as well say that Nature has never made any flowers since Linnæus shut up
his herbarium. We have no statues and pictures of modern saints, but
saints themselves, thank God, have never been wanting. 'As it was in the
beginning, is now, and ever shall be--'"
"But what about your cathedral?" said my wife.
"O yes!--my cathedral, yes. When my stocks in cloud-land rise, I'll
build a cathedral larger than Milan's; and the men, but more
particularly the _women_, thereon, shall be those who have done even
more than St. Paul tells of in the saints of old, who 'subdued kingdoms,
wrought righteousness, quenched the violence of fire, escaped the edge
of the sword, out of weakness were made strong, waxed valiant in fight,
turned to flight the armies of the aliens.' I am not now thinking of
Florence Nightingale, nor of the host of women who have been walking
worthily in her footsteps, but of nameless saints of more retired and
private state,--domestic saints, who have tended children not their own
through whooping-cough and measles, and borne the unruly whims of
fretful invalids,--stocking-darning, shirt-making saints,--saints who
wore no visible garment of hair-cloth, bound themselves with no belts of
spikes and nails, yet in their inmost souls were marked and seared with
the red cross of a life-long self-sacrifice,--saints for whom the
mystical terms _self-annihilation_ and _self-crucifixion_ had a real and
tangible meaning, all the stronger because their daily death was marked
by no outward sign. No mystical rites consecrated them; no organ-music
burst forth in solemn rapture to welcome them; no habit of their order
proclaimed to themselves and the world that they were the elect of
Christ, the brides of another life: but small eating cares, daily
prosaic duties, the petty friction of all the littleness and all the
inglorious annoyances of every day, were as dust that hid the beauty and
grandeur of their calling even from themselves; they walked unknown even
to their households, unknown even to their own souls; but when the Lord
comes to build his New Jerusalem, we shall find many a white stone with
a new name thereon, and the record of deeds and words which only He that
seeth in secret knows. Many a humble soul will be amazed to find that
the seed it sowed in such weakness, in the dust of daily life, has
blossomed into immortal flowers under the eye of the Lord.
"When I build my cathedral, _that_ woman," I said, pointing to a small
painting by the fire, "shall be among the first of my saints. You see
her there, in an every-day dress-cap with a mortal thread-lace border,
and with a very ordinary worked collar, fastened by a visible and
terrestrial breastpin. There is no nimbus around her head, no sign of
the cross upon her breast; her hands are clasped on no crucifix or
rosary. Her clear, keen, hazel eye looks as if it could sparkle with
mirthfulness, as in fact it could; there are in it both the subtile
flash of wit and the subdued light of humor; and though the whole face
smiles, it has yet a certain decisive firmness that speaks the soul
immutable in good. That woman shall be the first saint in my cathedral,
and her name shall be recorded as Saint Esther. What makes saintliness
in my view, as distinguished from ordinary goodness, is a certain
quality of magnanimity and greatness of soul that brings life within the
circle of the heroic. To be really great in little things, to be truly
noble and heroic in the insipid details of every-day life, is a virtue
so rare as to be worthy of canonization,--and this virtue was hers. New
England Puritanism must be credited with the making of many such women.
Severe as was her discipline, and harsh as seems now her rule, we have
yet to see whether women will be born of modern systems of tolerance and
indulgence equal to those grand ones of the olden times whose places now
know them no more. The inconceivable austerity and solemnity with which
Puritanism invested this mortal life, the awful grandeur of the themes
which it made household words, the sublimity of the issues which it
hung upon the commonest acts of our earthly existence, created
characters of more than Roman strength and greatness; and the good men
and women of Puritan training excelled the saints of the Middle Ages, as
a soul fully developed intellectually, educated to closest thought, and
exercised in reasoning, is superior to a soul great merely through
impulse and sentiment.
"My earliest recollections of Aunt Esther, for so our saint was known,
were of a bright-faced, cheerful, witty, quick-moving little middle-aged
person, who came into our house like a good fairy whenever there was a
call of sickness or trouble. If an accident happened in the great
roistering family of eight or ten children, (and when was not something
happening to some of us?) and we were shut up in a sick-room, then duly
as daylight came the quick step and cheerful face of Aunt Esther,--not
solemn and lugubrious like so many sick-room nurses, but with a
never-failing flow of wit and story that could beguile even the most
doleful into laughing at their own afflictions. I remember how a fit of
the quinsy--most tedious of all sicknesses to an active child--was
gilded and glorified into quite a _fête_ by my having Aunt Esther all to
myself for two whole days, with nothing to do but amuse me. She charmed
me into smiling at the very pangs which had made me weep before, and of
which she described her own experiences in a manner to make me think
that, after all, the quinsy was something with an amusing side to it.
Her knowledge of all sorts of medicines, gargles, and alleviatives, her
perfect familiarity with every canon and law of good nursing and
tending, was something that could only have come from long experience in
those good old New England days when there were no nurses recognized as
a class in the land, but when watching and the care of the sick were
among those offices of Christian life which the families of a
neighborhood reciprocally rendered each other. Even from early youth she
had obeyed a special vocation as sister of charity in many a sick-room,
and, with the usual keen intelligence of New England, had widened her
powers of doing good by the reading of medical and physiological works.
Her legends of nursing in those days of long typhus-fever and other
formidable and protracted forms of disease were to our ears quite
wonderful, and we regarded her as a sort of patron saint of the
sick-room. She seemed always so cheerful, so bright, and so devoted,
that it never occurred to us youngsters to doubt that she enjoyed, above
all things, being with us, waiting on us all day, watching over us by
night, telling us stories, and answering, in her lively and always
amusing and instructive way, that incessant fire of questions with which
a child persecutes a grown person.
"Sometimes, as a reward of goodness, we were allowed to visit her in
her own room, a neat little parlor in the neighborhood, whose windows
looked down a hillside on one hand, under the boughs of an apple
orchard, where daisies and clover and bobolinks always abounded in
summer time, and, on the other, faced the street, with a green yard
flanked by one or two shady elms between them and the street. No nun's
cell was ever neater, no bee's cell ever more compactly and carefully
arranged; and to us, familiar with the confusion of a great family of
little ones, there was something always inviting about its stillness,
its perfect order, and the air of thoughtful repose that breathed over
it. She lived there in perfect independence, doing, as it was her
delight to do, every office of life for herself. She was her own cook,
her own parlor and chamber maid, her own laundress; and very faultless
the cooking, washing, ironing, and care of her premises were. A slice of
Aunt Esther's gingerbread, one of Aunt Esther's cookies, had, we all
believed, certain magical properties such as belonged to no other mortal
mixture. Even a handful of walnuts that were brought from the depths of
her mysterious closet had virtues in our eyes such as no other walnuts
could approach. The little shelf of books that hung suspended by cords
against her wall was sacred in our regard; the volumes were like no
other books; and we supposed that she derived from them those stores of
knowledge on all subjects which she unconsciously dispensed among
us,--for she was always telling us something of metals, or minerals, or
gems, or plants, or animals, which awakened our curiosity, stimulated
our inquiries, and, above all, led us to wonder where she had learned it
all. Even the slight restrictions which her neat habits imposed on our
breezy and turbulent natures seemed all quite graceful and becoming. It
was right, in our eyes, to cleanse our shoes on scraper and mat with
extra diligence, and then to place a couple of chips under the heels of
our boots when we essayed to dry our feet at her spotless hearth. We
marvelled to see our own faces reflected in a thousand smiles and winks
from her bright brass andirons,--such andirons we thought were seen on
earth in no other place,--and a pair of radiant brass candlesticks, that
illustrated the mantel-piece, were viewed with no less respect.
"Aunt Esther's cat was a model for all cats,--so sleek, so intelligent,
so decorous and well-trained, always occupying exactly her own cushion
by the fire, and never transgressing in one iota the proprieties
belonging to a cat of good breeding. She shared our affections with her
mistress, and we were allowed as a great favor and privilege, now and
then, to hold the favorite on our knees, and stroke her satin coat to a
smoother gloss.
"But it was not for cats alone that she had attractions. She was in
sympathy and fellowship with everything that moved and lived; knew every
bird and beast with a friendly acquaintanceship. The squirrels that
inhabited the trees in the front-yard were won in time by her
blandishments to come and perch on her window-sills, and thence, by
trains of nuts adroitly laid, to disport themselves on the shining
cherry tea-table that stood between the windows; and we youngsters used
to sit entranced with delight as they gambolled and waved their feathery
tails in frolicsome security, eating rations of gingerbread and bits of
seed-cake with as good a relish as any child among us.
"The habits, the rights, the wrongs, the wants, and the sufferings of
the animal creation formed the subject of many an interesting
conversation with her; and we boys, with the natural male instinct of
hunting, trapping, and pursuing, were often made to pause in our career,
remembering her pleas for the dumb things which could not speak for
themselves.
"Her little hermitage was the favorite resort of numerous friends. Many
of the young girls who attended the village academy made her
acquaintance, and nothing delighted her more than that they should come
there and read to her the books they were studying, when her superior
and wide information enabled her to light up and explain much that was
not clear to the immature students.
"In her shady retirement, too, she was a sort of Egeria to certain men
of genius, who came to read to her their writings, to consult her in
their arguments, and to discuss with her the literature and politics of
the day,--through all which her mind moved with an equal step, yet with
a sprightliness and vivacity peculiarly feminine.
"Her memory was remarkably retentive, not only of the contents of books,
but of all that great outlying fund of anecdote and story which the
quaint and earnest New England life always supplied. There were pictures
of peculiar characters, legends of true events stranger than romance,
all stored in the cabinets of her mind; and these came from her lips
with the greater force because the precision of her memory enabled her
to authenticate them with name, date, and circumstances of vivid
reality. From that shadowy line of incidents which marks the twilight
boundary between the spiritual world and the present life she drew
legends of peculiar clearness, but invested with the mysterious charm
which always dwells in that uncertain region; and the shrewd flash of
her eye, and the keen, bright smile with which she answered the
wondering question, 'What _do_ you suppose it was?' or, 'What could it
have been?' showed how evenly rationalism in her mind kept pace with
romance.
"The retired room in which she thus read, studied, thought, and surveyed
from afar the whole world of science and literature, and in which she
received friends and entertained children, was perhaps the dearest and
freshest spot to her in the world. There came a time, however, when the
neat little independent establishment was given up, and she went to
associate herself with two of her nieces in keeping house for a
boarding-school of young girls. Here her lively manners and her gracious
interest in the young made her a universal favorite, though the cares
she assumed broke in upon those habits of solitude and study which
formed her delight. From the day that she surrendered this independency
of hers, she had never, for more than a score of years, a home of her
own, but filled the trying position of an accessory in the home of
others. Leaving the boarding-school, she became the helper of an invalid
wife and mother in the early nursing and rearing of a family of young
children,--an office which leaves no privacy and no leisure. Her bed was
always shared with some little one; her territories were exposed to the
constant inroads of little pattering feet; and all the various
sicknesses and ailments of delicate childhood made absorbing drafts upon
her time.
"After a while she left New England with the brother to whose family
she devoted herself. The failing health of the wife and mother left more
and more the charge of all things in her hands; servants were poor, and
all the appliances of living had the rawness and inconvenience which in
those days attended Western life. It became her fate to supply all other
people's defects and deficiencies. Wherever a hand failed, there must
her hand be. Whenever a foot faltered, she must step into the ranks. She
was the one who thought for and cared for and toiled for all, yet made
never a claim that any one should care for her.
"It was not till late in my life that I became acquainted with the deep
interior sacrifice, the constant self-abnegation, which all her life
involved. She was born with a strong, vehement, impulsive nature,--a
nature both proud and sensitive,--a nature whose tastes were passions,
whose likings and whose aversions were of the most intense and positive
character. Devoted as she always seemed to the mere practical and
material, she had naturally a deep romance and enthusiasm of temperament
which exceeded all that can be written in novels. It was chiefly owing
to this that a home and a central affection of her own were never hers.
In her early days of attractiveness, none who would have sought her
could meet the high requirements of her ideality; she never saw her
hero,--and so never married. Family cares, the tending of young
children, she often confessed, were peculiarly irksome to her. She had
the head of a student, a passionate love for the world of books. A
Protestant convent, where she might devote herself without interruption
to study, was her ideal of happiness. She had, too, the keenest
appreciation of poetry, of music, of painting, and of natural scenery.
Her enjoyment in any of these things was intensely vivid whenever, by
chance, a stray sunbeam of the kind darted across the dusty path of her
life; yet in all these her life was a constant repression. The eagerness
with which she would listen to any account from those more fortunate
ones who had known these things, showed how ardent a passion was
constantly held in check. A short time before her death, talking with a
friend who had visited Switzerland, she said, with great feeling: 'All
my life my desire to visit the beautiful places of this earth has been
so intense, that I cannot but hope that after my death I shall be
permitted to go and look at them.'
"The completeness of her self-discipline may be gathered from the fact,
that no child could ever be brought to believe she had not a natural
fondness for children, or that she found the care of them burdensome. It
was easy to see that she had naturally all those particular habits,
those minute pertinacities in respect to her daily movements and the
arrangement of all her belongings, which would make the meddling,
intrusive demands of infancy and childhood peculiarly hard for her to
meet. Yet never was there a pair of toddling feet that did not make free
with Aunt Esther's room, never a curly head that did not look up, in
confiding assurance of a welcome smile, to her bright eyes. The
inconsiderate and never-ceasing requirements of children and invalids
never drew from her other than a cheerful response; and to my mind there
is more saintship in this than in the private wearing of any number of
hair-cloth shirts or belts lined with spikes.
"In a large family of careless, noisy children there will be constant
losing of thimbles and needles and scissors; but Aunt Esther was always
ready, without reproach, to help the careless and the luckless. Her
things, so well kept and so treasured, she was willing to lend, with
many a caution and injunction it is true, but also with a relish of
right good-will. And, to do us justice, we generally felt the sacredness
of the trust, and were more careful of her things than of our own. If a
shade of sewing-silk were wanting, or a choice button, or a bit of braid
or tape, Aunt Esther cheerfully volunteered something from her well-kept
stores, not regarding the trouble she made herself in seeking the key,
unlocking the drawer, and searching out in bag or parcel just the
treasure demanded. Never was more perfect precision, or more perfect
readiness to accommodate others.
"Her little income, scarcely reaching a hundred dollars yearly, was
disposed of with a generosity worthy a fortune. One tenth was sacredly
devoted to charity, and a still further sum laid by every year for
presents to friends. No Christmas or New Year ever came round that Aunt
Esther, out of this very tiny fund, did not find something for children
and servants. Her gifts were trifling in value, but well timed,--a ball
of thread-wax, a paper of pins, a pincushion,--something generally so
well chosen as to show that she had been running over our needs, and
noting what to give. She was no less gracious as receiver than as giver.
The little articles that we made for her, or the small presents that we
could buy out of our childish resources, she always declared were
exactly what she needed; and she delighted us by the care she took of
them and the value she set upon them.
"Her income was a source of the greatest pleasure to her, as maintaining
an independence without which she could not have been happy. Though she
constantly gave, to every family in which she lived, services which no
money could repay, it would have been the greatest trial to her not to
be able to provide for herself. Her dress, always that of a true
gentlewoman,--refined, quiet, and neat,--was bought from this restricted
sum, and her small travelling expenses were paid out of it. She abhorred
anything false or flashy: her caps were trimmed with _real_ thread-lace,
and her silk dresses were of the best quality, perfectly well made and
kept; and, after all, a little sum always remained over in her hands for
unforeseen exigencies.
"This love of independence was one of the strongest features of her
life, and we often playfully told her that her only form of selfishness
was the monopoly of saintship,--that she who gave so much was not
willing to allow others to give to her,--that she who made herself
servant of all was not willing to allow others to serve her.
"Among the trials of her life must be reckoned much ill-health; borne,
however, with such heroic patience that it was not easy to say when the
hand of pain was laid upon her. She inherited, too, a tendency to
depression of spirits, which at times increased to a morbid and
distressing gloom. Few knew or suspected these sufferings, so completely
had she learned to suppress every outward manifestation that might
interfere with the happiness of others. In her hours of depression she
resolutely forbore to sadden the lives of those around her with her own
melancholy, and often her darkest moods were so lighted up and adorned
with an outside show of wit and humor, that those who had known her
intimately were astonished to hear that she had ever been subject to
depression.
"Her truthfulness of nature amounted almost to superstition. From her
promise once given she felt no change of purpose could absolve her; and
therefore rarely would she give it absolutely, for she _could not_ alter
the thing that had gone forth from her lips. Our belief in the certainty
of her fulfilling her word was like our belief in the immutability of
the laws of nature. Whoever asked her got of her the absolute truth on
every subject, and, when she had no good thing to say, her silence was
often truly awful. When anything mean or ungenerous was brought to her
knowledge, she would close her lips resolutely; but the flash in her
eyes showed what she would speak were speech permitted. In her last days
she spoke to a friend of what she had suffered from the strength of her
personal antipathies. 'I thank God,' she said, 'that I believe at last I
have overcome all that too, and that there has not been, for some years,
any human being toward whom I have felt a movement of dislike.'
"The last year of her life was a constant discipline of unceasing pain,
borne with that fortitude which could make her an entertaining and
interesting companion even while the sweat of mortal agony was starting
from her brow. Her own room she kept as a last asylum, to which she
would silently retreat when the torture became too intense for the
repression of society, and there alone, with closed doors, she wrestled
with her agony. The stubborn independence of her nature took refuge in
this final fastness; and she prayed only that she might go down to death
with the full ability to steady herself all the way, needing the help of
no other hand.
"The ultimate struggle of earthly feeling came when this proud
self-reliance was forced to give way, and she was obliged to leave
herself helpless in the hands of others. 'God requires that I should
give up my last form of self-will,' she said; 'now I have resigned
_this_, perhaps he will let me go home.'
"In a good old age, Death, the friend, came and opened the door of this
mortal state, and a great soul, that had served a long apprenticeship to
little things, went forth into the joy of its Lord; a life of
self-sacrifice and self-abnegation passed into a life of endless rest."
"But," said Rudolph, "I rebel at this life of self-abnegation and
self-sacrifice. I do not think it the duty of noble women, who have
beautiful natures and enlarged and cultivated tastes, to make
themselves the slaves of the sick-room and nursery."
"Such was not the teaching of our New England faith," said I. "Absolute
unselfishness,--the death of self,--such were its teachings, and such as
Esther's the characters it made. 'Do the duty nearest thee,' was the
only message it gave to 'women with a mission'; and from duty to duty,
from one self-denial to another, they rose to a majesty of moral
strength impossible to any form of mere self-indulgence. It is of souls
thus sculptured and chiselled by self-denial and self-discipline that
the living temple of the perfect hereafter is to be built. The pain of
the discipline is short, but the glory of the fruition is eternal."
XII.
THE NEW YEAR.
[1865.]