Whether, if Hawthorne had not been a shy man, afflicted with a sort of

horror of his species at times, always averse to letting himself go,

miserable and morbid, we should have been the inheritors of the great

fortune which he has left us, is not for us to decide. Whether we should

have owned "The Gentle Boy," the immortal "Scarlet Letter," "The House

with Seven Gables," "The Marble Faun," and all the other wonderful

things which grew out of that secluded and gifted nature, had he been

born a cheerful, popular, and sympathetic boy, with a dancing-school

manner, instead of an awkward and shy youth (although an exceedingly

handsome one), we can not tell. That is the great secret behind the

veil. The answer is not yet made, the oracle has not spoken, and we must

not invade the penumbra of genius.

WASHINGTON AND IRVING.

It has always been a comfort to the awkward and the shy that Washington

could not make an after-dinner speech; and the well-known anecdote--"Sit

down, Mr. Washington, your modesty is even greater than your

valor"--must have consoled many a voiceless hero. Washington Irving

tried to welcome Dickens, but failed in the attempt, while Dickens was

as voluble as he was gifted. Probably the very surroundings of

sympathetic admirers unnerved both Washington and Irving, although there

are some men who can never "speak on their legs," as the saying goes, in

any society.

Other shy men--men who fear general society, and show embarrassment in

the every-day surroundings--are eloquent when they get on their feet.

Many a shy boy at college has astonished his friends by his ability in

an after-dinner speech. Many a voluble, glib boy, who has been appointed

the orator of the occasion, fails utterly, disappoints public

expectation, and sits down with an uncomfortable mantle of failure upon

his shoulders. Therefore, the ways of shyness are inscrutable. Many a

woman who has never known what it is to be bashful or shy has, when

called upon to read a copy of verses, even to a circle of intimate

friends, lost her voice, and has utterly broken down, to her own and her

friends' great astonishment.

The voice is a treacherous servant; it deserts us, trembles, makes a

failure of it, is "not present or accounted for" often when we need its

help. It is not alone in the shriek of the hysterical that we learn of

its lawlessness; it is in its complete retirement. A bride often, even

when she felt no other embarrassment, has found that she had no voice

with which to make her responses. It simply was not there.

A lady who was presented at court, and who felt--as she described

herself wonderfully at her ease, began talking, and, without wishing to

speak loud, discovered that she was shouting like a trumpeter. The

somewhat unusual strain which she had put upon herself during the ordeal

of being presented at the English court revenged itself by an outpouring

of voice which she could not control.

Many shy people have recognized in themselves this curious and

unconscious elevation of voice. It is not so common as a loss of voice,

but it is quite as uncontrollable.

The bronchial tubes play us another trick when we are frightened; the

voice is the voice of somebody else; it has no resemblance to our own.

Ventriloquism might well study the phenomena of shyness, for the voice

becomes base that was treble, and soprano that which was contralto.

"I dislike to have Wilthorpe come to see me," said a very shy woman, "I

know my voice will squeak so." With her Wilthorpe, who for some reason

drove her into an agony of shyness, had the effect of making her talk in

a high, unnatural strain, excessively fatiguing.

The presence of one's own family, who are naturally painfully

sympathetic, has always had upon the bashful and the shy a most evil

effect.

"I can never plead a case before my father," "Nor I before my son," said

two distinguished lawyers. "If mamma is in the room, I shall never be

able to get through my part," said a young amateur actor.

But here we must pause to note another exception in the laws of shyness.

In the false perspective of the stage, shyness often disappears. The shy

man, speaking the words and assuming the character of another, often

loses his shyness. It is himself of whom he is afraid, not of Tony

Lumpkin or of Charles Surface, of Hamlet or of Claude Melnotte. Behind

their masks he can speak well; but if he at his own dinner-table essays

to speak, and mamma watches him with sympathetic eyes, and his brothers

and sisters are all listening, he fails.

"Lord Percy sees me fall."

Yet it is with our own people that we must stand or fall, live or die;

it is in our own circle that we must conquer our shyness.

Now, these reflections are not intended as an argument against sympathy

properly expressed. A reasonable and judiciously expressed sympathy with

our fellow-beings is the very highest attribute of our nature. "It

unravels secrets more surely than the highest critical faculty. Analysis

of motives that sway men and women is like the knife of the anatomist;

it works on the dead. Unite sympathy to observation, and the dead spring

to life." It is thus to the shy, in their moments of tremor, that we

should endeavor to be calmly sympathetic; not cruel, but indifferent,

unobservant.

Now, women of genius, who obtain a reflected comprehension of certain

aspects of life through sympathy, often arrive at the admirable result

of apprehending the sufferings of the shy without seeming to observe

them. Such a woman, in talking to a shy man, will not seem to see him;

she will prattle on about herself, or tell some funny anecdote of how

she was tumbled out into the snow, or how she spilled her glass of

claret at dinner, or how she got just too late to the lecture; and while

she is thus absorbed in her little improvised autobiography, the shy man

gets hold of himself, and ceases to be afraid of her. This is the secret

of tact.

MADAME RECAMIER.

Madame Recamier, the famous beauty, was always somewhat shy. She was not

a wit, but she possessed the gift of drawing out what was best in

others. Her biographers have blamed her that she had not a more

impressionable temper, that she was not more sympathetic. Perhaps (in

spite of her courage when she took up contributions in the churches

dressed as a Neo-Greek) she was always hampered by shyness. She

certainly attracted all the best and most gifted of her time, and had a

noble fearlessness in friendship, and a constancy which she showed by

following Madame de Stael into exile, and in her devotion to Ballenche

and Chateaubriand. She had the genius of friendship, a native sincerity,

a certain reality of nature--those fine qualities which so often

accompany the shy that we almost, as we read biography and history,

begin to think that shyness is but a veil for all the virtues.

Perhaps to this shyness, or to this hidden sympathy, did Madame Recamier

owe that power over all men which survived her wonderful beauty. The

blind and poor old woman of the Abbaye had not lost her charm; the most

eminent men and women of her day followed her there, and enjoyed her

quiet (not very eloquent) conversation. She had a wholesome heart; it

kept her from folly when she was young, from a too over-facile

sensitiveness to which an impressionable, sympathetic temperament would

have betrayed her. Her firm, sweet nature was not flurried by

excitement; she had a steadfastness in her social relations which has

left behind an everlasting renown to her name.

And what are, after all, these social relations which call for so much

courage, and which can create so much suffering to most of us as we

conquer for them our awkwardness and our shyness? Let us pause for a

moment, and try to be just. Let us contemplate these social ethics,

which call for so much that is, perhaps, artificial and troublesome and

contradictory. Society, so long as it is the congregation of the good,

the witty, the bright, the intelligent, and the gifted, is the thing

most necessary to us all. We are apt to like it and its excitements

almost too well, or to hate it, with its excesses and its mistakes, too

bitterly. We are rarely just to society.

The rounded, and harmonious, and temperate understanding and use of

society is, however, the very aim and end of education. We are born to

live with each other and not for ourselves. If we are cheerful, our

cheerfulness was given to us to make bright the lives of those about us;

if we have genius, that is a sacred trust; if we have beauty, wit,

joyousness, it was given us for the delectation of others, not for

ourselves; if we are awkward and shy, we are bound to break the crust,

and to show that within us is beauty, cheerfulness, and wit. "It is but

the fool who loves excess." The best human being should moderately like

society.--MRS. JOHN SHERWOOD.

* * * * *

XXVIII.

JOHN MARSHALL

(BORN 1755--DIED 1835.)

IN THE REVOLUTIONARY ARMY--HIS MARRIAGE--LAW LECTURES--AT THE BAR--HIS

INTELLECTUAL POWERS--ON THE BENCH.

The family stock of Marshall, like that of Jefferson, was Welsh, as is

generally the case in names with a double letter, as a double f or a

double l. This Welsh type was made steady by English infusions. The

first Marshall came from Wales in 1730, and settled in the same county

where Washington, Monroe, and the Lees were born. He was a poor man, and

lived in a tract called "The Forest." His eldest son, Thomas, went out

to Fauquier County, at the foot of the Blue Ridge, and settled on Goose

Creek, under Manassas Gap. This Thomas Marshall had been a playmate of

George Washington, and, like him, was a mountain surveyor, and they

loved each other, and when the Revolutionary War broke out both went

into the service, Thomas Marshall being colonel of one of the Virginia

regiments. His son, John Marshall, who was not twenty years old when the

conflict began, became a lieutenant under his father. The mother of John

Marshall was named Mary Kieth, and his grandmother Elizabeth Markham,

and the latter was born in England.

Marshall's father had a good mind, not much education; but he was a

great reader, and especially loved poetry, and he taught his son to

commit poetry to memory, and to model his mind on the clear diction and

heroic strain of poets like Milton, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Pope. In

these books of poetry the great chief-justice found the springs to

freshen his own good character. To the last day of his life he loved

literature, and was especially fond of novels, and of books written by

females. He held the view that the United States must be a literary

nation in the sense of having great and noble authors to leaven its

people and teach them high thoughts. His schools were chiefly down in

the Chesapeake Bay, in the county of his birth, and his teachers were

poor Presbyterian clergymen from Scotland, who at that period were the

teachers of nearly all the Middle States, from New York southward. He

knew some Latin, but not very much. One of his teachers was his own

father, who, with a large family, took delight in training this boy.

OUR JUDGE ON DRILL.

In 1775 the country hunters and boors on the Blue Ridge Mountain went to

their mustering place, and, the senior officer being absent, this young

Marshall, with a gun on his shoulder, began to show them how to use it.

Like them, he wore a blue hunting shirt and trousers of some stuff

fringed with white, and in his round hat was a buck-tail for a cockade.

He was about six feet high, lean and straight, with a dark skin, black

hair, a pretty low forehead, and rich, dark small eyes, the whole making

a face dutiful, pleasing, and modest. After the drill was over he stood

up and told those strange, wild mountaineers, who had no newspapers and

knew little of the world, what the war was about. He described to them

the battle of Lexington. They listened to him for an hour, as if he had

been some young preacher.

Thus was our great chief-justice introduced to public life. He had come

to serve, and found that he must instruct. When he marched with the

regiment of these mountaineers, who carried tomahawks and

scalping-knives, the people of Williamsburg trembled for their lives. At

that time, the country near Harper's Ferry was the Far West. In a very

little while, these mountaineers, by mingled stratagem and system,

defeated Lord Dunmore, very much as Andrew Jackson defeated the British

at New Orleans thirty-five years later. Marshall then went with the army

to the vicinity of Philadelphia; was in the battles of Brandywine and

Germantown, and in the long Winter of Valley Forge. Almost naked at that

place, he showed an abounding good-nature, that kept the whole camp

content. If he had to eat meat without bread, he did it with a jest.

Among his men he had the influence of a father, though a boy. He was so

much better read than others that he frequently became a judge advocate,

and in this way he got to know Alexander Hamilton, who was on

Washington's staff. Marshall was always willing to see the greatness of

another person, and Judge Story says that he said of Hamilton that he

was not only of consummate ability as both soldier and statesman, but

that, in great, comprehensive mind, sound principle, and purity of

patriotism, no nation ever had his superior.

It became Marshall's duty, in the course of twenty-five years, to try

for high treason the man who killed his friend Hamilton, but he

conducted that trial with such an absence of personal feeling that it

was among the greatest marvels of our legal history. He could neither be

influenced by his private grief for Hamilton, nor by Jefferson's

attempts as President to injure Burr, nor by Burr himself, whom he

charged the jury to acquit, but whom he held under bond on another

charge, to Burr's rage. Marshall was in the battle of Monmouth, and at

the storming of Stony Point, and at the surprise of Jersey City. In the

army camps, he became acquainted with the Northern men, and so far from

comparing invidiously with them, he recognized them all as

fellow-countrymen and brave men, and never in his life was there a

single trace of sectionalism.

HIS MARRIAGE.

Near the close of the Revolution, Marshall went to Yorktown, somewhat

before Cornwallis occupied it, to pay a visit, and there he saw Mary

Ambler at the age of fourteen. She became his wife in 1783. Her father

was Jacqueline Ambler, the treasurer of the State of Virginia. She lived

with him forty-eight years, and died in December, 1831. He often

remarked in subsequent life that the race of lovers had changed. Said

he: "When I married my wife, all I had left after paying the minister

his fee was a guinea, and I thought I was rich." General Burgoyne, whom

Marshall's fellow-soldiers so humiliated, wrote some verses, and among

these were the following, which Marshall said over to himself often when

thinking of his wife:

"Encompassed in an angel's frame,

An angel's virtues lay;

Too soon did heaven assert its claim

And take its own away.

My Mary's worth, my Mary's charms,

Can never more return.

What now shall fill these widowed arms?

Ah, me! my Mary's urn."

LAW LECTURES.

The only law lectures Marshall ever attended were those of Chancellor

Wythe, at William and Mary College, Williamsburg, while the Revolution

was still going on. Before the close of the war he was admitted to the

bar, but the courts were all suspended until after Cornwallis's

surrender. Before the war closed Marshall walked from near Manassas Gap,

or rather from Oak Hill, his father's residence, to Philadelphia on foot

to be vaccinated. The distance was nearly two hundred miles; but he

walked about thirty-five miles a day, and when he got to Philadelphia

looked so shabby that they repelled him at the hotel; but this only made

him laugh and find another hotel. He never paid much attention to his

dress, and observed through life the simple habits he found agreeable as

a boy. For two years he practiced in one rough, native county; but it

soon being evident that he was a man of extraordinary grasp of a law

case, he removed to Richmond, which had not long been the capital, and

there he lived until his death, which happened in 1835 in the city of

Philadelphia, whither he had repaired to submit to a second operation.

The first of these operations was cutting to the bladder for the stone,

and he survived it. Subsequently, his liver became enlarged and had

abcesses on it, and his stomach would not retain much nutriment.

Marshall was a social man, and at times convivial; and I should think it

probable that, though he lived to a good old age, these complaints were,

to some extent, engendered by the fried food they insist upon in

Virginia, and addiction to Madeira wine instead of lighter French or

German wines. He was one of the last of the old Madeira drinkers of this

country, like Washington, and his only point of pride was that he had

perhaps the best Madeira at Richmond. Above all other men who ever lived

at Richmond, Virginia, Marshall gives sanctity and character to the

place. His house still stands there, and ought to become the property of

the bar of this country. It is now a pretty old house, made of brick and

moderately roomy.

AT THE BAR.

The basis of Marshall's ability at the bar was his understanding. Not

highly read, he had one of those clear understandings which was equal to

a mill-pond of book-learning. His first practice was among his old

companions in arms, who felt that he was a soldier by nature, and one of

those who loved the fellowship of the camp better than military or

political ambition. Ragged and dissipated, they used to come to him for

protection, and at a time when imprisonment for debt and cruel

executions were in vogue. He not only defended them, but loaned them

money. He lost some good clients by not paying more attention to his

clothing, but these outward circumstances could not long keep back

recognition of the fact that he was the finest arguer of a case at the

Richmond bar, which then contained such men as Edmund Randolph, Patrick

Henry, and later, William Wirt. He was not an orator, did not cultivate

his voice, did not labor hard; but he had the power to penetrate to the

very center of the subject, discover the chief point, and rally all his

forces there. If he was defending a case, he would turn his attention to

some other than the main point, in order to let the prosecution assemble

its powers at the wrong place. With a military eye he saw the strong and

weak positions, and, like Rembrandt painting, he threw all his light on

the right spot. The character of his argument was a perspicuous, easy,

onward, accumulative, reasoning statement. He had but one gesture--to

lift up his hand and bring it down on the place before him constantly.

He discarded fancy or poetry in his arguments. William Wirt said of him,

in a sentence worth committing to memory as a specimen of good style in

the early quarter of this century: "All his eloquence consists in the

apparent deep self-conviction and emphatic earnestness of his manner;

the corresponding simplicity and energy of his style; the close and

logical connection of his thoughts, and the easy graduations by which he

opens his lights on the attentive minds of his hearers. The audience are

never permitted to pause for a moment. There is no stopping to weave

garlands of flowers to hang in festoons around a favorite argument. On

the contrary, every sentence is progressive; every idea sheds new light

on the subject; the listener is kept perpetually in that sweetly

pleasurable vibration with which the mind of man always receives new

truths; the dawn advances with easy but unremitting pace; the subject

opens gradually on the view, until, rising in high relief in all its

native colors and proportions, the argument is consummated by the

conviction of the delighted hearer."

Immediately after the Revolutionary War the State courts were crowded

with business, because of the numerous bankruptcies, arising from war

habits, the changes in the condition of families, repudiation of debts,

false currency, etc. Marshall was one of the first lawyers who rose to

the magnanimity to admit the propriety of a federal judiciary, different

from that of the States. The other lawyers thought it would not do to

take the business away from these courts. They preferred to see the

people hanging around Richmond, with their cases undecided and unheard

on account of the pressure of business, rather than to concede a

national judiciary. All sorts of novel questions were arising at that

time, cases which had no precedents, which the English law-books did not

reach, and where the man of native powers, pushing out like Columbus on

the unknown, soon developed a sturdy strength and self-reliance the mere

popinjay and student of the law could never get. Among the cases he

argued was the British debt case, tried in 1793. The United States now

had its Circuit Court, and Chief-justice Jay presided at Richmond. The

treaty of peace of England provided that the creditors on either side

should meet with no lawful impediment to the recovery of the full value

of all _bona fide_ debts theretofore contracted. The question was

whether debts sequestrated by the Virginia Legislature during the war

came under this treaty. It is said that the Countess of Huntingdon heard

the speeches on this case, and said that every one of the lawyers, if in

England, would have been given a peerage. Patrick Henry broke his voice

down in this case, and never again could speak with his old force.

Marshall surpassed them all in the cogency of his reasoning. At that

time he was thought to be rather lazy. He went into the State

Legislature in 1782, just before he married. His personal influence was

such in Richmond that, although he was constantly in the minority, he

was always elected. His principal amusement was pitching the quoit,

which he did to the end of his days, and could ring the meg, it is said,

at a distance of sixty feet frequently. He arose early in the morning

and went to market without a servant, and brought back his chickens in

one hand and his market basket on the other arm. He never took offense,

and once when a dude stopped him on the street and asked him where there

was a fellow to take home his marketing, Marshall inquired where he

lived, and said, "I will take it for you." After he got home with the

other man's marketing, the dude was much distressed to find that Mr.

Marshall had been his supposed servant.

INTELLECTUAL POWER.

Nevertheless, the intellectual existence of the man was decided. From

the beginning of his life he took the view that while Virginia was the

State of his birth, his country was America; that all he and his

neighbors could accomplish on this planet would be under the great

government which comprehends all, and, true to this one idea, he never

wavered in his life. Mr. Jefferson, who was much his senior, he

distrusted profoundly, regarding him as a man of cunning, lacking in

large faith, and constitutionally biased in mind. In the sketch Marshall

made of General Washington, he said, and it is believed that he referred

to Jefferson: "He made no pretension to that vivacity which fascinates

or to that wit which dazzles, and frequently imposes on the

understanding. More solid than brilliant; judgment, rather than genius,

constituted the most prominent feature of his character. No man has ever

appeared upon the theater of public action whose integrity was more

incorruptible, or whose principles were more perfectly free from the

contamination of those selfish and unworthy passions which find their

nourishment in the conflicts of party. Having no views which required

concealment, his real and avowed motives were the same, and his whole

correspondence does not furnish a single case from which even an enemy

would infer that he was capable, under any circumstances, of stooping to

the employment of duplicity. No truth can be uttered with more

confidence than that his ends were always upright and his means always

pure. He exhibited the rare example of a politician to whom wiles were

totally unknown, and whose professions to foreign governments, and to

his own countrymen, were always sincere. In him was fully exemplified

the real distinction which found existence between wisdom and cunning,

and the importance, as well as the truth of the maxim, that honesty is

the best policy." It is to be noticed that Marshall's "Life of

Washington," though written by the chief-justice of the United States,

was not a success, and passed through only one edition. It gave him more

annoyance than any thing in his life. He wrote it with labor and

sincerity, but he was incapable of writing mere smart, vivacious things,

and, in the attempt to give Washington his due proportions, he

insensibly failed of making a popular book.

Jefferson, who had been urging Tobias Lear, Washington's secretary, to

get out of Washington's papers remarks injurious to himself, was greatly

exercised at the publication of Marshall's book about as much as the

better element dudes are at Blaine's book.

Mr. Marshall, in 1788, assisted to make the new constitution of

Virginia. By the desire of Washington he ran for Congress as a

Federalist. President Washington offered him the place of

attorney-general, which he declined. He also declined the minister to

France, but subsequently accepted the position from President Adams, and

in France was insulted with his fellow-members by Talleyrand. John

Adams, on his return, wished to make him a member of the Supreme Court,

but this he declined, preferring the practice of the law.

It was at Mount Vernon that Washington prevailed upon him to run for

Congress. The story being raised that Patrick Henry was opposed to him,

old Henry came forward and said: "I should rather give my vote to John

Marshall than to any citizen of this State at this juncture, one only

excepted," meaning Washington.

The father of Robert E. Lee was one of the old Federal minority rallying

under Marshall. Marshall had scarcely taken his seat in Congress, in

1799, when Washington died, and he officially announced the death at

Philadelphia, and followed his remarks by introducing the resolutions

drafted by General Lee, which contained the words, "First in war, first

in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen."

ON THE BENCH.

John Marshall was next Secretary of State of John Adams, succeeding

Timothy Pickering. Adams was defeated for re-election, but before he

went out of office he appointed Marshall chief-justice, at the age of

forty-five.

At the head of that great bench sat Marshall more than one-third of a

century. Before him pleaded all the great lawyers of the country, like

William Pinckney, Hugh Legaré, Daniel Webster, Horace Binney, Luther

Martin, and Walter Jones.

John Marshall left as his great legacy to the United States his

interpretation of the Constitution. While chief-justice he became a

member of the Constitutional Convention of Virginia in company with

Madison and Monroe, both of whom had been President. He gave the Federal

Constitution its liberal interpretation, that it was not merely a bone

thrown to the general government, which must be watched with suspicion

while it ate, but that it was a document with something of the

elasticity of our population and climate, and that it was designed to

convey to the general state powers noble enough to give us respect.

Without a spot on his reputation, without an upright enemy, the old man

attended to his duty absolutely, loved argument, encouraged all young

lawyers at the bar, and he lived down to the time of nullification, and

when General Jackson issued his proclamation against the nullifiers John

Marshall and Judge Story went up to the White House and took a glass of

wine with him.

And thus those two old men silently appreciated each other near the end

of their days when the suspicions of Jefferson had resulted in incipient

rebellion that was to break out in less than thirty years, and which

Marshall predicted unless there was a more general assent to the fact

that we were one country, and not a parcel of political

chicken-coops.--GEORGE ALFRED TOWNSEND.

* * * * *

XXIX.

A NOBLE MOTHER.

HOW SHE TRAINED HERSELF, AND EDUCATED HER BOYS

Harrietta Rea, in _The Christian Union_, some time ago, drew a picture

of home life in the West, which ought to be framed and hung up in every

household of the land.

In one of the prairie towns of Northern Iowa, where the Illinois Central

Railroad now passes from Dubuque to Sioux City, lived a woman whose

experience repeats the truth that inherent forces, ready to be

developed, are waiting for the emergencies that life may bring.

She was born and "brought up" in New England. With the advantages of a

country school, and a few terms in a neighboring city, she became a fair

scholar--not at all remarkable; she was married at twenty-one to a young

farmer, poor, but intelligent and ambitious. In ten years, after the

death of their parents they emigrated to Iowa, and invested their money

in land that bade fair to increase in value, but far away from

neighbors. Here they lived, a happy family, for five years, when he

died, leaving her, at the age of thirty-five, with four boys, the eldest

nearly fourteen, the youngest nine. The blow came suddenly, and at first

was overwhelming. Alone, in what seemed almost a wilderness, she had no

thought of giving up the farm. It was home. There they must stay and do

the best they could. The prospect of a railroad passing near them, in

time, was good; then some of the land might be sold. A little money bad

been laid by--nothing that she ought to touch for the present. Daniel,

the hired man, who had come out with them, and who was a devoted friend

and servant, she determined to keep--his judgment was excellent in farm

matters. Hitherto the boys had gone regularly to school, a mile or two

away; for a settlement in Iowa was never without its school-house. They

were bright and quick to learn. Their father had been eager to help and

encourage them. Newspapers, magazines, and now and then a good book, had

found their way into this household. Though very fond of reading

herself, with the care of her house she had drifted along, as so many

women do, until the discipline of study, or any special application, had

been almost forgotten. It was the ambition of both parents that their

sons should be well educated. Now Jerry and Thede, the two oldest, must

be kept at home during the summer to work. Nate and Johnnie could help

at night and in the morning. The boys had all been trained to habits of

obedience. They were affectionate, and she knew that she could depend

upon their love.

One evening, alone in her bedroom, she overheard some part of a

conversation as the children were sitting together around the open

fire-place:

"I don't mind the work," said Theodore, "if I could only be learning,

too. Father used to say he wanted me to be a civil engineer."

"If father was here," said eleven-year-old Nate, "you could study

evenings and recite to him. I wish mother could help; but, then I guess

mother's--"

"Help how?" she heard Jerry ask sharply, before Nate could finish his

sentence; and she knew the boy was jealous at once for her. "Isn't she

the best mother in the world?"

"Yes, she is; and she likes stories, too; but I was just thinking, now

that you can't go to school, if she only knew a lot about every thing,

why, she could tell you."

"Well," replied Jerry, with all the gravity of a man, "we must just take

hold and help all we can; it's going to be hard enough for mother. I

just hate to give up school and pitch into work. Thede, you shall go

next Winter, any way."

"Shan't we be lonesome next winter?" said little Johnnie, who had taken

no part in the talk; until now; "won't mother be afraid? I want my

father back," and, without a word of warning, he burst into tears.

Dead silence for a few minutes. The outburst was so sudden, she knew

they were all weeping. It was Jerry again who spoke first: "Don't let

mother see us crying. Come, Johnnie, let's take Bone, and all go down to

the trap;" then she heard them pass out of the house.

Desolation fell upon that poor mother for the next hour. Like a knife,

Nate's remark had passed through her heart, "Father could have helped!"

Couldn't she help her boys, for whom she was ready to die? Was she only

"mother," who prepared their meals and took care of their clothes? She

wanted a part in the very best of their lives. She thought it all over,

sitting up far into the night. If she could only create an interest in

some study that should bind them all together, and in which she could

lead! Was she too old to begin? Never had the desire to become the very

center of interest to them taken such a hold upon her.

A few weeks after, she said one morning, at the breakfast table, "Boys,

I've been thinking that we might begin geology this summer, and study

it, all of us together. Your father and I meant to do it sometime. I've

found a text-book; by and by, perhaps, Thede can draw us a chart. Jerry

will take hold, I know, and Nate and Johnnie can hunt for specimens.

We'll have an hour or two every night."

The children's interest awoke in a flash, and that very evening the

question discussed was one brought in by Nate: "What is the difference

between limestone and granite?" A simple one, but it opened the way for

her, and their first meeting proved a success. She had to study each day

to be ready and wide awake for her class. They lived in a limestone

region. Different forms of coral abounded, and other fossils were

plenty. An old cupboard in the shed was turned into a cabinet. One day

Nate, who had wandered off two or three miles, brought home a piece of

rock, where curious, long, finger-shaped creatures were imbedded. Great

was the delight of all to find them described as _orthoceratites,_ and

an expedition to the spot was planned for some half-holiday. Question

after question led back to the origin of the earth. She found the

nebular hypothesis, and hardly slept one night trying to comprehend it

clearly enough to put it before others in a simple fashion. Her book was

always at hand. By and by they classified each specimen, and the best of

their kind were taken to shelves in the sitting-room. Her own enthusiasm

in study was aroused, and, far from a hardship, it now became a delight.

Her spirit was contagious. The boys, always fond of "mother," wondered

what new life possessed her; but they accepted the change all the same.

She found that she could teach, and also could inspire her pupils. They

heard of a gully, five or six miles away, where crystals had been found.

Making a holiday, for which the boys worked like Trojans, they took

their lunch in the farm wagon, and rode to the spot; and if their search

was not altogether successful, it left them the memory of a happy time.

In the meantime the farm prospered. She did all the work in the house

and all the sewing, going out, too, in the garden, where she raised a

few flowers, and helping to gather vegetables. Daniel and the boys were

bitterly opposed to her helping them. "Mother," said Jerry, "if you

won't ever think you must go out, I'll do any thing to make up. I don't

want you to look like those women we see sometimes in the fields."

Generally she yielded; her work was enough for one pair of hands.

Through it all now ran the thought that her children were growing up;

they would become educated men; she would not let them get ahead, not so

as to pass her entirely.

Winter came. Now Daniel could see to the work; but these habits of study

were not to be broken. "Boys, let us form a history club," was the

proposition; "it shan't interfere with your lessons at school." They

took the history of the United States, which the two younger children

were studying. Beginning with the New England settlements, and being six

in number, they called each other, for the time, after the six States,

persuading old Daniel to take his native Rhode Island. "That woman beats

all creation," he was heard to exclaim, "the way she works all day and

goes on at night over her books." The mother used to say she hardy knew

if she were any older than her boys when they were trying to trip each

other with questions. The teacher of the district school came over one

Saturday afternoon. "I never had such pupils," said he, "as your sons,

in history; and indeed they want to look into every thing." Afterward he

heard with delight the story of their evening's work. The deep snows

often shut them in, but the red light shone clearly and bright from that

sitting-room window, and a merry group were gathered around the table.

Every two weeks an evening was given to some journey. It was laid out in

advance, and faithfully studied. Once, Theodore remembers, a shout of

laughter was raised when nine o'clock came by Jerry's exclamation, "O,

mother, don't go home now; we are all having such a good time!" Five

years they lived in this way, and almost entirely by themselves. They

studied botany. She knew the name of every tree and shrub for miles

around. The little boys made a collection of birds' eggs, and then began

to watch closely the habits of the birds. It was a pure, simple life. It

would have been too wild and lonely but for the charm of this devoted

mother. Her hours of loneliness were hidden from them; but she learned

in an unusual degree to throw every energy into the day's work of study,

and create, as it were, a fresh enthusiasm for the present hour. Her

loving sacrifice was rewarded. Each child made her his peculiar

confidante. She became the inspiration of his life.

English history opened a wide field to this family. One afternoon she

brought in Shakespeare to prove some historical question. It was a rainy

day, and the boys were all at home. Jerry began to read "Hamlet" aloud;

it proved a treasure that brought them into a new world of delight.

Sometimes they took different characters for representation, and the

evening ended in a frolic; for good-natured mirth was never repressed.

First of all, a preparation had been made for the Sabbath. There was a

church in this town, but at a distance of several miles, and during many

days the roads were impassable. She had leaned upon infinite Strength,

gathering wisdom through all these experiences. The secret of many a

promise had been revealed to her understanding; and, above every thing,

she desired that the Scriptures should become precious to her children.

She took up Bible characters, bringing to bear the same vivid interest,

the same power of making them realities.

These lessons were varied by little sketches or reports of one Sunday to

be read aloud the next. Of this, Nate took hold with a special zest.

None of this family could sing. She thought of a substitute. They

learned the Psalms, much of Isaiah, and many hymns, repeating them in

concert, learning to count upon this hour around the fire as others do

upon their music. How many of these times came to her in after life--the

vision of the bright faces of her boys as they clustered affectionately

around her!

Time rolled by. The railroad passed through. A village sprang up, and

the land was ready to sell. She could keep enough for her own use, and

the boys could prepare for college. Thede and Nate went away to school.

The old home was kept bright and pleasant; friends, new settlers, came

in, and now there was visiting and social life.

Jerry stayed on the farm; Theodore became a civil engineer; Nate a

minister; Johnnie went into business. Theodore used to say: "Mother, as

I travel about, all the stones and the flowers make me think of you. I

catch sight of some rock, and stop to laugh over those blessed times."

Nate said: "Mother, when I am reading a psalm in the pulpit, there

always comes to me a picture of those old evenings, with you in the

rocking-chair by the firelight, and I hear all your voices again."

Johnnie wrote: "Mother, I think that every thing I have has come to me

through you." When Jerry, who remained faithful always, had listened to

his brothers, he put his arm about her, saying tenderly: "There will

never be any body like mother to me."

She died at sixty-five, very suddenly. Only a few hours before, she had

exclaimed, as her children all came home together: "There never were

such good boys as mine. You have repaid me a thousand-fold. God grant

you all happy homes." They bore her coffin to the grave themselves. They

would not let any other person touch it. In the evening they gathered

around the old hearth-stone in the sitting-room, and drew their chairs

together. No one spoke until Nate said, "Boys, let us pray;" and then,

all kneeling around her vacant chair, he prayed that the mantle of their

mother might fall upon them. They could ask nothing beyond that.

No Longer My Own.

In serving the Master I love,

In doing his bidding each day,

The sweetness of bondage I prove,

And sing, as I go on my way--

I never such freedom have known

As now I'm no longer my own.

His burden is easy to bear,

My own was a mountain of lead;

His yoke it is gladness to wear,

My own with my life-blood was red--

I never such gladness have known

As now I'm no longer my own.

Discharging the duties I owe

To household and neighbor of mine,

The beauty of bondage I know,

And count it as beauty divine--

I never such beauty have known

As now I'm no longer my own.

And everywhere, Master so dear,

A dutiful bondman of thine,

All things my possession appear,

Their glory so verily mine--

I never such glory have known

As now I'm no longer my own.

My heart overflows with brave cheer;

For where is the bondage to dread,

As long as the Master is dear,

And love that is selfish is dead!--

I never such safety have known

As now I'm no longer my own.

* * * * *

XXX.

THE CARE OF THE BODY.

WHAT DR. SARGENT, OF THE HARVARD GYMNASIUM, SAYS ABOUT IT--POINTS FOR

PARENTS, TEACHERS, AND PUPILS.

The time is coming--indeed has come--when every writer will divide the

subject of education into physical, moral, and intellectual. We

recognize theoretically that physical education is the basis of all

education. From the time of Plato down to the time of Horace Mann and

Herbert Spencer that has been the theory. It has also been the theory of

German educators. The idea that the mind is a distinct entity, apart

from the body, was a theological idea that grew out of the reaction

against pagan animalism. The development of the body among the Greeks

and Romans was followed by those brutal exhibitions of physical prowess

in the gladiatorial contests where the physical only was cultivated and

honored. With the dawn of Christianity a reaction set in against this

whole idea of developing the body. They thought no good could come from

its supreme development, because they had seen so much evil. The priests

represented the great danger which accompanied this physical training

without moral culture, and there is no doubt that they were right to a

certain degree. Give a man only supreme physical education, without any

attention to the moral and intellectual, and he will go to pieces like

our prize-fighters and athletes. But the Christians went to the other

extreme. They practiced the most absurd system of asceticism, depriving

themselves of natural food and rest, and, of course, the results which

followed on a grand scale were just what would follow in the individual.

Let a person follow the course they did, denying himself necessary

raiment and food, taking no exercise, and living in retirement, and

nervous prostration will follow, and hysterical disturbances and

troubles. This result in the individual was found on a large scale

throughout Christendom. The idea that the Christians brought down from

the very earliest dawn of Christianity, that the body and soul are

distinct, and that whatever is done to mortify the flesh increases the

spiritual, life, has a grain of truth in it. There were men in our army

who, half-starved, marched through the Southern swamps in a state of

exaltation. They imagined they were walking through floral gardens, with

birds flitting about and singing overhead. But it was an unnatural,

morbid state. So priests deprived themselves of food, and reduced

themselves to the lowest extent physically, and then saw visions; and

were in an exalted mental state. But it was morbid. If a man sit up till

twelve o'clock to write on a certain theme, he may not have a single

idea until that hour; but then his mind begins to work, and perhaps he

can work better than under any other circumstances. But his condition is

abnormal. It does not represent the man's true state of health. He is

gaining that momentary advancement of power at terrible cost.

This disregard of physical conditions is giving rise to national

disturbance. It has thoroughly worked itself into our educational

system. Though our schools profess to be purely secular, they still

adhere to this old theological idea. You can not get teachers to enter

with zest into exercises for physical development, because they think

that a man who trains the body must be inferior to the man who trains

the mind. They do not see that the two are closely allied. They will

tell you that the time is all apportioned, so many hours for each study,

and that if you take half an hour out for exercise the boy must lose so

much Latin or Greek, or something else. The idea of the high-school is

to get the boy into college. They care nothing about the condition of

the individual. The individual must be sacrificed to the reputation of

the school, or of the master; the standard must be kept up. If the

master can not get just such a percentage of scholars into college, his

own reputation and the reputation of the school are injured. If he can

get this percentage into college, he does not care what becomes of the

individual. Our schools treat a boy as professional trainers treat a man

on the field; the only idea is to make the boy win a certain prize. They

do not care any thing about his health; that is nothing to them. Their

reputation is made upon the success of the boy in his entrance to

college. Here I have to step in and say to the father: "This boy must

not go any farther. His future prospects ought not to be sacrificed in

this way. Your son's success in life does not depend upon his going

through the Latin school. Let him step out and take another year. Do not

attempt to crowd him." The result of this lack of attention to physical

training, even looking at it from the intellectual stand-point, is

fatal. The boy gets a disgust for study, as one does for any special

kind of food when kept exclusively upon it. Many a fellow who stood high

in school breaks away from books as soon as he enters college, and goes

to the other extreme. That is nature's method of seeking relief. He has

mental dyspepsia, and every opportunity that offers for physical play he

accepts. He can not help it, and he ought not to be blamed for it,

because it is the natural law.

The laws of assimilation govern the brain as well as the body. You can

only store up just about so much matter--call it educational material if

you will--in a given time. If you undertake to force the physical

activity of the brain, you must supply it with more nourishment. If a

boy takes no exercise to increase his appetite, if he does not

invigorate and nourish his blood, which supplies brain substance, of

course there is deterioration. If he has a good stock of reserve

physical power he will get on very well for a while, but all at once he

will come to a stop. How many hundreds of those who stood well when they

entered college get to a certain point and can get no farther, because

they have not the physical basis. They are like athletes who can run a

certain speed, but can never get beyond that. On the other hand, men who

have had a more liberal physical training will go right by them, though

not such good scholars, because they have more of a basis back in the

physical.

When these things are fully appreciated, the whole system of education

will be revolutionized. To build the brain we must build the body. We

must not sacrifice nerve tissue and nerve power in physical training, as

there is danger of doing if gymnastics are not guided by professional

men. But the proper training of the body should produce the highest

intellectual results.

Certain parts of the body bear certain relations to one another. The

office of the stomach is to supply the body with nourishment. The office

of the heart is to pump this nourishment over the body. The office of

the lungs is to feed the heart and stomach with pure blood. All support

one another, and all are dependent on each other. If a boy sits in a

cramped position in school, that interferes with the circulation of the

blood, and that with the nourishment of the brain. You could in this way

trace the cause of many a schoolboy's headache. Speaking roughly, we

might say that one-half of the school children have a hollow at the

bottom of the breast-bone from sitting in such positions, and this

depression interferes with digestion. And the moment the stomach gives

out, that affects the whole physical and mental condition. When

nutrition is imperfect, the action of the heart and the distribution of

the blood are interfered with.

The only way to remedy these evils is by popular education. It is of no

use to attempt to bring about at once; any regular or prescribed system

of exercise, requiring such exercises to be carried out in school,

because our schools, like our theaters, are what the public make them.

There is many a master who knows he is pursuing the wrong course, but he

is kept to it by the anxious solicitations of parents who wish their

children kept up to a certain rank. They are forced to follow the

present system by the inordinate demands of parents. The parents must be

educated. The father and mother must be converted to the necessity, the

absolute necessity for success in life, of physical culture. There are

plenty of men who stand as political and financial leaders who are not

highly educated men. A man who has the rudiments of education--reading,

writing, arithmetic--with a good physique, good health, a well-balanced

and organized frame, brought into contact with the world, stands a

better chance of success than the one who goes through school and takes

a high rank at the expense of his physique.

Let a gifted but weakly lawyer go into a court-room and meet some

bull-headed opponent with not half the keen insight or knowledge of the

law, but one who has tenacity, ability to hold on, and nine times out

ten the abler man of the two--mentally--goes home wearied and defeated,

and the other man wins the case. Who are the men prominent in the

pulpit? Are they weak, puny men, or men of physique? Who are the leaders

in the Churches? They are not leaders on account of their intellectual

brilliancy, but by their wholeness as men. They find sympathy with the

people because they are good specimens of manhood. There might be many

more such had they been better trained.

The best training-school for the body is the gymnasium. That is the

purpose of all its appliances and apparatus. But it may be dispensed

with if one has an adequate desire for physical training. Give a boy to

understand that his body is not impure and vile, but that it is as much

worth consideration as his mind, and that if he does not take carte of

his body he can not do any thing with his mind, and ways of physical

training will not be wanting.

All children should be examined at intervals by a physician, and a

record kept of their development. I measure my little boy every year. I

know how he is growing. If he has been subject to too much excitement,

there will be larger relative growth of the head, and we adjust his

manner of life accordingly. The object of education is to _develop the

boy_, not to put him through so much of arithmetic or so much language.

The object is to get out of the boy all there is in him. The first

thing, then, is to have the boy examined. If, instead of calling a

physician when the children are sick, he is called while they are well,

it would be much better. Is he getting round-shouldered? Has he a crook

in the back? Is he beginning to stoop? There are many things which can

be stopped in a child which can never be changed after the habits are

hardened. Too late the parent may find that his child is incapacitated

for the highest education, because there is no room for the heart and

lungs to play their parts. The boy is limited in his possibilities as a

tree planted in unfavorable soil is limited. He is stunted. He will

reach a certain limit, and no efforts on his part will carry him

further. But if he has been taken in hand in time, and these suggestions

acted upon, different results might have been produced. These efforts to

develop the boy's body will awaken the interest of the boy himself. It

does not awaken animalism. Let a man have pride in his body, and his

morals will look out for themselves. If a a boy is thus examined, and a

record kept, he will take a pride in keeping up his record. It is not

necessary, then, to have appliances. He can make trees and

clothes-horses and gates and fences take their place. Teach him the

value of such opportunities. Teach him to increase the capacity of his

lungs and heart, and what relation they bear to the brain, and thus

awaken his interest. He will soon learn to exercise in the best way.

When the parent has to watch a boy to see that he exercises, exercise is

of little or no avail. But let the father and mother realize the full

value and importance of the body, and the results will follow naturally.

Every thing depends primarily upon the parent. If he simply commands

exercise without sharing in it, he is like a father who lectures his

sons about smoking and drinking while he smokes and drinks himself.

This is a great field. It is opening up broader every day. I do not know

any field where a man can go more enthusiastically to work. It affects

not only the physical, but the moral condition. We have brought about a

higher moral tone at Harvard through physical training. There is less

smoking and drinking by far than before the gymnasium was so universally

used. Every thing that develops the whole man affects morals. Our Maker

did not put us here merely to be trained for somewhere else. No one can

walk through the streets of Boston without feeling that there is need

enough of work to do right here, in bringing about a better condition of

affairs; something which shall be nearer an ideal heaven on earth.--_The

Christian Union_.

* * * * *

XXXI.

SAINT CECILIA

THE PATRONESS OF MUSIC-MYTHS CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC-ITS RELATION

TO WORK AND BLESSEDNESS

Her legend relates that about the year 230, which would be in the time

of the Emperor Alexander. Severus, Cecilia, a Roman lady, born of a

noble and rich family, who in early youth had been converted to

Christianity, and had made a vow of perpetual virginity, was constrained

by her parents to marry a certain Valerian, a pagan, whom she succeeded

in converting to Christianity without infringing the vow she had made.

She also converted her brother-in-law, Tiburtius, and a friend called

Maximius, all of whom were martyred in consequence of their faith.

It is further related, among other circumstances purely legendary, that

Cecilia often united instrumental music to that of her voice, in singing

the praises of the Lord. On this all her fame has been founded, and she

has become the special patroness of music and musicians all the world

over. Half the musical societies of Europe have been named after her,

and her supposed musical acquirements have led the votaries of a sister

art to find subjects for their work in episodes of her life. The grand

painting by Domenichino, at Bologna, in which the saint is represented

as rapt in an ecstasy of devotion, with a small "organ," as it is

called--an instrument resembling a large kind of Pandean pipes--in her

hand, is well known, as is also Dryden's beautiful ode. The illustration

which accompanies this chapter, after a painting by one of the brothers

Caracci, of the seventeenth century, represents Cecilia at the organ.

Borne heavenward on the tide of music, she sees a vision of the holy

family, the child Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, with an angel near at hand in

quiet gladness.

God's harmony is written

All through, in shining bars,

The soul His love has smitten

As heaven is writ with stars.

MYTHS CONCERNING THE ORIGIN OF MUSIC.

Music is so delightfully innocent and charming an art, that we can not

wonder at finding it almost universally regarded as of divine origin.

Pagan nations generally ascribe the invention of their musical

instruments to their gods, or to certain superhuman beings of a godlike

nature. The Hebrews attributed it to man, but as Jubal is mentioned as

"the father of all such as handle the harp and organ" only, and as

instruments of percussion were almost invariably in use long before

people were led to construct stringed and wind instruments, we may

suppose that, in the Biblical records, Jubal is not intended to be

represented as the original inventor of all the Hebrew instruments, but

rather as a great promoter of the art of music.

"However, be this as it may, this much is certain: there are among

Christians at the present day not a few sincere upholders of the literal

meaning of these records, who maintain that instrumental music was

already practiced in heaven before the creation of the world. Elaborate

treatises have been written on the nature and effect of that heavenly

music, and passages from the Bible have been cited by the learned

authors which are supposed to confirm indisputably the opinions advanced

in their treatises.

"It may, at a first glance, appear singular that nations have not,

generally, such traditional records respecting the originator of their

vocal music as they have respecting the invention of their musical

instruments. The cause is, however, explicable; to sing is-as natural to

man as to speak, and uncivilized nations are not likely to speculate

whether singing has ever been invented.

"There is no need to recount here the well-known mythological traditions

of the ancient Greeks and Romans referring to the origin of their

favorite musical instruments. Suffice it to remind the reader that

Mercury and Apollo were believed to be the inventors of the lyre and

cithara (guitar); that the invention of the flute was attributed to

Minerva, and that Pan is said to have invented the syrinx. More worthy

of our attention are some similar records of the Hindoos, because they

have hitherto scarcely been noticed in any work on music.

"In the mythology of the Hindoos, the god Nareda is the inventor of the

_vina_, the principal musical instrument of Hindoostan. Saraswati, the

consort of Brahma, may be said to be considered as the Minerva of the

Hindoos. She is the goddess of music as well as of speech. To her is

attributed the invention of the systematic arrangement of the sounds

into a musical scale. She is represented seated on a peacock and playing

a stringed instrument of the guitar kind. Brahma, himself, we find

depicted as a vigorous man with four handsome heads, beating with his

hands upon a small drum. Arid Vishnu, in his incarnation as Krishna, is

represented as a beautiful youth playing upon a flute. The Hindoos still

possess a peculiar kind of flute which they consider as the favorite

instrument of Krishna. Furthermore, they have the divinity of Genesa,

the god of wisdom, who is represented as a man with the head of an

elephant holding in his hands a _tamboura_, a kind of lute with a long

neck.

"Among the Chinese, we meet with a tradition according to which they

obtained their musical scale from a miraculous bird called Foung-hoang,

which appears to have been a sort of phoenix. As regards the invention

of musical instruments, the Chinese have various traditions. In one of

these we are told that the origin of some of their most popular

instruments dates from the period when China was under the 'dominion of

the heavenly spirits called Ki. Another assigns the invention of several

of their stringed instruments to the great Fohi, called the "Son of

Heaven," who was, it is said, the founder of the Chinese Empire, and who

is stated to have lived about B.C. 3000, which was long after the

dominion of the Ki, or spirits. Again, another tradition holds that the

most important Chinese musical instruments, and the systematic

arrangement of the tones, are an invention of Niuva, a supernatural

female, who lived at the time of Fohi, and who was a virgin-mother. When

Confucius, the great Chinese philosopher, happened to hear, on a certain

occasion, some divine music, he became so greatly enraptured that he

could not take any food for three months. The music which produced the

miraculous effect was that of Kouei, the Orpheus of the Chinese, whose

performance on the _king_, a kind of harmonicon constructed of slabs of

sonorous stone, would draw wild animals around him and make them

subservient to his will.

"The Japanese have a beautiful tradition, according to which the

Sun-goddess, in resentment of the violence of an evil-disposed brother,

retired into a cave, leaving the universe in darkness and anarchy; when

the beneficent gods, in their concern for the welfare of mankind,

devised music to lure her forth from her retreat, and their efforts soon

proved successful.

"The Kalmucks, in the vicinity of the Caspian Sea, adore a beneficient

divinity called Maidari, who is represented as a rather jovial-looking

man, with a mustache and imperial, playing upon an instrument with three

strings, somewhat resembling the Russian _balalaika_.

"Almost all these ancient conceptions we meet with, also, among European

nations, though more or less modified.

"Odin, the principal deity of the ancient Scandinavians, was the

inventor of magic songs and Runic writings.

"In the Finnish mythology the divine Vainamoinen is said to have

constructed the five-stringed harp, called _kantele_, the old national

instrument of the Finns. The frame he made out of the bones of a pike,

and the teeth of the pike he used for the tuning-pegs. The strings he

made of hair from the tail of a spirited horse. When the harp fell into

the sea and was lost, he made another, the frame of which was birchwood,

with pegs made out of the branch of an oak-tree. As strings for this

harp he used the silky hair of a young girl. Vainamoinen took his harp,

and sat down on a hill, near a silvery brook. There he played with so

irresistible an effect that he entranced whatever came within hearing of

his music. Men and animals listened, enraptured; the wildest beasts of

the forests lost their ferocity; the birds of the air were drawn toward

him; the fishes rose to the surface of the water and remained immovable;

the trees ceased to wave their branches; the brook retarded its course

and the wind its haste; even the mocking echo approached stealthily, and

listened with the utmost attention to the heavenly sounds. Soon the

women began to cry; then the old men and the children also began to cry,

and the girls and the young men--all cried for delight. At last

Vainamoinen himself wept, and his big tears ran over his beard and

rolled into the water and became beautiful pearls at the bottom of the

sea.

"Several other musical gods, or godlike musicians, could be cited; and,

moreover, innumerable minor spirits, all bearing evidence that music is

of divine origin.

"True, people who think themselves more enlightened than their

forefathers, smile at these old traditions, and say that the original

home of music is the human heart. Be it so. But do not the purest and

most beautiful conceptions of man partake of a divine character? Is not

the art of music generally acknowledged to be one of these? And is it

not, therefore, even independently of myths and mysteries, entitled to

be called the divine art?"

THE RELATION OF MUSIC TO WORK AND BLESSEDNESS.

"Give us," says Carlyle, "O, give us the man who sings at his work! Be

his occupation what it may, he is equal to any of those who follow the

same pursuit in silent sullenness. He will do more in the same time--he

will do it better--he will persevere longer. One is scarcely sensible of

fatigue whilst he marches to music. The very stars are said to make

harmony as they revolve in their spheres. Wondrous is the strength of

cheerfulness, altogether past calculation its powers of endurance.

Efforts, to be permanently useful, must be uniformly joyous--a spirit

all sunshine--graceful from very gladness--beautiful because bright."

Again, this author says, who had so much music in his heart, though not

of the softest kind--rather of the epic sort:

"The meaning of song goes deep. Who is there that, in logical words, can

express the effect music has on us? A kind of inarticulate, unfathomable

speech, which leads to the edge of the infinite, and lets us for moments

gaze into that!"

The late Canon Kingsley certainly conceived much of the height and

depth, and length and breath of song, when he wrote:

"There is music in heaven, because in music there is no self-will. Music

goes on certain rules and laws. Man did not make these laws of music; he

has only found them out; and, if he be self-willed and break them, there

is an end of his music instantly: all he brings out is discord and ugly

sounds: The greatest musician in the world is as much bound by those

laws as the learner in the school; and the greatest musician is one who,

instead of fancying that because he is clever he may throw aside the

laws of music, knows the laws of music best, and observes them most

reverently. And therefore it was that the old Greeks, the wisest of the

heathens, made a point of teaching their children _music_; because, they

said, it taught them not to be self-willed and fanciful, but to see the

beauty, the usefulness of rule, the divineness of laws. And, therefore,

music is fit for heaven; therefore music is a pattern and type of

heaven, and of the everlasting life of God which perfect spirits live in

heaven; a life of melody and order in themselves; a life of harmony with

each other and with God.

"If thou fulfillest the law which God has given thee, the law of love

and liberty, then thou makest music before God, and thy life is a hymn

of praise to God.

"If thou act in love and charity with thy neighbors, thou art making

sweeter harmony in the ears of our Lord Jesus Christ than psaltery,

dulcimer, and all other kinds of music.

"If thou art living a righteous and a useful life, doing thy duty

orderly and cheerfully where God has put thee, then thou art making

sweeter melody in the ears of the Lord Jesus Christ than if thou hast

the throat of the nightingale; for then thou, in thy humble place, art

humbly copying the everlasting harmony and melody by which God made the

worlds and all that therein is, and, behold, it was very good, in the

day when the morning stars sang together, and all the sons of God

shouted for joy over the new-created earth, which God made to be a

pattern of his own perfection."

The minstrel's heart in sadness

Was wrestling with his fate;

"Am I the sport of madness,"

He sighed, "and born too late?"

"No gifts are ever given,"

A friendly voice replied,

"On which the smile of Heaven

Does not indeed abide.

God's harmony is written

All through, in shining bars,

The soul his love has smitten,

As heaven is writ with stars.

The major notes and minor

Are waiting for their wings;

Pray thou the great Diviner

To touch the secret springs.

He may not give expression

In any ocean-tide,

But music, like confession,

Will waft thee to his side;

Where thou, as on a river,

The current deep and strong,

Shalt sail with him forever

Into the land of song."

* * * * *

XXXII.

THOMAS DE QUINCEY.

(BORN 1786--DIED 1859.)

A LIFE OF WONDER AND WARNING.

The "English Opium-eater" himself told publicly, throughout a period of

between thirty and forty years, whatever is known about him to any body;

and in sketching the events of his life, the recorder has little more to

do than to indicate facts which may be found fully expanded in Mr. De

Quincey's "Confessions of an Opium-eater" and "Autobiographic Sketches."

The business which he, in fact, left for others to do is that which, in

spite of obvious impossibility, he was incessantly endeavoring to do

himself--that of analyzing and forming a representation and judgment of

his mind, and of his life as molded by his mind. The most intense

metaphysician of a time remarkable for the predominance of metaphysical

modes of thought, he was as completely unaware, as smaller men of his

mental habits, that in his perpetual self-study and analysis he was

never approaching the truth, for the simple reason that he was not even

within ken of the necessary point of view. "I," he says, "whose disease

it was to meditate too much and to observe too little." And the

description was a true one, as far as it went. And the completion of the

description was one which he could never have himself arrived at. It

must, we think, be concluded of De Quincey that he was the most

remarkable instance in his time of a more than abnormal, of an

artificial, condition of body and mind--a characterization which he must

necessarily be the last man to conceive of. To understand this, it is

necessary to glance at the events of his life. The briefest notice will

suffice, as they are within the reach of all, as related in his own

books.

Thomas De Quincey was the son of a merchant engaged in foreign commerce,

and was born at Manchester in 1786. He was one of eight children, of

whom no more than six were ever living at once, and several of whom died

in infancy. The survivors were reared in a country home, the incidents

of which, when of a kind to excite emotion, impressed themselves on this

singular child's memory from a very early age. We have known only two

instances, in a rather wide experience of life, of persons distinctly

remembering so far back as a year and a half old. This was De Quincey's

age when three deaths happened in the family, which he remembered, not

by tradition, but by his own contemporary emotions. A sister of three

and a half died, and he was perplexed by her disappearance, and

terrified by the household whisper that she had been ill-used just

before her death by a servant. A grandmother died about the same time,

leaving little impression, because she had been little seen. The other

death was of a beloved kingfisher, by a doleful accident. When the boy

was five, he lost his playfellow and, as he says, intellectual guide,

his sister Elizabeth, eight years old, dying of hydrocephalus, after

manifesting an intellectual power which the forlorn brother recalled

with admiration and wonder for life. The impression was undoubtedly

genuine; but it is impossible to read the "Autobiographical Sketch" in

which the death and funeral of the child are described without

perceiving that the writer referred back to the period he was describing

with emotions and reflex sensations which arose in him and fell from the

pen at the moment. His father, meantime, was residing abroad, year after

year, as a condition of his living at all; and he died of pulmonary

consumption before Thomas was seven years old. The elder brother, then

twelve, was obviously too eccentric for home management, if not for all

control; and, looking no further than these constitutional cases, we are

warranted in concluding that the Opium-eater entered life under peculiar

and unfavorable conditions.

He passed through a succession of schools, and was distinguished by his

eminent knowledge of Greek. At fifteen he was pointed out by his master

(himself a ripe scholar) to a stranger in the remarkable words, "That

boy could harangue an Athenian mob better than you or I could address an

English one." And it was not only the Greek, we imagine, but the

eloquence, too, was included in this praise. In this, as in the subtlety

of the analytical power (so strangely mistaken for entire intellectual

supremacy in our day), De Quincey must have strongly resembled

Coleridge. Both were fine Grecians, charming discoursers, eminent

opium-takers, magnificent dreamers and seers; large in their promises,

and helpless in their failure of performance. De Quincey set his heart

upon going to college earlier than his guardians thought proper; and, on

his being disappointed in this matter, he ran away from his tutor's

house, and was lost for several months, first in Wales and afterward in

London. He was then sixteen. His whole life presents no more remarkable

evidence of his constant absorption in introspection than the fact that,

while tortured with hunger in the streets of London, for many weeks, and

sleeping (or rather lying awake with cold and hunger) on the floor of an

empty house, it never once occurred to him to earn money. As a classical

corrector of the press, and in other ways, he might no doubt have

obtained employment; but it was not till afterward asked why he did not,

that the idea ever entered his mind. How he starved, how he would have

died but for a glass of spiced wine in the middle of the night on some

steps in Soho Square, the Opium-eater told all the world above thirty

years since; and also of his entering college; of the love of wine

generated by the comfort it had yielded in his days of starvation; and

again, of the disorder of the functions of the stomach which naturally

followed, and the resort to opium as a refuge from the pain. It is to be

feared that the description given in those extraordinary "Confessions"

has acted more strongly in tempting young people to seek the eight

years' pleasures he derived from laudanum than, that of his subsequent

torments in deterring them. There was no one to present to them the

consideration that the peculiar organization of De Quincey, and his

bitter sufferings, might well make a recourse to opium a different thing

to him than to any body else. The quality of his mind and the exhausted

state of his body enhanced to him the enjoyments which he called

"divine," whereas there is no doubt of the miserable pain by which men

of all constitutions have to expiate an habitual indulgence in opium.

Others than De Quincey may or may not procure the pleasures he

experienced; but it is certain that every one must expiate his offense

against the laws of the human frame. And let it be remembered that De

Quincey's excuse is as singular as his excess. Of the many who have

emulated his enjoyment, there can hardly have been one whose stomach had

been well-nigh destroyed by months of incessant, cruel hunger.

This event of his life, his resort to opium, absorbed all the rest.

There is little more to tell in the way of incident. His existence was

thenceforth a series of dreams, undergone in different places, now at

college, and now in a Westmoreland cottage, with a gentle, suffering

wife, by his side, striving to minister to a need which was beyond the

reach of nursing. He could amuse his predominant faculties by reading

metaphysical philosophy and analytical reasoning on any subject, and by

elaborating endless analyses and reasonings of his own, which he had not

energy to embody. Occasionally the torpor encroached even on his

predominant faculties, and then he roused himself to overcome the habit;

underwent fearful suffering in the weaning; began to enjoy the vital

happiness of temperance and health, and then fell back again. The

influence upon the moral energies of his nature was, as might be

supposed, fatal. Such energy he once had, as his earlier efforts at

endurance amply testify. But as years passed on, he had not only become

a more helpless victim to his prominent vice, but manifested an

increasing insensibility to the most ordinary requisitions of honor and

courtesy, to say nothing of gratitude and sincerity. In his hungry days,

in London, he would not beg nor borrow. Five years later he wrote to

Wordsworth, in admiration and sympathy; received an invitation to his

Westmoreland Valley; went, more than once, within a few miles, and

withdrew and returned to Oxford, unable to conquer his painful shyness;

returned at last to live there, in the very cottage which had been

Wordsworth's; received for himself, his wife, and a growing family of

children, an unintermitting series of friendly and neighborly offices;

was necessarily admitted to much household confidence, and favored with

substantial aid, which was certainly not given through any strong liking

for his manners, conversation, or character. How did he recompense all

this exertion and endurance oh his behalf? In after years, when living

(we believe) at Edinburgh, and pressed by debt, he did for once exert

himself to write, and what he wrote was an exposure of every thing about

the Wordsworths which he knew merely by their kindness. He wrote papers,

which were eagerly read, and, of course, duly paid for, in which

Wordsworth's personal foibles were malignantly exhibited with ingenious

aggravations. The infirmities of one member of the family, the personal

blemish of another, and the human weaknesses of all, were displayed, and

all for the purpose of deepening the dislike against Wordsworth himself,

which the receiver of his money, the eater of his dinners, and the

dreary provoker of his patience strove to excite. Moreover, he

perpetrated an act of treachery scarcely paralleled, we hope, in the

history of literature. In the confidence of their most familiar days,

Wordsworth had communicated portions of his posthumous poem to his

guest, who was perfectly well aware that the work was to rest in

darkness and silence till after the poet's death. In these magazine

articles DeQuincey, using for this atrocious purpose his fine gift of

memory, published a passage, which he informed us was of far higher

merit than any thing else we had to expect. And what was Wordsworth's

conduct under this unequaled experience of bad faith and bad feeling?

While so many anecdotes were going of the poet's fireside, the following

ought to be added: An old friend was talking with him by that fireside,

and mentioned DeQuincey's magazine articles. Wordsworth begged to be

spared any account of them, saying that the man had long passed away

from the family life and mind, and that he did not wish to ruffle

himself in a useless way about a misbehavior which could not be

remedied. The friend acquiesced, saying: "Well, I will tell you only one

thing that he says, and then we will talk of other things. He says your

wife is too good for you." The old poet's dim eyes lighted up instantly,

and he started from his seat and flung himself against the mantel-piece,

with his back to the fire, as he cried with loud enthusiasm: "And that's

_true! There_ he is right!" And his disgust and contempt for the traitor

were visibly moderated.

During a long course of years DeQuincey went on dreaming always,

sometimes scheming works of high value and great efficacy, which were

never to exist; promising largely to booksellers and others, and failing

through a weakness so deep-seated that it should have prevented his

making any promises. When his three daughters were grown up, and his

wife was dead, he lived in a pleasant cottage at Lasswade, near

Edinburgh, well-known by name to those who have never seen its beauties

as the scene of Scott's early married life and first great achievements

in literature. There, while the family fortunes were expressly made

contingent on his abstinence from his drug, DeQuincey did abstain, or

observe moderation. His flow of conversation was then the delight of old

acquaintance and admiring strangers, who came to hear the charmer and to

receive the impression, which could never be lost, of the singular

figure and countenance and the finely modulated voice, which were like

nothing else in the world. It was a strange thing to look upon the

fragile form and features, which might be those of a dying man, and to

hear such utterances as his--now the strangest comments and

insignificant incidents; now pregnant remarks on great subjects, and

then malignant gossip, virulent and base, but delivered with an air and

a voice of philosophical calmness and intellectual commentary such as

caused the disgust of the listener to be largely qualified with

amusement and surprise. One good thing was, that nobody's name and fame

could be really injured by any thing DeQuincey could say. There was such

a grotesque air about the mode of his evil speaking, and it was so

gratuitous and excessive, that the hearer could not help regarding it as

a singular sort of intellectual exercise, or an effort in the speaker to

observe, for once, something outside of himself, rather than as any

token of actual feeling towards the ostensible object.

Let this strange commentator on individual character meet with more

mercy and a wiser interpretation than he was himself capable of. He was

not made like other men; and he did not live, think, or feel like them.

A singular organization was singularly and fatally deranged in its

action before it could show its best quality. Marvelous analytical

faculty he had; but it all oozed out in barren words. Charming eloquence

he had; but it degenerated into egotistical garrulity, rendered tempting

by the gilding of his genius. It is questionable whether, if he had

never touched opium or wine, his real achievements would have been

substantial, for he had no conception of a veritable stand-point of

philosophical investigation; but the actual effect of his intemperance

was to aggravate to excess his introspective tendencies, and to remove

him incessantly further from the needful discipline of true science. His

conditions of body and mind were abnormal, and his study of the one

thing he knew any thing about--the human mind--was radically imperfect.

His powers, noble and charming as they might have been, were at once

wasted and weakened through their own partial excess. His moral nature

relaxed and sank, as must always be the case where sensibility is

stimulated and action paralyzed; and the man of genius who, forty years

before his death, administered a moral warning to all England, and

commanded the sympathy and admiration of a nation, lived on, to achieve

nothing but the delivery of some confidences of questionable value and

beauty, and to command from us nothing more than a compassionate sorrow

that an intellect so subtle and an eloquence so charming in its pathos,

its humor, its insight, and its music, should have left the world in no

way the better for such gifts, unless by the warning afforded in

"Confessions" first, and then, by example, against the curse which

neutralized their influence and corrupted its source.--HARRIET

MARTINEAU.

* * * * *

XXXIII.

A VISION OF TIME.

NEW-YEAR'S EVE.

O did you not see him that over the snow

Came on with a pace so cautious and slow?--

That measured his step to a pendulum-tick,

Arriving in town when the darkness was thick?

In the midst of a vision of mind and heart,

A drama above all human art,

I saw him last night, with locks so gray,

A long way off, as the light died away.

And I knew him at once, so often before

Had he silently, mournfully passed at my door.

He must be cold and weary, I said,

Coming so far, with that measured tread.

I will urge him to linger awhile with me

Till his withering chill and weariness flee.

A story--who knows?--he may deign to rehearse,

And when he is gone I will put it in verse.

I turned to prepare for the coming guest,

With curious, troublous thoughts oppressed.

The window I cheered with the taper's glow

Which glimmered afar o'er the spectral snow.

My anxious care the hearth-stone knew,

And the red flames leaped and beckoned anew.

But chiefly myself, with singular care,

Did I for the hoary presence prepare.

Yet with little success, as I paced the room,

Did I labor to banish a sense of gloom.

My thoughts were going and coming like bees,

With store from the year's wide-stretching leas;

Some laden with honey, some laden with gall,

And into my heart they dropped it all!

O miserable heart! at once overrun

With the honey and gall thou can'st not shun.

O wretched heart! in sadness I cried,

Where is thy trust in the Crucified?

And in wrestling prayer did I labor long

That the Mighty One would make me strong.

That prayer was more than a useless breath:

It brought to my soul God's saving health.

The hours went by on their drowsy flight,

And came the middle watch of the night;

In part unmanned in spite of my care,

I beheld my guest in the taper's glare,

A wall of darkness around him thick,

As onward he came to a pendulum-tick.

Then quickly I opened wide the door,

And bade him pass my threshold o'er,

And linger awhile away from the cold,

And repeat some story or ballad old,--

His weary limbs to strengthen with rest,

For his course to the ever-receding West.

Through the vacant door in wonder I glanced,

And stood--was it long?--as one entranced.

Silence so awful did fill the room,

That the tick of the clock was a cannon's boom.

And my heart it sank to its lowest retreat,

And in whelming awe did muffle its beat.

For now I beheld, as never before;

And heard to forget--ah, nevermore!

For with outstretched hand, with scythe and glass,

With naught of a pause did the traveler pass.

And with upturned face he the silence broke,

And thus, as he went, he measuredly spoke:

My journey is long, but my limbs are strong;

And I stay not for rest, for story, or song.

It is only a dirge, that ever I sing;

It is only of death, the tale that I bring;

Of death that is life, as it cometh to pass;

Of death that is death, alas! alas!

And these I chant, as I go on my way,

As I go on my way forever and aye.

Call not thyself wretched, though bitter and sweet

In thy cup at this hour intermingle and meet.

Some cloud with the sunshine must ever appear,

And darkness prevails till morning is near.

But who doth remember the gloom and the night,

When the sky is aglow with the beautiful light?

O alas! if thou drinkest the bitter alone,

Nor heaven nor earth may stifle thy moan!

Thy moan!--and the echo died away--

Thy moan! thy moan forever and aye!

His measured voice I heard no more;

But not till I stand on eternity's shore,

And the things of time be forgotten all,

Shall I cease that traveler's words to recall.

As onward he moved to a pendulum-tick,

The gloom and the darkness around him thick,

I fell on my knees and breathed a prayer;

And it rose, I ween, through the midnight air,

To a God who knoweth the wants and all

The evil and good of this earthly thrall;

To One who suffered as on this day,

And began our sins to purge away:

To Him who hath promised to heed our cry,

And a troubled heart to purify.

And I feel that the gall will ever grow less,

Till I see His face in righteousness.

And now my soul is filled with cheer

For the march of a bright and happy New Year.

As years roll on, whether sun doth shine

Or clouds overcast, I will never repine;

For I know, when the race of time is run,

I shall enter a realm of Eternal Sun.

* * * * *

XXXIV.

JOHN BUNYAN

(BORN 1628--DIED 1688.)

FROM DARKNESS TO LIGHT.

John Bunyan, the most popular religious writer in the English language,

was born at Elstow, about a mile from Bedford, in the year 1628. He may

be said to have been born a tinker. The tinkers then formed a hereditary

caste, which was held in no high estimation. They were generally

vagrants and pilferers, and were often confounded with the gypsies,

whom, in truth, they nearly resembled. Bunyan's father was more

respectable than most of the tribe. He had a fixed residence, and was

able to send his son to a village school, where reading and writing were

taught.

The years of John's boyhood were those during which the Puritan spirit

was in the highest vigor all over England; and nowhere had that spirit

more influence than in Bedfordshire. It is not wonderful, therefore,

that a lad to whom nature had given a powerful imagination, and

sensibility which amounted to a disease, should have been early haunted

by religious terrors. Before he was ten, his sports were interrupted by

fits of remorse and despair; and his sleep was disturbed by dreams of

fiends trying to fly away with him. As he grew older, his mental

conflicts became still more violent. The strong language in which he

described them has strangely misled all his biographers except Mr.

Southey. It has long been an ordinary practice with pious writers to

cite Bunyan as an instance of the supernatural power of divine grace to

rescue the human soul from the lowest depths of wickedness. He is called

in one book the most notorious of profligates; in another, the brand

plucked from the burning. He is designated in Mr. Ivimey's "History of

the Baptists" as the depraved Bunyan, the wicked tinker of Elstow. Mr.

Ryland, a man once of great note among the Dissenters, breaks out into

the following rhapsody: "No man of common sense and common integrity can

deny that Bunyan was a practical atheist, a worthless, contemptible

infidel, a vile rebel to God and goodness, a common profligate, a

soul-despising, a soul-murdering, a soul-damning, thoughtless wretch as

could exist on the face of the earth. Now, be astonished, O heavens, to

eternity! and wonder, O earth and hell, while time endures! Behold this

very man become a miracle of mercy, a mirror of wisdom, goodness,

holiness, truth, and love." But whoever takes the trouble to examine the

evidence, will find that the good men who wrote this had been deceived

by a phraseology which, as they had been hearing it and using it all

their lives, they ought to have understood better. There can not be a

greater mistake than to infer, from the strong expressions in which a

devout man bemoans his exceeding sinfulness, that he has led a worse

life than his neighbors. Many excellent persons, whose moral character

from boyhood to old age has been free from any stain discernible to

their fellow-creatures, have, in their autobiographies and diaries,

applied to themselves, and doubtless with sincerity, epithets as severe

as could be applied to Titus Oates or Mrs. Brownrigg. It is quite

certain that Bunyan was, at eighteen, what, in any but the most

austerely Puritan circles, would have been considered as a young man of

singular gravity and innocence. Indeed, it may be remarked that he, like

many other penitents who, in general terms, acknowledged themselves to

have been the worst of mankind, fired up and stood vigorously on his

defense whenever any particular charge was brought against him by

others. He declares, it is true, that he had let loose the reins on the

neck of his lusts, that he had delighted in all transgressions against

the divine law, and that he had been the ringleader of the youth of

Elstow in all manner of vice. But, when those who wished him ill accused

him of licentious amours, he called on God and the angels to attest his

purity. No woman, he said, in heaven, earth, or hell could charge him

with having ever made any improper advances to her. Not only had he been

strictly faithful to his wife, but he had, even before marriage, been

perfectly spotless. It does not appear from his own confessions, or from

the railings of his enemies, that he ever was drunk in his life. One bad

habit he contracted, that of using profane language; but he tells us

that a single reproof cured him so effectually that he never offended

again. The worst that can be laid to the charge of this poor youth, whom

it has been the fashion to represent as the most desperate of

reprobates, as a village Rochester, is that he had a great liking for

some diversions, quite harmless in themselves, but condemned by the

rigid precisians among whom he lived, and for whose opinion he had a

great respect. The four chief sins of which he was guilty were dancing,

ringing the bells of the parish church, playing at tip-cat, and reading

the "History of Sir Bevis of Southampton." A rector of the school of

Laud would have held such a young man up to the whole parish as a model.

But Bunyan's notions of good and evil had been learned in a very

different school; and he was made miserable by the conflict between his

tastes and his scruples.

When he was about seventeen, the ordinary course of his life was

interrupted by an event which gave a lasting color to his thoughts. He

enlisted in the Parliamentary army, and served during the decisive

campaign of 1645. All that we know of his military career is that, at

the siege of Leicester, one of his comrades, who had taken his post, was

killed by a shot from the town. Bunyan ever after considered himself as

having been saved from death by the special interference of Providence.

It may be observed that his imagination was strongly impressed by the

glimpse which he had caught of the pomp of war. To the last he loved to

draw his illustrations of sacred things from camps and fortresses, from

guns, drums, trumpets, flags of truce, and regiments arrayed, each under

its own banner. His Greatheart, his Captain Boanerges, and his Captain

Credence are evidently portraits, of which the originals were among

those martial saints who fought and expounded in Fairfax's army.

In a few months Bunyan returned home and married. His wife had some

pious relations, and brought him as her only portion some pious books.

And now his mind, excitable by nature, very imperfectly disciplined by

education, and exposed, without any protection, to the infectious

virulence of the enthusiasm which was then epidemic in England, began to

be fearfully disordered. In outward things he soon became a strict

Pharisee. He was constant in attendance at prayers and sermons. His

favorite amusements were, one after another, relinquished, though not

without many painful struggles. In the middle of a game at tip-cat he

paused, and stood staring wildly upward with his stick in his hand. He

had heard a voice asking him whether he would leave his sins and go to

heaven, or keep his sins and go to hell; and he had seen an awful

countenance frowning on him from the sky. The odious vice of

bell-ringing he renounced; but he still for a time ventured to go to the

church-tower and look on while others pulled the ropes. But soon the

thought struck him that, if he persisted in such wickedness, the steeple

would fall on his head; and he fled in terror from the accursed place.

To give up dancing on the village green was still harder; and some

months elapsed before he had the fortitude to part with this darling

sin. When this last sacrifice had been made, he was, even when tried by

the maxims of that austere time, faultless. All Elstow talked of him as

an eminently pious youth. But his own mind was more unquiet than ever.

Having nothing more to do in the way of visible reformation, yet finding

in religion no pleasures to supply the place of the juvenile amusements

which he had relinquished, he began to apprehend that he lay under some

special malediction; and he was tormented by a succession of fantasies

which seemed likely to drive him to suicide or to Bedlam.

At one time he took it into his head that all persons of Israelite blood

would be saved, and tried to make out that he partook of that blood; but

his hopes were speedily destroyed by his father, who seems to have had

no ambition to be regarded as a Jew.

At another time, Bunyan was disturbed by a strange dilemma: "If I have

not faith, I am lost; if I have faith, I can work miracles." He was

tempted to cry to the puddles between Elstow and Bedford, "Be ye dry,"

and to stake his eternal hopes on the event.

Then he took up a notion that the day of grace for Bedford and the

neighboring villages was passed; that all who were to be saved in that

part of England were already converted; and that he had begun to pray

and strive some months too late.

Then he was harassed by doubts whether the Turks were not in the right,

and the Christians in the wrong. Then he was troubled by a maniacal

impulse which prompted him to pray to the trees, to a broomstick, to the

parish bull. As yet, however, he was only entering the Valley of the

Shadow of Death. Soon the darkness grew thicker. Hideous forms floated

before him. Sounds of cursing and wailing were in his ears. His way ran

through stench and fire, close to the mouth of the bottomless pit. He

began to be haunted by a strange curiosity about the unpardonable sin,

and by a morbid longing to commit it. But the most frightful of all the

forms which his disease took was a propensity to utter blasphemy, and

especially to renounce his share in the benefits of the redemption.

Night and day, in bed, at table, at work, evil spirits, as he imagined,

were repeating close to his ear the words, "Sell him! sell him!" He

struck at the hobgoblins; he pushed them from him; but still they were

ever at his side. He cried out in answer to them, hour after hour,

"Never, never! not for thousands of worlds--not for thousands!" At

length, worn out by this long agony, he suffered the fatal words to

escape him, "Let him go, if he will." Then his misery became more

fearful than ever. He had done what could not be forgiven. He had

forfeited his part of the great sacrifice. Like Esau, he had sold his

birthright, and there was no longer any place for repentance. "None," he

afterward wrote, "knows the terrors of those days but myself." He has

described his sufferings with singular energy, simplicity, and pathos.

He envied the brutes; he envied the very stones in the street, and the

tiles on the houses. The sun seemed to withhold its light and warmth

from him. His body, though cast in a sturdy mould, and though still in

the highest vigor of youth, trembled whole days together with the fear

of death and judgment. He fancied that this trembling was the sign set

on the worst reprobates, the sign which God had put on Cain. The unhappy

man's emotion destroyed his power of digestion. He had such pains that

he expected to burst asunder like Judas, whom he regarded as his

prototype.

Neither the books which Bunyan read nor the advisers whom he consulted

were likely to do much good in a case like his. His small library had

received a most unseasonable addition--the account of the lamentable end

of Francis Spira. One ancient man of high repute for piety, whom the

sufferer consulted gave an opinion which might well have produced fatal

consequences. "I am afraid," said Bunyan, "that I have committed the sin

against the Holy Ghost." "Indeed," said the old fanatic, "I am afraid

that you have."

At length the clouds broke; the light became clearer and clearer, and

the enthusiast, who had imagined that he was branded with the mark of

the first murderer, and destined to the end of the arch-traitor, enjoyed

peace and a cheerful confidence in the mercy of God. Years elapsed,

however, before his nerves, which had been so perilously overstrained,

recovered their tone. When he had joined a Baptist society at Bedford,

and was for the first time admitted to partake of the Eucharist, it was

with difficulty that he could refrain from imprecating destruction on

his brethren while the cup was passing from hand to hand. After he had

been some time a member of the congregation he began to preach; and his

sermons produced a powerful effect. He was, indeed, illiterate; but he

spoke to illiterate men. The severe training through which he had passed

had given him such an experimental knowledge of all the modes of

religious melancholy as he could never have gathered from books; and his

vigorous genius, animated by a fervent spirit of devotion, enabled him

not only to exercise a great influence over the vulgar, but even to

extort the half-contemptuous admiration of scholars. Yet it was long

before he ceased to be tormented by an impulse which urged him to utter

words of horrible impiety in the pulpit.

Counter-irritants are of as great use in moral as in physical diseases.

It should seem that Bunyan was finally relieved from the internal

sufferings which had embittered his life by sharp persecution from

without. He had been five years a preacher when the Restoration put it

in the power of the Cavalier gentlemen and clergymen all over the

country to oppress the Dissenters; and, of all the Dissenters whose

history is known to us, he was, perhaps, the most hardly treated. In

November, 1660, he was flung into Bedford jail; and there he remained,

with some intervals of partial and precarious liberty, during twelve

years. His persecutors tried to extort from him a promise that he would

abstain from preaching; but he was convinced that he was divinely set

apart and commissioned to be a teacher of righteousness, and he was

fully determined to obey God rather than man. He was brought before

several tribunals, laughed at, caressed, reviled, menaced, but in vain.

He was facetiously told that he was quite right in thinking that he

ought not to hide his gift; but that his real gift was skill in

repairing old kettles. He was compared to Alexander the coppersmith. He

was told that, if he would give up preaching, he should be instantly

liberated. He was warned that, if he persisted in disobeying the law, he

would be liable to banishment; and that if he were found in England

after a certain time, his neck would be stretched. His answer was, "If

you let me out to-day, I will preach again to-morrow." Year after year

he lay patiently in a dungeon, compared with which the worst prison now

to be found in the island is a palace. His fortitude is the more

extraordinary because his domestic feelings were unusually strong.

Indeed, he was considered by his stern brethren as somewhat too fond and

indulgent a parent. He had several small children, and among them a

daughter who was blind, and whom he loved with peculiar tenderness. He

could not, he said, bear even to let the wind blow on her; and now she

must suffer cold and hunger, she must beg, she must be beaten. "Yet," he

added, "I must, I must do it." While he lay in prison, he could do

nothing in the way of his old trade for the support of his family. He

determined, therefore, to take up a new trade. He learned to make long

tagged thread-laces; and many thousands of these articles were furnished

by him to the hawkers. While his hands were thus busied, he had other

employment for his mind and his lips. He gave religious instruction to

his fellow-captives, and formed from among them a little flock, of which

he was himself the pastor. He studied indefatigably the few books which

he possessed. His two chief companions were the Bible and Fox's "Book of

Martyrs." His knowledge of the Bible was such that he might have been

called a living concordance; and on the margin of his copy of the "Book

of Martyrs" are still legible the ill-spelled lines of doggerel in which

he expressed his reverence for the brave sufferers, and his implacable

enmity to the mystical Babylon.

At length he began to write, and though it was some time before he

discovered where his strength lay, his writings were not unsuccessful.

They were coarse, indeed, but they showed a keen mother-wit, a great

command of the homely mother-tongue, an intimate knowledge of the

English Bible, and a vast and dearly bought spiritual experience. They,

therefore, when the corrector of the press had improved the syntax and

the spelling, were well received by the humbler class of Dissenters.

Much of Bunyan's time was spent in controversy. He wrote sharply against

the Quakers, whom he seems always to have held in utter abhorrence. It

is, however, a remarkable fact that he adopted one of their peculiar

fashions; his practice was to write, not November or December, but

eleventh month and twelfth month.

He wrote against the liturgy of the Church of England. No two things,

according to him, had less affinity than the form of prayer and the

spirit of prayer. Those, he said with much point, who have most of the

spirit of prayer are all to be found in jail; and those who have most

zeal for the form of prayer are all to be found at the ale-house. The

doctrinal articles, on the other hand, he warmly praised, and defended

against some Arminian clergymen who had signed them. The most

acrimonious of all his works is his answer to Edward Fowler, afterward

bishop of Gloucester, an excellent man, but not free from the taint of

Pelagianism.

Bunyan had also a dispute with some of the chiefs of the sect to which

he belonged. He doubtless held with perfect sincerity the distinguishing

tenet of that sect, but he did not consider that tenet as one of high

importance, and willingly joined in communion with pious Presbyterians

and Independents. The sterner Baptists, therefore, loudly pronounced him

a false brother. A controversy arose which long survived the original

combatants. In our own time the cause which Bunyan had defended with

rude logic and rhetoric against Kiffin and Danvers was pleaded by Robert

Hall with an ingenuity and eloquence such as no polemical writer has

ever surpassed.

During the years which immediately followed the Restoration Bunyan's

confinement seems to have been strict; but as the passions of 1660

cooled, as the hatred with which the Puritans had been regarded while

their reign was recent gave place to pity, he was less and less harshly

treated. The distress of his family, and his own patience, courage, and

piety, softened the hearts of his persecutors. Like his own Christian in

the cage, he found protectors even among the crowd of Vanity Fair. The

bishop of the diocese, Dr. Barlow, is said to have interceded for him.

At length the prisoner was suffered to pass most of his time beyond the

walls of the jail, on condition, as it should seem, that he remained

within the town of Bedford.

He owed his complete liberation to one of the worst acts of one of the

worst governments that England has ever seen. In 1671 the Cabal was in

power. Charles II had concluded the treaty by which he bound himself to

set up the Roman Catholic religion in England. The first step which he

took toward that end was to annul, by an unconstitutional exercise of

his prerogative, all the penal statutes against the Roman Catholics; and

in order to disguise his real design, he annulled at the same time the

penal statutes against Protestant Non-conformists. Bunyan was

consequently set at large. In the first warmth of his gratitude, he

published a tract in which he compared Charles to that humane and

generous Persian king who, though not himself blessed with the light of

the true religion, favored the chosen people, and permitted them, after

years of captivity, to rebuild their beloved temple. To candid men, who

consider how much Bunyan had suffered, and how little he could guess the

secret designs of the court, the unsuspicious thankfulness with which he

accepted the precious boon of freedom will not appear to require any

apology.

Before he left his prison he had begun the book which has made his name

immortal. The history of that book is remarkable. The author was, as he

tells us, writing a treatise, in which he had occasion to speak of the

stages of the Christian progress. He compared that progress, as many

others had compared it, to a pilgrimage. Soon his quick wit discovered

innumerable points of similarity which had escaped his predecessors.

Images came crowding on his mind faster than he could put them into

words: quagmires and pits, steep hills, dark and horrible glens, soft

vales, sunny pastures; a gloomy castle, of which the courtyard was

strewn with the skulls and bones of murdered prisoners; a town all

bustle and splendor, like London on the Lord Mayor's Day; and the narrow

path, straight as a rule could make it, running on uphill and down hill,

through city and through wilderness, to the Black River and the Shining

Gate. He had found out--as most people would have said, by accident; as

he would doubtless have said, by the guidance of Providence--where his

powers lay. He had no suspicion, indeed, that he was producing a

masterpiece. He could not guess what place his allegory would occupy in

English literature, for of English literature he knew nothing. Those who

suppose him to have studied the "Fairy Queen," might easily be confuted,

if this were the proper place for a detailed examination of the passages

in which the two allegories have been thought to resemble each other.

The only work of fiction, in all probability, with which he could

compare his pilgrim, was his old favorite, the legend of Sir Bevis of

Southampton. He would have thought it a sin to borrow any time from the

serious business of his life, from his expositions, his controversies,

and his lace tags, for the purpose of amusing himself with what he

considered merely as a trifle. It was only, he assures us, at spare

moments that he returned to the House Beautiful, the Delectable

Mountains, and the Enchanted Ground. He had no assistance. Nobody but

himself saw a line till the whole was complete. He then consulted his

pious friends. Some were pleased. Others were much scandalized. It was a

vain story, a mere romance about giants, and lions, and goblins, and

warriors, sometimes fighting with monsters, and sometimes regaled by

fair ladies in stately palaces. The loose, atheistical wits at Will's

might write such stuff to divert the painted Jezebels of the court; but

did it become a minister of the Gospel to copy the evil fashions of the

world? There had been a time when the cant of such fools would have made

Bunyan miserable. But that time was passed, and his mind was now in a

firm and healthy state. He saw that in employing fiction to make truth

clear and goodness attractive, he was only following the example which

every Christian ought to propose to himself; and he determined to print.

The "Pilgrim's Progress" stole silently into the world. Not a single

copy of the first edition is known to be in existence. The year of

publication has not been ascertained. It is probable that during some

months, the little volume circulated only among poor and obscure

sectaries. But soon the irresistible charm of a book which gratified the

imagination of the reader with all the action and scenery of a fairy

tale, which exercised his ingenuity by setting him to discover a

multitude of curious analogies, which interested his feelings for human

beings, frail like himself, and struggling with temptations from within

and from without, which every moment drew a smile from him by some

stroke of quaint yet simple pleasantry, and nevertheless left on his

mind a sentiment of reverence for God and of sympathy for man, began to

produce its effect. In Puritanical circles, from which plays and novels

were strictly excluded, that effect was such as no work of genius,

though it were superior to the "Iliad," to "Don Quixote," or to

"Othello," can ever produce on a mind accustomed to indulge in literary

luxury. In 1668 came forth a second edition, with additions; and then

the demand became immense. In the four following years the book was

reprinted six times. The eighth edition, which contains the last

improvements made by the author, was published in 1682, the ninth in

1684, the tenth in 1685. The help of the engraver had early been called

in, and tens of thousands of children looked with terror and delight on

execrable copperplates, which represented Christian thrusting his sword

into Apollyon or writhing in the grasp of Giant Despair. In Scotland and

in some of the colonies, the Pilgrim was even more popular than in his

native country. Bunyan has told us, with very pardonable vanity, that in

New England his Dream was the daily subject of the conversation of

thousands, and was thought worthy to appear in the most superb binding.

He had numerous admirers in Holland and among the Huguenots of France.

With the pleasure, however, he experienced some of the pains of

eminence. Knavish booksellers put forth volumes of trash under his name,

and envious scribblers maintained it to be impossible that the poor

ignorant tinker should really be the author of the book which was called

his.

He took the best way to confound both those who counterfeited him and

those slandered him. He continued to work the gold-field which he had

discovered, and to draw from it new treasures; not, indeed, with quite

such ease and in quite such abundance as when the precious soil was

still virgin, but yet with success which left all competition far

behind. In 1684 appeared the second part of the "Pilgrim's Progress." It

was soon followed by the "Holy War," which, if the "Pilgrim's Progress"

did not exist, would be the best allegory that ever was written.

Bunyan's place in society was now very different from what it had been.

There had been a time when many Dissenting ministers, who could talk

Latin and read Greek, had affected to treat him with scorn. But his fame

and influence now far exceeded theirs. He had so great an authority

among the Baptists that he was popularly called Bishop Bunyan. His

episcopal visitations were annual. From Bedford he rode every year to

London, and preached there to large and attentive congregations. From

London he went his circuit through the country, animating the zeal of

his brethren, collecting and distributing alms, and making up quarrels.

The magistrates seem in general to have given him little trouble. But

there is reason to believe that, in the year 1685, he was in some danger

of again occupying his old quarters in Bedford jail. In that year, the

rash and wicked enterprise of Monmouth gave the government a pretext for

prosecuting the Non-conformists; and scarcely one eminent divine of the

Presbyterian, Independent, or Baptist persuasion remained unmolested.

Baxter was in prison; Howe was driven into exile; Henry was arrested.

Two eminent Baptists, with whom Bunyan had been engaged in controversy,

were in great peril and distress. Danvers was in danger of being hanged,

and Kiffin's grandsons were actually hanged. The tradition is, that

during those evil days, Bunyan was forced to disguise himself as a

wagoner, and that he preached to his congregation at Bedford in a

smock-frock, with a cart-whip in his hand. But soon a great change took

place. James the Second was at open war with the Church, and found it

necessary to court the Dissenters. Some of the creatures of the

government tried to secure the aid of Bunyan. They probably knew that he

had written in praise of the indulgence of 1672, and therefore hoped

that he might be equally pleased with the indulgence of 1687. But

fifteen years of thought, observation, and commerce with the world had

made him wiser. Nor were the cases exactly parallel. Charles was a

professed Protestant; James was a professed papist. The object of

Charles's indulgence was disguised; the object of James's indulgence was

patent. Bunyan was not deceived. He exhorted his hearers to prepare

themselves by fasting and prayer for the danger which menaced their

civil and religious liberties, and refused even to speak to the courtier

who came down to remodel the corporation of Bedford, and who, as was

supposed, had it in charge to offer some municipal dignity to the bishop

of the Baptists.

Bunyan did not live to see the Revolution. In the Summer of 1688 he

undertook to plead the cause of a son with an angry father, and at

length prevailed on the old man not to disinherit the young one. This

good work cost the benevolent intercessor his life. He had to ride

through heavy rain. He came drenched to his lodgings on Snow Hill, was

seized with a violent fever, and died in a few days. He was buried in

Bunhill Fields; and the spot where he lies is still regarded by the

Non-conformists with a feeling which seems scarcely in harmony with the

stern spirit of their theology. Many Puritans, to whom the respect paid

by Roman Catholics to the relics and tombs of saints seemed childish or

sinful, are said to have begged with their dying breath that their

coffins might be placed as near as possible to the coffin of the author

of the "Pilgrim's Progress."

The fame of Bunyan during his life, and during the century which

followed his death, was indeed great, but was almost entirely confined

to religious families of the middle and lower classes. Very seldom was

he, during that time, mentioned with respect by any writer of great

literary eminence. Young coupled his prose with the poetry of the

wretched D'Urfey. In the "Spiritual Quixote," the adventures of

Christian are ranked with those of Jack the Giant-killer and John

Hickathrift. Cowper ventured to praise the great allegorist, but did not

venture to name him. It is a significant circumstance that, till a

recent period, all the numerous editions of the "Pilgrim's Progress"

were evidently meant for the cottage and the servants' hall. The paper,

the printing, the plates were all of the meanest description. In

general, when the educated minority and the common people differ about

the merit of a book, the opinion of the educated minority finally

prevails. The "Pilgrim's Progress" is perhaps the only book about which,

after the lapse of a hundred years, the educated minority has come over

to the opinion of the common people.--MACAULAY.

O king without a crown,

O priest above the line

Whose course is through the ages down,

What wondrous eyes were thine!

As in the sea of glass,

So pictured in those eyes

Were all the things that come to pass

Beneath, above the skies;

Between two worlds the way,

The sun, the cloud, the snares,

The pilgrim's progress day by day,

The gladness God prepares.

Enough, enough this vision,

By thee built into story,

To crown thy life by Heaven's decision,

With monumental glory.

* * * * *

XXXV.

MADAME ROLAND

(BORN 1754--DIED 1793.)

THE MOST REMARKABLE WOMAN OF THE FRENCH REVOLUTION--THE IPHIGENIA OF

FRANCE.

Marie-Jeanne Phlipon, for this was her maiden name, was born in Paris in

the year 1754. Her father was an engraver. The daughter does not

delineate him in her memoirs with such completeness as she has sketched

her mother, but we can infer from the fleeting glimpses which she gives

of him that he was a man of very considerable intellectual and physical

force, but also of most irregular tendencies, which in his later years

debased him to serious immoralities. He was a superior workman,

discontented with his lot. He sought to better it by speculative

operations outside his vocation. As his daughter expresses it, "he went

in pursuit of riches, and met with ruin on his way." She also remarks of

him, "that he could not be said to be a good man, but he had a great

deal of what is called honor."

Her mother was evidently an angelic woman. Many passages in the memoirs

indicate that she possessed uncommon intellectual endowments; but so

exceeding were her virtues that, when her face rose to the daughter's

view in the night of after years, and gazed compassionately on her

through prison bars, the daughter, writing in the shadow of death,

presents her in the light only of purest, noblest womanhood.

Marie was so precocious that she could not remember when she was unable

to read. The first book she remembered reading was the Old and New

Testament. Her early religious teaching was most sufficient, and was

submitted to by a mind which, although practical and realistic, was

always devout and somewhat affected by mystical, vague, and enthusiastic

tendencies. She was a prodigy in the catechism, and was an agent of

terror to the excellent priest who taught her and the other children,

for she frequently confounded him in open class by questions which have

vexed persons of maturest years. She was taught the harp, the piano, the

guitar, and the violin. She was proficient in dancing. Such was her

astonishing aptitude in all studies that she says, "I had not a single

master who did not appear as much flattered by teaching me as I was

grateful for being taught; nor one who, after attending me for a year or

two, was not the first to say that his instructions were no longer

necessary." It was her habit in childhood, after she had read any book,

to lay it aside and reconstruct its contents by the processes of a most

powerful memory, and while doing so, to meditate upon, analyze, and

debate with it in the severest spirit of criticism and controversy.

When nine years of age she was reading Appian, the romances of Scarron,

which disgusted and did not taint her; the memoirs of De Paites and of

Madame de Montpensier. She mastered a treatise on heraldry so thoroughly

that she corrected her father one day when she saw him engraving a seal

inconformably to some minor rule of that art. She essayed a book on

contracts, but it did not entice her to a complete perusal.

She took great delight in Plutarch, which she often carried to church

instead of her missal. She read the "Candide" of Voltaire, Fénelon on

the education of girls, and Locke on that of children. During all this

time her mind was troubled by those unanswerable and saddening

reflections upon those recondite theological subjects which often

torture such children, and which grown up people are too often so

forgetful of their own childhood that they fail to sympathize with them.

She regarded with disapproval the transformation of the Devil into a

serpent, and thought it cruel in God to permit it. Referring to the time

when her first communion drew near, she writes: "I felt a sacred terror

take possession of my soul."

She became profoundly humble and inexpressibly timid. As she grew older

she learned that she was to live in a world of errors, sorrows, and

sins, and the mere knowledge of their existence, by some peculiar

process of her wonderful mind, seemed to be the signal for their

combined attack upon her soul. She watched her thoughts until forbidden

topics were generated in her mind by the very act of watchfulness. She

then regarded herself as an accomplice with every profane image which

invaded her innocent imagination. She subjected herself to physical

mortifications and austerities of a whimsical yet severe character. She

aspired to the fate of holy women of old, who had suffered martyrdom,

and she finally resolved to enter a convent. She was then eleven years

old. She was placed in such an institution ostensibly for further

education, but with the intention on her part there to always remain. It

was like entering the vestibule of heaven. She records of her first

night there: "I lifted up my eyes to the heavens; they were unclouded

and serene; I imagined that I felt the presence of the Deity smiling on

my sacrifice, and already offering me a reward in the consolatory peace

of a celestial abode."

She was always an acute observer and a caustic commentator, and she soon

discovered that the cloister is not necessarily a celestial abode, and

that its inmates do not inevitably enjoy consolatory peace. She found

feminine spite there of the same texture with that wreaked by worldly

women upon each other, and she notes the cruel taunts which good, old,

ugly, and learned sister Sophia received from some stupid nuns, who, she

says, "were fond of exposing her defects because they did not possess

her talents." But her devotional fervor did not abate. She fainted under

the feeling of awe in the act of her first communion, for she literally

believed that her lips touched the very substance of her God, and

thereafter she was long brooded over by that perfect peace which passeth

understanding.

She remained there a year, when her destiny was changed by some domestic

events which made her services necessary to her parents, and she

returned home. Her resolution was unchanged, and she read and meditated

deeply upon the Philotee of Saint Francis de Sales, upon the manual of

Saint Augustine, and upon the polemical writings of Bossuet. But by this

time the leaven of dissent began to work in that powerful intellect, for

she remarks upon these works, that "favorable as they are to the cause

which they defended, they sometimes let me into the secret of objections

which might be made to it, and set me to scrutinizing the articles of my

faith;" and she states that "this was the first step toward a skepticism

at which I was destined to arrive after having been successively

Jansenist, Cartesian, Stoic, and Deist." By this skepticism she

doubtless meant merely skepticism as to creeds, for in her memoirs,

written in daily expectation of death, and in most intense

self-communion, she writes upon the great subjects of immortality,

Deity, and providence in language of astonishing eloquence. "Can," she

writes, "can the sublime idea of a Divine Creator, whose providence

watches over the world, the immateriality of the soul and its

immortality, that consolatory hope of persecuted virtue, be nothing more

than amiable and splendid chimeras? But in how much obscurity are these

difficult problems involved? What accumulated objections arise when we

wish to examine them with mathematical rigor? No! it is not given to the

human mind to behold these truths in the full day of perfect evidence;

but why should the man of sensibility repine at not being able to

demonstrate what he feels to be true? In the silence of the closet and

the dryness of discussion, I can agree with the atheist or the

materialist as to the insolubility of certain questions; but in the

contemplation of nature my soul soars aloft to the, vivifying principle

which animates it, to the intellect which pervades it, and to the

goodness which makes it so glorious. Now, when immense walls separate me

from all I love, when all the evils of society have fallen upon us

together, as if to punish us for having desired its greatest blessings,

I see beyond the limits of life the reward of our sacrifices. How, in

what manner, I can not say. I only feel that so it ought to be." She

read incongruously. Condillac, Voltaire, the Lives of the Fathers,

Descartes, Saint Jerome, Don Quixote, Pascal, Montesquieu, Burlamaqui,

and the French dramatists, were read, annotated, and commented on. She

gives an appalling list of obsolete devotional books, which she borrowed

of a pious abbé, and returned with marginal notes which shocked him. She

read the Dictionnaire Philosophique, Diderot, D'Alembert, Raynal,

Holbach, and took delight in the Epistles of Saint Paul. She was, while

studying Malebranche and Descartes, so convinced, that she considered

her kitten, when it mewed, merely a piece of mechanism in the exercise

of its functions. The chilling negations and arid skepticism of

Helvetius shocked her, and she writes: "I felt myself possessed of a

generosity of soul of which he denied the existence." She concluded at

this time that a republic is the true form of government, and that every

other form is in derogation of man's natural rights.

She mastered Clairaut's geometry by copying the book, plates, and all,

from beginning to end. She read Pufendorf's folio on the law of nature.

She learned English, and read the life of Cromwell. She read the great

French preachers, Bossuet, Flechier, Bourdaloue, and Massillon. She was

vexed by the terrorism of their arguments. She thought that they

overrated the importance of the devil. She did not believe him to be as

powerful as they feared. She thought that they might teach oftener what

seemed to her the potent element of Christian faith--love--and leave the

devil out sometimes, and so she herself wrote a sermon on brotherly

love, with which that personage had nothing to do, and in which his name

was not even mentioned. She also read the Protestant preachers--Blair

especially. She entangled herself in the acute skepticism of Bayle.

She seemed possessed of one of those assimilative intellects which

extract by glances the substance from a book as the flash of lightning

demagnetizes the lodestone. Her acquisitions were consequently immense.

Though very yielding in the grasp of the mighty thinkers whom she

encountered, yet she read them in the spirit of criticism, controversy,

and dissent.

She was, nevertheless, the farthest in the world from becoming a

literary dragon. All this did not impair the freshness of girlhood. She

was meek and pure. Passages in her autobiography, which I can not

repeat, yet which ought to be read, establish this. She was throughout

entirely domestic. She did the marketing, cooked the food; nursed her

mother; kept a sharp eye on the apprentices; nearly fell in love, for

when the young painter, Taborel, who was twenty, and blushed like a

girl, visited her father's workshop, she always had a crayon or

something else to seek there, but at the sight of him ran away

trembling, without saying a word.

It was not difficult for her to be both scholar and housewife. Writing

in after years, of domestic cares, she says: "I never could comprehend

how the attention of a woman who possesses method and activity can be

engrossed by them.... Nothing is wanting but a proper distribution of

employments, and a small share of vigilance.... People who know how to

employ themselves always find leisure moments, while those who do

nothing are in want of time for any thing.... I think that a wife should

keep the linen and clothes in order, or cause them to be so kept; nurse

her children; give directions concerning the cookery, or superintend it

herself, but without saying a word about it, and with such command of

her temper, and such management of her time, as may leave her the means

of talking of other matters, and of pleasing no less by her good humor

than by the graces natural to her sex.... It is nearly the same in the

government of states as of families. Those famous housewives who are

always expatiating on their labors are sure either to leave much in

arrears, or to render themselves tiresome to every one around them; and,

in like manner, those men in power so talkative and so full of business,

only make a mighty bustle about the difficulties they are in because too

awkward or ignorant to remove them."

An acquaintance which one of her uncles, who was an ecclesiastic, had

with an upper servant of the royal household, enabled her to spend some

days at the palace of Versailles. She was lodged with the servants, and

enjoyed the servant's privilege of seeing every thing and sparing

nothing. Royalty was never put in the focus of eyes so critical. Her

comments upon this visit are very brief. She expresses her detestation

of what she saw, saying, "It gives me the feeling of injustice, and

obliges me every moment to contemplate absurdity."

The studies and experiences which have been described bring us to her

fifteenth year. She was then a beautiful woman. In her memoirs she

declines to state how she looked when a child, saying that she knows a

better time for such a sketch. In describing herself at fifteen, she

says: "I was five feet four inches tall; my leg was shapely; my hips

high and prominent; my chest broad and nobly decorated; my shoulders

flat; ... my face had nothing striking in it except a great deal of

color, and much softness and expression; my mouth is a little too

wide--you may see prettier every day--but you will see none with a smile

more tender and engaging; my eyes are not very large; the color of the

iris is hazel; my hair is dark brown; my nose gave me some uneasiness; I

thought it a little too flat at the end.... It is only since my beauty

has faded that I have known what it has been in its bloom. I was then

unconscious of its value, which was probably augmented by my ignorance."

That she understated her personal charms, the concurrent admiration of

contemporary men and women fully attests. Her physical beauty was

marvelous, and when great men were subjected to its influence, to the

imperial functions of her intellect, and to the persuasions of an

organization exceedingly spiritual and magnetic, it is no wonder that

her influence, domestic woman, housewife, as she always was, became so

effectual over them.