the ring in his hand, and kissed it, too; then kissed his
father, and sat down upon the bed and wept."
"I wish," said my uncle Toby, with a deep sigh, "I wish, Trim, I was
asleep."
"Your honor," replied the corporal, "is too much concerned. Shall I pour
your honor out a glass of sack to your pipe?" "Do, Trim," said my uncle
Toby.
"I remember," said my uncle Toby, sighing again, "the story of the
ensign and his wife, with a circumstance his modesty omitted; and
particularly well that he, as well as she, upon some account or other (I
forget what), was universally pitied by the whole regiment; but finish
the story thou art upon." "Tis finished already," said the corporal,
"for I could stay no longer, so wished his honor good-night." Young
LeFevre rose from off the bed and saw me to the bottom of the stairs;
and, as we went down together, told me they had come from Ireland, and
were on their route to join their regiment in Flanders. "But, alas,"
said the corporal, "the lieutenant's last day's march is over." "Then
what is to become of his poor boy?" cried my uncle Toby.
It was to my uncle Toby's eternal honor, though I tell it only for the
sake of those who, when cooped in betwixt a natural and a positive law,
know not, for their souls, which way in the world to turn themselves,
that, notwithstanding my uncle Toby was warmly engaged at that time in
carrying on the siege of Dendermond, parallel with the allies, who
pressed theirs on so vigorously that they scarce allowed him to get his
dinner, that, nevertheless, he gave up Dendermond, although he had
already made a lodgment upon the counterscarp, and bent his whole
thoughts-toward the private distresses at the inn, and that, except that
he ordered the garden gate to be bolted up, by which he might be said to
have turned the siege of Dendermond into a blockade, he left Dendermond
to itself, to be relieved or not by the French king as the French king
thought good, and only considered how he himself should relieve the poor
lieutenant and his son.
That kind Being, who is a friend to the friendless, shall recompense
thee for this.
"Thou hast left this matter short," said my uncle Toby to the corporal,
as he was putting him to bed, "and I will tell thee in what, Trim. In
the first place, when thou madest an offer of my services to LeFevre, as
sickness and traveling are both expensive, and thou knewest he was but a
poor lieutenant, with a son to subsist as well as himself out of his
pay, that thou didst not make an offer to him of my purse, because, had
he stood in need, thou knowest, Trim, he had been as welcome to it as
myself."
"Your honor knows," said the corporal, "I had no orders." "True," quoth
my uncle Toby, "thou did'st very right, Trim, as a soldier, but
certainly very wrong as a man."
"In the second place, for which, indeed, thou hast the same excuse,"
continued my uncle Toby, "when thou offeredst him whatever was in my
house, thou shouldst have offered him my house, too. A sick brother
officer should have the best quarters, Trim, and if we had him with us,
we could tend and look to him. Thou art an excellent nurse thyself,
Trim, and what with thy care of him, and the old woman's, and his boy's
and mine together, we might recruit him again at once and set him upon
his legs."
"In a fortnight, or three weeks," added my uncle Toby, smiling, "he
might march." "He will never march, an', please your honor, in this
world," said the corporal. "He will march," said my uncle Toby, rising
from the side of the bed with one shoe off. "An', please your honor,"
said the corporal, "he will never march, but to his grave." "He shall
march," cried my uncle Toby, marching the foot which had a shoe on,
though without advancing an inch, "he shall march to his regiment." "He
can not stand it," said the corporal. "He shall be supported," said my
uncle Toby. "He'll drop at last," said the corporal, "and what will
become of his boy?" "He shall not drop," said my uncle Toby, firmly.
"Ah, welladay, do what we can for him," said Trim, maintaining his
point, "the poor soul will die." "He shall not die, by G--d," cried my
uncle Toby.
The _accusing spirit_ which flew up to heaven's chancery with the oath,
blushed as he gave it in, and the _recording angel_, as he wrote it
down, dropped a tear upon the word and blotted it out forever.
My uncle Toby went to his bureau, put his purse into his breeches
pocket, and, having ordered the corporal to go early in the morning for
a physician, he went to bed and fell asleep.
The sun looked bright the morning after to every eye in the village but
LeFevre's and his afflicted son's; the hand of death pressed heavy upon
his eyelids, and hardly could the wheel at the cistern turn round its
circle when my uncle Toby, who had rose up an hour before his wonted
time, entered the lieutenant's room, and, without preface or apology,
set himself down upon the chair by the bedside, and independently of all
modes and customs, opened the curtain in the manner an old friend and
brother officer would have done it, and asked him how he did; how he had
rested in the night; what was his complaint; where was his pain, and
what could he do to help him? and without giving him time to answer any
one of the inquiries, went on and told him of the little plan which he
had been concerting with the corporal, the night before, for him.
"You shall go home directly, LeFevre," said my uncle Toby, "to my house,
and we'll send for a doctor to see what's the matter, and we'll have an
apothecary, and the corporal shall be your nurse and I'll be your
servant, LeFevre."
There was a frankness in my Uncle Toby, not the effect of familiarity,
but the cause of it, which let you at once into his soul and showed you
the goodness of his nature; to this, there was something in his looks,
and voice, and manner superadded, which eternally beckoned to the
unfortunate to come and take shelter under him; so that before my uncle
Toby had half finished the kind offers he was making to the father, had
the son insensibly pressed up close to his knees, and had taken hold of
the breast of his coat and was pulling it toward him. The blood and
spirits of LeFevre, which were waxing cold and slow within him, and were
retreating to their last citadel, the heart, rallied back, the film
forsook his eyes for a moment, and he looked up wishfully in my uncle
Toby's face, then cast a look upon his boy, and that ligament, fine as
it was, was never broken.
Nature instantly ebbed again; the film returned to its place; the pulse
fluttered--stopped--went on--throbbed--stopped
again--moved--stopped--shall I go on? No.
* * * * *
XXIII.
STEPHEN GIRARD
(BORN 1750--DIED 1831.)
THE NAPOLEON OF MERCHANTS--HIS LIFE SUCCESSFUL, AND YET A FAILURE.
Imagine the figure of an old man, low in stature, squarely built,
clumsily dressed, and standing on large feet. To this uncouth form, add
a repulsive face, wrinkled, cold, colorless, and stony, with one eye
dull and the other blind--a "wall-eye." His expression is that of a man
wrapped in the mystery of his own hidden thoughts. He looks--
"Like monumental bronze, unchanged his look--
A soul which pity never touched or shook--
Trained, from his lowly cradle to his bier,
The fierce extremes of good and ill to brook
Unchanging, fearing but the charge of fear--
A stoic of the mart, a man without a tear."
Such a man was Stephen Girard, one of the most distinguished merchants
in the annals of commerce, and the founder of the celebrated Girard
College in Philadelphia. Let us briefly trace his history and observe
his character.
Girard was a Frenchman by birth, born in the environs of Bordeaux, in
May, 1750, of obscure parents. His early instruction was very limited;
and, being deformed by a wall-eye, he was an object of ridicule to the
companions of his boyhood. This treatment, as is supposed by his
biographer, soured his temper, made him shrink from society, and led him
to live among his own thoughts rather than in mental communion with his
fellows.
The precise cause of his leaving his native hearth-stone is unknown. The
fact is certain that he did leave it, when only ten or twelve years old,
and sailed, a poor cabin-boy, to the West Indies. This was his
starting-point in life. Never had any boy a smaller capital on which to
build his fortune. He went out from his unhappy home, ignorant, poor,
unfriended, and unknown. That from such a cheerless beginning he should
rise to the rank of a merchant prince must be accounted one of the
marvels of human history.
His first step was to gain the confidence of his superiors, not so much
by affability and courtesy--for of these social virtues he was never
possessed--as by steady good conduct, fidelity to his employers,
temperance, and studied effort to do his humble duties well. Whatsoever
his hands found to do he did with his might. As a consequence, we find
him, in a few years, in high favor with a Captain Randall, of New York,
who always spoke of him as "my Stephen," and who promoted him from one
position to another, until he secured him the command of a small vessel,
and sent him on trading voyages between the ports of New York and New
Orleans. That the poor cabin-boy should rise, by his own merits, in some
six or seven years, to be the commander of a vessel was success such as
few lads have ever won with such slender means and few helps as were
within reach of young Girard.
When only nineteen, we find him in Philadelphia, driving a thrifty but
quiet trade in a little shop in Water Street. Shortly after opening this
store, his fancy was taken captive by a maiden of sixteen Summers, named
Mary, but familiarly called Polly, Lum. She was a shipwright's daughter,
a pretty brunette, who was in the habit of going to the neighboring
pump, barefooted, "with her rich, glossy, black hair hanging in
disheveled curls about her neck." Her modesty pleased him, her beauty
charmed him, and, after a few months of rude courtship, he was married
to her, in 1770.
His marriage, instead of carrying happiness into the home over which he
installed his beautiful bride, only embittered two lives. It was a union
of mere fancy on his side, and of self-interest on hers, not of genuine
affection. Their dispositions were not congenial. She was ignorant,
vulgar, slovenly. He was arbitrary, harsh, rude, imperious, unyielding.
How could their lives flow on evenly together? It was impossible. The
result was misery to both, and, as we shall see hereafter, the once
beautiful Polly Lum ended her days in a mad-house--a sad illustration of
the folly of premature, ill-assorted marriages.
Finding little at his fireside to move his heart, Girard gave his whole
soul to business, now trading to San Domingo and New Orleans, and then
in his store in Water Street. When the Revolutionary War began, it swept
his commercial ventures from the ocean, but he, still bent on gain and
indifferent as to the means of winning it, then opened a grocery, and
engaged in bottling cider and claret. When the British army occupied
Philadelphia, he moved this bottling business to Mount Holly, in New
Jersey, where he continued until the American flag again floated over
Independence Hall.
But times were hard and money scarce, and for awhile Girard added very
little to his means. Yet his keen eye was sharply watching for golden
opportunities, and his active mind busily thinking how to create or
improve them. In 1780, circumstances made trade with New Orleans and San
Domingo very profitable. He promptly engaged in it, and in two years
doubled his resources.
Peace being restored, Girard, full of faith in the future of his adopted
country, leased a block of stores for ten years at a very low rent. The
following year, while business still lay stunned by the blows it had
received during the war, he obtained a stipulation from his landlord,
giving him the right to renew his lease for a second ten years, if he
chose to demand it, when the first one should expire. This was an act of
judicious foresight. When, at the expiration of the first lease, he
visited his landlord, that gentleman, on seeing him enter his
counting-room, said:
"Well, Mr. Girard, you have made out so well by your bargain that I
suppose you will hardly hold me to the renewal of the lease for ten
years more."
"I have come," replied Gerard, with a look of grim satisfaction, "to
secure the ten years more. I shall not let you off."
Nor did he. And the great profits he derived from that fortunate lease
greatly broadened the foundation of his subsequently colossal fortune.
As yet, however, his wealth was very moderate, for in 1790, at the
dissolution of a partnership he had formed with his brother who had come
to America, his own share of the business amounted to only thirty
thousand dollars. And yet, forty years later, he died leaving a fortune
of ten millions.
It is sad; but may be profitable to know, that his happiness did not
increase with his possessions. While his balance-sheets recorded
increasing assets, his hearth-stone echoed louder and wilder echoes of
discordant voices. He was jealous, arbitrary, and passionate; his
unfortunate wife was resentful, fiery, and finally so furious that, in
1790, she was admitted as a maniac to an insane hospital, which she
never left until she was carried to her grave, unwept and unregretted,
twenty-five years after. Their only child had gone to an early grave.
Girard's nature must have been strangely perverted if he counted, as he
seems to have done, the pleasure of making money a compensation for the
absence of true womanly love from his cheerless fireside. His heart, no
doubt, was as unsentimental as the gold he loved to hoard.
The terrible retribution which about this time overtook the
slave-holders of St. Domingo, when their slaves threw off their
oppressive yoke, added considerably to his rising fortunes. He happened
to have two vessels in that port when the tocsin of insurrection rang
out its fearful notes. Frantic with apprehension, many planters rushed
with their costliest treasure to these ships, left them in care of their
officers, and went back for more. But the blood-stained hand of massacre
prevented their return. They and their heirs perished by knife or
bullet, and the unclaimed treasure was taken to Philadelphia, to swell
the stream of Girard's wealth. He deemed this a lucky accident, no
doubt; and smothered his sympathies for the sufferers in the
satisfaction he felt over the addition of fifty thousand dollars to his
growing estate. It stimulated, if it did not beget, the dream of his
life, the passion which possessed his soul, which was to acquire wealth
by which his _name_ might be kept before the world forever. "My _deeds_
must be my life. When I am dead my _actions_ must speak for me," he said
to an acquaintance one day, and thus gave expression to his plan of
life. There was nothing intrinsically noble in it. If the means he
finally adopted bore a philanthropic stamp on their face, his motive was
purely personal, and therefore low and selfish. What he toiled for was a
name that would never die. He was shrewd enough to perceive that this
end could be most surely gained by linking it with the philanthropic
spirit of the Christianity which he detested. And hence arose his idea
of founding Girard College.
Shortly after plucking the golden fruit which fell into his hands from
the St. Domingo insurrection Girard enlarged his business by building
several splendid ships and entering into the China and India trade. His
operations in this line were managed with a spirit that indicated a true
mercantile genius, and contributed greatly to the enlargement of his
fortune.
He made these ships the visible expressions of his thoughts on religion
and philosophy by naming them, after his favorite authors, the
_Montesquieu_, the _Helvetius_, the _Voltaire_, and the _Rousseau_. He
thus defiantly assured the world that he was not only a skeptic, but
that he also gloried in that by no means creditable fact.
Girard's life was filled with enigmas. He really loved no living soul.
He had no sympathies. He would not part with his money to save agent,
servant, neighbor, or relation from death. Nevertheless, when the yellow
fever spread dismay, desolation, and death throughout Philadelphia, in
1793, sweeping one-sixth of its population into the grave in about sixty
days, he devoted himself to nursing the sick in the hospital with a
self-sacrificing zeal which knew no bounds, and which excited universal
admiration and praise. His biographer accounts for this conduct,
repeated on two subsequent visitations of that terrible fever, by
supposing that he was naturally benevolent, but that his early trials
had sealed up the fountains of his human feeling. A great public
catastrophe broke the seal, the suppressed fountain flowed until the day
of terror passed, and then with resolute will he resealed the fountain,
and became a cold-hearted, selfish man again.
His selfish disregard for the claims of his dependents was shown, one
day, when one of his most successful captains, who had risen from the
humble position of apprentice to the command of a fine ship, asked to be
transferred to another ship. Girard made him no reply, but, turning to
his desk, said to his chief clerk:
"Roberjot, make out Captain Galigar's account immediately."
When this order was obeyed and the account settled, he coolly said to
the faithful officer:
"You are discharged, sir. I do not make the voyage for my captains, but
for myself."
There was no appeal to be made from this unjust, arbitrary decision, and
the man who had served him faithfully seventeen years left his
counting-room to seek another employer.
Discourtesy was also a characteristic of this unlovely and unloving man.
He never considered men's _feelings_, nor sought to give pleasure to
others by means of the small courtesies of life. He had a farm in the
suburbs of the city, and a garden at the back of his town residence. In
both he cultivated beautiful flowers and rare fruits; but never, either
to visitors or neighbors, did he offer gifts of either. Rich though he
was, he sent the surplus to market. He once told a visitor he might
glean strawberries from a bed which had been pretty thoroughly picked
over. Returning from the lower part of the garden, he found the
gentleman picking berries from a full bed. With a look of astonishment,
and a voice of half-suppressed anger, he pointed to the exhausted, bed
and said:
"I gave you permission only to eat from that bed."
Singular meanness! Yet, notwithstanding this narrow disposition, which
ran like veins abnormally distended over nearly all his habits of life,
he could, and did at times, do liberal things. But even in such things
he was capricious and eccentric; as when a highly esteemed Quaker, named
Coates, asked him one day to make a donation to the Pennsylvania
Hospital. He replied:
"Call on me to-morrow morning, Mr. Coates, and if you find me on a right
footing, I will do something."
Mr. Coates called as requested, and found Girard at breakfast.
"Draw up and eat," said Girard.
Coates did so quite readily. The repast ended, he said, "Now we will
proceed to business, Stephen."
"Well, what have you come for, Samuel?"
"Any thing thee pleases, Stephen," rejoined the Quaker.
Girard filled out and signed a check for two hundred dollars. Coates
took it, and, without noting how much was the amount, put it in his
pocket-book.
"What, you no look at the check I gave you!" exclaimed the merchant.
"No, beggars must not be choosers."
"Hand me back the check I gave you," demanded Girard.
"No, no, Stephen; a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush,"
responded Coates.
"By George," exclaimed Girard, "you have caught me on the _right
footing_."
He then drew a check for five hundred dollars, which he laid before the
Quaker, saying: "Will you now look at it, Samuel!"
"Well, to please thee, Stephen, I will."
He did so, and then, at Girard's request, returned the first and went
away triumphantly with the second check.
Skeptic though he was, Girard sometimes gave money to build churches,
not because they were _churches_, but because, as buildings, they
contributed to the improvement of the city. To a brother merchant, who
solicited aid toward building a Methodist church, he once presented a
check for five hundred dollars, saying:
"I approve of your motives, and, as the erection of such a building will
tend to improve that quarter of the city, I am willing to assist in the
furtherance of your object."
It happened that the church to which he thus contributed was
subsequently sold to the Episcopalians, who proceeded to convert it into
a Gothic structure at a very considerable outlay. They also waited on
Girard soliciting a contribution. He handed them a check for five
hundred dollars. The gentlemen solicitors looked blank, and intimated
that he had made the mistake of omitting a cipher. He had given the
"poor Methodists" that sum they pleaded; he surely must have intended to
make his present gift five thousand. With this remark they handed back
the check, requesting him to add the desired cipher.
"Ah, gentlemen, what you say? I have made one mistake? Let me see; I
believe not; but if you say so I must correct it."
Thus saying, he took up the check, tore it to pieces, and added: "I will
not contribute one cent. Your society is wealthy. The Methodists are
poor, but I make no distinction. Yet I can not please you.... I have
nothing to give for your magnificent church."
But, with all his offensive peculiarities, Girard continued to increase
his wealth. His ships spread their sails on every sea and earned money
for him in every great commercial port. In 1812 he founded the old
Girard Bank, and added the rich profits of banking to the immense gains
of his vast mercantile transactions. This new enterprise greatly
enlarged the sphere of his influence, especially as in matters
pertaining to the financial interests of the country and of the city of
Philadelphia he manifested a degree of public spirit which contrasted
marvelously with his narrowness, meanness, and even inhumanity, in
dealing with individual and private interests. He was certainly a
patriotic man. Nevertheless, as his biographer demonstrates, he always
contrived to make his patriotism tributary to the increase of his
immense wealth. His magnificent purchases of United States securities in
times of pecuniary disaster, though they contributed immensely to the
credit of the government, were not wholly patriotic. They were, to his
far-seeing mind, investments which were sure to pay. And he knew also
that the very magnitude of his purchases would, by strengthening public
confidence, insure the profitable returns he sought. Still, there is no
room for doubting the sincerity of his attachment to the country of his
adoption.
This fortunate accumulator of millions took very little from his hoards
for the promotion of his personal ease and physical enjoyments. He lived
in a plain mansion, simply furnished, and standing in the midst of
warehouses, where the din of business, the rolling of heavy wheels, and
the city's noisiest roar, constantly filled his ears. His table was
plentifully but not luxuriously supplied. As he grew old it was
extremely simple. He gave no parties, invited none to share his
hospitality, except now and then an individual from whom he had reason
for believing he could extract information which would be useful to him.
He worked incessantly at his business, rising at three or four o'clock
and toiling until after midnight. His keen eye inspected every
department of his complicated business, from the discounting of a note
to the building of a ship or the erection of a building. His only
recreation was his garden, his farm at Passyunk, or the training of his
birds. His life was coined into work. Its only real pleasure was derived
from the accumulation of the money which was to make his name immortal.
In 1830 the sight of his eye grew so dim that it was both difficult and
dangerous for him to grope his way along the familiar streets where he
transacted business. But so obstinately self-reliant was he that he
refused the aid of an attendant. He paid dearly for this obstinacy; for,
one day as he was going home from his bank, he was knocked down by a
wagon on a street-crossing. A gentleman, seeing him fall, rushed to his
assistance. But before he could reach him the plucky old merchant was on
his feet shouting, "Stop that fellow! stop that fellow!"
He was badly hurt. Nevertheless, he persisted in walking home. When his
physician came his face was found to be seriously wounded. His right ear
was almost entirely cut off. His eye was entirely closed. His entire
system had received a violent shock, from which it never recovered. His
wound healed, but from that time his body began to waste, his face grew
thin, and his natural force began to abate. His strength was sadly
impaired, and when, in December, 1831, he was attacked by a prevailing
influenza, his worn-out system succumbed. The disease touched his
powerful brain. He became first insane and then insensible, until, on
the 26th of December, 1831, this old man of eighty-two rose from his
bed, walked across his chamber, returned almost immediately to his bed,
and then, placing his hand upon his burning head, exclaimed:
"How violent is this disorder! How very extraordinary it is!"
After this he lapsed into an unconscious condition, and while in this
state, his naked soul passed into the presence-chamber of that Infinite
One whose worship it had neglected, and whose existence it had boldly
denied.
Thus ended that busy life, which began in poverty, and which had yielded
its possessor a fortune of _ten millions of dollars_. Surely, if wealth
and the power it wields be the real crown of life, Stephen Girard must
be accorded high rank among the mighty men who win magnificent victories
over the adverse circumstances of an obscure birth. He sought riches,
not as a miser who gloats with low delight over his glittering gold, but
as a man ambitious to make his name imperishable. His ambition was
satisfied. His ten millions, invested as directed in his will, which is
itself a marvel of worldly wisdom, is accomplishing his life-long
desire. So far as human foresight can perceive, Girard College will keep
the name of this wonderful man before the eyes of men through the coming
ages.
Nevertheless, we count this victor over the mighty obstacles which stand
between a penniless cabin-boy and the ownership of millions a vanquished
man. Bringing his life into the "light of the glory of God which shines
from the face of Jesus Christ," we are compelled to pronounce it a
miserable failure. We do not find either Christian faith or Christian
morality in it. As to faith, he had none; for he was an atheist, and
gloried in his disbelief of all revealed truth. As to morality, his
biographer informs us that he was an unchaste, profane, passionate,
arbitrary, ungenerous, unloving man. His apparent philanthropy was so
veined with selfishness that it was rarely ever exhibited except under
conditions which secured publicity. And even the college which
perpetuates his name proclaims, by its prohibition of _religious_
instruction, his hatred of "the only name given under heaven among men
whereby we can be saved." It is true that his will enjoins instruction
in morals; but it is heathen, not Christian, morality that he intended;
and, if the letter and spirit of his remarkable will were strictly
carried out, the graduates of Girard College would leave its walls as
ill instructed in the principles of genuine morality as were the
disciples of Socrates or the followers of Confucius. The only roots on
which pure morals can grow are faith in our heavenly Father and his
divine Son, and love which is born of that precious faith. That faith is
forbidden to be taught, and its divinely ordained teachers are
prohibited entrance within the walls his unsanctified ambition built.
Happily for the orphan boys who congregate there, the _spirit_ of that
antichristian will can not be executed in this Christian country. Its
_letter_ is no doubt respected; but the ethics of the institution are
not those of Voltaire, Rousseau, or Confucius, but of Jesus, whose life
is the only "light of men." Hence, while his college may perpetuate his
name, it will never cause mankind to love his character, nor to hope
that he is one of that exalted host which ascended to heaven through
much tribulation, and after washing their robes in the blood of the
Lamb.--DR. WISE, _in "Victors Vanquished_," Cranston & Stowe,
Cincinnati.
* * * * *
XXIV.
DISAPPOINTMENTS.
PLEASURE AFTER PAIN--PAIN AFTER PLEASURE.
Our illusions commence in the cradle, and end only in the grave. We have
all great expectations. Our ducks are ever to be geese, our geese swans;
and we can not bear the truth when it comes upon us. Hence our
disappointments; hence Solomon cried out that all was vanity, that he
had tried every thing, each pleasure, each beauty, and found it very
empty. People, he writes, should be taught by my example; they can not
go beyond me--"What can he do that comes after the king?"
It is very doubtful whether, to an untried or a young man, the warnings
of Solomon, or the outpourings of that griefful prophet whose name now
passes for a lamentation, have done much good. Hope balances caution,
and "springs eternal in the human breast." The old man fails, but the
young constantly fancies he shall succeed. "Solomon," he cries, "did not
know every thing;" but in a few years his own disappointments tell him
how true the king's words are, and he cherishes the experience he has
bought. But experience does not serve him in every case; it has been
said that it is simply like the stern-lights of a ship, which lighten
the path she has passed over, but not that which she is about to
traverse. To know one's self is the hardest lesson we can learn. Few of
us ever realize our true position; few see that they are like Bunyan's
hero in the midst of Vanity Fair, and that all about them are snares,
illusions, painted shows, real troubles, and true miseries, many trials
and few enjoyments.
Perhaps the bitterest feelings in our life are those which we
experience, when boys and girls, at the failures of our friendships and
our loves. We have heard of false friends; we have read of deceit in
books; but we know nothing about it, and we hardly believe what we hear.
Our friend is to be true as steel. He is always to like us, and we him.
He is a second Damon, we a Pythias. We remember the fond old stories of
celebrated friendships; how one shared his fortune, another gave his
life. Our friend is just of that sort; he is noble, true, grand, heroic.
Of course, he is wonderfully generous. We talk of him; he will praise
us. The whole people around, who laugh at the sudden warmth, we regard
as old fogies, who do not understand life half as well as we do. But by
and by our friend vanishes; the image which we thought was gold we find
made of mere clay. We grow melancholy; we are fond of reading Byron's
poetry; the sun is not nearly so bright nor the sky so blue as it used
to be. We sing, with the noble poet--
"My days are in the yellow leaf,
The flowers and fruits of love are gone;
The worm, the canker, and the grief
Are mine alone.!"
We cease to believe in friendship; we quote old saws, and fancy
ourselves cruelly used. We think ourselves philosophic martyrs, when the
simple truth is, that we are disappointed.
The major part of the misery in marriage arises from the false estimate
which we make of married happiness. A young man, who is a pure and good
one, when he starts in life is very apt to fancy all women angels. He
loves and venerates his mother; he believes her better, purer far, than
his father, because his school-days have taught him practically what men
are; but he does not yet know what women are. His sisters are angels
too, and the wife he is about to marry, the best, the purest woman in
the world, also an angel, of course. Marriage soon opens his eyes. It
would be out of the course of nature for every body to secure an angel;
and the young husband finds that he has married a woman of the ordinary
pattern--not a whit better on the whole than man; perhaps worse, because
weaker. The high-flown sentiment is all gone, the romantic ideas fade
down to the light of common day. "The bloom of young desire, the purple
light of love," as Milton writes in one of the most beautiful lines ever
penned, too often pass away as well, and a future of misery is opened up
on the basis of disappointment. After all, the difficulty to be got over
is this--how is mankind to be taught to take a just estimate of things?
Is it possible to put old heads upon young shoulders? Is not youth a
perpetual state of intoxication? Is not every thing better and brighter
far then than in middle life? These are the questions to be solved, and
once solved we shall be happy; we shall have learnt the great lesson,
that whatever is, is ordained by a great and wise power, and that we are
therewith to be content.
A kindly consideration for others is the best method in the world to
adopt, to ease off our own troubles; and this consideration is to be
cultivated very easily. There is not one of those who will take up this
book who is perfectly happy, and not one who does not fancy that he or
she might be very much better off. Perhaps ten out of every dozen have
been disappointed in life. They are not precisely what they should be.
The wise poor man, in spite of his wisdom, envies the rich fool; and the
fool--if he has any appreciation--envies the wisdom of the other. One is
too tall, the other is too short; ill-health plagues a third, and a bad
wife a fourth; and so on. Yet there is not one of the sorrows or
troubles that we have but might be reasoned away. The short man can not
add a cubit to his stature; but he may think, after all, that many great
heroes have been short, and that it is the mind, not the form, that
makes the man. Napoleon the Great, who had high-heeled boots, and was,
to be sure, hardly a giant in stature, once looked at a picture of
Alexander, by David. "Ah!" said he, taking snuff, with a pleased air,
"Alexander was shorter than I." The hero last mentioned is he who cried
because he had no more worlds to conquer, and who never thought of
conquering himself. But if Alexander were disappointed about another
world, his courtiers were much more so because they were not Alexanders.
But the world would not have cared for a surplus of them; one was
enough. Conquerers are very pleasant fellows, no doubt, and are
disappointed and sulky because they can not gain more battles; but we
poor frogs in the world are quite satisfied with one King Stork.
If we look at a disappointment as a lesson, we soon take the sting out
of it. A spider will teach us that. He is watching for a fly, and away
the nimble fellow flies. The spider upon this runs round his net to see
whether there be any holes, and to mend them. When doing so, he comes
upon an old body of one of his victims, and he commences again on it,
with a pious ejaculation of "Better luck next time." So one of the
greatest and wisest missionaries whom we have ever had, tried, when a
boy, to climb a tree. He fell down, and broke his leg. Seriously lamed,
he went on crutches for six months, and at the end of that time quietly
set about climbing the tree again, and succeeded. He had, in truth, a
reserve fund of good-humor and sound sense, saw where he failed, and
conquered it. His disappointment was worth twenty dozen successes to
him, and to the world too. It is a good rule, also, never to make too
sure of any thing, and never to put too high a price on it. Every thing
is worth doing well; every thing, presuming you like it, is worth
having. The girl you fall in love with may be silly and ill-favored; but
what of that? she is your love. "'Tis a poor fancy of mine own to like
that which none other man will have," says the fool Touchstone; but he
speaks like a wise man. He is wiser than the melancholy Jacques in the
same play, who calls all people fools, and mopes about preaching wise
saws. If our young men were as wise, there would not be half the
ill-assorted marriages in the world, and there would be fewer single
women. If they only chose by sense or fancy, or because they saw some
good quality in a girl--if they were not all captivated by the face
alone, every Jill would have her Jack, and pair off happily, like the
lovers in a comedy. But it is not so. We can not live without illusions;
we can not, therefore, subsist without disappointments. They, too,
follow each other as the night the day, the shade the sunshine; they are
as inseparable as life and death.
The difference of our conditions alone places a variety in these
illusions; perhaps the lowest of us have the brightest, just as
Cinderella, sitting amongst the coals, dreamed of the ball and beautiful
prince as well as her sisters. "Bare and grim to tears," says Emerson,
"is the lot of the children I saw yesterday; yet not the less they hung
it round with frippery romance, like the children of the happiest
fortune, and would talk of 'the dear cottage where so many joyful hours
had flown.' Well, this thatching of hovels is the custom of the country.
Women, more than all, are the element and kingdom of illusion." Happy is
it that they are so. These fancies and illusions bring forth the
inevitable disappointments, but they carry life on with a swing. If
every hovel-born child had sat down at his doorstep, and taken true
stock of himself, and had said, "I am a poor miserable child, weak in
health, without knowledge, with little help, and can not do much," we
should have wanted many a hero. We should have had no Stephenson, no
Faraday, no Arkwright, and no Watt. Our railways would have been
unbuilt, and the Atlantic Ocean would have been unbridged by steam. But
hope, as phrenologists tells us, lies above caution, and has dangerous
and active neighbors--wit, imagination, language, ideality--so the poor
cottage is hung round with fancies, and the man exists to help his
fellows. He may fail; but others take up his tangled thread, and unravel
it, and carry on the great business of life.
The constantly cheerful man, who survives his blighted hopes and
disappointments, who takes them just for what they are--lessons, and
perhaps blessings in disguise--is the true hero. He is like a strong
swimmer; the waves dash over him, but he is never submerged. We can not
help applauding and admiring such a man; and the world, good-natured and
wise in its verdict, cheers him when he gains the goal. There may be
brutality in the sport, but there can be no question as to the merit,
when the smaller prizefighter, who receives again and again his
adversary's knockdown blow, again gets up and is ready for the fray. Old
General Blucher was not a lucky general. He was beaten almost every time
he ventured to battle; but in an incredible space of time he had
gathered together his routed army, and was as formidable as before. The
Germans liked the bold old fellow, and called, and still call him,
Marshal Forwards. He had his disappointments, no doubt, but turned them,
like the oyster does the speck of sand which annoys it, to a pearl. To
our minds, the best of all these heroes is Robert Hall, the preacher,
who, after falling on the ground in paroxysms of pain, would rise with a
smile, and say, "I suffered much, but I did not cry out, did I? did I
cry out?" Beautiful is this heroism. Nature, base enough under some
aspects, rises into grandeur in such an example, and shoots upwards to
an Alpine height of pure air and cloudless sunshine; the bold, noble,
and kindly nature of the man, struggling against pain, and asking, in an
apologetic tone, "Did I cry out?" whilst his lips were white with
anguish, and his tongue, bitten through in the paroxysm, was red with
blood!
There is a companion picture of ineffaceable grandeur to this in Plato's
"Phoedo," where Socrates, who has been unchained simply that he may
prepare for death, sits upon his bed, and, rubbing his leg gently where
the iron had galled it, begins, not a complaint against fate, or his
judges, or the misery of present death, but a grateful little
reflection. "What an unaccountable thing, my friends, that seems to be
which men call pleasure; and how wonderful it is related to that which
appears to be its contrary--pain, in that they will not both be present
to a man at the same time; yet if any one pursues and attains the one,
he is almost always compelled to receive the other, as if they were both
united together from one head." Surely true philosophy, if we may call
so serene a state of mind by that hackneyed word, never reached,
unaided, a purer height!
There is one thing certain, which contains a poor comfort, but a strong
one--a poor one, because it reduces us all to the same level--it is
this: we may be sure that not one of us is without disappointment. The
footman is as badly off as his master, and the master as the footman.
The courtier is disappointed of his place, and the minister of his
ambition. Cardinal Wolsey lectures his secretary Cromwell, and tells him
of his disappointed ambition; but Cromwell had his troubles as well.
Henry the Eighth, the king who broke them both, might have put up the
same prayer; and the pope, who was a thorn in Harry's side, no doubt had
a peck of disappointments of his own. Nature not only abhors a vacuum,
but she utterly repudiates an entirely successful man. There probably
never lived one yet to whom the morning did not bring some disaster, the
evening some repulse. John Hunter, the greatest, most successful
surgeon, the genius, the wonder, the admired of all, upon whose words
they whose lives had been spent in science hung, said, as he went to his
last lecture, "If I quarrel with any one to-night, it will kill me." An
obstinate surgeon of the old school denied one of his assertions, and
called him a liar. It was enough. Hunter was carried into the next room,
and died. He had for years suffered from a diseased heart, and was quite
conscious of his fate. That was his disappointment. Happy are they who,
in this world of trial, meet their disappointments in their youth, not
in their old age; then let them come and welcome, not too thick to
render us morose, but like Spring mornings, frosty but kindly, the cold
of which will kill the vermin, but will let the plant live; and let us
rely upon it, that the best men (and women, too) are those who have been
early disappointed.
* * * * *
XXV.
THE THREE KINGS.
AN OLD STORY IN A NEW LIGHT.
Gaspar, a king and shepherd,
Alone at the door of his tent,
Thus mused, his eyes uplifted
And fixed on the firmament:
"Is it a dream, this vision
That haunts me day and night,
This beautiful manifestation
Of some eternal delight?
God set me to watching and waiting
Long years and years ago,
Waiting and watching for something
My heart could not forego.
I caught the hope of the nations,
The desire of the common heart,
Which grew to an expectation
That would not from me depart.
My soul was filled with hunger
Deeper than I can tell,
The while I watched for the shining
Of the Star in Israel.
O Star, to arise in Jacob!
I cried as my heart grew bold;
O Star, to arise in Jacob,
By prophecy seen of old!
For the sight of Thee I am dying,
For the joy of Thy Beautiful Face!
Of Thy coming give me a token,
Grant me this favor and grace!
At length there came an answer
Flaming the desolate year,
A revelation of beauty,
A more than mortal cheer;
For afar in the kindly heavens
The blessed token I saw!
And now my life is transfigured,
And lost in a nameless awe.
In a nameless awe I wander,
As one with a joy untold,
Too great for his own defining,
Too great for him to withhold.
But deep in my heart is the secret,
And in yonder beckoning Star,
And I must wait for the telling
Until I can hasten afar,--
Until I can find in travel
A heart akin to mine,
That day and night is adoring
And imploring beauty divine.
And so I will share the gladness
Which God intends for the world;
And so will I lift the banner,
To remain forever unfurled."
Hardly had Gaspar ended
The musing he loved so well,
When he heard the dreamy tinkle
Of a distant camel-bell.
He set his tent in order;
He brought forth of his best,
After the Arab custom,
To welcome the coming guest.
Who is this eager stranger
Dismounted so soon at the door?
A king from another kingdom,
Who has traveled the desert o'er,
In search of the same communion
That Gaspar was longing for.
And before of food he tasted,
Thus spake King Melchior:
"O Gaspar, God hath sent me
In the light of a peaceful Star,
To tell thee, my royal brother,
What my sweet communings are.
My life has been hid with Nature
For many a quiet year,
And in the hearts of my people,
Whose love hath cast out fear.
And I have been a dweller
With God, who is everywhere,
On earth, in the stars, the Spirit
Sublimest, calmest, most fair.
Among his mediators
And messengers of rest,
Which fill the earth and the heavens,
The stars I reckoned the best.
To the stars I gave my study,
I watched them rise and set,
And heard the music of silence
My soul can not forget;--
The music that seemed prophetic
Of the reign of peace to come,
When men shall live as lovers
In the quiet of one dear home.
But contemplation only
My heart could not satisfy:
I longed for the very presence
The stars did prophesy,
And eagerly looked for a token
Of heaven descended to earth,
A manifestation to tell me
The Prince had come to his birth--
The Prince to rule the nations,
The blessed Prince of Peace,
Through the scepter of whose kingdom
Confusion and war shall cease.
And God to me has been gracious,
Though one of his children the least,
For I have seen his token
All glorious in the east.
Yea, God to me has been gracious,
And shown me the way of love,
A revelation of goodness
As fair as heaven above."
The kings sat down together,
Communed in the breaking of bread,
And each the heart of the other
As an open volume read.
They felt the new force within them
Through fellowship increase:
The one he called it beauty,
The other named it peace.
All through the silent night-tide
Their thoughts one burden bore:
There was a joy eternal
Their longing souls before.
But still they waited, waited,
They hardly knew what for.
"What lack we yet, O Gaspar!"
At length asked Melchior.
"Three lights in yonder heaven
Wait on the polar star.
Hast eyes to read the poem?
Dost see how calm they are?
_Three_ lights in yonder heaven
Wait on the polar star;
But we are _two_," said Gaspar.
"Not _two_, but _three_ we are,"
Belthazzar said, dismounting,
Another king from far;
"And we whom God hath chosen
Follow a greater Star.
O, what are peace and beauty,
Except they stir the soul
And make the man a hero,
To gain some happier goal?
O, what are peace and beauty
That stop this side of God,
Though infinite the distance
Remaining to be trod?"
In haste, in haste they mounted,
The kings in God's employ,
And quickly peace and beauty
Began to change to joy.
They left behind their kingdoms
Whose lure was far too small,
To keep them apart from the kingdom
Of Him who is all in all.
They left behind their people,
Of loving and loved a host,
The first of the thronging Gentiles,
To love the Redeemer most.
They left behind possessions,
Their flocks in all their prime,
In haste to greet the Shepherd
Whose charge is the most sublime.
They passed through hostile regions;
For fear they halted not;
And weariness and hunger
Were less than things forgot.
So on and on they hastened
Where they never before had trod,
And the flaming Guide that led them,
Was ever the Glory of God.
By night in yonder heavens,
Within their hearts by day,
As of old the blessed Shekinah
Along the Red Sea way.
And they have troubled Herod
And left Jerusalem,
The joy-giving Star before them,
The Star of Bethlehem.
And they have seen and worshiped
The Everlasting Child,
In whom sweet Truth and Mercy
Were never unreconciled.
They have kissed the Beauty of Heaven,
Incarnate on the earth,
The Babe in the lap of Mary,
Of whom He came to his birth.
Their gifts of love they have rendered
Unto the new-born King,
Their gold and myrrh and frankincense,
The best that they could bring.
And vanished the Star forever,
When they turned from the Child away?
Shone it not then in their bosoms,
The light of Eternal Day?
They could not return to Herod--
Too precious for any swine,
The pearls which they had gathered
Out of the Sea Divine!
O Vision of the Redeemer,
In which faith has struggled to sight!
They carried it back to their country,
And published it day and night.
They carried it back to their country,
The vision since Eden's fall,
Which seen afar off has sweetened
The wormwood and the gall.
And it has become the story
Of every triumphant soul,
That in seeking the Eternal
Reaches a blessed goal.
* * * * *
XXVI.
FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE.
THE HEROINE OF THE CRIMEA.
"The care of the poor," said Hannah More, herself one of the most
illustrious women of her time, "is essentially the profession of women."
In her own person, Florence Nightingale has proved this; and not in one
or two cases, but by a whole life passed in devotion to the needs of the
poor and humble, the sick and the distressed. Comparatively little was
known of Miss Nightingale before the year 1854, when the needs of the
English army in the Crimea called forth the heroism of thousands. Then
it was that Florence Nightingale and other heroic women went out to the
East, and personally succored the wounded, comforted the weak-hearted,
and smoothed the pillows of the dying.
Miss Nightingale is every way a remarkable woman. The daughter of an
Englishman, W. Shore Nightingale, of Embly Park, Hampshire, she was born
in Florence, in the year 1823, and from this fair city she received her
patronymic. From her earliest youth she was accustomed to visit the
poor, and, as she advanced in years, she studied in the schools,
hospitals, and reformatory institutions of London, Edinburgh, and other
principal cities of England, besides making herself familiar with
similar places on the Continent. In 1851, "when all Europe," says a
recent writer, "seemed to be keeping holiday in honor of the Great
Exhibition, she took up her abode in an institution at Kaiserwerth, on
the Rhine, where Protestant sisters of mercy are trained for the
business of nursing the sick, and other offices of charity. For three
months she remained in daily and nightly attendance, accumulating the
most valuable practical experience, and then returned home to patiently
wait until an occasion should arise for its exercise. This occasion soon
arose; for, after attending various hospitals in London, the cry of
distress which, in 1854, arose from the distressed soldiery in Russia,
enlisted her warmest sympathies. Lady Mary Forester, Mrs. Sidney
Herbert, and other ladies, proposed to send nurses to the seat of war.
The government acceded to their request, and Miss Florence Nightingale,
Mrs. Bracebridge, and thirty-seven others, all experienced nurses, went
out to their assistance, and arrived at Constantinople on the 5th of
November. The whole party were soon established in the hospital at
Scutari, and there pursued their labor of love and benevolence. The good
they did, and the wonders they accomplished, are too well known to need
particular detail. "Every day," says one, writing from the military
hospital, "brought some new combination of misery to be somehow
unraveled by the power ruling in the sisters' town. Each day had its
peculiar trial to one who has taken such a load of responsibility in an
untried field, and with a staff of her own sex, all new to it. She has
frequently been known to stand twenty hours, on the arrival of fresh
detachments of sick, apportioning quarters, distributing stores,
directing the labors of her corps, assisting at the most painful
operations, where her presence might soothe or support, and spending
hours over men dying of cholera or fever. Indeed, the more awful to
every sense any particular case might be, the more certainly might her
slight form be seen bending over him, administering to his case by every
means in her power, and seldom quitting his side until death had
released him. And yet, probably, Miss Nightingale's personal devotion in
the cause was, in her own estimation, the least onerous of her duties.
The difficulties thrown in her way by the formalities of _system_ and
_routine_, and the prejudices of individuals, will scarcely be
forgotten, or the daily contests by which she was compelled to wring
from the authorities a scant allowance of the appliances needed in the
daily offices of her hand, until the co-operation of Mr. Macdonald, the
distributor of the _Times_ fund, enabled her to lay in stores, to
institute separate culinary and washing establishments, and, in short,
to introduce comfort and order into the department over which she
presided." And so, during the greater part of the momentous campaign,
she did the work that she had set out to do, bravely and faithfully, and
earnestly and well; and we may be sure that on her return to England she
was welcomed gladly. The queen presented her with a costly diamond
ornament, to be worn as a decoration, and accompanied it with an
autograph letter, in which her great merits were fully, gracefully, and
gratefully acknowledged. It was proposed to give Miss Nightingale a
public reception; but, with true modesty, she shrunk from appearing in
any other than her own character of nurse and soother, and at once
passed into retirement. But that retirement was not allowed to be
unproductive. So soon as her health, which was at all times delicate,
and had suffered considerably in the Crimea, had been somewhat restored,
she set to work to render the fruits of her experience useful to the
world. In 1859 she produced her "Hints on Nursing," one of the most
useful and practical little books ever published. In it she showed how
much might be done, even with small means, and in the midst of manifold
difficulties and discouragements; and it is no small triumph to the
advocates of female labor, in proper spheres, that Florence Nightingale
and her friends have shown that, as a nurse and comforter on the field
of battle, woman may work out her mission quietly and unostentatiously,
without, at the same time, interfering with the occupations of the other
sex. In Florence Nightingale we have an example of a lady bred in the
lap of luxury, and educated in the school of wealth and exclusiveness,
breaking down the barriers of custom, and proving to the world that true
usefulness belongs to no particular rank, age, or station, but is the
privilege of all Eve's daughters, and that any employment sanctified by
devotion and fervor and earnest desire to do good is essentially womanly
and graceful, and fitting alike to the inheritors of wealth or poverty.
That the absence of feminine influence must tend to materialize, to
sensualize, and to harden, must, we think, be admitted by all the
thoughtful. Woman is instituted by God the guardian of the heart as man
is of the mind. How many husbands, sons, and brothers, driven and
driving, through life in the absorbing excitement of a professional or
mercantile career, can testify to the arresting, reposeful, humanizing
atmosphere of a home where the wife, mother, or sister exerts her kindly
sway; and it is as necessary to the immaterial interests of a nation, to
the prevention of the legislative mind and executive hands being
completely swallowed up in the actual, the present, the mechanical, the
sensible, that some counteracting influence should be allowed and
encouraged similar to that of woman in her home.
To show the influence for good of associations of women for charitable
ends, Mrs. Jameson, in "Sisters of Charity at Home and Abroad," has
collected accounts from history and biography of many Romanist orders of
sisters, besides vindicating and putting forward Miss Nightingale and
her companions as examples. She would not for the world that the woman
should aspire to be the man, and aim at a masculine independence for
which she was never meant; and we thank the noble champion of Protestant
sisterhoods for disclaiming connection with any who want her to take
part in the public and prominent life of society, so to speak. It is
co-operation that is insisted upon--the ministering influence of the
woman with the business tact of the man. In prisons, hospitals,
work-houses, and lunatic asylums the influence of well-trained women, to
soften rigor, charm routine, beguile poverty, and tranquilize
distraction is often wanted; not so much to talk as to think, feel, and
do.
It may be said that there can not be the same need in a Protestant
country as in Roman Catholic countries of communities of single women,
where they are doubtless called for, if only in opposition to the
immense bodies of the higher and lower clergy; but, besides the fact of
there always being a greater number of women in a country in proportion
to the number of men, our commerce requires many sailors, not to mention
our army and navy, which in years past have swallowed up so many.
Surely, ministering women would be a blessing to the widows and orphans
of our gallant soldiers and sailors. There are numbers of daughters in
large families kept in conventual bondage by a father or brother or
their own timidity. Daughters, sisters, widows, we appeal to you! Are
there not some few among you with courage to lead where multitudes would
follow--some to whom a kind Providence has given liberty of action? It
is far from our intention to excite rebellion in families, or tempt away
from the manifest calls of duty; but can not some one begin what others
will continue? And we must not be indefinite: begin what? continue what?
A system which, in this Protestant land, would give to the poor outcast,
the little criminal, the child of the State, a mother as well as a
father; that would give to the wretched of all ages a sister as well as
a brother.
Alluding to Florence Nightingale, Mrs. Jameson says: "No doubt but it
will be through the patience, faith, and wisdom of men and women working
together. In an undertaking so wholly new to our English customs, so
much at variance with the usual education given to women in this
country, we shall meet with perplexities, difficulties--even failures.
All the ladies who have gone to Scutari may not turn out heroines. There
may be vain babblings and scribblings and indiscretions, such as may put
weapons into adverse hands. The inferior and paid nurses may, some of
them, have carried to Scutari bad habits, arising from imperfect
training. Still, let us trust that a principle will be recognized in the
country which will not be again lost sight of. It will be the true, the
lasting glory of Florence Nightingale and her band of devoted assistants
that they have broken through what Goethe calls a Chinese wall of
prejudices--prejudices religious, social, professional--and established
a precedent which will, indeed, multiply the good to all time. No doubt
there are hundreds of women who would now gladly seize the privileges
held out to them by such an example, and crowd to offer their services;
but would they pay the price of such dear and high privileges? Would
they fit themselves duly for the performance of such services, and earn
by distasteful, and even painful studies, the necessary certificates for
skill and capacity? Would they, like Miss Nightingale, go through a
seven years' probation, to try at once the steadiness of their motives
and the steadiness of their nerves? Such a trial is absolutely
necessary; for hundreds of women will fall into the common error of
mistaking an impulse for a vocation. But I do believe that there are
also hundreds who are fitted, or would gladly, at any self-sacrifice,
fit themselves for the work, if the means of doing so were allowed to
them. At present, an English lady has no facilities whatever for
obtaining the information or experience required; no such institutions
are open to her, and yet she is ridiculed for presenting herself without
the competent knowledge! This seems hardly just."
Anticipating objection, Mrs. Jameson says:
"To make or require vows of obedience is objectionable; yet we know that
the voluntary nurses who went to the East were called upon to do what
comes to the same thing--to sign an engagement to obey implicitly a
controlling and administrative power--or the whole undertaking must have
fallen to the ground. Then again, questions about costume have been
mooted, which appear to me wonderfully absurd. It has been suggested
that there should be something of uniformity and fitness in the dress
when on duty, and this seems but reasonable. I recollect once seeing a
lady in a gay, light, muslin dress, with three or four flounces, and
roses under bonnet, going forth to visit her sick poor. The incongruity
struck the mind painfully--not merely as an incongruity, but as an
impropriety--like a soldier going to the trenches in an opera hat and
laced ruffles. Such follies, arising from individual obtuseness, must be
met by regulation dictated by good sense, and submitted to as a matter
of necessity and obligation."
Again, says our authoress, who passed from her sphere of usefulness in
1860:
"It is a subject of reproach, that in this Christendom of ours, the
theory of good we preach should be so far in advance of our practice;
but that which provokes the sneer of the skeptic, and almost kills faith
in the sufferer, lifts up the contemplative mind with hope. Man's
_theory_ of good is God's _reality_; man's experience is the degree to
which he has already worked out, in his human capacity, that divine
reality. Therefore, whatever our practice may be, let us hold fast to
our theories of possible good; let us, at least, however they may outrun
our present powers, keep them in sight, and then our formal, lagging
practice, may in time overtake them. In social morals, as well as in
physical truth, 'the goal of yesterday will be the starting-point of
to-morrow,' and the things before which all England now stands in
admiring wonder will become the simple produce of the common day. This
we hope and believe."
The example of Florence Nightingale, so full of hope and prophecy to
Mrs. Jameson five-and-twenty years ago, has proved indeed an earnest of
better things, which all these years have been passing into realities.
Who shall say how much inspiration the noble band of ministering women
in our civil war derived from the heroine of the Crimea? When the great
occasion arrives, the heavenly impulse is seldom wanting. But God works
through means; and that one example of Christian devotion, so fresh in
the hearts of mothers, wives, and sisters, was an immense help in
developing the self-sacrifice which is latent in every true life. To say
nothing of the new impulse given to the organization of woman's work in
England, it is a matter for thankfulness to be able to note that the
signs of new life in this country are full of promise. In several of our
large cities, notably New York and Philadelphia, institutions have
recently been founded for the training of nurses, and sisterhoods
organized for the better accomplishment of Christian work in hospitals,
asylums, and among the poor and unfortunate--a work, indeed, which has
been done, in one way or another, in all the Christian ages, by every
true follower of the Master.
And here, in conclusion, the thought suggests itself that differences of
organization, whether ecclesiastical or otherwise, should not conceal
from our eyes the true notes of "the communion of the saints," or shut
from our hearts the conditions of inheriting the kingdom prepared from
the foundation of the world: "I was an hungered, and ye gave me meat; I
was thirsty, and ye gave me drink; I was a stranger, and ye took me in;
naked, and ye clothed me; I was sick, and ye visited me; I was in
prison, and ye came unto me."
O English Nightingale,
Who hadst the grace to hear
The dying soldier's far-off wail,
And pause not for a tear--
Who, as on angel wings,
Didst seek the wintry sea,
To put thy hand to menial things,
Which were not such to thee;
And didst, with heaven-born art,
Where pain implored release,
To mangled form and broken heart
Bring healing and sweet peace--
Thy work was music, song,
As brave as ever stirred
A nation's heart; as calm and strong
As angels ever heard!
Gazing on the modest, unassuming countenance shown in the illustration
which accompanies this sketch, one can imagine the surprised question to
which the King answers in the last day: "Inasmuch as ye have done it
unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me."
* * * * *
XXVII.
SHY PEOPLE
HAWTHORNE-WASHINGTON, IRVING, AND OTHERS--MADAME RECAMIER.
Sympathy is the most delicate tendril of the mind, and the most
fascinating gift which nature can give us. The most precious
associations of the human heart cluster around the word, and we love to
remember those who have sorrowed with us in sorrow, and rejoiced with us
when we were glad. But for the awkward and the shy the sympathetic are
the very worst company. They do not wish to be sympathized with--they
wish to be with people who are cold and indifferent; they like shy
people like themselves. Put two shy people in a room together, and they
begin to talk with unaccustomed glibness. A shy woman always attracts a
shy man. But women who are gifted with that rapid, gay impressionability
which puts them _en rapport_ with their surroundings, who have fancy and
an excitable disposition, a quick susceptibility to the influences
around them, are very charming in general society, but they are terrible
to the awkward and the shy. They sympathize too much, they are too aware
of that burning shame which the sufferer desires to conceal.
The moment a shy person sees before him a perfectly unsympathetic
person, one who is neither thinking nor caring for him, his shyness
begins to flee; the moment that he recognizes a fellow-sufferer he
begins to feel a re-enforcement of energy. If he be a lover, especially,
the almost certain embarrassment of the lady inspires him with hope and
renewed courage. A woman who has a bashful lover, even if she is
afflicted with shyness, has been known to find a way to help the poor
fellow out of his dilemma more than once.
HAWTHORNE.
Who has left us the most complete and most tragic history of shyness
which belongs to "that long rosary on which the blushes of a life are
strung," found a woman (the most perfect character, apparently, who ever
married and made happy a great genius) who, fortunately for him, was shy
naturally, although without that morbid shyness which accompanied him
through life. Those who knew Mrs. Hawthorne found her possessed of great
fascination of manner, even in general society, where Hawthorne was
quite impenetrable. The story of his running down to the Concord River
and taking boat to escape his visitors has been long familiar to us all.
Mrs. Hawthorne, no doubt, with a woman's tact and a woman's generosity,
overcame her own shyness in order to receive those guests whom Hawthorne
ran away from, and through his life remained his better angel. It was
through this absence of expressed sympathy that English people became
very agreeable to Hawthorne. He describes, in his "Note-Book," a speech
made by him at a dinner in England: "When I was called upon," he says,
"I rapped my head, and it returned a hollow sound." He had, however,
been sitting next to a shy English lawyer, a man who won upon him by his
quiet, unobtrusive simplicity, and who, in some well-chosen words,
rather made light of dinner-speaking and its terrors. When Hawthorne
finally got up and made his speech, his "voice, meantime, having a
far-off and remote echo," and when, as we learn from others, a burst of
applause greeted a few well-chosen words drawn from that full well of
thought, that pellucid rill of "English undefiled," the unobtrusive
gentleman by his side applauded and said to him, "It was handsomely
done." The compliment pleased the shy man. It is the only compliment to
himself which Hawthorne ever recorded.
Now, had Hawthorne been congratulated by a sympathetic, effusive
American, who had clapped him on the back, and who had said, "O, never
fear--you will speak well!" he would have said nothing. The shy sprite
in his own eyes would have read in his neighbor's eyes the dreadful
truth that his sympathetic neighbor would have indubitably betrayed--a
fear that he would _not_ do well. The phlegmatic and stony Englishman
neither felt nor cared whether Hawthorne spoke well or ill; and,
although pleased that he did speak well, invested no particular sympathy
in the matter, either for or against, and so spared Hawthorne's shyness
the last bitter drop in the cup, which would have been a recognition of
his own moral dread. Hawthorne bitterly records his own sufferings. He
says, in one of his books, "At this time I acquired this accursed habit
of solitude." It has been said that the Hawthorne family were, in the
earlier generation, afflicted with shyness almost as a
disease--certainly a curious freak of nature in a family descended from
robust sea-captains. It only goes to prove how far away are the
influences which control our natures and our actions.