London,--London Bridge specially, where they sell kids for a penny;
which story your new acquaintance unfortunately does not confirm. You
have read of these bridges, and seen pictures of them in the "Wonders of
the World"; but then Nat has seen them with his own eyes: he has
literally walked over London Bridge, on his own feet! You look at his
very shoes in wonderment, and are surprised you do not find some
startling difference between those shoes and your shoes. But there is
none,--only yours are a trifle stouter in the welt. You think Nat one of
the fortunate boys of this world,--born, as your old nurse used to say,
with a gold spoon in his mouth.
Beside Nat there is a girl lives over the opposite side of the way,
named Jenny,--with an eye as black as a coal, and a half a year older
than you, but about your height,--whom you fancy amazingly.
She has any quantity of toys, that she lets you play with as if they
were your own. And she has an odd old uncle, who sometimes makes you
stand up together, and then marries you after his fashion,--much to the
amusement of a grown-up house-maid, whenever she gets a peep at the
performance. And it makes you somewhat proud to hear her called your
wife; and you wonder to yourself, dreamily, if it won't be true some day
or other.
----Fie, Clarence, where is your split sixpence, and your blue ribbon!
Jenny is romantic, and talks of "Thaddeus of Warsaw" in a very touching
manner, and promises to lend you the book. She folds billets in a
lover's fashion, and practises love-knots upon her bonnet-strings. She
looks out of the corners of her eyes very often, and sighs. She is
frequently by herself, and pulls flowers to pieces. She has great pity
for middle-aged bachelors, and thinks them all disappointed men.
After a time she writes notes to you, begging you would answer them at
the earliest possible moment, and signs herself--"your attached Jenny."
She takes the marriage farce of her uncle in a cold way, as trifling
with a very serious subject, and looks tenderly at you. She is very much
shocked when her uncle offers to kiss her; and when he proposes it to
you, she is equally indignant, but--with a great change of color.
Nat says one day in a confidential conversation that it won't do to
marry a woman six months older than yourself; and this, coming from Nat
who has been to London, rather staggers you. You sometimes think that
you would like to marry Madge and Jenny both, if the thing were
possible, for Nat says they sometimes do so the other side of the ocean,
though he has never seen it himself.
----Ah, Clarence, you will have no such weakness as you grow older; you
will find that Providence has charitably so tempered our affections,
that every man of only ordinary nerve will be amply satisfied with a
single wife.
All this time--for you are making your visit a very long one, so that
autumn has come, and the nights are growing cool, and Jenny and yourself
are transferring your little coquetries to the chimney-corner--poor
Charlie lies sick at home. Boyhood, thank Heaven! does not suffer
severely from sympathy when the object is remote. And those letters from
the mother, telling you that Charlie cannot play,--cannot talk even as
he used to do,--and that perhaps his "Heavenly Father will take him away
to be with him in the better world," disturb you for a time only.
Sometimes however they come back to your thought on a wakeful night,
and you dream about his suffering, and think--why it is not you, but
Charlie, who is sick? The thought puzzles you; and well it may, for in
it lies the whole mystery of our fate.
Those letters grow more and more discouraging, and the kind admonitions
of your mother grow more earnest, as if (though the thought does not
come to you until years afterward) she was preparing herself to fasten
upon you that surplus of affection which she fears may soon be withdrawn
forever from the sick child.
It is on a frosty, bleak evening, when you are playing with Nat, that
the letter reaches you which says Charlie is growing worse, and that you
must come to your home. It makes a dreamy night for you--fancying how
Charlie will look, and if sickness has altered him much, and if he will
not be well by Christmas. From this you fall away in your reverie to the
odd old house and its secret cupboards, and your aunt's queer caps; then
come up those black eyes of "your attached Jenny," and you think it a
pity that she is six month's older than you; and again--as you recall
one of her sighs--you think that six months are not much after all!
You bid her good-bye, with a little sentiment swelling in your throat,
and are mortally afraid Nat will see your lip tremble. Of course you
promise to write, and squeeze her hand with an honesty you do not think
of doubting--for weeks.
It is a dull, cold ride, that day, for you. The winds sweep over the
withered cornfields with a harsh, chilly whistle, and the surfaces of
the little pools by the roadside are tossed up into cold blue wrinkles
of water. Here and there a flock of quail, with their feathers ruffled
in the autumn gusts, tread through the hard, dry stubble of an oatfield;
or, startled by the snap of the driver's whip, they stare a moment at
the coach, then whir away down the cold current of the wind. The blue
jays scream from the roadside oaks, and the last of the blue and purple
asters shiver along the wall. And as the sun sinks, reddening all the
western clouds to the color of the frosted maples, light lines of the
Aurora gush up from the northern hills, and trail their splintered
fingers far over the autumn sky.
It is quite dark when you reach home, but you see the bright reflection
of a fire within, and presently at the open door Nelly clapping her
hands for welcome. But there are sad faces when you enter. Your mother
folds you to her heart; but at your first noisy outburst of joy puts her
finger on her lip, and whispers poor Charlie's name. The Doctor you see
too, slipping softly out of the bedroom-door, with glasses in his hand;
and--you hardly know how--your spirits grow sad, and your heart
gravitates to the heavy air of all about you.
You cannot see Charlie, Nelly says;--and you cannot in the quiet parlor
tell Nelly a single one of the many things, which you had hoped to tell
her. She says,--"Charlie has grown so thin and so pale, you would never
know him." You listen to her, but you cannot talk: she asks you what you
have seen, and you begin, for a moment joyously; but when they open the
door of the sick-room, and you hear a faint sigh, you cannot go on. You
sit still, with your hand in Nelly's, and look thoughtfully into the
blaze.
You drop to sleep after that day's fatigue, with singular and perplexed
fancies haunting you; and when you wake up with a shudder in the middle
of the night, you have a fancy that Charlie is really dead: you dream of
seeing him pale and thin, as Nelly described him, and with the starched
grave-clothes on him. You toss over in your bed, and grow hot and
feverish. You cannot sleep; and you get up stealthily, and creep
down-stairs. A light is burning in the hall: the bedroom-door stands
half open, and you listen--fancying you hear a whisper. You steal on
through the hall, and edge around the side of the door. A little lamp is
flickering on the hearth, and the gaunt shadow of the bedstead lies dark
upon the ceiling. Your mother is in her chair with her head upon her
hand--though it is long after midnight. The Doctor is standing with his
back toward you, and with Charlie's little wrist in his fingers; and you
hear hard breathing, and now and then a low sigh from your mother's
chair.
An occasional gleam of firelight makes the gaunt shadows stagger on the
wall, like something spectral. You look wildly at them, and at the bed
where your own brother--your laughing, gay-hearted brother--is lying.
You long to see him, and sidle up softly a step or two; but your
mother's ear has caught the sound, and she beckons you to her, and folds
you again in her embrace. You whisper to her what you wish. She rises,
and takes you by the hand, to lead you to the bedside.
The Doctor looks very solemnly as we approach. He takes out his watch.
He is not counting Charlie's pulse, for he has dropped his hand, and it
lies carelessly, but oh, how thin! over the edge of the bed.
He shakes his head mournfully at your mother; and she springs forward,
dropping your hand, and lays her fingers upon the forehead of the boy,
and passes her hand over his mouth.
"Is he asleep, Doctor?" she says in a tone you do not know.
"Be calm, madam." The Doctor is very calm.
"I am calm," says your mother; but you do not think it, for you see her
tremble very plainly.
"Dear madam, he will never waken in this world!"
There is no cry,--only a bowing down of your mother's head upon the body
of poor dead Charlie!--and only when you see her form shake and quiver
with the deep, smothered sobs, your crying bursts forth loud and
strong.
The Doctor lifts you in his arms, that you may see that pale
head,--those blue eyes all sunken,--that flaxen hair gone,--those white
lips pinched and hard!--Never, never will the boy forget his first
terrible sight of Death!
In your silent chamber, after the storm of sobs has wearied you, the
boy-dreams are strange and earnest. They take hold on that awful
Visitant,--that strange slipping away from life, of which we know so
little, and yet know, alas, so much! Charlie that was your brother, is
now only a name: perhaps he is an angel; perhaps (for the old nurse has
said it when he was ugly--and now you hate her for it) he is with Satan!
But you are sure this cannot be: you are sure that God, who made him
suffer, would not now quicken and multiply his suffering. It agrees with
your religion to think so; and just now you want your religion to help
you all it can.
You toss in your bed, thinking over and over of that strange
thing--Death; and that perhaps it may overtake you before you are a man;
and you sob out those prayers (you scarce know why) which ask God to
keep life in you. You think the involuntary fear, that makes your little
prayer full of sobs, is a holy feeling;--and so it is a holy
feeling,--the same feeling which makes a stricken child yearn for the
embrace and the protection of a Parent. But you will find there are
those canting ones trying to persuade you, at a later day, that it is a
mere animal fear, and not to be cherished.
You feel an access of goodness growing out of your boyish grief; you
feel right-minded; it seems as if your little brother in going to Heaven
had opened a path-way thither, down which goodness comes streaming over
your soul.
You think how good a life you will lead; and you map out great purposes,
spreading themselves over the school-weeks of your remaining boyhood;
and you love your friends, or seem to, far more dearly than you ever
loved them before; and you forgive the boy who provoked you to that sad
fall from the oak, and you forgive him all his wearisome teasings. But
you cannot forgive yourself for some harsh words that you have once
spoken to Charlie; still less can you forgive yourself for having once
struck him in passion with your fist. You cannot forget his sobs
then;--if he were only alive one little instant to let you
say,--"Charlie, will you forgive me?"
Yourself you cannot forgive; and sobbing over it, and murmuring "Dear,
dear Charlie!" you drop into a troubled sleep.
V.
_Boy Religion._
Is any weak soul frightened, that I should write of the Religion of the
boy? How indeed could I cover the field of his moral or intellectual
growth, if I left unnoticed those dreams of futurity and of goodness,
which come sometimes to his quieter moments, and oftener to his hours of
vexation and trouble? It would be as wise to describe the season of
Spring with no note of the silent influences of that burning Day-god
which is melting day by day the shattered ice-drifts of Winter,--which
is filling every bud with succulence, and painting one flower with
crimson, and another with white.
I know there is a feeling--by much too general as it seems to me--that
the subject may not be approached except through the dicta of certain
ecclesiastic bodies, and that the language which touches it must not be
that every-day language which mirrors the vitality of our thought, but
should have some twist of that theologic mannerism, which is as cold to
the boy as to the busy man of the world.
I know very well that a great many good souls will call levity what I
call honesty, and will abjure that familiar handling of the boy's lien
upon Eternity which my story will show. But I shall feel sure, that, in
keeping true to Nature with word and with thought, I shall in no way
offend against those highest truths to which all truthfulness is
kindred.
You have Christian teachers, who speak always reverently of the Bible;
you grow up in the hearing of daily prayers; nay, you are perhaps taught
to say them.
Sometimes they have a meaning, and sometimes they have none. They have a
meaning when your heart is troubled, when a grief or a wrong weighs upon
you: then the keeping of the Father, which you implore, seems to come
from the bottom of your soul; and your eye suffuses with such tears of
feeling as you count holy, and as you love to cherish in your memory.
But they have no meaning when some trifling vexation angers you, and a
distaste for all about you breeds a distaste for all above you. In the
long hours of toilsome days little thought comes over you of the morning
prayer; and only when evening deepens its shadows, and your boyish
vexations fatigue you to thoughtfulness, do you dream of that coming and
endless night, to which--they tell you--prayers soften the way.
Sometimes upon a Summer Sunday, when you are wakeful upon your seat in
church, with some strong-worded preacher who says things that half
fright you it occurs to you to consider how much goodness you are made
of; and whether there be enough of it after all to carry you safely away
from the clutch of Evil? And straightway you reckon up those friendships
where your heart lies; you know you are a true and honest friend to
Frank; and you love your mother, and your father; as for Nelly, Heaven
knows, you could not contrive a way to love her better than you do.
You dare not take much credit to yourself for the love of little
Madge,--partly because you have sometimes caught yourself trying--not to
love her; and partly because the black-eyed Jenny comes in the way. Yet
you can find no command in the Catechism to love one girl to the
exclusion of all other girls. It is somewhat doubtful if you ever do
find it. But as for loving some half-dozen you could name, whose images
drift through your thought, in dirty, salmon-colored frocks, and
slovenly shoes, it is quite impossible; and suddenly this thought,
coupled with a lingering remembrance of the pea-green pantaloons,
utterly breaks down your hopes.
Yet you muse again,--there are plenty of good people, as the times go,
who have their dislikes, and who speak them too. Even the sharp-talking
clergyman you have heard say some very sour things about his landlord,
who raised his rent the last year. And you know that he did not talk as
mildly as he does in the church, when he found Frank and yourself
quietly filching a few of his peaches through the orchard fence.
But your clergyman will say perhaps, with what seems to you quite
unnecessary coldness, that goodness is not to be reckoned in your
chances of safety; that there is a Higher Goodness, whose merit is
All-Sufficient. This puzzles you sadly; nor will you escape the puzzle,
until, in the presence of the Home altar, which seems to guard you, as
the Lares guarded Roman children, you _feel_--you cannot tell how--that
good actions must spring from good sources; and that those sources must
lie in that Heaven toward which your boyish spirit yearns, as you kneel
at your mother's side.
Conscience too is all the while approving you for deeds well done;
and--wicked as you fear the preacher might judge it--you cannot but
found on those deeds a hope that your prayer at night flows more easily,
more freely, and more holily toward "Our Father in Heaven." Nor indeed
later in life--whatever may be the ill-advised expressions of human
teachers--will you ever find that _Duty performed_, and _generous
endeavor_ will stand one whit in the way either of Faith or of Love.
Striving to be good is a very direct road toward Goodness and if life be
so tempered by high motive as to make actions always good, Faith is
unconsciously won.
Another notion that disturbs you very much, is your positive dislike of
long sermons, and of such singing as they have when the organist is
away. You cannot get the force of that verse of Dr. Watts which likens
heaven to a never-ending Sabbath; you _do_ hope--though it seems a half
wicked hope--that old Dr. ---- will not be the preacher. You think that
your heart in its best moments craves for something more lovable. You
suggest this perhaps to some Sunday teacher, who only shakes his head
sourly, and tells you it is a thought that the Devil is putting in your
brain. It strikes you oddly that the Devil should be using a verse of
Dr. Watts to puzzle you! But if it be so, he keeps it sticking by your
thought very pertinaciously, until some simple utterance of your mother
about the Love that reigns in the other world seems on a sudden to widen
Heaven, and to waft away your doubts like a cloud.
It excites your wonder not a little to find people, who talk gravely and
heartily of the excellence of sermons and of church-going, sometimes
fall asleep under it all. And you wonder--if they really like preaching
so well--why they do not buy some of the minister's old manuscripts, and
read them over on week-days, or invite the clergyman to preach to them
in a quiet way in private.
----Ah, Clarence, you do not yet know the poor weakness of even
maturest manhood, and the feeble gropings of the soul toward a soul's
paradise in the best of the world! You do not yet know either, that
ignorance and fear will be thrusting their untruth and false show into
the very essentials of Religion.
Again you wonder, if the clergymen are all such very good men as you are
taught to believe, why it is that every little while people will be
trying to send them off, and very anxious to prove that, instead of
being so good, they are in fact very stupid and bad men. At that day you
have no clear conceptions of the distinction between stupidity and vice,
and think that a good man must necessarily say very eloquent things. You
will find yourself sadly mistaken on this point, before you get on very
far in life.
Heaven, when your mother peoples it with friends gone, and little
Charlie, and that better Friend who, she says, took Charlie in his arms,
and is now his Father above the skies, seems a place to be loved and
longed for. But to think that Mr. Such-an-one, who is only good on
Sundays, will be there too,--and to think of his talking as he does of a
place which you are sure he would spoil if he were there,--puzzles you
again; and you relapse into wonder, doubt, and yearning.
--And there, Clarence, for the present, I shall leave you. A wide, rich
heaven hangs above you, but it hangs very high. A wide, rough world is
around you, and it lies very low!
I am assuming in these sketches no office of a teacher. I am seeking
only to make a truthful analysis of the boyish thought and feeling. But
having ventured thus far into what may seem sacred ground, I shall
venture still farther, and clinch my matter with a moral.
There is very much religious teaching, even in so good a country as New
England, which is far too harsh, too dry, too cold for the heart of a
boy. Long sermons, doctrinal precepts, and such tediously-worded dogmas
as were uttered by those honest but hard-spoken men, the Westminster
Divines, fatigue, and puzzle, and dispirit him.
They may be well enough for those strong souls which strengthen by
task-work, or for those mature people whose iron habit of self-denial
has made patience a cardinal virtue; but they fall (_experto crede_)
upon the unfledged faculties of the boy like a winter's rain upon spring
flowers,--like hammers of iron upon lithe timber. They may make deep
impression upon his moral nature, but there is great danger of a sad
rebound.
Is it absurd to suppose that some adaptation is desirable? And might not
the teachings of that Religion, which is the ægis of our moral being, be
inwrought with some of those finer harmonies of speech and form which
were given to wise ends,--and lure the boyish soul by something akin to
that gentleness which belonged to the Nazarene Teacher, and which
provided not only meat for men, but "milk for babes"?
VI.
_A New-England Squire._
Frank has a grandfather living in the country, a good specimen of the
old-fashioned New-England farmer. And--go where one will the world
over--I know of no race of men who, taken as a whole, possess more
integrity, more intelligence, and more of those elements of comfort
which go to make a home beloved and the social basis firm, than the
New-England farmers.
They are not brilliant, nor are they highly refined; they know nothing
of arts, histrionic or dramatic; they know only so much of older nations
as their histories and newspapers teach them; in the fashionable world
they hold no place;--but in energy, in industry, in hardy virtue, in
substantial knowledge, and in manly independence, they make up a race
that is hard to be matched.
The French peasantry are, in all the essentials of intelligence and
sterling worth, infants compared with them; and the farmers of England
are either the merest 'ockeys in grain, with few ideas beyond their
sacks, samples, and market-days,--or, with added cultivation, they lose
their independence in a subserviency to some neighbor patron of rank;
and superior intelligence teaches them no lesson so quickly as that
their brethren of the glebe are unequal to them, and are to be left to
their cattle and the goad.
There are English farmers indeed, who are men in earnest, who read the
papers, and who keep the current of the year's intelligence; but such
men are the exceptions. In New England, with the school upon every third
hill-side, and the self-regulating, free-acting church to watch every
valley with week-day quiet, and to wake every valley with Sabbath sound,
the men become, as a class, bold, intelligent, and honest actors, who
would make again, as they have made before, a terrible army of
defence,--and who would find reasons for their actions as strong as
their armies.
Frank's grandfather has silver hair, but is still hale, erect, and
strong. His dress is homely but neat. Being a thorough-going
Protectionist, he has no fancy for the gewgaws of foreign importation,
and makes it a point to appear always in the village church, and on all
great occasions, in a sober suit of homespun. He has no pride of
appearance, and he needs none. He is known as the Squire throughout the
township; and no important measure can pass the board of selectmen
without the Squire's approval;--and this from no blind subserviency to
his opinion,--because his farm is large, and he is reckoned
"forehanded,"--but because there is a confidence in his judgment.
He is jealous of none of the prerogatives of the country parson, or of
the schoolmaster, or of the village doctor; and although the latter is a
testy politician of the opposite party, it does not all impair the
Squire's faith in his calomel; he suffers all his Radicalism with the
same equanimity that he suffers his rhubarb.
The day-laborers of the neighborhood, and the small farmers, consider
the Squire's note-of-hand for their savings better than the best bonds
of city origin; and they seek his advice in all matters of litigation.
He is a Justice of the Peace, as the title of Squire in a New-England
village implies; and many are the sessions of the country courts that
you peep upon with Frank, from the door of the great dining-room.
The defendant always seems to you in these important cases--especially
if his beard is rather long--an extraordinary ruffian, to whom Jack
Sheppard would have been a comparatively innocent boy. You watch
curiously the old gentleman sitting in his big arm-chair, with his
spectacles in their silver case at his elbow, and his snuffbox in hand,
listening attentively to some grievous complaint; you see him ponder
deeply,--with a pinch of snuff to aid his judgment,--and you listen with
intense admiration as he gives a loud preparatory "Ahem!" and clears
away the intricacies of the case with a sweep of that strong practical
sense which distinguishes the New-England farmer,--getting at the very
hinge of the matter, without any consciousness of his own precision, and
satisfying the defendant by the clearness of his talk as much as by the
leniency of his judgment.