CHAPTER XII.

THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. VIII.--OCTOBER, 1861.--NO. XLVIII.

NEAR OXFORD.

On a fine morning in September, we set out on an excursion to

Blenheim,--the sculptor and myself being seated on the box of our

four-horse carriage, two more of the party in the dicky, and the

others less agreeably accommodated inside. We had no coachman, but two

postilions in short scarlet jackets and leather breeches with top-boots,

each astride of a horse; so that, all the way along, when not otherwise

attracted, we had the interesting spectacle of their up-and-down bobbing

in the saddle. It was a sunny and beautiful day, a specimen of the

perfect English weather, just warm enough for comfort,--indeed, a little

too warm, perhaps, in the noontide sun,--yet retaining a mere spice or

suspicion of austerity, which made it all the more enjoyable.

The country between Oxford and Blenheim is not particularly interesting,

being almost level, or undulating very slightly; nor is Oxfordshire,

agriculturally, a rich part of England. We saw one or two hamlets, and I

especially remember a picturesque old gabled house at a turnpike-gate,

and, altogether, the wayside scenery had an aspect of old-fashioned

English life; but there was nothing very memorable till we reached

Woodstock, and stopped to water our horses at the Black Bear. This

neighborhood is called New Woodstock, but has by no means the brand-new

appearance of an American town, being a large village of stone houses,

most of them pretty well time-worn and weather-stained. The Black Bear

is an ancient inn, large and respectable, with balustraded staircases,

and intricate passages and corridors, and queer old pictures and

engravings hanging in the entries and apartments. We ordered a lunch

(the most delightful of English institutions, next to dinner) to be

ready against our return, and then resumed our drive to Blenheim.

The park-gate of Blenheim stands close to the end of the village-street

of Woodstock. Immediately on passing through its portals, we saw the

stately palace in the distance, but made a wide circuit of the park

before approaching it. This noble park contains three thousand acres of

land, and is fourteen miles in circumference. Having been, in part,

a royal domain before it was granted to the Marlborough family, it

contains many trees of unsurpassed antiquity, and has doubtless been the

haunt of game and deer for centuries. We saw pheasants in abundance,

feeding in the open lawns and glades; and the stags tossed their antlers

and bounded away, not affrighted, but only shy and gamesome, as we

drove by. It is a magnificent pleasure-ground, not too tamely kept, nor

rigidly subjected within rule, but vast enough to have lapsed back into

Nature again, after all the pains that the landscape-gardeners of

Queen Anne's time bestowed on it, when the domain of Blenheim was

scientifically laid out. The great, knotted, slanting trunks of the old

oaks do not now look as if man had much intermeddled with their growth

and postures. The trees of later date, that were set out in the Great

Duke's time, are arranged on the plan of the order of battle in which

the illustrious commander ranked his troops at Blenheim; but the ground

covered is so extensive, and the trees now so luxuriant, that the

spectator is not disagreeably conscious of their standing in military

array, as if Orpheus had summoned them together by beat of drum. The

effect must have been very formal a hundred and fifty years ago, but has

ceased to be so,--although the trees, I presume, have kept their ranks

with even more fidelity than Marlborough's veterans did.

One of the park-keepers, on horseback, rode beside our carriage,

pointing out the choice views, and glimpses at the palace, as we drove

through the domain. There is a very large artificial lake, (to say the

truth, it seemed to me fully worthy of being compared with the Welsh

lakes, at least, if not with those of Westmoreland,) which was created

by Capability Brown, and fills the basin that he scooped for it, just as

if Nature had poured these broad waters into one of her own valleys.

It is a most beautiful object at a distance, and not less so on its

immediate banks; for the water is very pure, being supplied by a small

river, of the choicest transparency, which was turned thitherward for

the purpose. And Blenheim owes not merely this water-scenery, but almost

all its other beauties, to the contrivance of man. Its natural features

are not striking; but Art has effected such wonderful things that the

uninstructed visitor would never guess that nearly the whole scene was

but the embodied thought of a human mind. A skilful painter hardly does

more for his blank sheet of canvas than the landscape-gardener, the

planter, the arranges of trees, has done for the monotonous surface

of Blenheim,--making the most of every undulation,--flinging down a

hillock, a big lump of earth out of a giant's hand, wherever it

was needed,--putting in beauty as often as there was a niche for

it,--opening vistas to every point that deserved to be seen, and

throwing a veil of impenetrable foliage around what ought to be

hidden;--and then, to be sure, the lapse of a century has softened the

harsh outline of man's labors, and has given the place back to Nature

again with the addition of what consummate science could achieve.

After driving a good way, we came to a battlemented tower and adjoining

house, which used to be the residence of the Ranger of Woodstock

Park, who held charge of the property for the King before the Duke of

Marlborough possessed it. The keeper opened the door for us, and in the

entrance-hall we found various things that had to do with the chase and

woodland sports. We mounted the staircase, through several stories,

up to the top of the tower, whence there was a view of the spires

of Oxford, and of points much farther off,--very indistinctly seen,

however, as is usually the case with the misty distances of England.

Returning to the ground-floor, we were ushered into the room in which

died Wilmot, the wicked Earl of Rochester, who was Ranger of the Park in

Charles II.'s time. It is a low and bare little room, with a window in

front, and a smaller one behind; and in the contiguous entrance-room

there are the remains of an old bedstead, beneath the canopy of which,

perhaps, Rochester may have made the penitent end that Bishop Burnet

attributes to him. I hardly know what it is, in this poor fellow's

character, which affects us with greater tenderness on his behalf than

for all the other profligates of his day, who seem to have been neither

better nor worse than himself. I rather suspect that he had a human

heart which never quite died out of him, and the warmth of which is

still faintly perceptible amid the dissolute trash which he left behind.

Methinks, if such good fortune ever befell a bookish man, I should

choose this lodge for my own residence, with the topmost room of the

tower for a study, and all the seclusion of cultivated wildness beneath

to ramble in. There being no such possibility, we drove on, catching

glimpses of the palace in new points of view, and by-and-by came to

Rosamond's Well. The particular tradition that connects Fair Rosamond

with it is not now in my memory; but if Rosamond ever lived and loved,

and ever had her abode in the maze of Woodstock, it may well be believed

that she and Henry sometimes sat beside this spring. It gushes out from

a bank, through some old stone-work, and dashes its little cascade

(about as abundant as one might turn out of a large pitcher) into a

pool, whence it steals away towards the lake, which is not far removed.

The water is exceedingly cold, and as pure as the legendary Rosamond was

not, and is fancied to possess medicinal virtues, like springs at which

saints have quenched their thirst. There were two or three old women

and some children in attendance with tumblers, which they present to

visitors, full of the consecrated water; but most of us filled the

tumblers for ourselves, and drank.

Thence we drove to the Triumphal Pillar which was erected in honor of

the Great Duke, and on the summit of which he stands, in a Roman garb,

holding a winged figure of Victory in his hand, as an ordinary man might

hold a bird. The column is I know not how many feet high, but lofty

enough, at any rate, to elevate Marlborough far above the rest of

the world, and to be visible a long way off: and it is so placed in

reference to other objects, that, wherever the hero wandered about

his grounds, and especially as he issued from his mansion, he must

inevitably have been reminded of his glory. In truth, until I came to

Blenheim, I never had so positive and material an idea of what Fame

really is--of what the admiration of his country can do for a successful

warrior--as I carry away with me and shall always retain. Unless he

had the moral force of a thousand men together, his egotism (beholding

himself everywhere, imbuing the entire soil, growing in the woods,

rippling and gleaming in the water, and pervading the very air with

his greatness) must have been swollen within him like the liver of a

Strasbourg goose. On the huge tablets inlaid into the pedestal of the

column, the entire Act of Parliament, bestowing Blenheim on the Duke

of Marlborough and his posterity, is engraved in deep letters, painted

black on the marble ground. The pillar stands exactly a mile from the

principal front of the palace, in a straight line with the precise

centre of its entrance-hall; so that, as already said, it was the Duke's

principal object of contemplation.

We now proceeded to the palace-gate, which is a great pillared archway,

of wonderful loftiness and state, giving admittance into a spacious

quadrangle. A stout, elderly, and rather surly footman in livery

appeared at the entrance, and took possession of whatever canes,

umbrellas, and parasols he could get hold of, in order to claim sixpence

on our departure. This had a somewhat ludicrous effect. There is

much public outcry against the meanness of the present Duke in his

arrangements for the admission of visitors (chiefly, of course,

his native countrymen) to view the magnificent palace which their

forefathers bestowed upon his own. In many cases, it seems hard that a

private abode should be exposed to the intrusion of the public merely

because the proprietor has inherited or created a splendor which

attracts general curiosity; insomuch that his home loses its sanctity

and seclusion for the very reason that it is better than other men's

houses. But in the case of Blenheim, the public have certainly an

equitable claim to admission, both because the fame of its first

inhabitant is a national possession, and because the mansion was a

national gift, one of the purposes of which was to be a token of

gratitude and glory to the English people themselves. If a man chooses

to be illustrious, he is very likely to incur some little inconveniences

himself, and entail them on his posterity. Nevertheless, his present

Grace of Marlborough absolutely ignores the public claim above

suggested, and (with a thrift of which even the hero of Blenheim himself

did not set the example) sells tickets admitting six persons at ten

shillings: if only one person enters the gate, he must pay for six; and

if there are seven in company, two tickets are required to admit them.

The attendants, who meet you everywhere in the park and palace, expect

fees on their own private account,--their noble master pocketing the ten

shillings. But, to be sure, the visitor gets his money's worth, since it

buys him the right to speak just as freely of the Duke of Marlborough as

if he were the keeper of the Cremorne Gardens.[A]

[Footnote A: The above was written two or three years ago, or more; and

the Duke of that day has since transmitted his coronet to his successor,

who, we understand, has adopted much more liberal arrangements. There is

seldom anything to criticize or complain of, as regards the facility of

obtaining admission to interesting private houses in England.]

Passing through a gateway on the opposite side of the quadrangle, we had

before us the noble classic front of the palace, with its two projecting

wings. We ascended the lofty steps of the portal, and were admitted into

the entrance-hall, the height of which, from floor to ceiling, is not

much less than seventy feet, being the entire height of the edifice. The

hall is lighted by windows in the upper story, and, it being a clear,

bright day, was very radiant with lofty sunshine, amid which a swallow

was flitting to and fro. The ceiling was painted by Sir James Thornhill

in some allegorical design, (doubtless commemorative of Marlborough's

victories,) the purport of which I did not take the trouble to make

out,--contenting myself with the general effect, which was most

splendidly and effectively ornamental.

We were guided through the showrooms by a very civil person, who allowed

us to take pretty much our own time in looking at the pictures. The

collection is exceedingly valuable,--many of these works of Art having

been presented to the Great Duke by the crowned heads of England or the

Continent. One room was all aglow with pictures by Rubens; and there

were works of Raphael, and many other famous painters, any one of which

would be sufficient to illustrate the meanest house that might contain

it. I remember none of them, however, (not being in a picture-seeing

mood,) so well as Vandyck's large and familiar picture of Charles I on

horseback, with a figure and face of melancholy dignity such as never

by any other hand was put on canvas. Yet, on considering this face of

Charles, (which I find often repeated in half-lengths,) and translating

it from the ideal into literalism, I doubt whether the unfortunate king

was really a handsome or impressive-looking man: a high, thin-ridged

nose, a meagre, hatchet face, and reddish hair and beard,--these are the

literal facts. It is the painter's art that has thrown such pensive and

shadowy grace around him.

On our passage through this beautiful suite of apartments, we saw,

through the vista of open doorways, a boy of ten or twelve years old

coming towards us from the farther rooms. He had on a straw hat, a linen

sack that had certainly been washed and re-washed for a summer or two,

and gray trousers a good deal worn,--a dress, in short, which an

American mother in middle station would have thought too shabby for her

darling school-boy's ordinary wear. This urchin's face was rather pale,

(as those of English children are apt to be, quite as often as our own,)

but he had pleasant eyes, an intelligent look, and an agreeable, boyish

manner. It was Lord Sunderland, grandson of the present Duke, and heir--

though not, I think, in the direct line--of the blood of the great

Marlborough, and of the title and estate.

After passing through the first suite of rooms, we were conducted

through a corresponding suite on the opposite side of the entrance-hall.

These latter apartments are most richly adorned with tapestries, wrought

and presented to the first Duke by a sisterhood of Flemish nuns; they

look like great, glowing pictures, and completely cover the walls of the

rooms. The designs purport to represent the Duke's battles and sieges;

and everywhere we see the hero himself, as large as life, and as

gorgeous in scarlet and gold as the holy sisters could make him, with a

three-cornered hat and flowing wig, reining in his horse, and extending

his leading-staff in the attitude of command. Next to Marlborough,

Prince Eugene is the most prominent figure. In the way of upholstery,

there can never have been anything more magnificent than these

tapestries; and, considered as works of Art, they have quite as much

merit as nine pictures out of ten.

One whole wing of the palace is occupied by the library, a most noble

room, with a vast perspective length from end to end. Its atmosphere

is brighter and more cheerful than that of most libraries: a wonderful

contrast to the old college-libraries of Oxford, and perhaps less sombre

and suggestive of thoughtfulness than any large library ought to be;

inasmuch as so many studious brains as have left their deposit on the

shelves cannot have conspired without producing a very serious and

ponderous result. Both walls and ceiling are white, and there are

elaborate doorways and fireplaces of white marble. The floor is of oak,

so highly polished that our feet slipped upon it as if it had been

New-England ice. At one end of the room stands a statue of Queen Anne in

her royal robes, which are so admirably designed and exquisitely wrought

that the spectator certainly gets a strong conception of her royal

dignity; while the face of the statue, fleshy and feeble, doubtless

conveys a suitable idea of her personal character. The marble of this

work, long as it has stood there, is as white as snow just fallen, and

must have required most faithful and religious care to keep it so. As

for the volumes of the library, they are wired within the cases and turn

their gilded backs upon the visitor, keeping their treasures of wit and

wisdom just as intangible as if still in the unwrought mines of human

thought.

I remember nothing else in the palace, except the chapel, to which we

were conducted last, and where we saw a splendid monument to the first

Duke and Duchess, sculptured by Rysbrach, at the cost, it is said, of

forty thousand pounds. The design includes the statues of the deceased

dignitaries, and various allegorical flourishes, fantasies, and

confusions; and beneath sleep the great Duke and his proud wife, their

veritable bones and dust, and probably all the Marlboroughs that have

since died. It is not quite a comfortable idea, that these mouldy

ancestors still inhabit, after their fashion, the house where their

successors spend the passing day; but the adulation lavished upon the

hero of Blenheim could not have been consummated, unless the palace of

his lifetime had become likewise a stately mausoleum over his remains,

--and such we felt it all to be, after gazing at his tomb.

The next business was to see the private gardens. An old Scotch

under-gardener admitted us and led the way, and seemed to have a fair

prospect of earning the fee all by himself; but by-and-by another

respectable Scotchman made his appearance and took us in charge, proving

to be the head-gardener in person. He was extremely intelligent and

agreeable, talking both scientifically and lovingly about trees and

plants, of which there is every variety capable of English cultivation.

Positively, the Garden of Eden cannot have been more beautiful than this

private garden of Blenheim. It contains three hundred acres, and by

the artful circumlocution of the paths, and the undulations, and the

skilfully interposed clumps of trees, is made to appear limitless. The

sylvan delights of a whole country are compressed into this space,

as whole fields of Persian roses go to the concoction of an ounce of

precious attar. The world within that garden-fence is not the same weary

and dusty world with which we outside mortals are conversant; it is a

finer, lovelier, more harmonious Nature; and the Great Mother lends

herself kindly to the gardener's will, knowing that he will make evident

the half-obliterated traits of her pristine and ideal beauty, and allow

her to take all the credit and praise to herself. I doubt whether there

is ever any winter within that precinct,--any clouds, except the fleecy

ones of summer. The sunshine that I saw there rests upon my recollection

of it as if it were eternal. The lawns and glades are like the memory of

places where one has wandered when first in love.

What a good and happy life might be spent in a paradise like this! And

yet, at that very moment, the besotted Duke (ah! I have let out a secret

which I meant to keep to myself; but the ten shillings must pay for all)

was in that very garden, (for the guide told us so, and cautioned

our young people not to be uproarious,) and, if in a condition for

arithmetic, was thinking of nothing nobler than how many ten-shilling

tickets had that day been sold. Republican as I am, I should still love

to think that noblemen lead noble lives, and that all this stately and

beautiful environment may serve to elevate them a little way above the

rest of us. If it fail to do so, the disgrace falls equally upon the

whole race of mortals as on themselves; because it proves that no

more favorable conditions of existence would eradicate our vices and

weaknesses. How sad, if this be so! Even a herd of swine, eating the

acorns under those magnificent oaks of Blenheim, would be cleanlier and

of better habits than ordinary swine.

Well, all that I have written is pitifully meagre, as a description of

Blenheim; and I hate to leave it without some more adequate expression

of the noble edifice, with its rich domain, all as I saw them in that

beautiful sunshine; for, if a day had been chosen out of a hundred

years, it could not have been a finer one. But I must give up the

attempt; only further remarking that the finest trees here were cedars,

of which I saw one--and there may have been many such--immense in girth

and not less than three centuries old. I likewise saw a vast heap of

laurel, two hundred feet in circumference, all growing from one root;

and the gardener offered to show us another growth of twice that

stupendous size. If the Great Duke himself had been buried in that spot,

his heroic heart could not have been the seed of a more plentiful crop

of laurels.

We now went back to the Black Bear, and sat down to a cold collation, of

which we ate abundantly, and drank (in the good old English fashion) a

due proportion of various delightful liquors. A stranger in England,

in his rambles to various quarters of the country, may learn little

in regard to wines, (for the ordinary English taste is simple, though

sound, in that particular,) but he makes acquaintance with more

varieties of hop and malt liquor than he previously supposed to exist.

I remember a sort of foaming stuff, called hop-champagne, which is very

vivacious, and appears to be a hybrid between ale and bottled cider.

Another excellent tipple for warm weather is concocted by mixing

brown-stout or bitter ale with ginger-beer, the foam of which stirs

up the heavier liquor from its depths, forming a compound of singular

vivacity and sufficient body. But of all things ever brewed from

malt, (unless it be the Trinity Ale of Cambridge, which I drank long

afterwards, and which Barry Cornwall has celebrated in immortal verse,)

commend me to the Archdeacon, as the Oxford scholars call it, in honor

of the jovial dignitary who first taught these erudite worthies how to

brew their favorite nectar. John Barleycorn has given his very heart to

this admirable liquor; it is a superior kind of ale, the Prince of Ales,

with a richer flavor and a mightier spirit than you can find elsewhere

in this weary world. Much have we been strengthened and encouraged by

the potent blood of the Archdeacon!

A few days after our excursion to Blenheim, the same party set forth,

in two flies, on a tour to some other places of interest in the

neighborhood of Oxford. It was again a delightful day; and, in truth,

every day, of late, had been so pleasant that it seemed as if each must

be the very last of such perfect weather; and yet the long succession

had given us confidence in as many more to come. The climate of England

has been shamefully maligned; its sulkinesses and asperities are not

nearly so offensive as Englishmen tell us (their climate being the only

attribute of their country which they never overvalue); and the really

good summer weather is the very kindest and sweetest that the world

knows.

We first drove to the village of Cumnor, about six miles from Oxford,

and alighted at the entrance of the church. Here, while waiting for the

keys, we looked at an old wall of the churchyard, piled up of loose gray

stones which are said to have once formed a portion of Cumnor Hall,

celebrated in Mickle's ballad and Scott's romance. The hall must have

been in very close vicinity to the church,--not more than twenty yards

off; and I waded through the long, dewy grass of the churchyard, and

tried to peep over the wall, in hopes to discover some tangible and

traceable remains of the edifice. But the wall was just too high to be

overlooked, and difficult to clamber over without tumbling down some of

the stones; so I took the word of one of our party, who had been here

before, that there is nothing interesting on the other side. The

churchyard is in rather a neglected state, and seems not to have been

mown for the benefit of the parson's cow; it contains a good many

gravestones, of which I remember only some upright memorials of slate to

individuals of the name of Tabbs.

Soon a woman arrived with the key of the church-door, and we entered the

simple old edifice, which has the pavement of lettered tombstones, the

sturdy pillars and low arches, and other ordinary characteristics of

an English country-church. One or two pews, probably those of the

gentlefolk of the neighborhood, were better furnished than the rest, but

all in a modest style. Near the high altar, in the holiest place, there

is an oblong, angular, ponderous tomb of blue marble, built against the

wall, and surmounted by a carved canopy of the same material; and over

the tomb, and beneath the canopy, are two monumental brasses, such as we

oftener see inlaid into a church-pavement. On these brasses are engraved

the figures of a gentleman in armor and a lady in an antique garb, each

about a foot high, devoutly kneeling in prayer; and there is a long

Latin inscription likewise cut into the enduring brass, bestowing the

highest eulogies on the character of Anthony Forster, who, with his

virtuous dame, lies buried beneath this tombstone. His is the knightly

figure that kneels above; and if Sir Walter Scott ever saw this tomb,

he must have had an even greater than common disbelief in laudatory

epitaphs, to venture on depicting Anthony Forster in such hues as

blacken him in the romance. For my part, I read the inscription in full

faith, and believe the poor deceased gentleman to be a much-wronged

individual, with good grounds for bringing an action of slander in the

courts above.

But the circumstance, lightly as we treat it, has its serious moral.

What nonsense it is, this anxiety, which so worries us, about our good

fame, or our bad fame, after death! If it were of the slightest real

moment, our reputations would have been placed by Providence more in our

own power, and less in other people's, than we now find them to be. If

poor Anthony Forster happens to have met Sir Walter in the other world,

I doubt whether he has ever thought it worth while to complain of the

latter's misrepresentations.

We did not remain long in the church, as it contains nothing else of

interest; and driving through the village, we passed a pretty large and

rather antique-looking inn, bearing the sign of the Bear and Ragged

Staff. It could not be so old, however, by at least a hundred years,

as Giles Gosling's time; nor is there any other object to remind the

visitor of the Elizabethan age, unless it be a few ancient cottages,

that are perhaps of still earlier date. Cumnor is not nearly so large a

village, nor a place of such mark, as one anticipates from its romantic

and legendary fame; but, being still inaccessible by railway, it has

retained more of a sylvan character than we often find in English

country-towns. In this retired neighborhood the road is narrow and

bordered with grass, and sometimes interrupted by gates; the hedges grow

in unpruned luxuriance; there is not that close-shaven neatness and

trimness that characterize the ordinary English landscape. The

whole scene conveys the idea of seclusion and remoteness. We met no

travellers, whether on foot or otherwise.

I cannot very distinctly trace out this day's peregrinations; but, after

leaving Cumnor a few miles behind us, I think we came to a ferry over

the Thames, where an old woman served as ferry-man, and pulled a boat

across by means of a rope stretching from shore to shore. Our

two vehicles being thus placed on the other side, we resumed our

drive,--first glancing, however, at the old woman's antique cottage,

with its stone floor, and the circular settle round the kitchen

fireplace, which was quite in the mediaeval English style.

We next stopped at Stanton Harcourt, where we were received at the

parsonage with a hospitality which we should take delight in describing,

if it were allowable to make public acknowledgment of the private and

personal kindnesses which we never failed to find ready for our needs.

An American in an English house will soon adopt the opinion that the

English are the very kindest people on earth, and will retain that idea

as long, at least, as he remains on the inner side of the threshold.

Their magnetism is of a kind that repels strongly while you keep beyond

a certain limit, but attracts as forcibly if you get within the magic

line.

It was at this place, if I remember right, that I heard a gentleman ask

a friend of mine whether he was the author of "The Red Letter A"; and,

after some consideration, (for he did not seem to recognize his own

book, at first, under this improved title,) our countryman responded,

doubtfully, that he believed so. The gentleman proceeded to inquire

whether our friend had spent much time in America,--evidently thinking

that he must have been caught young, and have had a tincture of English

breeding, at least, if not birth, to speak the language so tolerably,

and appear so much like other people. This insular narrowness is

exceedingly queer, and of very frequent occurrence, and is quite as much

a characteristic of men of education and culture as of clowns.

Stanton Harcourt is a very curious old place. It was formerly the seat

of the ancient family of Harcourt, which now has its principal abode

at Nuneham Courtney, a few miles off. The parsonage is a relic of the

family-mansion, or castle, other portions of which are close at hand;

for, across the garden, rise two gray towers, both of them picturesquely

venerable, and interesting for more than their antiquity. One of these

towers, in its entire capacity, from height to depth, constituted the

kitchen of the ancient castle, and is still used for domestic purposes,

although it has not, nor ever had, a chimney; or we might rather say, it

is itself one vast chimney, with a hearth of thirty feet square, and

a flue and aperture of the same size. There are two huge fireplaces

within, and the interior walls of the tower are blackened with the smoke

that for centuries used to gush forth from them, and climb upward,

seeking an exit through some wide air-holes in the conical roof, full

seventy feet above. These lofty openings were capable of being so

arranged, with reference to the wind, that the cooks are said to have

been seldom troubled by the smoke; and here, no doubt, they were

accustomed to roast oxen whole, with as little fuss and ado as a modern

cook would roast a fowl. The inside of the tower is very dim and sombre,

(being nothing but rough stone walls, lighted only from the apertures

above mentioned,) and has still a pungent odor of smoke and soot, the

reminiscence of the fires and feasts of generations that have passed

away. Methinks the extremest range of domestic economy lies between an

American cooking-stove and the ancient kitchen, seventy dizzy feet in

height, of Stanton Harcourt.

Now--the place being without a parallel in England, and therefore

necessarily beyond the experience of an American--it is somewhat

remarkable, that, while we stood gazing at this kitchen, I was haunted

and perplexed by an idea that somewhere or other I had seen just this

strange spectacle before. The height, the blackness, the dismal void,

before my eyes, seemed as familiar as the decorous neatness of my

grandmother's kitchen; only my unaccountable memory of the scene was

lighted up with an image of lurid fires blazing all round the dim

interior circuit of the tower. I had never before had so pertinacious an

attack, as I could not but suppose it, of that odd state of mind wherein

we fitfully and teasingly remember some previous scene or incident, of

which the one now passing appears to be but the echo and reduplication.

Though the explanation of the mystery did not for some time occur to me,

I may as well conclude the matter here. In a letter of Pope's, addressed

to the Duke of Buckingham, there is an account of Stanton Harcourt, (as

I now find, although the name is not mentioned,) where he resided while

translating a part of the "Iliad." It is one of the most admirable

pieces of description in the language,--playful and picturesque, with

fine touches of humorous pathos,--and conveys as perfect a picture as

ever was drawn of a decayed English country-house; and among other

rooms, most of which have since crumbled down and disappeared, he dashes

off the grim aspect of this kitchen,--which, moreover, he peoples with

witches, engaging Satan himself as head-cook, who stirs the infernal

caldrons that seethe and bubble over the fires. This letter, and others

relative to his abode here, were very familiar to my earlier reading,

and, remaining still fresh at the bottom of my memory, caused the weird

and ghostly sensation that came over me on beholding the real spectacle

that had formerly been made so vivid to my imagination.

Our next visit was to the church, which stands close by, and is quite

as ancient as the remnants of the castle. In a chapel or side-aisle,

dedicated to the Harcourts, are found some very interesting

family-monuments,--and among them, recumbent on a tombstone, the figure

of an armed knight of the Lancastrian party, who was slain in the Wars

of the Roses. His features, dress, and armor are painted in colors,

still wonderfully fresh, and there still blushes the symbol of the Red

Rose, denoting the faction for which he fought and died. His head rests

on a marble or alabaster helmet; and on the tomb lies the veritable

helmet, it is to be presumed, which he wore in battle,--a ponderous iron

case, with the visor complete, and remnants of the gilding that once

covered it. The crest is a large peacock, not of metal, but of wood.

Very possibly, this helmet was but an heraldic adornment of his tomb;

and, indeed, it seems strange that it has not been stolen before

now, especially in Cromwell's time, when knightly tombs were little

respected, and when armor was in request. However, it is needless to

dispute with the dead knight about the identity of his iron pot, and

we may as well allow it to be the very same that so often gave him the

headache in his lifetime. Leaning against the wall, at the foot of the

tomb, is the shaft of a spear, with a wofully tattered and utterly faded

banner appended to it,--the knightly banner beneath which he marshalled

his followers in the field. As it was absolutely falling to pieces, I

tore off one little bit, no bigger than a finger-nail, and put it into

my waistcoat-pocket; but seeking it subsequently, it was not to be

found.

On the opposite side of the little chapel, two or three yards from this

tomb, is another, on which lie, side by side, one of the same knightly

race of Harcourts, and his lady. The tradition of the family is, that

this knight was the standard-bearer of Henry of Richmond in the Battle

of Bosworth Field; and a banner, supposed to be the same that he earned,

now droops over his effigy. It is just such a colorless silk rag as the

one already described. The knight has the order of the Garter on his

knee, and the lady wears it on her left arm,--an odd place enough for a

garter; but, if worn in its proper locality, it could not be decorously

visible. The complete preservation and good condition of these statues,

even to the minutest adornment of the sculpture, and their very

noses,--the most vulnerable part of a marble man, as of a living one,

are miraculous. Except in Westminster Abbey, among the chapels of the

kings, I have seen none so well preserved. Perhaps they owe it to the

loyalty of Oxfordshire, diffused throughout its neighborhood by the

influence of the University, during the great Civil War and the rule

of the Parliament. It speaks well, too, for the upright and kindly

character of this old family, that the peasantry, among whom they had

lived for ages, did not desecrate their tombs, when it might have been

done with impunity.

There are other and more recent memorials of the Harcourts, one of which

is the tomb of the last lord, who died about a hundred years ago. His

figure, like those of his ancestors, lies on the top of his tomb, clad,

not in armor, but in his robes as a peer. The title is now extinct,

but the family survives in a younger branch, and still holds this

patrimonial estate, though they have long since quitted it as a

residence.

We next went to see the ancient fish-ponds appertaining to the mansion,

and which used to be of vast dietary importance to the family in

Catholic times, and when fish was not otherwise attainable. There are

two or three, or more, of these reservoirs, one of which is of very

respectable size,--large enough, indeed, to be really a picturesque

object, with its grass-green borders, and the trees drooping over

it, and the towers of the castle and the church reflected within the

weed-grown depths of its smooth mirror. A sweet fragrance, as it were,

of ancient time and present quiet and seclusion was breathing all

around; the sunshine of to-day had a mellow charm of antiquity in its

brightness. These ponds are said still to breed abundance of such fish

as love deep and quiet waters: but I saw only some minnows, and one or

two snakes, which were lying among the weeds on the top of the water,

sunning and bathing themselves at once.

I mentioned that there were two towers remaining of the old castle: the

one containing the kitchen we have already visited; the other, still

more interesting, is next to be described. It is some seventy feet high,

gray and reverend, but in excellent repair, though I could not perceive

that anything had been done to renovate it. The basement story was once

the family-chapel, and is, of course, still a consecrated spot. At

one corner of the tower is a circular turret, within which a narrow

staircase, with worn steps of stone, winds round and round as it climbs

upward, giving access to a chamber on each floor, and finally emerging

on the battlemented roof. Ascending this turret-stair, and arriving at

the third story, we entered a chamber, not large, though occupying the

whole area of the tower, and lighted by a window on each side. It

was wainscoted from floor to ceiling with dark oak, and had a little

fireplace in one of the corners. The window-panes were small, and set in

lead. The curiosity of this room is, that it was once the residence of

Pope, and that he here wrote a considerable part of the translation of

Homer, and likewise, no doubt, the admirable letters to which I have

referred above. The room once contained a record by himself, scratched

with a diamond on one of the window-panes, (since removed for

safe-keeping to Nuneham Courtney, where it was shown me,) purporting

that he had here finished the fifth book of the "Iliad" on such a day.

A poet has a fragrance about him, such as no other human being is gifted

withal; it is indestructible, and clings forevermore to everything that

he has touched. I was not impressed, at Blenheim, with any sense that

the mighty Duke still haunted the palace that was created for him; but

here, after a century and a half, we are still conscious of the presence

of that decrepit little figure of Queen Anne's time, although he was

merely a casual guest in the old tower, during one or two summer months.

However brief the time and slight the connection, his spirit cannot be

exorcised so long as the tower stands. In my mind, moreover, Pope, or

any other person with an available claim, is right in adhering to the

spot, dead or alive; for I never saw a chamber that I should like better

to inhabit,--so comfortably small, in such a safe and inaccessible

seclusion, and with a varied landscape from each window. One of

them looks upon the church, close at hand, and down into the green

churchyard, extending almost to the foot of the tower; the others have

views wide and far, over a gently undulating tract of country. If

desirous of a loftier elevation, about a dozen more steps of the

turret-stair will bring the occupant to the summit of the tower,--where

Pope used to come, no doubt, in the summer evenings, and peep--poor

little shrimp that he was!--through the embrasures of the battlement.

From Stanton Harcourt we drove--I forget how far--to a point where a

boat was waiting for us upon the Thames, or some other stream; for I am

ashamed to confess my ignorance of the precise geographical whereabout.

We were, at any rate, some miles above Oxford, and, I should imagine,

pretty near one of the sources of England's mighty river. It was

little more than wide enough for the boat, with extended oars, to

pass,--shallow, too, and bordered with bulrushes and water-weeds, which,

in some places, quite overgrew the surface of the river from bank to

bank. The shores were flat and meadow-like, and sometimes, the boatman

told us, are overflowed by the rise of the stream. The water looked

clean and pure, but not particularly transparent, though enough so to

show us that the bottom is very much weed-grown; and I was told that the

weed is an American production, brought to England with importations of

timber, and now threatening to choke up the Thames and other English

rivers. I wonder it does not try its obstructive powers upon the

Merrimack, the Connecticut, or the Hudson,--not to speak of the St.

Lawrence or the Mississippi!

It was an open boat, with cushioned seats astern, comfortably

accommodating our party; the day continued sunny and warm, and perfectly

still; the boatman, well trained to his business, managed the oars

skilfully and vigorously; and we went down the stream quite as swiftly

as it was desirable to go, the scene being so pleasant, and the passing

hour so thoroughly agreeable. The river grew a little wider and deeper,

perhaps, as we glided on, but was still an inconsiderable stream; for it

had a good deal more than a hundred miles to meander through before it

should bear fleets on its bosom, and reflect palaces and towers and

Parliament-houses and dingy and sordid piles of various structure, as it

rolled to and fro with the tide, dividing London asunder. Not, in truth,

that I ever saw any edifice whatever reflected in its turbid breast,

when the sylvan stream, as we beheld it now, is swollen into the Thames

at London.

Once, on our voyage, we had to land, while the boatman and some other

persons drew our skiff round some rapids, which we could not otherwise

have passed; another time, the boat went through a lock. We, meanwhile,

stepped ashore to examine the ruins of the old nunnery of Godstowe,

where Fair Rosamond secluded herself, after being separated from her

royal lover. There is a long line of ruinous wall, and a shattered tower

at one of the angles; the whole much ivy-grown,--brimming over, indeed,

with clustering ivy, which is rooted inside of the walls. The nunnery is

now, I believe, held in lease by the city of Oxford, which has converted

its precincts into a barnyard. The gate was under lock and key, so that

we could merely look at the outside, and soon resumed our places in the

boat.

At three o'clock, or thereabouts, (or sooner or later,--for I took

little heed of time, and only wished that these delightful wanderings

might last forever,) we reached Folly Bridge, at Oxford. Here we took

possession of a spacious barge, with a house in it, and a comfortable

dining-room or drawing-room within the house, and a level roof, on which

we could sit at ease, or dance, if so inclined. These barges are common

at Oxford,--some very splendid ones being owned by the students of

the different colleges, or by clubs. They are drawn by horses, like

canal-boats; and a horse being attached to our own barge, he trotted off

at a reasonable pace, and we slipped through the water behind him, with

a gentle and pleasant motion, which, save for the constant vicissitude

of cultivated scenery, was like no motion at all. It was life without

the trouble of living; nothing was ever more quietly agreeable. In this

happy state of mind and body we gazed at Christ-Church meadows, as we

passed, and at the receding spires and towers of Oxford, and on a good

deal of pleasant variety along the banks: young men rowing or fishing;

troops of naked boys bathing, as if this were Arcadia, in the simplicity

of the Golden Age; country-houses, cottages, water-side inns, all with

something fresh about them, as not being sprinkled with the dust of the

highway. We were a large party now; for a number of additional guests

had joined us at Folly Bridge, and we comprised poets, novelists,

scholars, sculptors, painters, architects, men and women of renown, dear

friends, genial, outspoken, open-hearted Englishmen,--all voyaging

onward together, like the wise ones of Gotham in a bowl. I remember not

a single annoyance, except, indeed, that a swarm of wasps came aboard of

us and alighted on the head of one of our young gentlemen, attracted by

the scent of the pomatum which he had been rubbing into his hair. He was

the only victim, and his small trouble the one little flaw in our day's

felicity, to put us in mind that we were mortal.

Meanwhile a table had been laid in the interior of our barge, and

spread with cold ham, cold fowl, cold pigeon-pie, cold beef, and other

substantial cheer, such as the English love, and Yankees too,--besides

tarts, and cakes, and pears, and plums,--not forgetting, of course, a

goodly provision of port, sherry, and champagne, and bitter ale,

which is like mother's milk to an Englishman, and soon grows equally

acceptable to his American cousin. By the time these matters had been

properly attended to, we had arrived at that part of the Thames which

passes by Nuneham Courtney, a fine estate belonging to the Harcourts,

and the present residence of the family. Here we landed, and, climbing

a steep slope from the river-side, paused a moment or two to look at an

architectural object, called the Carfax, the purport of which I do not

well understand. Thence we proceeded onward, through the loveliest park

and woodland scenery I ever saw, and under as beautiful a declining

sunshine as heaven ever shed over earth, to the stately mansion-house.

As we here cross a private threshold, it is not allowable to pursue

my feeble narrative of this delightful day with the same freedom as

heretofore; so, perhaps, I may as well bring it to a close. I may

mention, however, that I saw the library, a fine, large apartment, hung

round with portraits of eminent literary men, principally of the last

century, most of whom were familiar guests of the Harcourts. The house

itself is about eighty years old, and is built in the classic style, as

if the family had been anxious to diverge as far as possible from the

Gothic picturesqueness of their old abode at Stanton Harcourt. The

grounds were laid out in part by Capability Brown, and seemed to me even

more beautiful than those of Blenheim. Mason the poet, a friend of the

house, gave the design of a portion of the garden. Of the whole place I

will not be niggardly of my rude Transatlantic praise, but be bold

to say that it appeared to me as perfect as anything earthly can

be,--utterly and entirely finished, as if the years and generations

had done all that the hearts and minds of the successive owners could

contrive for a spot they dearly loved. Such homes as Nuneham Courtney

are among the splendid results of long hereditary possession; and we

Republicans, whose households melt away like new-fallen snow in a

spring morning, must content ourselves with our many counterbalancing

advantages,--for this one, so apparently desirable to the far-projecting

selfishness of our nature, we are certain never to attain.

It must not be supposed, nevertheless, that Nuneham Courtney is one of

the great show-places of England. It is merely a fair specimen of the

better class of country-seats, and has a hundred rivals, and many

superiors, in the features of beauty, and expansive, manifold, redundant

comfort, which most impressed me. A moderate man might be content with

such a home,--that is all.

And now I take leave of Oxford without even an attempt to describe

it,--there being no literary faculty, attainable or conceivable by me,

which can avail to put it adequately, or even tolerably, upon paper. It

must remain its own sole expression; and those whose sad fortune it may

be never to behold it have no better resource than to dream about

gray, weather-stained, ivy-grown edifices, wrought with quaint Gothic

ornament, and standing around grassy quadrangles, where cloistered walks

have echoed to the quiet footsteps of twenty generations,--lawns and

gardens of luxurious repose, shadowed with canopies of foliage, and

lit up with sunny glimpses through archways of great boughs,--spires,

towers, and turrets, each with its history and legend,--dimly

magnificent chapels, with painted windows of rare beauty and brilliantly

diversified hues, creating an atmosphere of richest gloom,--vast

college-halls, high-windowed, oaken-panelled, and hung round with

portraits of the men, in every age, whom the University has nurtured to

be illustrious,--long vistas of alcoved libraries, where the wisdom

and learned folly of all time is shelved,--kitchens, (we throw in this

feature by way of ballast, and because it would not be English Oxford

without its beef and beer,) with huge fireplaces, capable of roasting a

hundred joints at once,--and cavernous cellars, where rows of piled-up

hogsheads seethe and fume with that mighty malt-liquor which is the true

milk of Alma Mater: make all these things vivid in your dream, and you

will never know nor believe how inadequate is the result to represent

even the merest outside of Oxford.

We feel a genuine reluctance to conclude this article without making our

grateful acknowledgements, by name, to a gentleman whose overflowing

kindness was the main condition of all our sight-seeings and enjoyments.

Delightful as will always be our recollection of Oxford and its

neighborhood, we partly suspect that it owes much of its happy coloring

to the genial medium through which the objects were presented to us,--to

the kindly magic of a hospitality unsurpassed, within our experience, in

the quality of making the guest contented with his host, with himself,

and everything about him. He has inseparably mingled his image with our

remembrance of the Spires of Oxford.

CYRIL WILDE.

For some reason which it does not concern us now to investigate,

Kentucky, under the dominion of the white man, has continued to justify

its native name of "Dark and Bloody Ground," in being the scene of a

remarkable number of tragedies in real life.

One of these, less known to the public in later times, we think

transcends all the others in boldness of conception, regularity of plot,

variety of passion and character displayed, and horror and pathos of

catastrophe. It might have furnished a worthy subject to the pen of

Sophocles or Shakespeare, one that they would have found already cast

into a highly dramatic form, requiring only fitting words to convey the

passions of the actors. Little invention of situation or incident

would have been needed, for neither could be imagined more intensely

interesting; nor could the most finished artist have constructed a plot

more coherent in all its details, or more strictly in accordance with

the rules of composition,--even to the preservation of the Aristotelian

unities of time and place. So perfect, indeed, does it seem, that,

were it not substantiated in every point by the records of a judicial

tribunal, it might well be taken for the invention of some master of

human nature and the dramatic art.

Captain Cyril Wilde, the hero, or rather the victim, of the events we

are about to narrate, was one of those perfectly happy men whom every

one has learned to regard as favorites of Fortune, and on whom no one

ever expects disaster to fall, simply because it never has done so. Well

descended, at a period when good birth was a positive honor in itself,

and connected, either by affinity or friendship, with the best society

of Kentucky, he held, by hereditary right, a high position among that

old aristocracy which then and for a long time afterward stoutly

maintained its own against the encroaching spirit of democratic

equality, and whose members still kept in mind many of the traditions,

honored in their own persons the dignity, and strove to preserve in

their households somewhat of the manners, of the Cavaliers of the Old

Dominion. Nor was wealth wanting to complete his happiness,--at least,

such wealth as was needed by one of his simple tastes and unostentatious

habits. He was rich beyond his disposition to spend, but not beyond his

capacity to enjoy,--a capacity multiplied by as many times as he had

friends to stimulate it;--summer friends, alas! too many of them proved

to be. His character was without reproach; his disposition easy and

genial; his mind of that happy middle order which always commands

respect, while it feels none of the restless ambition and impotent

longing for public recognition that usually attend the possession of

superior abilities.

Such was the position of Captain Wilde, and such the character he bore

during the first thirty-eight years of his life. Not many have known

a more lengthened prosperity,--and few, very few, a more sudden and

terrible reverse. Fortune, like a fond mistress, had lavished her gifts

on him without stint,--but, like a jealous one, seemed resolved that he

should owe everything to her gratuitous bounty, and the moment he sought

to win an object of desire by his own exertions turned her face away

forever, persecuting her former favorite thenceforth with vindictive

malice. Continuing to yield, for a time, with apparent complacency,

every boon he sought, she treacherously concealed therein the germs of

all his woes.

In the year 17--Captain Wilde was persuaded to better his already happy

condition by marriage. The lady he chose, or suffered to be chosen for

him, was a Miss M----, a scion of one of those extensive families, not

now so common as formerly, which by repeated intermarriage and always

settling together develop a spirit of clanship, so exclusive as to make

them almost incapable of any feeling of interest outside of their own

name and connection, and render them liable to regard any person

of different blood, who may happen to intermarry among them, as an

intruder. In some parts of the Union these clans may still be found

flourishing in considerable purity and vigor,--the same name sometimes

prevailing over a district of many miles,--a fact which an observant

traveller would surmise from a certain prevailing cast of form and

feature.

It was with a family of this kind that Captain Wilde was, in an evil

hour, induced to ally himself,--a step which soon proved to be the first

in a long career of misfortune. The lady possessed that worst of

all tempers, a quick and irritable, but at the same time hard and

unforgiving one. And she soon showed, that, in her estimation, the

feelings and interests of her husband were as nothing in comparison with

those of her family, and that, in any variance, she would leave the

former and cleave to the latter. Such variances were, unfortunately,

almost inevitable; for the family of Mrs. Wilde differed both in

politics and religion from her husband,--a fact, it may here be

remarked, which had no small influence on his subsequent fate,--and the

narrow, bigoted exclusiveness of the wife was utterly incompatible with

the free and open-hearted fellowship with which the husband received

his acquaintances, of whatever sect or party. In a very few months,

therefore, it began to be whispered abroad that the hitherto happy and

joyous bachelor's-hall had become a scene of constant bickerings and

heartburnings.

But mere incongruity of tempers and habits was not, as was supposed by

their neighbors, the only source of domestic discord. This might in time

have entirely disappeared; had conjugal confidence only been allowed its

natural growth, all might have been passably well in the end, in spite

of such serious drawbacks; for, from the necessity of his nature, the

husband would in time have become completely subservient to the sterner

spirit of his wife, which, in turn, might have been mollified in some

degree amid the peaceful duties of home;--a state of things that has

existed in many families, which have, nevertheless, enjoyed a fair

share of domestic happiness in spite of this inversion of the natural

relations of their heads. But Mrs. Wilde had brought into her husband's

house that deadliest foe of domestic peace, an elderly, ill-tempered,

suspicious female relative, serving in the capacity of _confidante_.

This curse was embodied in the person of a much older sister, who

happened to be neither maid, wife, nor widow, and, having once effected

an entrance under the pretence of assisting to arrange the disordered

household-affairs, easily contrived to render her position a permanent

one. So soon as this was achieved, she appears to have begun her hateful

work of sowing discord between the new-married pair. Having long since

blighted her own hopes of happiness, she seemed to find no consolation

so sweet as wrecking that of others;--not that she had no love for her

sister; on the contrary, her love, such as it was, was really strong

and lasting; and in her fierce grief for that sister's death she met

a punishment almost equal to her deserts. Nor was it long before she

provided herself with a most effectual means of accomplishing her

malicious object, of inflaming the troubles of the household into which

she had intruded herself. This was the discovery, real or pretended, of

a former illicit connection between her brother-in-law and a pretty and

intelligent mulatto girl, about eighteen or nineteen years of age, who

was still retained in the family in the capacity of housemaid. Having

once struck this jarring chord, she continued to play upon it with

diabolical skill. To those who watched the course of her unholy labors,

the energy and ingenuity with which this wretched woman wrought at her

task, and the completeness of her success, would have seemed a subject

of admiration, if the result had not been so deplorable as to merge all

other emotions in indignant detestation.

So thoroughly had her design been accomplished in the course of a single

year, that the birth of as sweet a child as ever smiled upon fond

parents, instead of serving as a point of union between Captain Wilde

and his wife, only increased their estrangement by furnishing another

subject of contention. Alas! the peace of Eden was not more utterly

destroyed by the treacherous wiles of the serpent than that of this

ill-starred household by the whispers of this serpent in woman's shape.

Under her continual exasperations, Mrs. Wilde's temper, naturally harsh,

became at last so outrageous and unbridled as to render her unfortunate

husband's life one long course of humiliation and misery. Far from

taking any pains to hide their discords from the world, she seemed

to court observation by seizing every opportunity of inflicting

mortification upon him in public, reckless of the reflections such

improprieties might bring upon herself.

But why, it may be asked, did not both parties seek a separation, when

affairs had reached such a state as this? First, because Captain Wilde,

though advised thereto, naturally shrank from the scandal such a step

always occasions; and, on the other side, because his wife was gifted

with one of those intolerable tempers that make some women cling to a

partner they hate with a jealous tenacity which love could scarcely

inspire, simply for the reason that a separation would put an end to

their power, so dearly prized, of inflicting pain;--for hatred has its

jealousy, as well as love.

Of the perverse ingenuity of these two women in causing the deepest

mortification to the unfortunate gentleman, whenever Fate and his own

weakness gave them the power, we will notice one instance, on account of

the important influence it had in bringing about the denouement of this

domestic tragedy.

According to the kindly custom of that time, Captain Wilde had on one

occasion requested the assistance of some of his neighbors in treading

out his grain; and the party had set to work at dawn, in order to avail

themselves of the cooler portion of the day. After waiting with longing

ears for the sound of the breakfast-horn, they finally, at a late hour,

repaired to the house, uncalled. Here the host, supposing all to be

ready, led his friends unceremoniously into the dining-room, where he

was astonished, and not a little angered, to find his wife and sister

seated composedly at their meal, which they had already nearly finished,

with only the three customary plates on the table, and no apparent

preparation for a larger number. On his beginning to remonstrate in a

rather heated tone, his wife arose, and, remarking that she had not been

used to eat in company with common laborers, swept disdainfully from the

room, followed by her sister. No more unpardonable insult could have

been offered to Kentucky farmers, at the very foundation of whose social

creed lay the principle of equality, and of whose character an intense

and jealous feeling of personal dignity was the most salient feature:

for these were men of independent means, who had come rather to

superintend the labors of their negroes than to labor themselves,--such

occasions being regarded only as pleasant opportunities for free and

unrestrained sociability, far more agreeable than formal and ceremonious

visits. On these occasions, the host would conduct his friends over

his farm to survey the condition of his crops, or point out to their

admiration his fine cattle, or obtain their opinion concerning some

contemplated improvement;--a most admirable means of drawing closer the

bonds of neighborly feeling and interest. A more bitter mortification,

therefore, could hardly have been devised for one who always prided

himself on his open-hearted Kentucky hospitality even to strangers.

Justly enraged by such foolish and ill-timed rudeness, he flung a knife,

which he had idly taken up, violently upon the table, swearing that his

friends should, in his house, be treated as gentlemen; at the same time

calling to the mulatto, Fanny, he bade her prepare breakfast, and added,

in a tone but half-suppressed, "You are the only woman on the place

who behaves like a lady." This imprudent remark was overheard by the

ever-present sister-in-law, and the use she made of it may be imagined.

In this unpleasant state of his domestic relations, the character of

Captain Wilde Seemed to undergo an entire transformation. From being

remarkable for his love of quiet retirement, he became restless and

dissatisfied; and instead of laughing, as formerly, at public employment

as only vanity and vexation, he, now that a greater vexation assailed

him in his once peaceful home, eagerly sought relief, not, as a younger

or less virtuous man might have done, in dissipation, but in the

distractions of public business. But here again his evil fortune granted

the desired boon in a shape pregnant with future disaster. The hostility

of Mrs. Wilde's family, which had now become deeply excited,--combined

with his own political heterodoxy,--forbade any hope of attaining a

place by popular choice; and in an evil hour his friends succeeded in

procuring him the office of exciseman.

Now there is no peculiarity more marked in all the branches of the

Anglo-Saxon race than the extreme impatience with which they submit to

any direct interference of the government in the private affairs of the

citizens; and no form of such interference has ever been so generally

odious as the excise, and, by consequence, no officer so generally

detested as the exciseman. This feeling, on account of the very large

number of persons engaged in distilling, was then formidably strong in

Kentucky,--all the more so that this form of taxation was a favorite

measure of the existing Federal Administration. Those who ventured to

accept so hateful an office at the hands of so hated a government were

sure to make themselves highly unpopular. In time, when the people began

to learn their own strength and the weakness of the authorities,

the enforcement of the law became dangerous, and at last altogether

impossible. The writer has been told, by a gentleman holding a

responsible position under our judicial system, that the name of his

grandfather--the last Kentucky exciseman--to this day stands charged on

the government-books with thousands of dollars arrears, although he was

a man of great courage and not at all likely to be deterred from the

discharge of his duty by any ordinary obstacle.

Such was the place sought and obtained by the unfortunate Wilde as

a refuge from domestic wretchedness. The consequence it was easy to

foresee. In a few months, he who had been accustomed to universal

good-will became an object of almost as general dislike; and as people

are apt to attribute all sorts of evil to one who has by any means

incurred their hostility, and are never satisfied until they have

blackened the whole character in which they have found one offensive

quality, the family difficulties of the unpopular official soon became a

theme of common scandal, all the blame, of course, being laid upon him.

This state of things, disagreeable in itself, proved most unfortunate in

its influence on his subsequent fate; for, had he retained his previous

popularity in the county, the last deplorable catastrophe would

certainly never have happened: since every lawyer knows full well, that,

in capital cases especially, juries are merely the exponents of public

sentiment, and that the power of any judge to cause the excited

sympathies of a whole community to sink into calm indifference at the

railing of a jury-box is about as effective as was the command of the

Dane in arresting the in-rolling waters of the ocean. This is peculiarly

true in this country, where the people, both in theory and in fact, are

so completely sovereign that the institutions of government are only

instruments, having little capability of independent, and none at all of

antagonistic action. The skilful advocate, therefore, always watches the

crowd of eager faces without the bar, with eye as anxious and far more

prophetic than that with which he studies the formal countenances of the

panel whom he directly addresses.

There was one circumstance, arising indirectly from his public

employment, that exercised no trivial influence upon Captain Wilde's

fate. On one occasion, while engaged with a brother-official in

arranging their books preparatory to the annual settlement, his wife,

becoming enraged because he failed to attend instantly to her orders

concerning some trifling domestic matter, rushed into his study and

caught up an armful of papers, which she attempted to throw into the

fire. The documents were of great importance; and to prevent her

carrying her childish purpose into execution, her husband was obliged

to seize her quickly and violently, and drag her from the hearth. The

reader will hardly recognize this incident in the form in which it was

afterward detailed from the witness-stand; and it is only on account

of the effect which this and other occurrences of like nature had in

bringing about the final event of our history, that we take the trouble

to narrate matters so trifling and uninteresting; for it appeared that

every incident of the kind was carefully registered in the memory of

the Erinnys of this devoted household, whence it came out magnified and

distorted into a brutal and unprovoked outrage.

Wretched indeed must have been the state of that family in which such

scenes were allowed to meet the eyes of strangers; and again it may be

asked, Why did not Captain Wilde take measures to dissolve a union

that had resulted in so much unhappiness, and in which all hope of

improvement must now have disappeared? Such a step would certainly have

been wise; nor could the strictest moralist have found aught to censure

therein. But it was now too late. No observer of human affairs has

failed to notice how surely a stronger character gains ascendency over a

weaker with which it is brought into familiar contact. No law of man can

abrogate this great law of Nature. Talk as we may about the power of

knowledge or intellect or virtue, the whole ordering of society shows

that it is strength of character which fixes the relative status of

individuals. In whatever community we may live, we need only look around

to discover that its real leaders are not the merely intelligent,

educated, and good, but the energetic, the self-asserting, the

aggressive. Nor will mere passive strength of will prevent subjection;

for how often do we see a spirit, whose only prominent characteristic is

a restless and tireless pugnacity, hold in complete subserviency those

who are far superior in actual strength of mind, purely through the

apathy of the latter, and their indisposition to live in a state of

constant effort! It is because this petty domineering temper is found

much oftener in women than in men, that we see a score of henpecked

husbands to one ill-used wife. Woe to the man who falls into this kind

of slavery to a wicked woman! for through him she will commit acts she

would never dare in her own person; and a double woe to him, if he be

not as wicked and hardened as his mistress! The bargain of the old

Devil-bought magicians was profitable, compared with his; since he gets

nothing whatever for the soul he surrenders up.

In the present case, a couple of years sufficed for the energetic and

ever-belligerent temper of the wife to subdue completely the mild and

peaceable nature of the husband. At her bidding most of his former

acquaintances were discarded; and even his warmest friends and nearest

relations, no longer meeting the old hearty welcome, gradually ceased

to visit his house. But the bitterest effect of this weak and culpable

abdication of his rights was experienced by his slaves. Sad indeed for

them was the change from the ease and abundance of the bachelor's-hall,

where slavery meant little more than a happy exemption from care, to

their present condition, in which it meant hopeless submission to the

power of a capricious and cruel mistress. The worst form of female

tyranny is that exhibited on a Southern plantation, under the sway of a

termagant. Her power to afflict is so complete and all-pervading, that

not an hour, nay, hardly a minute of the victim's life is exempt, if

the disposition exist to exercise it. Besides, this species of domestic

oppression has this in common with all the worst tyrannies which have

been most feared and hated by men: the severities are ordered by those

who neither execute them nor witness their execution,--that being

left to agents, usually hardened to their office, and who dare not be

merciful, even if so inclined. It adds two-fold to the bitterness of

such tyranny, that the tyrant is able to acquire a sort of exemption

from the weakness of pity. It is wisely ordered that few human beings

shall feel aught but pain in looking upon the extreme bodily anguish of

their fellow-men; and when a monster appears who seems to contradict

this benign law, he is embalmed as a monster, and transmitted to future

times along with such _rara aves_ as Caligula, Domitian, and Nana Sahib.

And here--as a Southern man, brought up in the midst of a household of

slaves--let me remark, that the worst feature of our system of slavery

is the possibility of the negroes falling into the hands of a brutal

owner capable of exercising all the power of inflicting misery which the

law gives him.

But the natural law of compensation is universal; and if the most

wretched object in existence be a slave subject to the sway of a brutal

owner, certainly the next is the humane master who has to do with a

sullen, malicious, or dishonest negro,--while for one instance of the

former, there are a hundred of the latter who would willingly give up

the whole value of their human chattels in order to get rid of the

vexations they occasion. And where master and man were equally bad, we

have known cases in which it was really hard to say which contrived to

inflict most misery: the one might get used to blows and curses so as

not much to mind them, but the other could never escape the agonies of

rage into which his contumacious chattel was able to throw him at any

time.

Captain Wilde's temper was more than usually mild and lenient; and he

was probably the most wretched being on his own plantation during the

last two years of his life,--a day seldom passing that he was not

compelled to inflict some sort of punishment upon his negroes. These,

however, never ceased to feel for him the respectful attachment inspired

by his kindness during the happy years of his bachelor-life; but,

strange as it may seem, that feeling was now mingled with a sort of

pity; for they well knew the painful reluctance with which he obeyed the

harsh commands of his wife. And of all who mourned the hapless fate

of this unfortunate gentleman, none mourned more bitterly, and few

cherished his memory so long or so tenderly, as these humble dependants,

who best knew his real character.

But it was upon the mulatto girl Fanny, particularly, that the

tyrannical cruelty of Mrs. Wilde was poured out in all its severity.

From some cause,--whether because her duties rendered her more liable

to commit irritating faults, or whether, being always in sight, she was

simply the most convenient object of abuse, or whether on account of the

alleged former intimacy between this girl and her master,--certain it

is that the hatred with which the mistress pursued her had something in

it almost diabolical. And she seemed to take a peculiar satisfaction

in making her husband the instrument of her persecutions: an ingenious

method of punishing both her victims, if the motive were the last of

those above suggested. And truly bitter it must have been to both, when

the hand that had been only too kind was now forced to the infliction

even of stripes; so that one hardly knows which to pity most: though,

if the essence of punishment be degradation, certainly the legal slave

suffered less of it than the moral one who had fallen so low beneath the

dominion of a termagant wife. But let it be ever remembered to the honor

of this wretched daughter of bondage, that, in spite of all, she never

lost that devoted attachment for her master which in one of a more

favored race might be called by a softer name. For, whatever may have

been his feelings toward her, there can remain no doubt of the nature of

hers for him,--so touchingly displayed at a subsequent period, when she

cast away the terror of violent death, so strong in all her race, and

sought, by a voluntary confession of guilt never imputed to her, to

save him by taking his place upon the scaffold. Surely, such heroic

self-sacrifice suffices to

"sublime

Her dark despair and plead for its one crime."

It was probably on a discovery of this feeling in the girl that the

intermeddling sister-in-law founded her charge against the master.

But there is a point beyond which human endurance cannot go,--at

which milder natures turn to voluntary death as a refuge from further

suffering, and fiercer ones begin to contemplate crime with savage

complacency. Towards this point the ruthless and persevering cruelty of

these two women was now rapidly driving their wretched victim, and soon,

very soon, they were to learn that they had been hunting, not a lamb,

but a tigress, whose single spring, when brought to bay, would be as

quick, as sure, and as deadly as was ever made from an Indian jungle.

For now, near the end of the third year of Captain Wilde's married life,

its wretched scenes of discord and tyranny were about to be closed in a

catastrophe that was to overwhelm a great community with consternation

and horror, and blot an entire family out of existence almost in a

single night,--a catastrophe in which Providence, true to that ideal of

perfect justice called poetical, working out the punishment of two

of the actors by means of their own inhumanity, at the same time

mysteriously involved two others,--one clothed in all the innocence

of infancy, and the other guilty only through weakness and as the

instrument of another. Seldom has destruction been more sudden or more

complete, and never, perhaps, was so annihilating a blow dealt by so

weak a hand.

Those who remember the early times of Kentucky know that the place of

the agricultural and mechanics' fairs of the present day was supplied

by "big meetings," which, under the various names of associations,

camp-meetings, and basket-meetings, continued in full popularity to a

quite recent period, and were at last partially suppressed on account

of the immorality which they occasioned and encouraged. It was to these

holy fairs--as now to secular ones--that the wealth and fashion of

early Kentucky crowded for the purpose of displaying themselves most

conspicuously before the eyes of assembled counties. Mrs. Wilde, like

most women of her temper, was passionately fond of such public triumphs,

and had determined, at a camp-meeting soon to be held in the vicinity,

to outshine all her rural neighbors in splendor. For the full

realization of this ambition, a new carriage was, in her opinion,

absolutely necessary. This fact she communicated to her husband, and

upon some demur on his part, a thing now very rare, her temper, as

usual, broke forth in a storm of reproach and abuse, so that the poor

man, completely subdued, was glad to purchase peace by acquiescence

in what his judgment regarded as a foolish expense; and he prepared

immediately to set off for L---- to procure the coveted vehicle. But

before he had mounted, his wife, yet hot from their recent altercation,

discovered or affected to discover some negligence on the part of the

mulatto girl, who was engaged in nursing the child, which was at this

time suffering from a dangerous illness. Now the one tender trait of

this violent woman was intense love for her offspring; but it was a

love that, far from softening her manner toward others, partook, on the

contrary, of the fierceness of her general character, and became, like

that of a wild animal for its young, a source of constant apprehension

to those whose duty compelled them to approach its object. So now,

seizing the weeping culprit by the hair, she dragged her to the door,

and, after exhausting her own powers of maltreatment, called to her

husband and ordered him to bring, on his return, a new cowhide,--"For

you shall," cried she, in uncontrollable rage, "give this wretch, in the

morning, two hundred lashes!" It was a brutal threat, falling from the

lips of one who was called a lady: for, of all tortures, that of

the cowhide is for the moment the most intolerable, in its sharp,

penetrating agony, as is well known by those who remember even a

moderate application of it to their own person in school-boy days. The

victim knew that the execution of the barbarous menace would be strict

to the letter, and that it would be but little preferable to death

itself. Yet, in spite of this, she now, for the first time, failed to

cower and tremble, but arose and faced her oppressor, erect and defiant.

The last drop had now been dashed into the cup of endurance,--the final

blow had been struck, under which the human spirit either falls crushed

and prostrated forever, or from which it springs up tempered to

adamantine hardness, and incapable thenceforth of feeling either fear

for itself or pity for its smiter. That one moment had entirely reversed

the relations of the two, making the slave mistress of her mistress's

fate, while the latter thenceforward held her very existence at the will

of her slave. The cruel woman had raised up for herself that enemy more

terrible even to throned tyrants than an army with banners: for there

is something truly terrific in the almost omnipotent power of harm

possessed by any intelligent being, whom hatred, or fanaticism, or

suffering has wound up to that point of desperation where it is willing

to throw away its own life in order to reach that of an adversary,

--such desperation as inspired the gladiator Maternus, in his romantic

expedition from the woods of Transylvania through the marshes of

Pannonia and the Alpine passes, to strike the lord of the Roman world

in the recesses of his own palace, and in the presence of his thousand

guards. He who has provoked such hostility can know no safety, but in

the destruction of his enemy,--a fact well understood by the elder

Napoleon, who, however he might admire, never pardoned those whose

attempts on his person showed them utterly reckless of the safety of

their own.

And now, for a few hours, the whole interest of our narrative centres in

her whom that moment had so completely transformed and made already a

murderess in heart and in purpose. And how thoroughly must that heart

have been steeled, and how entire must have been the banishment of all

counteracting feelings, when she could for a whole day, in the midst of

a household of fellow-servants, and under the watchful eyes of an angry

mistress, continue to discharge her usual tasks, bearing this deadly

purpose in her breast, yet never, by word, look, or gesture, betray the

slightest indication of its dreadful secret,--no, not even so much as to

draw suspicion toward herself after the discovery of the crime! There

was no time or opportunity for preparation, of which little was indeed

necessary; for human life is a frail thing, and a determined hand is

always strong. She had already undergone the most effectual preparation

for such a task,--that of the soul; and when that is once thoroughly

accomplished, not much more is needed: a fact which seems not to be

understood by those patriotic assassins--French and Italian--whose

elaborately contrived infernal-machines do but betray the anxious

precautions taken to insure lives which, according to their own

professions, have been rendered valueless by tyranny, and ought

therefore to be the more freely risked. Felton and Charlotte Corday

understood their business better; but even their preparations may be

called elaborate, compared with those of this poor slave-girl.

Captain Wilde returned late in the evening with the coveted coach; and

the whole family, white and black, of course, turned out to admire that

crowning addition to the family splendor. But among the noisy group of

the latter there stood one who gazed upon the object of admiration

with thoughts far different from those of her companions; and soon the

careless mirth of all was checked and chilled into silent fear, when

they saw their master take from beneath one of the seats a new specimen

of the well-known green cow-skin, and hand it, with a troubled,

deprecating look, to his wife. Ah! they all knew that appealing look

well, and the hard, relentless frown by which it was answered, as well

as they knew the use of the dreaded instrument itself. But there was

only one among them who comprehended its immediate purpose. The glance

of cruel meaning which the tyranness, after having examined the lithe,

twisted rod critically for an instant, cast upon the object of her

malice, probably banished the last lingering hesitation from the breast

of the latter,--who turned away ostensibly to the performance of her

accustomed duties, but in reality to settle the details of a crime

unsurpassed in coolness and resolution by aught recorded of pirate or

highwayman. It was probably during the hours immediately succeeding

Captain Wilde's return that her deadly purpose shaped itself forth in

the plan finally executed; because it was not till then that she became

cognizant of all the circumstances which entered into its formation.

Seldom have more nicely calculated combinations entered into the plots

of criminals, and never was a plot depending on so many chances more

completely successful. Yet the pivot of the whole, as often in more

extensive schemes of homicide, is to be found in the reckless daring and

utter disregard of personal safety manifested throughout. For this alone

she seems to have made no calculations and taken no precautions;

her whole mind being bent apparently on the solution of one single

difficulty,--how to approach her enemy undetected.

As to the details of this affair, let us mention one or two facts, and

then the conduct of the murderess will itself explain them. We have

already stated that the only child of Captain and Mrs. Wilde, an infant

about eighteen months old, was at this time dangerously ill. For a

fortnight it had been the custom of the parents to sit up with it on

alternate nights, this night it being the father's regular turn to

perform that duty; but his trip of twenty-five or thirty miles had

fatigued him so much that it was judged best for his wife to relieve

him,--his slumbers being usually so profound as to be almost lethargic,

so that, when once fairly asleep, the loudest noises even in the same

room would fail to arouse him, and it being feared, therefore, that the

little patient might suffer, if left to his care in his present state of

weariness. In the same room slept a young negro girl, whose duty it was

to carry the child into the open air when occasion required,--an office

which Fanny herself had more than once performed. The reader will note

how ingeniously every one of these circumstances was woven into the

girl's scheme of death, and how each was made subservient to the end in

view.

* * * * *

At ten o'clock on the night of the 18th of July, 17--, everything had

become quiet about that lonely farm-house, so completely isolated in the

midst of its wide plantation that the barking of the dogs at the nearest

dwellings was barely heard in the profound stillness. A dim light, as

if from a deeply shaded candle, shone from one of the casements to the

right of the hall-door, showing where the parents watched by the bed of

their suffering infant. Along the high-road, which, a few rods in front,

stretched white and silent in the moonlight between its long lines of

worm-fences, a solitary traveller on horseback was journeying at this

hour. This gentleman afterward remembered being more than usually

impressed by the air of peace and repose that reigned about the place,

as he rode under the tall locust-trees which skirted the yard and cast

their dark shadows over into the highway. But he did not see a female

form flitting furtively from the negro-quarters in the rear, toward the

house; and a shade of suspicion might have crossed his mind, had he

glanced back a moment later and beheld that form approach the lighted

window with stealthy, cautious steps, and peer long and intently through

the partially drawn curtains upon the scene within, then, stooping low,

glide along the moonlit wall and disappear beneath the short flight of

wooden steps that led up to the front-door.

Here ensconced, safe from observation, the murderess lay listening to

every sound in the sick-room above. Ten,--eleven,--twelve,--one,--sounded

from the clock in the dining-room on the other side of the hall.

For three hours has she crouched there, but the opportunity

she expected has not yet come. The moon was setting and deep

darkness beginning to envelop the earth, when, just as she was about to

steal forth and regain her cabin unobserved, the door above her head

opened, and the young negro nurse, still half-asleep, came forth, stood

for a moment upon the topmost step to recover her senses, and then, with

the wailing infant in her arms, descended and passed round the corner of

the house. She had barely disappeared when the murderess crept from her

lair, and, swift and noiseless as a serpent or a cat, glided up the

steps through the open door, and in another moment had again concealed

herself beneath the leaves of a large table that stood in the hall

close to the door of the sick-room, which, standing ajar, gave her an

opportunity of studying once more the situation of things within. In the

corner farthest from her lurking-place stood the bed on which her master

was slumbering, concealing with its curtains the front-window against

which it was placed. At the foot of this, under the other front-window,

was the pallet of the nurse, and midway between it and the door through

which she peered was the low trundle-bed of the sick child, on which at

this moment lay the mother,--soon to become a mother again; while at

the farther end of the room a candle was burning dimly upon the hearth.

Thus, for half an hour, the murderess crouched within a few feet of her

victim and watched, noting every circumstance with the eye of a beast of

prey about to spring. At the end of that time the nurse returned, placed

the quieted child beside its mother, and, closing the door, retired to

her own pallet, whence her loud breathing almost immediately told that

she was asleep. Still with bated breath the mulatto waited, stooping

with her ear at the keyhole till the regular respirations of the mother

and the softened panting of the little invalid assured her that all

was safe. Then, at last, turning the handle of the latch silently and

gradually, she glided into the room and stood by the side of her victim.

The whole range of imaginative literature cannot furnish an incident

of more absorbing interest; nor can the whole history of the theatre

exhibit a situation of more tremendous scenical power than was presented

at this moment in that chamber of doom. The four unconscious sleepers

with the murderess in the midst of them, bending with hard, glittering

eyes over her prey, while around them all the huge shadows cast by the

dim, untrimmed light, like uncouth monsters, rose, flitted, and fell, as

if in a goblin-dance of joy over the scene of approaching guilt. Sleep,

solemn at any time, becomes almost awful when we gaze upon it amid the

stillness of night, so mysterious is it, and so near akin to the deeper

mystery of death,--so peaceful, with a peace so much like that of the

grave: men could scarcely comprehend the idea of the one, if they were

not acquainted with the reality of the other. There lay the mother, with

her arms around her sleeping child, whose painful breathing showed that

it suffered even while it slept. Such a spectacle might have moved the

hardest heart to pity; but it possessed no such power over that of the

desperate slave, whose vindictive purpose never wavered for an instant.

Passing round the bed, she stooped and softly encircled the emaciated

little neck with her fingers. One quick, strong gripe,--the poor, weak

hands were thrown up, a soft gasp and a slight spasm, and it was done.

The frail young life, which had known little except suffering, and which

disease would probably have extinguished in a few hours or days, was

thus at once and almost painlessly cut short by the hand of violence.

And now at last the way was clear. "I knew," said she afterwards, "the

situation of my mistress; and I thought that by jumping upon her with my

knees I should kill her at once." Disturbed by the slight struggle of

the dying child, Mrs. Wilde moved uneasily for a moment, and again sunk

into quietude, lying with her face--that hard, cold face--upward. This

was the opportunity for the destroyer. Bounding with all her might from

the floor, she came down with bended knees upon the body of her victim.

But the shock, though severe, was not fatal; and with a loud cry of

"Oh, Captain Wilde, help me!" she, by a convulsive effort, threw her

assailant to the floor. Though stunned and bewildered by the suddenness

and violence of the attack, the wretched woman in that terrible moment

recognized her enemy, and felt the desperate purpose with which she was

animated, and so recognizing and so feeling, must have known in that

momentary interval all that the human soul can know of despair and

terror. But it was only for a moment; for, before she could utter a

second cry for help, the baffled assailant was again upon her with the

bound of a tigress. A blind and breathless struggle ensued between the

desperate ferocity of the slave and the equally desperate terror of the

mistress; while faster and wilder went the huge, dim shadows in their

goblin-dance, as the yellow flame flared and flickered in the agitated

air. For a few moments, indeed, the result of the struggle seemed

doubtful, and Mrs. Wilde at length, by a violent effort, raised herself

almost upright, with the infuriated slave still hanging to her throat;

but the latter converted this into an advantage, by suddenly throwing

her whole weight upon the breast of her mistress, thus casting her

violently backward across the head-board of the bed, and dislocating the

spine. Another half-uttered cry, a convulsive struggle, and the deed was

accomplished. One slight shiver crept over the limbs, and then the body

hung limp and lifeless where it had fallen,--the head resting upon the

floor, on which the long raven hair was spread abroad in a disordered

mass. The victor gazed coolly on her work while recovering breath; and

then, to make assurance doubly sure, took up, as she thought, a stocking

from the bed and deliberately tied it tight round the neck of the

corpse. Then, gliding to the door, she quitted the scene of her fearful

labors as noiselessly as she had entered, leaving behind her not one

trace of her presence,--but leaving, unintentionally, a most fatal false

trace, which suspicion continued to follow until it had run an entirely

innocent man to his grave. The last act of the drama of woman's passion

and woman's revenge was over; the tragedy of man's suffering and

endurance still went on.

How or by whom the terrible spectacle in that chamber of death was

first discovered we are not told. All we know, from the reports of the

negroes, is, that Captain Wilde, who seemed stupefied at first, suddenly

passed into a state of excitement little short of distraction,--now

raving, as if to an imaginary listener, and then questioning and

threatening those about him with incoherent violence. To these simple

observers such conduct was entirely incomprehensible; but we may easily

suppose that at this moment the unfortunate man first realized the

fearful nature of the circumstances which surrounded him, and perceived

the abyss which had yawned so suddenly at his feet. And no wonder that

he shrank back from the prospect, overwhelmed for the moment with

consternation and despair,--not the prospect of death, but of a

degradation far worse to the proud spirit of the Kentucky gentleman,

on whose good name even political hatred had never been able to fix a

stain.

The terrified negroes carried the alarm to the nearest neighbors, and

soon the report of this appalling occurrence was flying like lightning

toward the utmost bounds of the county. The first stranger who reached

the scene of death was Mr. Summers, formerly an intimate friend of

Captain Wilde. When he entered the room, he found the poor gentleman

on his knees beside the body of his child, with his face buried in the

bed-clothes. At the sound of footsteps he raised his wild, tearless

eyes, exclaiming, "My God! my God! Mr. Summers, my wife has been

murdered here, in my own room, and it will be laid on me!" Shocked by

the almost insane excitement of his old friend, and sensible of the

imprudence of his words, Summers begged him to compose himself, pointing

out the danger of such language. But the terrible thought had mastered

his mind with a monomaniacal power, and to every effort at consolation

from those who successively came in the only reply was, "Oh, my God,

it will all be laid upon me!" Fortunately, those who heard these

expressions were old friends, who, although they had been long

unfamiliar, knew the native uprightness of the man, and still felt

kindly toward one whose estrangement they knew was the effect of weak

submission to the dictation of his wife, not the result of any change in

his own feelings. They regarded his wild words as only the incoherent

utterances of a mind bewildered by horror, and were anxious to put an

end to the harrowing scene, and remove the stricken man as soon as

possible from the observation of a mixed crowd that was now rapidly

assembling from all directions, many of whom knew Captain Wilde only

in his unpopular capacity of exciseman, and would therefore be apt to

suspect a darker explanation of his strange behavior.

So shocking had been the sight presented to their eyes, on entering

the room, that hitherto no one had had sufficient presence of mind to

examine the bodies closely; but at last Mr. Summers, cooler than the

rest, approached to raise that of Mrs. Wilde, and then, for the first

time, perceived the bandage about her neck. It proved to be _a white

silk neckerchief_, which Summers removed and began to examine. As he

did so, his face was seen to grow suddenly pale as death. All pressed

anxiously forward to see, and a silent, but fearfully significant

look passed round the circle; for in one corner, embroidered in large

letters, was the name of _Cyril Wilde_. As silently every eye sought the

devoted man, and on many countenances the look of doubt settled at once

into one of conviction, when they saw that he wore no cravat; and to

many ears the heart-broken moan of the wretched husband and father,

which a moment before seemed only the foreboding of over-sensitive

innocence, now sounded like the voice of self-accusing guilt. So great

is the power of imagination in modifying our beliefs!

After such a discovery an arrest followed as a matter of course; and a

popular feeling adverse to the accused quickly manifested itself in

the community. But it is pleasant to know, that, in spite of all

appearances, many of Captain Wilde's old friends never lost faith in his

innocence, or hesitated to renew in his hour of adversity the kindly

relations that had existed before his marriage; while his own

kindred stood by him and bravely fought his hopeless battle to the

last,--employing as his advocate the celebrated John Breckenridge, who

was then almost without a rival at the Kentucky bar. But, on the other

hand, his wife's family pursued their unfortunate relative with a

savageness of hatred hardly to be paralleled. Having hunted him to the

very foot of the scaffold, their persevering malice seemed unsated even

by the sight of their victim suspended as a felon before their very

eyes; for it was reported, at the time, that two of the murdered woman's

brothers were seen upon the ground during the execution.

And now it was that the unpopularity resulting from Captain Wilde's

official employment manifested its most baleful effects. Had he

possessed at this crisis the same general good-will he had enjoyed four

years before, he might have bid defiance to the rage of his enemies, and

have escaped, in spite of all the suspicious circumstances by which he

stood environed. For the general drift of sentiment in the West has

always been against capital penalties, and it is next to impossible

to carry such penalties into effect against a popular favorite. In a

country like this we might as soon expect to see the hands of a clock

move in a direction contrary to the machinery by which it is governed,

as a jury to run counter to plainly declared popular feelings. There may

now and then be instances of their acquitting contrary to the general

sentiment, where that sentiment is unimpassioned; but we much doubt

whether there has ever occurred a single example of a jury convicting a

person in whose favor the sympathy of a whole community was warmly and

earnestly expressed. Of such sympathy Captain Wilde had none; for to the

great majority he was known only as the exciseman, and as such was an

object of hostility. Not that this hostility at any time took the form

of insult and abuse,--for we are proud to say that outside of the large

towns such disgraceful exhibitions of feeling are unknown,--but it

left the minds of the general mass liable to be operated on by all

the suspicious circumstances of the case, and by the slanders of the

personal enemies of the accused.

On the 23d of November, an immense crowd of people, both men and women,

were assembled in the court-house at ---- to witness a trial which was

to fix a dark stain on the judicial annals of Kentucky, and in which,

for the thousandth time, a court of justice was to be led fatally astray

by the accursed thing called Circumstantial Evidence, and made the

instrument of that most deplorable of all human tragedies, a formal,

legalized murder. It is one of the most glaring inconsistencies of our

law, that it admits, in a trial where the life of a citizen is at stake,

a species of testimony which it regards as too inconclusive and too

liable to misconstruction to be allowed in a civil suit involving, it

may be, less than the value of a single dollar. True, it is a favorite

maxim of prosecutors, that "circumstances will not lie"; but it requires

little acquaintance with the history of criminal trials to prove that

circumstantial evidence has murdered more innocent men than all the

false witnesses and informers who ever disgraced courts of justice by

their presence; and the slightest reflection will convince us that this

shallow sophism contains even less practical truth than the general mass

of proverbs and maxims, proverbially false though they be. For not only

is the chance of falsehood, on the part of the witness who details the

circumstances, greater,--since a false impression can be conveyed with

far less risk of detection by distortion and exaggeration of a fact than

by the invention of a direct lie,--but there is the additional danger of

an honest misconception on his part; and every lawyer knows how hard

it is for a dull witness to distinguish between the facts and his

impressions of them, and how impossible it often is to make a witness

detail the former without interpolating the latter. But the greatest

risk of all is that the jury themselves may misconstrue the

circumstances, and draw unwarranted conclusions therefrom. It is an

awful assumption of responsibility to leap to conclusions in such cases,

and the leap too often proves to have been made in the dark. God help

the wretch who is arraigned on suspicious appearances before a jury who

believe that "circumstances won't lie"! for the Justice that presides at

such a trial is apt to prove as blind and capricious as Chance herself.

In reviewing the present trial in particular, one may well feel puzzled

to decide which of these deities presided over its conduct. A Greek or

Roman would have said, Neither,--but a greater than either,--Fate; and

we might almost adopt the old heathen notion, as we watch the downward

course of the doomed gentleman from this point, and note how invariably

every attempt to ward off destruction is defeated, as if by the

persevering malice of some superior power. We shall soon see the most

popular and influential attorney of the State driven from the case by an

awkward misunderstanding; another, hardly inferior, expire almost in

the very act of pleading it; and, finally, when the real criminal

comes forward, at the last moment, to avert the ruin which she has

involuntarily drawn down upon the head of her beloved master, and

take his place upon the scaffold, we shall behold her heroic offer of

self-sacrifice frustrated by influences the most unexpected,--political

influences which--with shame be it told--were sufficient to induce a

governor of Kentucky to withhold the exercise of executive clemency, the

most glorious prerogative intrusted to our chief magistrates, and

which it ought to have been a most pleasing privilege to grant: for,

incredible as it may seem, Governor ---- knew, when he signed the

death-warrant, that the man he was consigning to an ignominious grave

was innocent of the crime for which he was to suffer.

The trial was opened in the presence of a crowded assembly, among whom

it was easy to discern that general conviction of the prisoner's guilt

so chilling to the spirits of a defendant and his counsel, and so much

deprecated by the latter, because he knows too well how far it goes

toward a prejudgment of his cause. Several of the most prominent members

of the bar had been retained by the family of Mrs. Wilde to assist the

State's attorney in the prosecution. In the defence John Breckenridge

stood alone, needing no help; for all knew that whatever man could do in

behalf of his client would be done by him. The prisoner himself, upon

whom all eyes were turned, appeared dejected, but calm, like one who had

resigned all hope. The ominous foreboding, which had so overcome him on

the fatal morning of the murder, had never left him for a single moment.

From that hour he had looked upon himself as doomed, and had yielded

only a passive acquiescence in the measures of defence proposed by

his friends, awaiting the fate which he regarded as inevitable with

a patience almost apathetic. Adversity brought out in bold relief

qualities that might have sustained a cause whose victories are

martyrdoms, but how useless to one requiring active heroism!

All the damaging facts attending the discovery of the murder--the

failure of any signs of a stranger's presence in the apartment, the

peculiar behavior of the accused, the finding of his cravat on the neck

of the corpse, his acknowledgment of having worn it on the previous

day--were fully, but impartially, detailed by the witnesses for the

Commonwealth. No one could deny that the circumstances were strongly

against the prisoner: and these shadows, at best, and too often mere

delusive mirages of truth, the law allows to be weighed against the life

of a man. Against these shadows all the powers of Breckenridge were

taxed to the uttermost; and he might have succeeded, for his eloquence

was most persuasive, and his influence over the minds of the people

nearly unlimited, had not a false witness appeared to add strength by

deliberate perjuries to a case already strong. It was the ungrateful

sister-in-law of the accused, who had owed to him a home and an asylum

from the merited scorn of her family and the world, who now came forward

to complete the picture of her own detestable character, and put the

finishing hand to her unhallowed work, by swearing away that life which

her arts had rendered scarcely worth defending, could death have come

unaccompanied by disgrace. With a manner betraying suppressed, but

ill-concealed eagerness, and in language prompt and fluent, as if

reciting by rote a carefully kept journal, she went on to detail every

fault or neglect or impatient act of her relative, not sparing exposure

of the most delicate domestic events, at the same time carefully

suppressing all mention of his provocations. In reply to the question,

whether she had ever witnessed any violence that led her to fear

personal danger to her sister, she replied, that, on one occasion,

Captain Wilde, being displeased at something in relation to the

preparation of a meal, seized a large carving-knife and flung it at his

wife, who only escaped further outrage by flying from the house. On

another occasion, she remembered, he became furiously angry because her

sister wished him to see some guests, and, seizing her by the hair,

dragged her to the door of his study, and cast her into the hall so

violently that she lay senseless upon the floor until accidentally

discovered,--her husband not even calling assistance. It is easy to

imagine what an effect such exposures of the habitual brutality of the

man, narrated by a near relation of the sufferer, and interrupted at

proper intervals by sobs and tears, would have upon an impulsive jury,

obliged to derive their knowledge of the case wholly from such a source,

and already strongly impressed by the circumstantial details with a

presumption unfavorable to the defendant. Now, since there were other

persons in the court-house who had witnessed these two scenes of alleged

maltreatment, it may seem strange that they were not brought forward

to contradict this woman on those two points, which would at once have

destroyed the effect of her entire testimony,--the maxim, _Falsum in

uno, falsum in omnibus_, being always readily applied in such cases. Had

this been done, a reaction of popular feeling would almost certainly

have followed in favor of the accused, which might have borne him safely

through, in spite of all the presumptive proof against him. For nothing

is truer than Lord Clarendon's observation, that, "when a man is shown

to be less guilty than he is charged, people are very apt to consider

him more innocent than he may actually be." But in this case the

falsehood was secured from exposure by its very magnitude, until it was

too late for such exposure to be of any benefit to the prisoner. The

persons who had beheld the scenes as they really occurred never thought

of identifying them with brutal outrages, now narrated under oath, at

which their hearts grew hard toward the unmanly perpetrator as they

listened.

Against the strong array of facts and fictions presented by the

prosecution the only circumstance that could be urged by the counsel for

the prisoner was, that the child was murdered along with the mother;

and this could only avail to strengthen a presumption of innocence, had

innocence been otherwise rendered probable; but when a conviction of

his guilt had been arrived at already, it merely served to increase the

atrocity of his crime, and to insure the enforcement of its penalty.

After a two days' struggle, in which every resource of reason and

eloquence was exhausted by the defendant's counsel, the judge proceeded

to a summing up which left the jury scarcely an option, even had they

been inclined to acquit. The latter withdrew in the midst of a deep and

solemn silence, while the respectful demeanor of the spectators showed

that at last a feeling of pity was beginning to steal into their hearts

for the unhappy gentleman, who still sat, as he had done during those

two long days of suspense, with his face buried in his hands, as

motionless as a statue. A profound stillness reigned in the hall during

the absence of the jury, broken only occasionally by a stifled sob from

some of the ladies present. After an absence of less than an hour the

jury returned and handed in a written verdict; and as the fatal word

"Guilty" fell from the white lips of the agitated clerk, the calmest

face in that whole vast assembly was that of him whom it doomed to

the ignominious death of a felon. And calm he had been ever since the

dreadful morning of his arrest; for the vial of wrath had then been

broken upon his head, and he had tasted the whole bitterness of an agony

which can be endured but a short while, and can never be felt a second

time. For, as intense heat quickly destroys the vitality of the nerves

on which it acts, and as flesh once deeply cauterized by fire is

thenceforth insensible to impressions of pain, so the soul over which

one of the fiery agonies of life has passed can never experience a

repetition thereof. Besides, it is well known that the anticipation of

an unjust accusation is far more agitating to a virtuous man than the

reality, which is sure to arouse that strange martyr-spirit wherewith

injustice always arms its victim, and supported by which alone even the

most timid men have often suffered with fortitude, and the most unworthy

died with dignity.

At that time the judicial arrangements of Kentucky allowed an appeal,

in criminal cases, from the Circuit to the District Court; and it

was determined to carry this cause before the latter tribunal, Mr.

Breckenridge declaring that he believed he should be able to reverse the

verdict. On what ground he founded this opinion we do not know: whether

he felt convinced that the local prejudice against his client and the

influence of his enemies in the County of ---- had mainly contributed to

bring about the unfavorable result of the present hearing, and he hoped

to escape these adverse agencies by a change of venue,--or whether

he counted on a change of public feeling after the first burst of

excitement had subsided, to bear him through,--or whether he had

discovered the falsehood of the testimony of the sister-in-law,--or,

finally, whether it was that he had obtained a clearer and more

favorable insight into the case, and recognized grounds of hope

therein,--it is impossible now to say. But it is certain, that to

the defendant and his friends he declared his confidence of a final

acquittal, if the cause were transferred to the appellate court; and

John Breckenridge was not a man to boast emptily, or to hold out hopes

which he knew could never be realized. But at this crisis occurred a

strange misunderstanding, which drove from the support of the wretched

victim of Fate the only man who thoroughly understood the case in all

its minutest details, and would have been most likely to conduct it to

a happy termination. When the preparations for the last struggle were

almost completed, and the time set for the final trial drew near, Mr.

McC----, who, as Captain Wilde's brother-in-law, had been most active

and zealous in his behalf, was informed by some officious intermeddler

that Breckenridge had said in confidential conversation among his

friends, "that the case was entirely desperate, that he had no hope

whatever of altering the verdict by an appeal, and the family would save

money by letting the law take its course, there being no doubt of the

justice of the sentence." Mr. McC----, believing that he might rely on

the word of his informant, unfortunately, without making any inquiry as

to the truth of the tale, and without assigning any reason, wrote to Mr.

Breckenridge a curt letter of dismissal, and immediately employed George

---- to conduct the further defence. This gentleman, surpassed by no

man in Kentucky as a logician, lawyer, and orator, was inferior to the

discarded attorney in that great requisite of a jury-lawyer, personal

popularity, besides laboring under the disadvantage of being new to the

case, and having but a short time to make himself acquainted with its

details. Personal pique and professional punctilio, of course, withheld

his predecessor from affording any further assistance or advice in a

business from which he had been so summarily dismissed. We cannot now

measure accurately the effect of this change of counsel; we only know,

that, at the time, it was considered most disastrous by those having the

best opportunities of judging.

But if Mr. ---- went into the cause under this disadvantage, he was

spurred on by the consideration that in his client he was defending a

friend: for they had been friends in youth, and, though long separated,

the tie had never been interrupted. Hence he threw himself into the case

with an ardor which money could never have inspired, and in the course

of the few remaining days had succeeded in mastering all its essential

points.

The interest excited by this second trial was as deep and far more

widely spread than by the first. Few proceedings of the kind in Kentucky

ever called together a crowd at once so large and intelligent, a great

proportion being lawyers, who had been induced to attend by the desire

to witness what it was expected would be one of the most brilliant

efforts of an eminent member of their fraternity.

The principal difference between the two trials was, that, on this

occasion, the testimony of the sister-in-law was much damaged by the

exposure both of her exaggerations and suppressions of important facts

touching the incident at the breakfast-table. Having incautiously

allowed herself to be drawn into particularizing so minutely as to fix

the exact date, and so positively as to render retraction impossible,

she was, to her own evident discomfiture, flatly contradicted by more

than one of those present on that occasion, who described the scene

as it actually occurred. Of course, after such a revelation of

untruthfulness, her whole testimony became liable to suspicion, the

more violent that the falsehood was plainly intentional. Moreover, the

defendant was now provided with evidence of the constant and intolerable

provocations to which he had been subjected during the whole of his

married life. Of this, however, the most moderate and guarded use was to

be made; because, while it was necessary, by exposing the true character

and habitual violence of his wife, to relieve the prisoner of that load

of public indignation which had been excited against him on account

of his alleged brutality, it was even more important that no strong

resentment should be supposed to have grown up on his part against his

tormentor. This delicate task was managed by the attorney with such

consummate skill, that, when the evidence on both sides was closed,

public sympathy, if not public conviction, had undergone a very

perceptible change. The prosecutors, aware of this, felt the success of

their case endangered, and exerted themselves to the utmost to prevent

the tide, now almost in equilibrium, from ebbing back with a violence

proportionate to that of its flow. But the argument even of their ablest

champion, John ----, seemed almost puerile, in comparison with this, the

last effort of George ----,--an effort which was long remembered, even

less on account of its melancholy termination than for its extraordinary

eloquence. The Kentuckians of that day were accustomed to hear

Breckenridge, Clay, Talbot, Allen, and Grundy, all men of singular

oratorical fame,--but never, we have heard it affirmed, was a more

moving appeal poured into the ears of a Kentucky jury. Availing himself

of every resource of professional skill, he now demonstrated, to the

full satisfaction of many, the utter inadequacy of the circumstantial

evidence upon which so much stress had been laid to justify a

conviction,--sifting and weighing carefully every fact and detail,

and trying the conclusions that had been drawn therefrom by the most

rigorous and searching logic,--and then, assailing the credibility of

the testimony brought forward to prove the habitual cruelty of his

client, he gave utterance to a withering torrent of invective and

sarcasm, in which the character of the main hostile witness shrivelled

and blackened like paper in a flame. Then--having been eight hours on

his feet--he began to avail himself of that last dangerous resource

which genius only may use,--the final arrow in the lawyer's quiver,

which is so hard to handle rightly, and, failing, may prove worse than

useless, but, sped by a strong hand and true aim, often tells decisively

on a hesitating jury,--we mean a direct appeal to their feelings. Like a

skilful leader who gathers all his exhausted squadrons when he sees the

crisis of battle approaching, the great advocate seemed now to summon

every overtaxed power of body and spirit to his aid, as he felt that the

moment was come when he must wring an acquittal from the hearts of his

hearers. Nor did either soul or intellect fail at the call. Higher and

stronger surged the tide of passionate eloquence, until every one felt

that the icy barrier was beginning to yield,--for tears were already

seen on more than one of the faces now leaning breathlessly forward from

the jury-box to listen,--when all at once a dead silence fell throughout

the hall: the voice whose organ-tones had been filling its remotest

nook suddenly died away in a strange gurgle. Several physicians present

immediately divined what had happened; nor were the multitude near kept

long in doubt; for all saw, at the next moment, a crimson stream welling

forth from those lips just now so eloquent,--checking their eloquence,

alas, forever! It was quickly reported through the assembly that the

speaker had ruptured one of the larger blood-vessels in the lungs. The

accident was too dangerous for delay, and George ---- was borne almost

insensible from the scene of his struggles and his triumphs, to reënter,

as it proved, no more. He lived but three days longer,--long enough,

however, to learn that he had sacrificed his life in vain, the jury

having, after a lengthened consideration, affirmed the former verdict

against his friend and client.

The unfortunate man stood up to receive this second sentence with the

same face of impassive misery with which he had listened to the first.

To the solemn mockery, "If he had anything to urge why sentence of death

should not be passed upon him," he shook his head wearily, and answered,

"Nothing." It was evident that his mind was failing fast under the

overwhelming weight of calamity. It was sad to see this high-born,

but ill-fated gentleman thus bowing humbly to a felon's doom; and the

remembrance of that scene must have been a life-long remorse to his

judges, when the events of a few weeks revealed to them the terrible

truth, that he was innocent of the crime for which they had condemned

him.

We will not dwell upon the events alluded to; for even at the distance

of nearly three-quarters of a century they are too painful and

humiliating. Suffice it to say, that, when the murderess discovered that

her beloved master was to suffer for her crime, and that no other chance

of salvation remained, she made a full confession of the whole matter.

But the sentence had been pronounced, and the power of suspending its

execution rested with the Governor; and that dignitary--let his name,

in charity, remain unsaid--was about to be a candidate for reelection to

the office which he disgraced, while the family of the murdered lady was

one of the most extensive and influential in the State, the whole of

which influence was thrown into the scale against mercy and justice.

With what result was seen, when, on the morning of the ---- of April,

17--, the prison-doors were opened for the last time for his passage,

and Cyril Wilde was led forth to the execution of an iniquitous

sentence, though, even while the sad cart was moving slowly, very

slowly, through the crowded, strangely silent street, some of the very

men who had pronounced it were imploring the Governor almost on their

knees that it might be stayed. The prisoner alone seemed impatient to

hasten the reluctant march, and meet the final catastrophe. He knew of

the efforts that were making to save him, and the confession on which

they were founded. He had listened to hopeful words and confident

predictions; but no expression of hope had thereby been kindled for an

instant on his pale, dejected face. The ominous premonition which had

come upon him at the moment of that first overpowering realization of

his danger continued to gain strength with every successive stroke of

untoward Fate, until it had become the ruling idea of his mind, in which

there grew up the sort of desperate impatience with which we long for

any end we know to be inevitable. The waters of his life had been so

mingled with gall, and the bitter draught so long pressed to his lips,

that now he seemed only eager to drain at once the last dregs, and cast

the hated cup from him forever,--impatient to find peace and rest in

the grave, even if it were the grave of a felon, and at the foot of the

gallows.

Here let the curtain fall upon the sad closing scene. We will only

remark, in conclusion, that the name and family of this ill-fated victim

of false and circumstantial evidence have long since disappeared from

the land where they had known such disgrace; and but few persons are

now living who can recall the foregoing details of the once celebrated

"Wilde Tragedy."

CRAWFORD'S STATUES AT RICHMOND.

Long I owe a song, my Brother, to thy dear and deathless claim;

Long I've paused before thy ashes, in my poverty and shame:

Something stirs me now from silence, with a fixed and awful breath;

'Tis the offspring of thy genius, that was parent to thy death.

They were murderous, these statues; as they left thy teeming brain,

Their hurry and their thronging rent the mother-mould in twain:

So the world that takes them sorrowful their beauties must deplore;

From the portals whence they issued lovely things shall pass no more.

With a ghostly presence wait they in a stern and dark remorse,

As the marbles they are watching were sepulchral to thy corse;

Nay, one draws his cloak about him, and the other standeth free

With his patriot arms uplifted to the grasp of Liberty.

Shall I speak to you, ye silent ones? Your father lies at rest,

With the mighty impulse folded, like a banner, to his breast;

Ye are crownèd with remembrance, and the glory of men's eyes;

But within that heart, low buried, some immortal virtue lies.

When with heavy strain and pressure ye were lifted to your height,

Then his passive weight was lowered to the vaults of sorrowing Night:

They who lifted struggled sorely, ere your robes on high might wave;

They who lowered with a spasm laid such greatness in its grave.

In the moonlight first I saw you,--with the dawn I take my leave;

Others come to gaze and wonder,--not, like me, to pause and grieve:

Sure, whatever heart doth hasten here, of master or of slave,

This aspect of true nobleness makes merciful and brave.

But I know the spot they gave him, with the cool green earth above,

Where I saw the torchlight glitter on the tears of widowed love,

And we left his garlands fading;--to redeem that moment's pain,

Would that ye were yet in chaos, and your master back again!

No! the tears have Nature's passport, but the wish is poor and vain,

Since every noblest human work such sacrifice doth gain;

God appoints the course of Genius, like the sweep of stars and sun:

Honor to the World's rejoicing, and the Will that must be done!

JOURNAL OF A PRIVATEERSMAN.

II.

We left our privateer, the Revenge, Captain Norton, of Newport, Rhode

Island, making sail for New Providence, with her lately captured prize.

There was an English Court of Admiralty established on this island, and

here the prize was to be condemned and sold. The Journal begins again on

Monday, 10th August, 1741.

* * * * *

_Monday, 10th._ Fine breeze of wind at N.W., with a large sea. At 5 A.M.

saw Hog Island & the island of Providence. Fired a gun & lay to for a

pilot to take us in. At 8 a pilot boat came off, & Jeremiah Harman,

Master of our prize, in her, having arrived the day before. Passed by

the Rose man of war, stationed here. We saluted her with 7 guns, &

she returned us 5. Ran aground for'ard & lay some time off of Major

Stewart's house, but the man of war sent his boat to carry out an anchor

for us, and we got off. The Cap't went ashore to wait on his Excellency,

& sent the pinnace off for the prisoners, who were immediately put in

jail.

_Thursday, 13th._ Landed all our corn, and made a clear hole of the

prize. At 9 P.M. it began to thunder & lighten very hard. Our sloop

received great damage from a thunderbolt that struck our mast & shivered

it very much, besides tearing a large piece off the hounds. As it fell,

it tore up the bitts, broke in the hatch way, and burst through both our

sides, starting the planks under her wale, melting several cutlasses &

pistols, and firing off several small arms, the bullets of which stuck

in her beam. It was some time before we perceived that she leaked, being

all thunder struck; but when the Master stepped over the side to examine

her, he put his foot on a plank that was started, and all this time the

water had been pouring in. We immediately brought all our guns on the

other side to give her a heel, & sent the boat ashore for the Doctor,

a man having been hurt by the lightning. When we got her on a heel,

we tried the pumps, not being able to do it before, for our careful

carpenter had ne'er a pump box rigged or fit to work; so, had it not

been for the kind assistance of the man of war's people, who came off as

soon as they heard of our misfortune, & put our guns on board the prize,

we must certainly have sunk, most of our own hands being ashore. This

day, James Avery, our boatswain, was turned out for neglect of duty.

_Friday, 14th._ This morning came on board Cap't Frankland to see the

misfortune we had suffered the night before, & offered to assist us

in all he could. He sent his carpenter, who viewed the mast & said he

thought he could make it do again. The Cap't, hearing of a piece of

timber for his purpose, waited on his Excellency to desire him to lay

his commands on Mr Thompson to spare it him. He sent Mr Scott, Judge of

the Admiralty, to get it in his name, promising to make it good to him

in case of any trouble arising from the timber not belonging to him.

Unloaded all our provisions & put them on board the prize, in order to

get ready for the carpenters to repair the sloop.

_Saturday, 15th._ A court was called at 4 o'clock P.M., Cap't Norton's

petition read, and an agent appointed for the owners. The Company's

Quartermaster & myself were examined, with John Evergin & Samuel

Eldridge, the two English prisoners, concerning the prize, and so the

court was adjourned till Monday, at 10 of the clock, A.M.

_Monday, 17th._ The court met according to adjournment. Jean Baptiste

Domas was examined concerning the freedom of the prisoners, and his

deposition taken in writing. All the evidence and depositions were then

read in court, sworn to, and signed, after which the court adjourned to

Wednesday at 10 of the clock. There are no lawyers in this place, the

only blessing that God could bestow on such a litigious people.

_Wednesday, 19th._ At 10 A.M., the court being opened, & the libel read,

I begged leave of his Honour to be heard, which being granted, I spoke

as follows:[A]--

[Footnote A: The speech of Peter Vezian is characteristic of the times

and of the privateering spirit. It gives expression to the popular

hatred of the Spaniards and the Romanists, to the common false charges

against the brave Oglethorpe, to the general inhuman feeling toward

negroes, and to the distrust of the pretenders to religious experience

during the "Great Revival" under the preaching of Wesley and Whitefield.

Its faults of diction add to its genuine flavor.]

May it please your Honour,--As there is no advocate appointed by this

Hon'ble Court to appear in behalf of the Capturers of a sloop taken

by Don Pedro Estrado July the 5th, belonging to some of His Majesty's

subjects of Great Britain or Ireland, and retaken by Cap't Benj. Norton

& Comp'y in a private sloop of war called the Revenge, July the 20th, &

brought into this court for condemnation, I, as Captain's Quartermaster,

appear in behalf of the owners, Cap't, & Comp'y, to prove that the said

sloop & cargo, together with the three mulattoes & one negro, which are

all slaves, belonging to some of the vassals or subjects of the King of

Spain, ought to be condemned for the benefit & use of the capturers as

aforesaid.

I'm certain I'm undertaking a task for which I am no ways qualified. But

as I have leave to speak in a court instituted by the laws of England,

and before a judge who I am certain is endued with the strictest honour

and justice, I don't doubt, that, if, through ignorance, I should omit

any proof that would be of advantage to us, your Honour will be so good

as to aid & assist me in it.

It will be needless, I believe, Sir, to bring any further proof than

what has been already brought & sworn to in Court to prove the right &

power we had to seize this sloop & cargo on the high seas, & bring her

here for condemnation. There is a late act of parliament, made in the

12th year of his present Majesty's reign, wherein it says, that all

vessels belonging to His Majesty's subjects of Great Britain or Ireland,

which shall have been taken by the enemy, and have been in their

possession the space of 96 hours, if retaken by any private man of

war, shall belong one half to the capturers, as salvage, free from all

charges. As this has been fully proved in court, that the time the enemy

has had her in possession is above 96 hours, I don't doubt but the one

half, free of all charges, will be allotted us for salvage. The thing

about which there is any dispute is the three mulattoes & one negro, all

slaves, taken by the prize, & said to belong to some vassals or subjects

of the King of Spain; and it is put upon us by this court to prove

that they are so, which I hope to do by several circumstances, and the

insufficiency of the evidence in their favour, which amounts to nothing

more than hearsay.

The first evidence in their favour is that of John Evergin, a native

of N'o Carolina, who professes himself to be a child of the Spirit. In

April last, having been taken prisoner by the said Don Pedro Estrado, &

brought to S't Augustine, he consented, for the value of a share in the

profits, to pilot them in the bowels of his native country, and betrayed

his countrymen to that cruel and barbarous nation. Can your Honour

confide in a man who has betrayed his countrymen, robbed them of their

lives, and what was dearer to them, their liberty? One who has exposed

his brethren to imminent danger & reduced them and their families to

extreme want by fire & sword, can the evidence, I say, of such a vile

wretch, who has forfeited his liege to his King by entering the enemy's

service, and unnaturally sold his countrymen, be of any weight in a

court of justice? No, I am certain, and I hope it will meet with none to

prove that these slaves are freemen; for all that he has said, by his

own confession, was only but hearsay. The other evidence is of a villain

of another stamp, a French runnagado, Jean Baptiste Domas. His evidence

is so contradictory that I hope it will meet the same fate as I think

will befall the first. I will own that he has sworn to it. But how? On a

piece of stick made in the shape of a thing they name a cross, said to

be blest and sanctified by the polluted words & hands of a wretched

priest, a spawn of the whore of Babylon, who is a monster of nature &

a servant to the Devil, who for a _real_ will pretend to absolve his

followers from perjury, incest, or parricide, and canonize them for

cruelties committed upon we heretics, as they style us, and even rank

them in the number of those cursed saints who by their barbarity have

rendered their names immortal & odious to all true believers. By devils

such as these they swear, and to them they pray. Can your Honour, then,

give credit to such evidence, when there is no doubt that it was agreed

between the witnesses to swear that the negroes were free? This they

might easily do, for there is no question but they told him so; and to

swear it was but a trifle, when absolution can be got so cheap. It does

not stand to reason, that slaves, who are in hopes of getting their

freedom, would acknowledge themselves to be slaves. Do not their

complexion and features tell all the world that they are the blood of

negroes, and have sucked slavery & cruelty from their infancy? Can any

one think, when we call to mind that barbarous action[B] committed

on his Majesty's brave subjects at the retaking of the fort at S't

Augustine, which was occasioned by the treachery of their vile General,

when he sacrificed them to that barbarous colour, that it was done by

any who had the least drop of blood either of liberty or Christianity

in them? No, I am confident your Honour can't think so; no, not even of

their Gov'r, under whose vile commission this was suffered to be done,

and went unpunished. It was headed by this Francisco, that cursed seed

of Cain, cursed from the foundation of the world, who has the impudence

to come into Court and plead that he is free. Slavery is too good for

such a savage; nay, all the cruelty invented by man will never make

amends for so vile a proceeding; and if I may be allowed to speak

freely, with submission, the torments of the world to come will not

suffice. God forgive me, if I judge unjustly! What a miserable state

must that man be in, who is under the jurisdiction of that vile & cruel

colour! I pity my poor fellow creatures who may have been made prisoners

in this war, and especially some that were lately sent to the Havanah,

and all by the treachery of that vile fellow, John Evergin, who says he

is possessed with the spirit of the inward man, but was possessed with

the spirit of Beelzebub, when he piloted the cursed Spaniards over the

bar of Obricock, as it has been proved in Court.

[Footnote B: It was reported that the English and American prisoners of

war had been barbarously mutilated and tortured.]

I don't doubt but this tragical act, acted at St Augustine, has reached

home before now. This case, perhaps, may travel as far; and when they

remember the sufferings of their countrymen under the command of this

Francisco, whom we have got in possession, together with some of his

comp'y who were concerned with him & under his command in that inhuman

act, they will agree, no doubt, as I hope your Honour will, that they

must be slaves who were concerned in it. I hope, therefore, that by the

contradictions which have been shown in Court between this Jean Baptiste

Domas, who affirms he never saw them till on board the privateer, and

the evidence of Francisco & Augustine, which proves that they knew him

some months before, and conversed with him, is proof enough they are

slaves; and I hope that by the old law of nations, where it says that

all prisoners of war, nay, even their posterity, are slaves, that by

that law Pedro Sanche & Andrew Estavie will be deemed such for the use

of the capturers. So I rest it with your Honour.

Then the Judge gave his decree, that the sloop & cargo should be sold at

vendue, & the one half thereof should be paid the Capturers for salvage,

free from all charges; that Jean Baptiste Domas, Pedro Sanche, & Andrew

Estavie, according to the laws of England, should remain as prisoners of

war till ransomed; and that Augustine & Francisco, according to the

laws of the plantations, should be the slaves, & for the use of the

Capturers. So the Court broke up.

_Friday, 21st._ This day made an end of selling the cargo of the prize.

Sold 55 bush. corn, 41 bb's pork, 6 bb's of beef, 4 bb's of oil, and

then set up Signor Cap't Francisco under the name of Don Blass. He was

sold to Mr. Stone for 34£ 8s. 8d. Pork & beef very much damnified.

_Thursday, 27th._ Got all our sails & powder from on shore, and took an

inventory of the prize's rigging and furniture, as she was to be sold on

Saturday next. Capt Frankland came on board to view her, intending to

buy her, I believe.

_Saturday, 29th._ To-day the sloop & furniture was sold, & bought by

Cap't Frankland.

_Monday, 31st._ The captain settled with everybody, intending to sail

to-morrow. He took bills of Exchange of Capt Frankland on his brother,

Messrs. Frankland & Lightfoot, merchants in Boston, and endorsed by the

Company's Quartermaster, for 540£, New England currency. The first bill

he sent to Cap't Freebody by Capt Green, bound to Boston in the prize,

with a letter.

_Wednesday, Sept. 2nd._ This morning at 8 A.M. weighed anchor, having a

pilot on board. The man of war's barge with their Lieut came on board to

search our hold & see that we did not carry any of his hands with us.

_Thursday, 3d._ At 10 A.M. had a vendue at the mast of the plunder taken

in the prize, which was sold to the amount of 50£.

_Friday, 4th._ Moderate weather till 4 A.M., when we hauled down our

mainsail to get clear of the keys & brought to under our ballast

mainsail, the wind blowing a mere hurricane.

_Sunday, 6th._ Out both reefs our mainsail. Hope to God to have fine

weather. Got clear of the reefs, and stood out the hurricane, which

was terrible. Very few godly enough to return God thanks for their

deliverance.

_Sunday, 13th._ The Captain gave the people a case bottle of rum, as a

tropick bottle for his pinnace. The people christened her and gave

her the name of _The Spaniard's Dread_. At 11 A.M. made the land of

Hispaniola & the island of Tortugas. We are now on cruising ground. The

Lord send us success against our enemies!

_Monday, 14th._ Hard gales of wind. Brought to off Tortugas under our

foresail, and about 5 A.M. saw a sloop bearing down upon us. Got all

things ready to receive her, fired our bow chaser, hoisted our jib &

mainsail & gave chase, and, as we outsailed her, she was soon brought

to. She proved to be a sloop from Philadelphia, bound to Jamaica; and

as it blew a mere fret of wind from N.E., we brought to again under our

ballast mainsail.

_Thursday, 17th._ Still cruising as above. At 7 P.M. saw 2 sloops, one

on our Starboard and the other on our Larboard bow, steering N.W. We

fired several shot to bring them to, but one of them was obstinate.

Capt. Hubbard, the Com'r of the other, came to at the first shot. He was

from Jamaica & bound to York, & informed us that there was a large fleet

just arrived from England to join the Admiral; that Admiral Vernon was

gone to St. Jago de Cuba; that there was a hot press both by sea & by

land; & that the Spanish Admiral was blown up in a large man of war at

the Havanah, which we hope may prove true. The other sloop, he said, was

one under Cap't Styles, bound also to York, and had sailed in comp'y

with him. Styles received some damage for his obstinacy in not bringing

to, for our shot hulled him and tore his sails. At 5 A.M. saw a top

sail schooner; but the master, while going to the mast head to see what

course she steered, had the misfortune to fall & break his arm just

above the wrist. Gave the vessel chase as far as Inagua Island, when she

came to. We made the Captain come on board with his papers, from which

we found that he came from Leogane, and was bound to Nantz in France,

loaded with sugars, indigo, and hides, and also 300 pieces of 8/8 sent

by the Intendant to the receiver of the customs of Nantz. We went aboard

in the Captain's yawl, and found the cargo agreeable to his bills of

lading, manifest, and clearance, and so let him pass. He informed us

that there was a brig belonging to the Spaniards at Leogane, that came

in there in distress, having lost his mast, which gentleman we hope to

have the honour of dining or supping with before long.

_Saturday, 19th._ Moderate weather. Saw a sail and gave chase.

_Sunday, 20th._ At 5 P.M. came up with the chase, which proved to be a

French ship that had been blown out of Leogane in the hurricane 6 days

ago. Her mizzen mast had been cut to get clear of the land; her quarters

stove in; her head carried away; and there was neither anchor nor cable

aboard. Of 16 hands, which were aboard, there was but one sailor, and he

was the master, and they were perishing for want of water. There was

on board 30 hhd sugar, 1 hhd & 1 bbl indigo, 13 hhd Bourdeaux wine, &

provisions in plenty. We ordered the master on board, and, as soon as he

came over the side, he fell on his knees and begged for help. When we

heard his deplorable case, we spared him some water, &, as he was an

entire stranger on the coast, put one of our hands aboard to navigate

his vessel. They kept company with us all night, and in the morning sent

us a hhd of wine. At 5 A.M., they being about a league to windward of

us, we made in for the Molo by Cape Nicholas, and she steering after us,

we brought her in. But the wind coming up ahead, & their ship out of

trim, they could not work up so far as we, so they came to an anchor a

league below us. The Cap't of the ship is named Doulteau, the ship La

Genereuse, Dutch built, and is from Rochelle in France.

_Monday, 21st._ Our Lieu't with two hands went ashore to see if he could

kill any cattle. Some others of the people went for water and found 7

wells. The people on board were busy in fishing, of which they caught

an abundance; but some of the hands who eat of the fish complained that

they were poisoned by them.

_Wednesday, 23d._ At 6 P.M. the master of the ship came on board to

return thanks to our Cap't for his kind assistance, & offered him

anything he might have occasion for. He gave the people another hhd of

claret & some sugar, & to the Cap't a quarter cask of wine for his own

drinking, also 6 lengths of old junk. At 6 A.M. left the poor Frenchman

in hopes of letting his Cap't know where he was, weighed anchor from the

Molo, and, the weather being moderate, got on our cruising ground, the

North side of Cuba.

_Saturday, 26th._ About 5 P.M. thought we saw a vessel at anchor under

the land. Lay off & on till 5 A.M., when we saw 2 sails, a brigantine &

a sloop. Gave them chase, the sloop laying to for us, & the brigantine

making the best of her way to the leeward. We presently came up with

the sloop, & when in gun shot, hoisted our pennant. The compliment was

returned with a Spanish ensign at mast head, and a gun to confirm it. We

then went alongside of him & received his broadside, which we cheerfully

returned. He then dropped astern, & bore away before the wind, crowding

all the sail he could, and we, having tacked and done the like, came

again within gun shot. While chasing, we shifted our bow guns to our

fore ports, and they had done the like with their after guns, moving

them to their cabin windows, from which they polled us with their stern

chasers, while we peppered them with our fore guns. At last, after some

brisk firing, they struck. We ordered their canoe on board, which was

directly manned, and brought their Capt, who delivered his commission &

sword to our Cap't, and surrendered himself a prisoner of war. He was

desperately wounded in the arm, & had received several small shot in his

head & body. Three of his hands were wounded, & one negro boy killed.

This vessel had been new fitted out in November last from the Havanah,

was on our coast early in the spring, & had taken several vessels and

brought them in to the Havanah, where in August she was again fitted

out, and had met with good success on the coast of Virginia. She

mounted 6 guns & 12 swivels, & had a crew of 30 hands, two of whom were

Englishmen, who had been taken prisoners, and had entered their service.

We now made all the sail we could crowd after the brigantine, which by

this time was almost out of sight. Our damage in the engagement was

not much; one man slightly wounded by a splinter, two more by a piece

accidentally going off after the fight, upwards of 20 shot in our sails,

2 through our mast, & 1 through our gunwale. This day the Revenge has

established her honour, which had almost been lost by letting the other

privateer go off with 4 ships, as before mentioned. Still in chase of

the brigantine, which is making for the land.

_Sunday, 27th._ At 4 A.M. came up with the chase, fired two guns, &

brought her to. She had been taken by the privateer 23 days before, in

Lat. 26.° N., while coming from Barbadoes; was loaded with rum, sugar, &

some bags of cotton, & was bound to Boston. Her owners are Messrs. Lee &

Tyler, Merchants there, Thomas Smith was her commander, & there were 5

Spaniards aboard, whom we took.

_Monday, 28th._ Put the Lieut on board the privateer prize with 7 hands;

also put on board the brigantine Capt Tho. Smith, with verbal orders to

follow us until we could get letters written to send her to Rhode Island

to Cap't Freebody.

_Tuesday, 29th._ Lost sight of both prizes, & lay to the best part of

the forenoon to let them come up with us.

_Wednesday, 30th._ Saw our prize, [the sloop,] bore down on her, &

ordered her canoe on board. The Quartermaster went on board & brought

off her powder & other stores, leaving 7 hands to navigate her, with

verbal orders to keep us company. No news of the brigantine; we suppose

she is gone to the northward. She has one of our hands on board.

_Thursday, Oct. 1st._ Calm weather, with thunder & rain. Brave living

with our people. Punch every day, which makes them dream strange things,

which foretells good success in our cruise. They dream of nothing but

mad bulls, Spaniards, & bags of gold. Examined the papers of the sloop,

& found several in Spanish & French, among which was the condemnation of

Cap't Stocking's sloop.

_Friday, 2nd._ At 6 A.M. saw a ship under the land. Stretched in for

her, when she hoisted a French pennant & an English ensign. Hoisted our

Spanish Jack at mast head, and sent our pinnace aboard to discover what

it was. She proved to be a ship that had been taken by Don Francisco

Loranzo, our prisoner, off the Capes of Virginia. He had put a Lieu't,

10 hands, & 5 Englishmen to carry her to the Havanah. But the Spaniards

ran her ashore on purpose. We brought off the 5 Englishmen, the

Spaniards having run for it. We caught one & brought him on board, and

sent our prize alongside to save what goods we could, for the ship was

bilged.

_Saturday, 3d._ The people busy in getting goods out of the ship, we

laying off & on.

_Sunday, 4th._ Sent John Webb as master with 7 mariners on board the

prize, & with them a Bermudian negro, who had been taken prisoner in a

fishing boat by the Spanish Cap't off the Bermudas, & a mulatto prisoner

belonging to the Spaniards, with the instructions which are underneath.

Latitude 22.° 50' N., Oct. 4th, 1741.

MR. JOHN WEBB,

You being appointed master of the sloop Invincible, late a Spanish

privateer, commanded by Cap't Don Francisco Loranzo, and taken by me &

company, we order you to keep company with us till farther orders. But

if, by some unforeseen accident, bad weather, or giving chase, we should

chance to part, then we order that you proceed directly with said sloop

& cargo to Rhode Island in New England. And if, by the Providence

of God, you safe arrive there, you must apply to Mr. John Freebody,

Merchant there, & deliver your sloop & cargo to him or his assigns.

You are also ordered to take care that you speak to no vessel, nor

suffer any to speak with you, during your passage, nor permit any

disorder on board; but you must take a special care of the cargo that

none be embezzled, and, if weather permits, you must be diligent in

drying the goods, to hinder them from spoiling. Wishing you a good

voyage, we remain your friends.

B.N.

D.M.

Copy of a letter sent to Capt Freebody per John Webb in the sloop.

SIR,--I hope my sundry letters sent you by different hands are come

safe.

This waits upon you with the agreeable news of our taking a Spanish

privateer on the 26th Sep't last, off Cape Roman, on the north side of

Cuba. She was conveying to the Havanah a brigantine which she had taken,

coming from Barbadoes & bound to Boston, & laden with rum, sugar, and

some bags of cotton. We had the pleasure of meeting him early in the

morning, & gave chase. When within about a mile of him we hoisted our

pennant, which compliment he immediately returned with his ensign at

mast head and a gun to confirm it. We received several shot from him, &

cheerfully returned them. He then made the best of his way off, crowding

all the sail he could; and we, doing the like, came again within gun

shot, and plied her with our bow chasers, which were shifted to the fore

ports for that purpose. They in return kept pelting us with their stern

chasers out of their cabin windows, but after some brisk firing they

struck. Our rigging, mast, & gunwale received some damage. Upwards of 25

shot went through our sails, 2 through our mast in its weakest part just

below where it was fished, 1 cut our fore shroud on the Larboard side, &

another went through our Starboard gunwale, port & all. Only one of our

men was wounded by the enemy, and he slightly by a splinter. Two

others were hurt in the arm by one of the people's pieces going off

accidentally after the engagement. The poor Cap't of the privateer was

wounded in the arm and the bone fractured, one negro boy killed,

& others wounded. He was fitted out last November at the Havanah,

proceeded to S't. Augustine, & while on our coast early in the spring

took several vessels. In August last he was again fitted out, & had

taken several more vessels on our coast. But we had the good fortune to

stop his course. His name is Don Francisco Loranzo, & by all report,

though an enemy, a brave man, endued with a great deal of clemency, &

using his prisoners with a great deal of humanity. The like usage he

receives with us, for he justly deserves it.

We have sent you the sloop commanded by John Webb, loaded with sundry

goods somewhat damaged, which I must desire you to unload directly & to

take care to get them dried. There is also a negro boy that is sickly,

a negro man said to have been taken off Bermudas by the privateer as he

was a fishing, & a mulatto belonging to some of the subjects or vassals

of the King of Spain, all of which we recommend to your care that they

may not elope.

The number of Spanish prisoners taken on board, the Captain included,

is 48, out of which 11 are of the blood of negroes, for which we don't

doubt that we shall have his Majesty's bounty money, which is 5£

sterling per head. We also desire that the vessel may not be condemned

till our arrival, but only unloaded & a just account taken of what was

on board. As to the brigantine, the Captain of her, whom we put in again

out of civility, has used us in a very rascally manner; for he ran away

from us in the night with the vessel, & no doubt designed to cheat us

out of our salvage, which is the half of brig & cargo, the enemy having

had possession of her for 22 days. As she is a vessel of value, I hope

you'l do your endeavors to recover our just dues, and apply to the

owners, who are, as we are credibly informed, Messrs Lee & Tyler of

Boston, both of whom are under the state of conviction since the gospel

of Whitfield & Tennant has been propagated in New England. So that we

are in hopes they will readily give a just account of her cargo & her

true value, & render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's, which is

the moral preached by Whitefield.

As this will require a lawsuit, I hope you will get the best advice you

possibly can, &, if she is at Boston or elsewhere, get her seized &

condemned. She was designed to be consigned to you, & the master was

sent on board to take possession, & get things in order to sail, while

we were writing letters & bills of lading, but he gave us the slip. So,

relying on your care, we don't doubt but you will recover her and

add her to the privateer prize. The brigantine was called the Sarah,

commanded by Tho's Smith, & had on board 11 hhd of rum, 23 hhd of sugar,

& 12 bags of cotton. She was well fitted with 4 swivels, one gun, &

other stores. She was a new, pink stern vessel, & carried off one of our

hands, who, no doubt, will acquaint you of the whole affair. We hope

you will show no favour to the Cap't for his ill usage, but get a just

account of his venture, one half of which is our due. This affair is

recommended to you by all the company, and we hope that you will serve

us to the utmost of your power, not doubting in the least of your

justice & equity.

Inclosed you will receive Cap't Frankland's 2 Bills of Exchange on

his brother for 540£, also a list of the vessels which were taken by

Francisco Loranzo since he first went out on his cruise, which you may

use at pleasure either to publish or conceal. We are still cruising on

the Northern side of Cuba, & are in hopes of getting something worth

while in a short time.

We are all in good health; so, having no more to add but my kind

remembrances to all friends,

I remain

sincerely yours,

B.N.

_Monday, 5th._ The company gave the Cap't a night gown, a spencer wig, &

4 pair of thread stockings, & to the Lieut a pair of buck skin breeches.

The Doctor bought a suit of broad cloth, which cost him 28 pieces of

eight and is carried to his account in the sloop's ledger.

* * * * *

Here Peter Vezian's journal abruptly comes to an end. But we know from

other papers, that the "Revenge," after a successful cruise, returned

safely to Newport; and thence in the next succeeding years often sailed

out against the Spaniards. Queer legends of those privateering days

still linger in Newport, and traces of ill-gotten wealth may still

be discovered there. The sailors of the old seaport are as bold and

adventurous as ever, but they are grown honester, and never again shall

a crew be found there to man either slave-trader or privateer. Northern

seamen have no liking for such occupation.

CONCERNING PEOPLE OF WHOM MORE MIGHT HAVE BEEN MADE.

It is recorded in history, that at a certain public dinner in America

a Methodist preacher was called on to give a toast. It may be supposed

that the evening was so far advanced that every person present had been

toasted already, and also all the friends of every one present. It thus

happened that the Methodist preacher was in considerable perplexity as

to the question, What being, or class of beings, should form the subject

of his toast. But the good man was a person of large sympathies; and

some happy link of association recalled to his mind certain words with

which he had a professional familiarity, and which set forth a subject

of a most comprehensive character. Arising from his seat, the Methodist

preacher said, that, without troubling the assembled company with any

preliminary observations, he begged to propose the health of ALL PEOPLE

THAT ON EARTH DO DWELL.

Not unnaturally, I have thought of that Methodist preacher and his

toast, as I begin to write this essay. For, though its subject was

suggested to me by various little things of very small concern to

mankind in general, though of great interest to one or two individual

beings, I now discern that the subject of this essay is in truth as

comprehensive as the subject of that toast. I have something to say

_Concerning People of whom More might have been Made_: I see now that

the class which I have named includes every human being. More might have

been made, in some respects, possibly in many respects, of _All

People that on Earth do Dwell_. Physically, intellectually, morally,

spiritually, more might have been made of all. Wise and diligent

training on the part of others, self-denial, industry, tact, decision,

promptitude, on the part of the man himself, might have made something

far better than he now is of every man that breathes. No one is made the

most of. There have been human beings who have been made the most of as

regards some one thing, who have had some single power developed to the

utmost; but no one is made the most of, all round; no one is even made

the most of as regards the two or three most important things of all.

And, indeed, it is curious to observe that the things in which human

beings seem to have attained to absolute perfection have for the most

part been things comparatively frivolous,--accomplishments which

certainly were not worth the labor and the time which it must have cost

to master them. Thus, M. Blondin has probably made as much of himself as

can be made of mortal, in the respect of walking on a rope stretched at

a great height from the ground. Hazlitt makes mention of a man who had

cultivated to the very highest degree the art of playing at rackets, and

who accordingly played at rackets incomparably better than any one else

ever did. A wealthy gentleman, lately deceased, by putting his whole

mind to the pursuit, esteemed himself to have reached entire perfection

in the matter of killing otters. Various individuals have probably

developed the power of turning somersets, of picking pockets, of

playing on the piano, jew's-harp, banjo, and penny trumpet, of mental

calculation in arithmetic, of insinuating evil about their neighbors

without directly asserting anything, to a measure as great as is

possible to man. Long practice and great concentration of mind upon

these things have sufficed to produce what might seem to tremble on the

verge of perfection,--what unquestionably leaves the attainments of

ordinary people at an inconceivable distance behind. But I do not call

it making the most of a man, to develop, even to perfection, the power

of turning somersets and playing at rackets. I call it making the most

of a man, when you make the best of his best powers and qualities,--when

you take those things about him which are the worthiest and most

admirable, and cultivate these up to their highest attainable degree.

And it is in this sense that the statement is to be understood, that

no one is made the most of. Even in the best, we see no more than the

rudiments of good qualities which might have been developed into a great

deal more; and in very many human beings, proper management might have

brought out qualities essentially different from those which these

beings now possess. It is not merely that they are rough diamonds, which

might have been polished into blazing ones,--not merely that they are

thoroughbred colts drawing coal-carts, which with fair training would

have been new Eclipses: it is that they are vinegar which might have

been wine, poison which might have been food, wild-cats which might have

been harmless lambs, soured miserable wretches who might have been happy

and useful, almost devils who might have been but a little lower than

the angels. Oh, the unutterable sadness that is in the thought of what

might have been!

Not always, indeed. Sometimes, as we look back, it is with deep

thankfulness that we see the point at which we were (we cannot say how)

inclined to take the right turning, when we were all but resolved to

take that which we can now see would have landed us in wreck and ruin.

And it is fit that we should correct any morbid tendency to brood upon

the fancy of how much better we might have been, by remembering also how

much worse we might have been. Sometimes the present state of matters,

good or bad, is the result of long training, of influences that were at

work through many years, and that produced their effect so gradually

that we never remarked the steps of the process, till some day we waken

up to a sense of the fact, and find ourselves perhaps a great deal

better, probably a great deal worse, than we had been vaguely imagining.

But the case is not unfrequently otherwise. Sometimes one testing-time

decided whether we should go to the left or to the right. There are in

the moral world things analogous to the sudden accident which makes a

man blind or lame for life: in an instant there is wrought a permanent

deterioration. Perhaps a few minutes before man or woman took the step

which can never be retraced, which must banish forever from all they

hold dear, and compel to seek in some new country far away a place where

to hide their shame and misery, they had just as little thought of

taking that miserable step as you, my reader, have of taking one like

it. And perhaps there are human beings in this world, held in the

highest esteem, and with not a speck on their snow-white reputation, who

know within themselves that they have barely escaped the gulf, that

the moment has been in which all their future lot was trembling in the

balance, and that a grain's weight more in the scale of evil and by this

time they might have been reckoned among the most degraded and abandoned

of the race. But probably the first deviation, either to right or left,

is in most cases a very small one. You know, my friend, what is meant by

the _points_ upon a railway. By moving a lever, the rails upon which the

train is advancing are, at a certain place, broadened or narrowed by

about the eighth of an inch. That little movement decides whether

the train shall go north or south. Twenty carriages have come so far

together; but here is a junction station, and the train is to be

divided. The first ten carriages deviate from the main line by a

fraction of an inch at first; but in a few minutes the two portions of

the train are flying on, miles apart. You cannot see the one from the

other, save by distant puffs of white steam through the clumps of trees.

Perhaps already a high hill has intervened, and each train is on its

solitary way,--one to end its course, after some hours, amid the roar

and smoke and bare ugliness of some huge manufacturing town; and the

other to come through green fields to the quaint, quiet, dreamy-looking

little city, whose place is marked, across the plain, by the noble spire

of the gray cathedral rising into the summer blue. We come to such

points in our journey through life,--railway-points, as it were, which

decide not merely our lot in life, but even what kind of folk we shall

be, morally and intellectually. A hair's breadth may make the deviation

at first. Two situations are offered you at once: you think there is

hardly anything to choose between them. It does not matter which you

accept; and perhaps some slight and fanciful consideration is allowed to

turn the scale. But now you look back, and you can see that _there_ was

the turning-point in your life; it was because you went there to the

right, and not to the left, that you are now a great English prelate,

and not a humble Scotch professor. Was there not a time in a certain

great man's life, at which the lines of rail diverged, and at which the

question was settled, Should he be a minister of the Scotch Kirk, or

should he be Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain? I can imagine a

stage in the history of a lad in a counting-house, at which the little

angle of rail may be pushed in or pushed back that shall send the train

to one of two places five hundred miles asunder: it may depend upon

whether he shall take or not take that half-crown, whether, thirty years

after, he shall be taking the chair, a rubicund baronet, at a missionary

society meeting, and receive the commendations of philanthropic peers

and earnest bishops, or be laboring in chains at Norfolk Island, a

brutalized, cursing, hardened, scourge-scarred, despairing wretch,

without a hope for this life or the other. Oh, how much may turn upon a

little thing! Because the railway train in which you were coming to a

certain place was stopped by a snowstorm, the whole character of your

life may have been changed. Because some one was in the drawing-room

when you went to see Miss Smith on a certain day, resolved to put to her

a certain question, you missed the tide, you lost your chance, you went

away to Australia and never saw her more. It fell upon a day that

a ship, coming from Melbourne, was weathering a rocky point on an

iron-bound coast, and was driven close upon that perilous shore. They

tried to put her about; it was the last chance. It was a moment of awful

risk and decision. If the wind catches the sails, now shivering as the

ship comes up, on the right side, then all on board are safe. If the

wind catches the sails on the other side, then all on board must perish.

And so it all depends upon which surface of certain square yards of

canvas the uncertain breeze shall strike, whether John Smith, who is

coming home from the diggings with twenty thousand pounds, shall go

down and never be heard of again by his poor mother and sisters away in

Scotland,--or whether he shall get safely back, a rich man, to gladden

their hearts, and buy a pretty little place, and improve the house on it

into the pleasantest picture, and purchase, and ride, and drive various

horses, and be seen on market-days sauntering in the High Street of the

county-town, and get married, and run about the lawn before his door,

chasing his little children, and become a decent elder of the Church,

and live quietly and happily for many years. Yes, from what precise

point of the compass the next flaw of wind should come would decide the

question between the long homely life in Scotland and a nameless burial

deep in a foreign sea.

It seems to me to be one of the main characteristics of human beings,

not that they actually are much, but that they are something of which

much may be made. There are untold potentialities in human nature. The

tree cut down, concerning which its heathen owner debated whether he

should make it into a god or into a three-legged stool, was positively

nothing in its capacity of coming to different ends and developments,

when we compare it with each human being born into this world. Man is

not so much a thing already, as he is the germ of something. He is,

so to speak, material formed to the hand of circumstances. He is

essentially a germ, either of good or evil. And he is not like the seed

of a plant, in whose development the tether allows no wider range than

that between the more or less successful manifestation of its inherent

nature. Give a young tree fair play, good soil and abundant air,--tend

it carefully, in short, and you will have a noble tree. Treat the young

tree unfairly,--give it a bad soil, deprive it of needful air and light,

and it will grow up a stunted and poor tree. But in the case of the

human being, there is more than this difference in degree. There may be

a difference in kind. The human being may grow up to be, as it were,

a fair and healthful fruit-tree, or to be a poisonous one. There is

something positively awful about the potentialities that are in

human nature. The Archbishop of Canterbury might have grown up under

influences which would have made him a bloodthirsty pirate or a sneaking

pickpocket. The pirate or the pickpocket, taken at the right time, and

trained in the right way, might have been made a pious, exemplary man.

You remember that good divine, two hundred years since, who, standing in

the market-place of a certain town, and seeing a poor wretch led by him

to the gallows, said, "There goes myself, but for the grace of God." Of

course, it is needful that human laws should hold all men as equally

responsible. The punishment of such an offence is such an infliction, no

matter who committed the offence. At least the mitigating circumstances

which human laws can take into account must be all of a very plain and

intelligible character. It would not do to recognize anything like a

graduated scale of responsibility. A very bad training in youth would be

in a certain limited sense regarded as lessening the guilt of any wrong

thing done; and you may remember, accordingly, how that magnanimous

monarch, Charles II., urged to the Scotch lords, in extenuation of the

wrong things he had done, that his father had given him a very bad

education. But though human laws and judges may vainly and clumsily

endeavor to fix each wrongdoer's place in the scale of responsibility,

and though they must, in a rough way, do what is rough justice in five

cases out of six, still we may well believe that in the view of the

Supreme Judge the responsibilities of men are most delicately graduated

to their opportunities. There is One who will appreciate with entire

accuracy the amount of guilt that is in each wrong deed of each

wrong-doer, and mercifully allow for such as never had a chance of being

anything but wrong-doers. And it will not matter whether it was from

original constitution or from unhappy training that these poor creatures

never had that chance. I was lately quite astonished to learn that some

sincere, but stupid American divines have fallen foul of the eloquent

author of "Elsie Venner," and accused him of fearful heresy, because he

declared his confident belief that "God would never make a man with a

crooked spine and then punish him for not standing upright." Why, that

statement of the "Autocrat" appears to me at least as certain as that

two and two make four. It may, indeed, contain some recondite and

malignant reference which the stupid American divines know, and which

I do not; it may be a mystic Shibboleth, indicating far more than it

asserts; as at one time in Scotland it was esteemed as proof that a

clergyman preached unsound doctrine, if he made use of the Lord's

Prayer. But, understanding it simply as meaning that the Judge of all

the Earth will do right, it appears to me an axiom beyond all question.

And I take it as putting in a compact form the spirit of what I have

been arguing for,--to wit, that, though human law must of necessity hold

all rational beings as alike responsible, yet in the eye of God the

difference may be immense. The graceful vase, that stands in the

drawing-room under a glass shade, and never goes to the well, has no

great right to despise the rough pitcher that goes often and is broken

at last. It is fearful to think what malleable material we are in the

hands of circumstances.

And a certain Authority, considerably wiser and incomparably more

charitable than the American divines already mentioned, recognized the

fact, when He taught us to pray, "Lead us not into temptation!" We shall

think, in a little while, of certain influences which may make or mar

the human being; but it may be said here that I firmly believe that

happiness is one of the best of disciplines. As a general rule, if

people were happier, they would be better. When you see a poor cabman

on a winter-day, soaked with rain, and fevered with gin, violently

thrashing the wretched horse he is driving, and perhaps howling at it,

you may be sure that it is just because the poor cabman is so miserable

that he is doing all that. It was a sudden glimpse, perhaps, of his bare

home and hungry children, and of the dreary future which lay before

himself and them, that was the true cause of those two or three furious

lashes you saw him deal upon the unhappy screw's ribs. Whenever I read

any article in a review, which is manifestly malignant, and intended not

to improve an author, but to give him pain, I cannot help immediately

wondering what may have been the matter with the man who wrote the

malignant article. Something must have been making him very unhappy,

I think. I do not allude to playful attacks upon a man, made in pure

thoughtlessness and buoyancy of spirit,--but to attacks which indicate a

settled, deliberate, calculating rancor. Never be angry with the man who

makes such an attack; you ought to be sorry for him. It is out of great

misery that malignity for the most part proceeds. To give the ordinary

mortal a fair chance, let him be reasonably successful and happy. Do not

worry a man into nervous irritability, and he will be amiable. Do not

dip a man in water, and he will not be wet.

Of course, my friend, I know who is to you the most interesting of all

beings, and whose history is the most interesting of all histories.

_You_ are to yourself the centre of this world, and of all the interests

of this world. And this is quite right.

There is no selfishness about all this, except that selfishness which

forms an essential element in personality,--that selfishness which must

go with the fact of one's having a self. You cannot help looking at all

things as they appear from your own point of view; and things press

themselves upon your attention and your feeling as they affect yourself.

And apart from anything like egotism, or like vain self-conceit, it is

probable that you may know that a great deal depends upon your exertion

and your life. There are those at home who would fare but poorly, if you

were just now to die. There are those who must rise with you, if you

rise, and sink with you, if you sink. Does it sometimes suddenly strike

you, what a little object you are, to have so much depending on you?

Vaguely, in your thinking and feeling, you add your circumstances

and your lot to your personality; and these make up an object of

considerable extension. You do so with other people as well as with

yourself. You have all their belongings as a background to the picture

of them which you have in your mind; and they look very little when

you see them in fact, because you see them without these belongings.

I remember, when a boy, how disappointed I was at first seeing the

Archbishop of Canterbury. It was Archbishop Howley. There he was,

a slender, pale old gentleman, sitting in an arm-chair at a public

meeting. I was chiefly disappointed, because there was _so little_ of

him. There was just the human being. There was no background of grand

accessories. The idea of the Primate of England which I had in some

confused manner in my mind included a vision of the venerable towers of

Lambeth,--of a long array of solemn predecessors, from Thomas à Becket

downwards,--of great historical occasions on which the Archbishop of

Canterbury had been a prominent figure; and in some way I fancied,

vaguely, that you would see the primate surrounded by all these things.

You remember the Highlander in "Waverley," who was much mortified when

his chief came to meet an English guest, unattended by any retinue, and

who exclaimed, in consternation and sorrow, "He has come without his

tail!" Even such was my early feeling. You understand later that

associations are not visible, and that they do not add to a man's

extension in space. But (to go back) you do, as regards yourself, what

you do as regards greater men: you add your lot to your personality,

and thus you make up a bigger object. And when you see yourself in your

tailor's shop, in a large mirror (one of a series) wherein you see your

figure all round, reflected several times, your feeling will probably

be, What a little thing you are! If you are a wise man, you will go away

somewhat humbled, and possibly somewhat the better for the sight. You

have, to a certain extent, done what Burns thought it would do all men

much good to do: you have "seen yourself as others see you." And even

to do so physically is a step towards a juster and humbler estimate of

yourself in more important things. It may here be said, as a further

illustration of the principle set forth, that people who stay very much

at home feel their stature, bodily and mental, much lessened when they

go far away from home, and spend a little time among strange scenes and

people. For, going thus away from home, you take only yourself. It is

but a small part of your extension that goes. You go; but you leave

behind your house, your study, your children, your servants, your

horses, your garden. And not only do you leave them behind, but they

grow misty and unsubstantial when you are far away from them. And

somehow you feel, that, when you make the acquaintance of a new friend

some hundreds of miles off, who never saw your home and your family, you

present yourself before him only a twentieth part or so of what you feel

yourself to be when you have all your belongings about you. Do you not

feel all that? And do you not feel, that, if you were to go away to

Australia forever, almost as the English coast turned blue and then

invisible on the horizon, your life in England would first turn

cloud-like, and then melt away?

But without further discussing the philosophy of how it comes to be, I

return to the statement that you yourself, as you live in your home, are

to yourself the centre of this world,--and that you feel the force of

any great principle most deeply, when you feel it in your own case.

And though every worthy mortal must be often taken out of himself,

especially by seeing the deep sorrows and great failures of other men,

still, in thinking of people of whom more might have been made, it

touches you most to discern that you are one of these. It is a very sad

thing to think of yourself, and to see how much more might have been

made of you. Sit down by the fire in winter, or go out now in summer and

sit down under a tree, and look back on the moral discipline you have

gone through,--look back on what you have done and suffered. Oh, how

much better and happier you might have been! And how very near you have

often been to what would have made you so much happier and better! If

you had taken the other turning when you took the wrong one, after much

perplexity,--if you had refrained from saying such a hasty word,--if you

had not thoughtlessly made such a man your enemy! Such a little thing

may have changed the entire complexion of your life. Ah, it was because

the points were turned the wrong way at that junction, that you are now

running along a line of railway through wild moorlands, leaving the warm

champaign below ever more hopelessly behind. Hastily, or pettedly,

or despairingly, you took the wrong turning; or you might have been

dwelling now amid verdant fields and silver waters in the country of

contentment and success. Many men and women, in the temporary bitterness

of some disappointment, have hastily made marriages which will embitter

all their future life,--or which at least make it certain that in this

world they will never know a joyous heart any more. Men have died

as almost briefless barristers, toiling into old age in heartless

wrangling, who had their chance of high places on the bench, but

ambitiously resolved to wait for something higher, and so missed the

tide. Men in the church have taken the wrong path at some critical time,

and doomed themselves to all the pangs of disappointed ambition. But I

think a sincere man in the church has a great advantage over almost all

ordinary disappointed men. He has less temptation, reading affairs by

the light of after-time, to look back with bitterness on any mistake he

may have made. For, if he be the man I mean, he took the decisive step

not without seeking the best of guidance; and the whole training of his

mind has fitted him for seeing a higher Hand in the allotment of human

conditions. And if a man acted for the best, according to the light he

had, and if he truly believes that God puts all in their places in

life, he may look back without bitterness upon what may appear the

most grievous mistakes. I must be suffered to add, that, if he is able

heartily to hold certain great truths and to rest on certain sure

promises, hardly any conceivable earthly lot should stamp him a soured

or disappointed man. If it be a sober truth, that "all things shall work

together for good" to a certain order of mankind, and if the deepest

sorrows in this world may serve to prepare us for a better,--why, then,

I think that one might hold by a certain ancient philosopher (and

something more) who said, "I have learned, in whatsoever state I am,

therewith to be content."

* * * * *

You see, reader, that, in thinking of _People of whom More might have

been Made_, we are limiting the scope of the subject. I am not thinking

how more might have been made of us originally. No doubt, the potter

had power over the clay. Give a larger brain, of finer quality, and

the commonplace man might have been a Milton. A little change in the

chemical composition of the gray matter of that little organ which is

unquestionably connected with the mind's working as no other organ of

the body is, and, oh, what a different order of thought would have

rolled off from your pen, when you sat down and tried to write your

best! If we are to believe Robert Burns, some people have been made more

of than was originally intended. A certain poem records how that which,

in his homely phrase, he calls "stuff to mak' a swine," was ultimately

converted into a very poor specimen of a human being. The poet had no

irreverent intention, I dare say; but I am not about to go into the

field of speculation which is opened up by his words. I know, indeed,

that, in the hands of the Creator, each of us might have been made

a different man. The pounds of material which were fashioned into

Shakspeare might have made a bumpkin with little thought beyond pigs

and turnips, or, by some slight difference beyond man's skill to trace,

might have made an idiot. A little infusion of energy into the mental

constitution might have made the mild, pensive day-dreamer who is

wandering listlessly by the river-side, sometimes chancing upon noble

thoughts, which he does not carry out into action, and does not even

write down on paper, into an active worker, with Arnold's keen look, who

would have carved out a great career for himself, and exercised a real

influence over the views and conduct of numbers of other men. A very

little alteration in feature might have made a plain face into

a beautiful one; and some slight change in the position or the

contractibility of certain of the muscles might have made the most

awkward of manners and gaits into the most dignified and graceful. All

_that_ we all understand. But my present subject is the making which is

in circumstances after our natural disposition is fixed,--the training,

coming from a hundred quarters, which forms the material supplied by

Nature into the character which each of us actually bears. And setting

apart the case of great genius, whose bent towards the thing in which it

will excel is so strong that it will find its own field by inevitable

selection, and whose strength is such that no unfavorable circumstances

can hold it down, almost any ordinary human being may be formed into

almost any development. I know a huge massive beam of rough iron, which

supports a great weight. Whenever I pass it, I cannot help giving it a

pat with my hand, and saying to it, "You might have been hair-springs

for watches." I know an odd-looking little man attached to a certain

railway-station, whose business it is, when a train comes in, to go

round it with a large box of a yellow concoction and supply grease to

the wheels. I have often looked out of the carriage-window at that

odd little man and thought to myself, "Now you might have been a

chief-justice." And, indeed, I can say from personal observation that

the stuff ultimately converted into cabinet-ministers does not at an

early stage at all appreciably differ from that which never becomes more

than country-parsons. There is a great gulf between the human being who

gratefully receives a shilling, and touches his cap as he receives it,

and the human being whose income is paid in yearly or half-yearly sums,

and to whom a pecuniary tip would appear as an insult; yet, of course,

that great gulf is the result of training alone. John Smith the laborer,

with twelve shillings a week, and the bishop with eight thousand a

year, had, by original constitution, precisely the same kind of feeling

towards that much-sought, yet much-abused reality which provides the

means of life. Who shall reckon up by what millions of slight touches

from the hand of circumstance, extending over many years, the one man is

gradually formed into the giving of the shilling, and the other man into

the receiving of it with that touch of his hat? Who shall read back the

forming influences at work since the days in the cradle, that gradually

formed one man into sitting down to dinner, and another man into waiting

behind his chair? I think it would be occasionally a comfort, if one

could believe, as American planters profess to believe about their

slaves, that there is an original and essential difference between men;

for, truly, the difference in their positions is often so tremendous

that it is painful to think that it is the self-same clay and the

self-same common mind that are promoted to dignity and degraded to

servitude. And if _you_ sometimes feel _that_,--_you_, in whose favor

the arrangement tends,--what do you suppose your servants sometimes

think upon the subject? It was no wonder that the millions of Russia

were ready to grovel before their Czar, while they believed that he

was "an emanation from the Deity." But in countries where it is quite

understood that every man is just as much an emanation from the Deity

as any other, you will not long have that sort of thing. You remember

Goldsmith's noble lines, which Dr. Johnson never could read without

tears, concerning the English character. Is it not true that it is just

because the humble, but intelligent Englishman understands distinctly

that we are all of us _people of whom more might have been made_, that

he has "learnt to venerate himself as man"? And thinking of influences

which form the character, there is a sad reflection which has often

occurred to me. It is, that circumstances often develop a character

which it is hard to contemplate without anger and disgust. And yet, in

many such cases, it is rather pity that is due. The more disgusting the

character formed in some men, the more you should pity them. Yet it is

hard to do _that_. You easily pity the man whom circumstances have

made poor and miserable; how much more you should pity the man whom

circumstances have made bad! You pity the man from whom some terrible

accident has taken a limb or a hand; but how much more should you pity

the man from whom the influences of years have taken a conscience and a

heart! And something is to be said for even the most unamiable and worst

of the race. No doubt, it is mainly their own fault that they are so

bad; but still it is hard work to be always rowing against wind and

tide, and some people could be good only by doing _that_ ceaselessly. I

am not thinking now of pirates and pickpockets. But take the case of a

sour, backbiting, malicious, wrong-headed, lying old woman, who gives

her life to saying disagreeable things and making mischief between

friends. There are not many mortals with whom one is less disposed to

have patience. But yet, if you knew all, you would not be so severe in

what you think and say of her. You do not know the physical irritability

of nerve and weakness of constitution which that poor creature may have

inherited; you do not know the singular twist of mind which she may have

got from Nature and from bad and unkind treatment in youth; you do not

know the bitterness of heart she has felt at the polite snubbings and

ladylike tortures which in excellent society are often the share of the

poor and the dependent. If you knew all these things, you would bear

more patiently with my friend Miss Limejuice, though I confess that

sometimes you would find it uncommonly hard to do so.

As I wrote that last paragraph, I began dimly to fancy that somewhere I

had seen the idea which is its subject treated by an abler hand by far

than mine. The idea, you may be sure, was not suggested to me by books,

but by what I have seen of men and women. But it is a pleasant thing to

find that a thought which at the time is strongly impressing one's self

has impressed other men. And a modest person, who knows very nearly what

his humble mark is, will be quite pleased to find that another man has

not only anticipated his thoughts, but has expressed them much better

than he could have done. Yes, let me turn to that incomparable essay of

John Foster, "On a Man's writing Memoirs of Himself." Here it is.

"Make the supposition that any given number of persons,--a hundred,

for instance,--taken promiscuously, should be able to write memoirs of

themselves so clear and perfect as to explain, to your discernment at

least, the entire process by which their minds have attained their

present state, recounting all the most impressive circumstances. If they

should read these memoirs to you in succession, while your benevolence,

and the moral principles according to which you felt and estimated,

were kept at the highest pitch, you would often, during the disclosure,

regret to observe how many things may be the causes of irretrievable

mischief. 'Why is the path of life,' you would say, 'so haunted as if

with evil spirits of every diversity of noxious agency, some of which

may patiently accompany, or others of which may suddenly cross, the

unfortunate wanderer?' And you would regret to observe into how many

forms of intellectual and moral perversion the human mind readily yields

itself to be modified.

* * * * *

"'I compassionate you,' would, in a very benevolent hour, be your

language to the wealthy, unfeeling _tyrant of a family and a

neighborhood_, who seeks, in the overawed timidity and unretaliated

injuries of the unfortunate beings within his power, the gratification

that should have been sought in their affections. Unless you had brought

into the world some extraordinary refractoriness to the influence of

evil, the process that you have undergone could not easily fail of being

efficacious. If your parents idolized their own importance in their

son so much that they never opposed your inclinations themselves nor

permitted it to be done by any subject to their authority,--if the

humble companion, sometimes summoned to the honor of amusing you, bore

your caprices and insolence with the meekness without which he had

lost his enviable privilege,--if you could despoil the garden of some

nameless dependent neighbor of the carefully reared flowers, and torment

his little dog or cat, without his daring to punish you or to appeal

to your infatuated parents,--if aged men addressed you in a submissive

tone, and with the appellation of 'Sir,' and their aged wives uttered

their wonder at your condescension, and pushed their grandchildren away

from around the fire for your sake, if you happened, though with the

strut of pertness, and your hat on your head, to enter one of their

cottages, perhaps to express your contempt of the homely dwelling,

furniture, and fare,--if, in maturer life, you associated with vile

persons, who would forego the contest of equality to be your allies in

trampling on inferiors,--and if, both then and since, you have been

suffered to deem your wealth the compendium or equivalent of every

ability and every good quality,--it would indeed be immensely strange,

if you had not become in due time the miscreant who may thank the power

of the laws in civilized society that he is not assaulted with clubs

and stones, to whom one could cordially wish the opportunity and the

consequences of attempting his tyranny among some such people as those

_submissive_ sons of Nature in the forests of North America, and whose

dependants and domestic relatives may be almost forgiven when they shall

one day rejoice at his funeral."

What do you think of _that_, my reader, as a specimen of embittered

eloquence and nervous pith? It is something to read massive and

energetic sense, in days wherein mystical twaddle, and subtlety which

hopelessly defies all logic, are sometimes thought extremely fine, if

they are set out in a style which is refined into mere effeminacy.

* * * * *

I cherish a very strong conviction, (as has been said,) that, at least

in the case of educated people, happiness is a grand discipline for

bringing out what is amiable and excellent. You understand, of course,

what I mean by happiness. We all know, of course, that light-heartedness

is not very familiar to grown-up people, who are doing the work of life,

who feel its many cares, and who do not forget the many risks which hang

over it. I am not thinking of the kind of thing which is suggested to

the minds of children, when they read, at the end of a tale, concerning

its heroine and hero, that "they lived happily ever after." No, we don't

look for that. By happiness I mean freedom from terrible anxiety and

from pervading depression of spirits, the consciousness that we are

filling our place in life with decent success and approbation, religious

principle and character, fair physical health throughout the family, and

moderate good temper and good sense. And I hold, with Sydney Smith, and

with that keen practical philosopher, Becky Sharpe, that happiness and

success tend very greatly to make people passably good. Well, I see an

answer to the statement, as I do to most statements; but, at least, the

beam is never subjected to the strain which would break it. I have seen

the gradual working of what I call happiness and success in ameliorating

character. I have known a man who, by necessity, by the pressure of

poverty, was driven to write for the magazines,--a kind of work for

which he had no special talent or liking, and which he had never

intended to attempt. There was no more miserable, nervous, anxious,

disappointed being on earth than he was, when he began his writing for

the press. And sure enough, his articles were bitter and ill-set to a

high degree. They were thoroughly ill-natured and bad. They were not

devoid of a certain cleverness; but they were the sour products of

a soured nature. But that man gradually got into comfortable

circumstances: and with equal step with his lot the tone of his writings

mended, till, as a writer, he became conspicuous for the healthful,

cheerful, and kindly nature of all he produced. I remember seeing a

portrait of an eminent author, taken a good many years ago, at a time

when he was struggling into notice, and when he was being very severely

handled by the critics. That portrait was really truculent of aspect.

It was sour, and even ferocious-looking. Years afterwards I saw that

author, at a time when he had attained vast success, and was universally

recognized as a great man. How improved that face! All the savage lines

were gone; the bitter look was gone; the great man looked quite genial

and amiable. And I came to know that he really was all he looked. Bitter

judgments of men, imputations of evil motives, disbelief in anything

noble or generous, a disposition to repeat tales to the prejudice of

others, envy, hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness,--all these

things may possibly come out of a bad heart; but they certainly come out

of a miserable one. The happier any human being is, the better and more

kindly he thinks of all. It is the man who is always worried, whose

means are uncertain, whose home is uncomfortable, whose nerves are

rasped by some kind friend who daily repeats and enlarges upon

everything disagreeable for him to hear,--it is he who thinks hardly

of the character and prospects of humankind, and who believes in the

essential and unimprovable badness of the race.

* * * * *

This is not a treatise on the formation of character: it pretends to

nothing like completeness. If this essay were to extend to a volume of

about three hundred and eighty pages, I might be able to set out and

discuss, in something like a full and orderly fashion, the influences

under which human beings grow up, and the way in which to make the best

of the best of these influences, and to evade or neutralize the worst.

And if, after great thought and labor, I had produced such a volume, I

am well aware that nobody would read it. So I prefer to briefly glance

at a few aspects of a great subject just as they present themselves,

leaving the complete discussion of it to solid individuals with more

leisure at their command.

* * * * *

Physically, no man is made the most of. Look at an acrobat or a boxer:

_there_ is what your limbs might have been made for strength and

agility: _that_ is the potential which is in human nature in these

respects. I never witnessed a prize-fight, and assuredly I never will

witness one: but I am told, that, when the champions appear in the ring,

stripped for the combat, (however bestial and blackguard-looking their

countenances may be,) the clearness and beauty of their skin testify

that by skilful physical discipline a great deal more may be made of

that human hide than is usually made of it. Then, if you wish to see

what may be made of the human muscles as regards rapid dexterity, look

at the Wizard of the North or at an Indian juggler. I am very far,

indeed, from saying or thinking that this peculiar preëminence is worth

the pains it must cost to acquire it. Not that I have a word to say

against the man who maintains his children by bringing some one faculty

of the body to absolute perfection: I am ready even to admit that it is

a very right and fit thing that one man in five or six millions should

devote his life to showing the very utmost that can be made of the human

fingers, or the human muscular system as a whole. It is fit that a rare

man here and there should cultivate some accomplishment to a perfection

that looks magical, just as it is fit that a man here and there should

live in a house that cost a million of pounds to build, and round which

a wide tract of country shows what may be made of trees and fields where

unlimited wealth and exquisite taste have done their best to improve

Nature to the fairest forms of which it is capable. But even if it were

possible, it would not be desirable that all human beings should live in

dwellings like Hamilton Palace or Arundel Castle; and it would serve no

good end at all, certainly no end worth the cost, to have all educated

men muscular as Tom Sayers, or swift of hand as Robert Houdin. Practical

efficiency is what is wanted for the business of this world, not

absolute perfection: life is too short to allow any but exceptional

individuals, few and far between, to acquire the power of playing at

rackets as well as rackets can possibly be played. We are obliged to

have a great number of irons in the fire: it is needful that we should

do decently well a great number of things; and we must not devote

ourselves to one thing, to the exclusion of all the rest. And

accordingly, though we may desire to be reasonably muscular and

reasonably active, it will not disturb us to think that in both these

respects we are people of whom more might have been made. It may here

be said that probably there is hardly an influence which tends so

powerfully to produce extreme self-complacency as the conviction, that,

as regards some one physical accomplishment, one is a person of whom

more could not have been made. It is a proud thing to think that you

stand decidedly ahead of all mankind: that Eclipse is first, and the

rest nowhere; even in the matter of keeping up six balls at once, or of

noting and remembering twenty different objects in a shop-window as you

walk past it at five miles an hour. I do not think I ever beheld a human

being whose aspect was of such unutterable pride as a man I lately saw

playing the drum as one of a certain splendid military band. He was

playing in a piece in which the drum music was very conspicuous; and

even an unskilled observer could remark that his playing was absolute

perfection. He had the thorough mastery of his instrument. He did the

most difficult things not only with admirable precision, but without

the least appearance of effort. He was a great, tall fellow: and it was

really a fine sight to see him standing very upright, and immovable save

as to his arms, looking fixedly into distance, and his bosom swelling

with the lofty belief, that, out of four or five thousand persons who

were present, there was not one who, to save his life, could have done

what he was doing so easily.

So much of physical dexterity. As for physical grace, it will be

admitted that in that respect more might be made of most human beings.

It is not merely that they are ugly and awkward naturally, but that they

are ugly and awkward artificially. Sir Bulwer Lytton, in his earlier

writings, was accustomed to maintain, that, just as it is a man's duty

to cultivate his mental powers, so is it his duty to cultivate his

bodily appearance. And doubtless all the gifts of Nature are talents

committed to us to be improved; they are things intrusted to us to make

the best of. It may be difficult to fix the point at which the care

of personal appearance in man or woman becomes excessive. It does

so unquestionably when it engrosses the mind to the neglect of more

important things. But I suppose that all reasonable people now believe

that scrupulous attention to personal cleanliness, freshness, and

neatness is a Christian duty. The days are past, almost everywhere, in

which piety was held to be associated with dirt. Nobody would mention

now, as a proof how saintly a human being was, that, for the love of

God, he had never washed his face or brushed his hair for thirty

years. And even scrupulous neatness need bring with it no suspicion of

puppyism. The most trim and tidy of old men was good John Wesley; and

he conveyed to the minds of all who saw him the notion of a man whose

treasure was laid up beyond this world, quite as much as if he had

dressed in such a fashion as to make himself an object of ridicule,

or as if he had forsworn the use of soap. Some people fancy that

slovenliness of attire indicates a mind above petty details. I have seen

an eminent preacher ascend the pulpit with his bands hanging over his

right shoulder, his gown apparently put on by being dropped upon him

from the vestry ceiling, and his hair apparently unbrushed for several

weeks. There was no suspicion of affectation about that good man; yet I

regarded his untidiness as a defect, and not as an excellence. He gave

a most eloquent sermon; yet I thought it would have been well, had the

lofty mind that treated so admirably some of the grandest realities of

life and of immortality been able to address itself a little to the care

of lesser things. I confess, that, when I heard the Bishop of Oxford

preach, I thought the effect of his sermon was increased by the decorous

and careful fashion in which he was arrayed in his robes. And it is

to be admitted that the grace of the human aspect may be in no small

measure enhanced by bestowing a little pains upon it. You, youthful

matron, when you take your little children to have their photographs

taken, and when their nurse, in contemplation of that event, attired

them in their most tasteful dresses and arranged their hair in its

prettiest curls, you know that the little things looked a great deal

better than they do on common days. It is pure nonsense to say that

beauty when unadorned is adorned the most. For that is as much as to say

that a pretty young woman, in the matter of physical appearance, is a

person of whom no more can be made. Now taste and skill can make more of

almost anything. And you will set down Thomson's lines as flatly opposed

to fact, when your lively young cousin walks into your room to let you

see her before she goes out to an evening party, and when you compare

that radiant vision, in her robes of misty texture, and with hair

arranged in folds the most complicated, wreathed, and satin-shoed,

with the homely figure that took a walk with you that afternoon,

russet-gowned, tartan-plaided, and shod with serviceable boots for

tramping through country mud. One does not think of loveliness in the

case of men, because they have not got any; but their aspect, such as it

is, is mainly made by their tailors. And it is a lamentable thought,

how very ill the clothes of most men are made. I think that the art of

draping the male human body has been brought to much less excellence

by the mass of those who practise it than any other of the useful and

ornamental arts. Tailors, even in great cities, are generally extremely

bad. Or it may be that the providing the human frame with decent and

well-fitting garments is so very difficult a thing that (save by a great

genius here and there) it can be no more than approximated to. As for

tailors in little country villages, their power of distorting and

disfiguring is wonderful. When I used to be a country clergyman, I

remember how, when I went to the funeral of some simple rustic, I was

filled with surprise to see the tall, strapping, fine young country

lads, arrayed in their black suits. What awkward figures they looked

in those unwonted garments! How different from their easy, natural

appearance in their every-day fustian! Here you would see a young fellow

with a coat whose huge collar covered half his head when you looked at

him from behind; a very common thing was to have sleeves which entirely

concealed the hands; and the wrinkled and baggy aspect of the whole

suits could be imagined only by such as have seen them. It may be

remarked here, that those strong country lads were in another respect

people of whom more might have been physically made. Oh for a

drill-sergeant to teach them to stand upright, and to turn out their

toes, and to get rid of that slouching, hulking gait which gives such

a look of clumsiness and stupidity! If you could but have the

well-developed muscles and the fresh complexion of the country with the

smartness and alertness of the town! You have there the rough material

of which a vast deal may be made; you have the water-worn pebble which

will take on a beautiful polish. Take from the moorland cottage the

shepherd lad of sixteen; send him to a Scotch college for four years;

let him be tutor in a good family for a year or two; and if he be an

observant fellow, you will find in him the quiet, self-possessed air

and the easy address of the gentleman who has seen the world. And it is

curious to see one brother of a family thus educated and polished into

refinement, while the other three or four, remaining in their father's

simple lot, retain its rough manners and its unsophisticated feelings.

Well, look at the man who has been made a gentleman,--probably by the

hard labor and sore self-denial of the others,--and see in him what each

of the others might have been! Look with respect on the diamond which

needed only to be polished! Reverence the undeveloped potential which

circumstances have held down! Look with interest on these people of whom

more might have been made!

Such a sight as this sometimes sets us thinking how many germs of

excellence are in this world turned to no account. You see the polished

diamond and the rough one side by side. It is too late now; but the dull

colorless pebble might have been the bright glancing gem. And you may

polish the material diamond at any time; but if you miss your season in

the case of the human one, the loss can never be repaired. The bumpkin

who is a bumpkin at thirty must remain a bumpkin to threescore and ten.

But another thing that makes us think how many fair possibilities are

lost is to remark the fortuitous way in which great things have often

been done,--and done by people who never dreamt that they had in them

the power to do anything particular. These cases, one cannot but think,

are samples of millions more. There have been very popular writers who

were brought out by mere accident. They did not know what precious vein

of thought they had at command, till they stumbled upon it as if by

chance, like the Indian at the mines of Potosi. It is not much that we

know of Shakspeare, but it seems certain that it was in patching up

old plays for acting that he discovered within himself a capacity for

producing that which men will not easily let die. When a young military

man, disheartened with the service, sought for an appointment as an

Irish Commissioner of Excise, and was sadly disappointed because he did

not get it, it is probable that he had as little idea as any one else

had that he possessed that aptitude for the conduct of war which was

to make him the Duke of Wellington. And when a young mathematician,

entirely devoid of ambition, desired to settle quietly down and devote

all his life to that unexciting study, he was not aware that he was a

person of whom more was to be made,--who was to grow into the great

Emperor Napoleon. I had other instances in my mind, but after these last

it is needless to mention them. But such cases suggest to us that there

may have been many Folletts who never held a brief, many Keans who never

acted but in barns, many Vandyks who never earned more than sixpence a

day, many Goldsmiths who never were better than penny-a-liners, many

Michaels who never built their St. Peters,--and perhaps a Shakspeare who

held horses at the theatre-door for pence, as the Shakspeare we know of

did, and who stopped there.

Let it here be suggested, that it is highly illogical to conclude that

you are yourself a person of whom a great deal more might have been

made, merely because you are a person of whom it is the fact that very

little has actually been made. This suggestion may appear a truism; but

it is one of those simple truths of which we all need to be occasionally

reminded. After all, the great test of what a man can do must be what a

man does. But there are folk who live on the reputation of being pebbles

capable of receiving a very high polish, though from circumstances

they did not choose to be polished. There are people who stand high in

general estimation on the ground of what they might have done, if they

had liked. You will find students who took no honors at the university,

but who endeavor to impress their friends with the notion, that, if

they had chosen, they could have attained to unexampled eminence. And

sometimes, no doubt, there are great powers that run to waste. There

have been men whose doings, splendid as they were, were no more than a

hint of how much more they could have done. In such a case as that of

Coleridge, you see how the lack of steady industry and of all sense of

responsibility abated the tangible result of the noble intellect God

gave him. But as a general rule, and in the case of ordinary people, you

need not give a man credit for the possession of any powers beyond those

which he has actually exhibited. If a boy is at the bottom of his class,

it is probably because he could not attain its top. My friend Mr.

Snarling thinks he can write much better articles than those which

appear in the "Atlantic Monthly"; but as he has not done so, I am not

inclined to give him credit for the achievement. But you can see that

this principle of estimating people's abilities, not by what they have

done, but by what they think they could do, will be much approved by

persons who are stupid and at the same time conceited. It is a pleasing

arrangement, that every man should fix his own mental mark, and hold by

his estimate of himself. And then, never measuring his strength with

others, he can suppose that he could have beat them, if he had tried.

* * * * *

Yes, we are all mainly fashioned by circumstances; and had the

circumstances been more propitious, they might have made a great deal

more of us. You sometimes think, middle-aged man, who never have passed

the limits of Britain, what an effect might have been produced upon your

views and character by foreign travel. You think what an indefinite

expansion of mind it might have caused,--how many narrow prejudices it

might have rubbed away,--how much wiser and better a man it might have

made you. Or more society and wider reading in your early youth might

have improved you,--might have taken away the shyness and the intrusive

individuality which you sometimes feel painfully,--might have called out

one cannot say what of greater confidence and larger sympathy. How very

little, you think to yourself, you have seen and known! While others

skim great libraries, you read the same few books over and over; while

others come to know many lands and cities, and the faces and ways of

many men, you look, year after year, on the same few square miles of

this world, and you have to form your notion of human nature from the

study of but few human beings, and these very commonplace. Perhaps it is

as well. It is not so certain that more would have been made of you, if

you had enjoyed what might seem greater advantages. Perhaps you learned

more, by studying the little field before you earnestly and long, than

you would have learned, if you had bestowed a cursory glance upon fields

more extensive by far. Perhaps there was compensation for the fewness of

the cases you had to observe in the keenness with which you were able

to observe them. Perhaps the Great Disposer saw that in your case the

pebble got nearly all the polishing it would stand,--the man nearly all

the chances he could improve.

If there be soundness and justice in this suggestion, it may afford

consolation to a considerable class of men and women: I mean those

people who, feeling within themselves many defects of character, and

discerning in their outward lot much which they would wish other than

it is, are ready to think that some one thing would have put them

right,--that some one thing would put them right even yet,--but

something which they have hopelessly missed, something which can never

be. There was just one testing event which stood between them and their

being made a vast deal more of. They would have been far better and far

happier, they think, had some single malign influence been kept away

which has darkened all their life, or had some single blessing been

given which would have made it happy. If you had got such a parish,

which you did not get,--if you had married such a woman,--if your little

child had not died,--if you had always the society and sympathy of such

an energetic and hopeful friend,--if the scenery round your dwelling

were of a different character,--if the neighboring town were four miles

off, instead of fifteen,--if any one of these circumstances had been

altered, what a different man you might have been! Probably many people,

even of middle age, conscious that the manifold cares and worries of

life forbid that it should be evenly joyous, do yet cherish at the

bottom of their heart some vague, yet rooted fancy, that, if but one

thing were given on which they have set their hearts, or one care

removed forever, they would be perfectly happy, even here. Perhaps you

overrate the effect which would have been produced on your character by

such a single cause. It might not have made you much better; it might

not even have made you very different. And assuredly you are wrong in

fancying that any such single thing could have made you happy,--that is,

entirely happy. Nothing in this world could ever make you _that_. It is

not God's purpose that we should be entirely happy here, "This is not

our rest." The day will never come which will _not_ bring its worry. And

the possibility of terrible misfortune and sorrow hangs over all. There

is but One Place where we shall be right; and _that_ is far away.

* * * * *

Yes, more might have been made of all of us; probably, in the case of

most, not much more _will_ be made in this world. We are now, if we

have reached middle life, very much what we shall be to the end of the

chapter. We shall not, in this world, be much better; let us humbly

trust that we shall not be worse. Yet, if there be an undefinable

sadness in looking at the marred material of which so much more might

have been made, there is a sublime hopefulness in the contemplation of

material, bodily and mental, of which a great deal more and better will

certainly yet be made. Not much more may be made of any of us in life;

but who shall estimate what may be made of us in immortality? Think of a

"spiritual body"! think of a perfectly pure and happy soul! I thought of

this, on a beautiful evening of this summer, walking with a much valued

friend through a certain grand ducal domain. In front of a noble

sepulchre, where is laid up much aristocratic dust, there are

sculptured, by some great artist, three colossal faces, which are meant

to represent Life, Death, and Immortality. It was easy to represent

Death: the face was one of solemn rest, with closed eyes; and the

sculptor's skill was mainly shown in distinguishing Life from

Immortality. And he had done it well. _There_ was Life: a care-worn,

anxious, weary face, that seemed to look at you earnestly, and with

a vague inquiry for something,--the something that is lacking in all

things here. And _there_ was Immortality: life-like, but, oh, how

different from mortal Life! _There_ was the beautiful face, calm,

satisfied, self-possessed, sublime, and with eyes looking far away. I

see it yet, the crimson sunset warming the gray stone,--and a great

hawthorn-tree, covered with blossoms, standing by. Yes, _there_ was

Immortality; and you felt, as you looked at it,--that it was MORE MADE

OF LIFE!

* * * * *

MY FRIEND'S LIBRARY.

That exquisite writer, Horae Subsecivae Brown, quotes, (without

comment,) as a motto to one of his volumes, an anecdote from Pierce

Egan, which I reproduce here:--

"A lady, resident in Devonshire, going into one of her parlors,

discovered a young ass, who had found its way into the room, and

carefully closed the door upon himself. He had evidently not been long

in this situation before he had nibbled a part of Cicero's Orations,

and eaten nearly all the index of a folio edition of Seneca in Latin, a

large part of a volume of La Bruyère's 'Maxims' in French, and several

pages of 'Cecilia.' He had done no other mischief whatever."

Spare your wit, Sir, or Madam! Why should _you_ laugh, and apply the

sting in Mr. Egan's story to the case of "Yours Truly"?

* * * * *

I scarcely know a greater pleasure than to be allowed for a whole day to

spend the hours unmolested in my friend's library. So much _privilege_

abounds there, I call it _Urbanity Hall_. It is a plain, modestly

appointed apartment, overlooking a broad sheet of water; and I can see,

from where I like to sit and read, the sail-boats go tilting by, and

glancing across the bay. Sometimes, when a rainy day sets in, I run down

to my friend's house, and ask leave to browse about the library,--not

so much for the sake of reading, as for the intense enjoyment I have in

turning over the books that have a personal history as it were. Many of

them once belonged to authors whose libraries have been dispersed. My

friend has enriched her editions with autographic notes of those fine

spirits who wrote the books which illumine her shelves, so that one is

constantly coming upon some fresh treasure in the way of a literary

curiosity. I am apt to discover something new every time I take down a

folio or a miniature volume. As I ramble on from shelf to shelf,

"Straight mine eye hath caught new pleasures,"

and the hours often slip by into the afternoon, and glide noiselessly

into twilight, before dinner-time is remembered. Drifting about only a

few days ago, I came by accident upon a magic quarto, shabby enough

in its exterior, with one of the covers hanging by the eyelids, and

otherwise sadly battered, to the great disfigurement of its external

aspect. I did not remember even to have seen it in the library before,

(it turned out to be a new comer,) and was about to pass it by with an

unkind thought as to its pauper condition, when it occurred to me, as

the lettering was obliterated from the back, I might as well open to the

title-page and learn the name at least of the tattered stranger. And I

was amply rewarded for the attention. It turned out to be "The Novels

and Tales of the Renowned John Boccacio, The first Refiner of Italian

Prose: containing A Hundred Curious Novels, by Seven Honorable Ladies

and Three Noble Gentlemen, Framed in Ten Days." It was printed in London

in 1684, "for Awnsham Churchill, at the Black Swan at Amen Corner." But

what makes this old yellow-leaved book a treasure-volume for all time is

the inscription on the first fly-leaf, in the handwriting of a man of

genius, who, many years ago, wrote thus on the blank page:

"To MARIANNE HUNT.

"Her Boccacio (_alter et idem_) come back to her after many years'

absence, for her good-nature in giving it away in a foreign country to a

traveller whose want of books was still worse than her own.

"From her affectionate husband,

"LEIGH HUNT.

"August 23,1839--Chelsea, England."

This record tells a most interesting story, and reveals to us an episode

in the life of the poet, well worth the knowing. I hope no accident

will ever cancel this old leather-bound veteran from the world's

bibliographic treasures. Spare it, Fire, Water, and Worms! for it does

the heart good to handle such a quarto.

* * * * *

One does not need to look far among the shelves in my friend's library

to find companion-gems of this antiquated tome. Among so many of

"The assembled souls of all that men held

wise,"

there is no solitude of the mind. I reach out my hand at random, and,

lo! the first edition of Milton's "Paradise Lost"! It is a little brown

volume, "Printed by S. Simmons, and to be sold by S. Thomson at the

Bishop's-Head in Duck Lane, by H. Mortlack at the White Hart in

Westminster Hall, M. Walker under St. Dunstan's Church in Fleet Street,

and R. Boulten at the Turk's Head in Bishopsgate Street, 1668." Foolish

old Simmons deemed it necessary to insert over his own name the

following notice, which heads the Argument to the Poem:--

"THE PRINTER TO THE READER.

"Courteous Reader, There was no Argument at first intended to the Book,

but for the satisfaction of many that have desired it, I have procured

it, and withall a reason of that which stumbled many others, why the

Poem Rimes not."

The "Argument," which Milton omitted in subsequent editions, is very

curious throughout; and the reason which the author gives, at the

request of Mr. Publisher Simmons, why the poem "Rimes not," is quaint

and well worth transcribing an extract here, as it does not always

appear in more modern editions. Mr. Simmons's Poet is made to say,--

"The Measure is _English_ Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of _Homers_

in _Greek_, and of _Virgil_ in _Latin_; Rime being no necessary Adjunct

or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but

the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame

Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets,

carried away by Custom, but much to their own vexation, hindrance, and

constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse

then else they would have exprest them."

We give the orthography precisely as Milton gave it in this his first

edition.

There is a Table of Errata prefixed to this old copy, in which the

reader is told,

"for hun_dreds_ read hun_derds_.

for _we_ read _wee_."

Master Simmons's proof-reader was no adept in his art, if one may judge

from the countless errors which he allowed to creep into this immortal

poem when it first appeared in print. One can imagine the identical copy

now before us being handed over the counter in Duck Lane to some eager

scholar on the look-out for something new, and handed back again to Mr.

Thomson as too dull a looking poem for his perusal. Mr. Edmund Waller

entertained that idea of it, at any rate.

* * * * *

One of the sturdiest little books in my friend's library is a thick-set,

stumpy old copy of Richard Baxter's "Holy Commonwealth," written in

1659, and, as the title-page informs us, "at the invitation of James

Harrington Esquire,"--as one would take a glass of Canary,--by

_invitation!_ There is a preface addressed "To all those in the Army or

elsewhere, that have caused our many and great Eclipses since 1646." The

worms have made dagger-holes through and through the "inspired leaves"

of this fat little volume, till much strong thinking is now very

perforated printing. On the flyleaf is written, in a rough, straggling

hand,

"WILLIAM WORDSWORTH,

"Rydal Mount."

The poet seems to have read the old book pretty closely, for there are

evident marks of his liking throughout its pages.

* * * * *

Connected with the Bard of the Lakes is another work in my friend's

library, which I always handle with a tender interest. It is a copy of

Wordsworth's Poetical Works, printed in 1815, with all the alterations

afterwards made in the pieces copied in by the poet from the edition

published in 1827. Some of the changes are marked improvements, and

nearly all make the meaning clearer. Now and then a prosaic phrase gives

place to a more poetical expression. The well-known lines,

"Of Him who walked in glory and in joy,

Following his plough along the mountain-side,"

read at first,

"_Behind_ his plough _upon_ the mountain-side."

* * * * *

In a well-preserved quarto copy of "Rasselas," with illustrations by

Smirke, which my friend picked up in London a few years ago, I found

the other day an unpublished autograph letter from Dr. Johnson, so

characteristic of the great man that it is worth transcribing. It is

addressed

"_To the Reverend Mr. Compton.

"To be sent to Mrs. Williams_."

And it is thus worded:--

"Sir,

"Your business, I suppose, is in a way of as easy progress as such

business ever has. It is seldom that event keeps pace with expectation.

"The scheme of your book I cannot say that I fully comprehend. I would

not have you ask less than an hundred guineas, for it seems a large

octavo.

"Go to Mr. Davis, in Russell Street, show him this letter, and show him

the book if he desires to see it. He will tell you what hopes you may

form, and to what Bookseller you should apply.

"If you succeed in selling your book, you may do better than by

dedicating it to me. You may perhaps obtain permission to dedicate it to

the Bishop of London, or to Dr. Vyse, and make way by your book to more

advantage than I can procure you.

"Please to tell Mrs. Williams that I grow better, and that I wish to

know how she goes on. You, Sir, may write for her to,

"Sir,

"Your most humble Servant,

"SAM: JOHNSON.

"Octo. 24, 1782."

Dear kind-hearted old bear! On turning to Boswell's Life of his Ursine

Majesty, we learn who Mr. Compton was. When the Doctor visited France

in 1775, the Benedictine Monks in Paris entertained him in the most

friendly way. One of them, the Rev. James Compton, who had left England

at the early age of six to reside on the Continent, questioned him

pretty closely about the Protestant faith, and proposed, if at some

future time he should go to England to consider the subject more deeply,

to call at Bolt Court. In the summer of 1782 he paid the Doctor a

visit, and informed him of his desire to be admitted into the Church of

England. Johnson managed the matter satisfactorily for him, and he was

received into communion in St. James's Parish Church. Till the end of

January, 1783, he lived entirely at the Doctor's expense, his own means

being very scanty. Through Johnson's kindness he was nominated Chaplain

at the French Chapel of St. James's, and in 1802 we hear of him as being

quite in favor with the excellent Bishop Porteus and several other

distinguished Londoners. Thus, by the friendly hand of the hard-working,

earnest old lexicographer, Mr. Compton was led from deep poverty up to

a secure competency, and a place among the influential dignitaries of

London society. Poor enough himself, Johnson never shrank back, when

there was an honest person in distress to be helped on in the battle of

life. God's blessing on his memory for all his sympathy with struggling

humanity!

* * * * *

My friend has an ardent affection for Walter Scott and Charles Lamb. I

find the first edition of "Marmion," printed in 1808, "by J. Ballantyne

& Co. for Archibald Constable and Company, Edinburgh," most carefully

bound in savory Russia, standing in a pleasant corner of the room. Being

in quarto, the type is regal. Of course the copy is enriched with a

letter in the handwriting of Sir Walter. It is addressed to a personal

friend, and is dated April 17, 1825. The closing passage in it is of

especial interest.

"I have seen Sheridan's last letter imploring Rogers to come to his

assistance. It stated that he was dying, and concluded abruptly

with these words 'they are throwing the things out of window.' The

memorialist certainly took pennyworths out of his friend's character.--I

sate three hours for my picture to Sir Thomas Lawrence during which the

whole conversation was filled up by Rogers with stories of Sheridan, for

the least of which if true he deserved the gallows."

Ever Yours, "WALTER SCOTT."

In the April of 1802 Scott was living in a pretty cottage at Lasswade;

and while there he sent off the following letter, which I find attached

with a wafer to my friend's copy of the Abbotsford edition of his works,

and written in a much plainer hand than he afterwards fell into. The

address is torn off.

"SIR,

"I esteem myself honored by the polite reception which you have given to

the Border Minstrelsy and am particularly flattered that so very good a

judge of poetical Antiquities finds any reason to be pleased with the

work.--There is no portrait of the _Flower of Yarrow_ in existence,

nor do I think it very probable that any was ever taken. Much family

anecdote concerning her has been preserved among her descendants of whom

I have the honor to be one. The epithet of '_Flower of Yarrow_' was in

later times bestowed upon one of her immediate posterity, Miss Mary

Lillias Scott, daughter of John Scott Esq. of Harden, and celebrated for

her beauty in the pastoral song of Tweedside,--I mean that set of modern

words which begins 'What beauty does Flora disclose.' This lady I myself

remember very well, and I mention her to you least you should receive

any inaccurate information owing to her being called like her

predecessor the 'Flower of Yarrow.' There was a portrait of this latter

lady in the collection at Hamilton which the present Duke transferred

through my hands to Lady Diana Scott relict of the late Walter Scott

Esq. of Harden, which picture was vulgarly but inaccurately supposed to

have been a resemblance of the original Mary Scott, daughter of Philip

Scott of Dryhope, and married to _Auld Wat_ of Harden in the middle of

the 16th century.

"I shall be particularly happy if upon any future occasion I can in

the slightest degree contribute to advance your valuable and patriotic

labours, and I remain, Sir,

"Your very faithful

"and obt. Servant

"WALTER SCOTT."

This letter is worthy to be printed, and the readers of the "Atlantic

Monthly" now see it for the first time, I believe, set in type.

* * * * *

Old Bernard Lintott, at the Cross-Keys in Fleet Street, brought out

in 1714 "The Rape of the Lock, an Heroi-Comical Poem, in Five Cantos,

written by Mr. Pope." He printed certain words in the title-page in red,

and other certain words in black ink. His own name and Mr. Pope's he

chose to exhibit in sanguinary tint. A copy of this edition, very much

thumbed and wanting half a dozen leaves, fell into the hands of Charles

Lamb more than a hundred years after it was published. Charles bore it

home, and set to work to supply, in his small neat hand, from another

edition, what was missing from the text in his stall-bought copy. As he

paid only sixpence for his prize, he could well afford the time it took

him to write in on blank leaves, which he inserted, the lines from

"Thus far both armies to Belinda yield,"

onward to the couplet,

"And thrice they twitch'd the Diamond in her Ear,

Thrice she look'd back, and thrice the Foe drew near."

Besides this autographic addition, enhancing forever the value of this

old copy of Pope's immortal poem, I find the following little note, in

Lamb's clerkly chirography, addressed to

"Mr. Wainright, on _Thursday_.

"Dear Sir,

"The _Wits_ (as Clare calls us) assemble at my cell (20 Russell Street,

Cov. Gar.) this evening at 1/4 before 7. Cold meat at 9. Puns at----a

little after. Mr. Cary wants to see you, to scold you. I hope you will

not fail.

"Yours &c. &c. &c.

"C. LAMB."

There are two books in my friend's library which once belonged to the

author of the "Elegy in a Country Churchyard." One of them is "A Voyage

to and from the Island of Borneo, in the East Indies: printed for T.

Warner at the Black Boy, and F. Batley at the Dove, in 1718." It has the

name of T. Gray, written by himself, in the middle of the title-page, as

was his custom always. Before Gray owned this book, it belonged to Mr.

Antrobus, his uncle, who wrote many original notes in it. The volume has

also this manuscript memorandum on one of the fly-leaves, signed by a

well-known naturalist, now living in England:--

"August 28, 1851.

"This book has Gray's autograph on the title page, written in his usual

neat hand. It has twice been my fate to witness the sale of Gray's most

interesting collection of manuscripts and books, and at the last sale

I purchased this volume. I present it to ---- as a little token of

affectionate regard by her old friend, now in his 85th year."

Who will not be willing to admit the great good-luck of my friend in

having such a donor for an acquaintance?

But one of the chief treasures in the library of which I write is Gray's

copy of Milton's "Poems upon several occasions. Both English and Latin.

Printed at the _Blew Anchor_ next Mitre Court over against Fetter

Lane in Fleet Street." When a boy at school, Gray owned and read this

charming old volume, and he has printed his name, school-boy fashion,

all over the title-page. Wherever there is a vacant space big enough to

hold _Thomas Gray_, there it stands in faded ink, still fading as time

rolls on. The Latin poems seem to have been most carefully conned by the

youthful Etonian, and we know how much he esteemed them in after-life.

* * * * *

Scholarly Robert Southey once owned a book that now towers aloft in my

friend's library. It is a princely copy of Ben Jonson, the Illustrious.

Southey lent it, when he possessed the _magnifico_, to Coleridge, who

has begemmed it all over with his fine pencillings. As Ben once handled

the trowel, and did other honorable work as a bricklayer, Coleridge

discourses with much golden gossip about the craft to which the great

dramatist once belonged. The editor of this magazine would hardly

thank me, if I filled ten of his pages with extracts from the rambling

dissertations in S.T.C.'s handwriting which I find in this rare folio,

but I could easily pick out that amount of readable matter from the

margins. One manuscript anecdote, however, I must transcribe from the

last leaf. I think Coleridge got the story from "The Seer."

"An Irish laborer laid a wager with another hod bearer that the latter

could not carry him up the ladder to the top of a house in his hod,

without letting him fall. The bet is accepted, and up they go. There is

peril at every step. At the top of the ladder there is life and the loss

of the wager,--death and success below! The highest point is reached in

safety; the wagerer looks humbled and disappointed. 'Well,' said he,

'you have won; there is no doubt of that; worse luck to you another

time; but at the third story I HAD HOPES.'"

* * * * *

In a quaint old edition of "The Spectator," which seems to have been

through many sieges, and must have come to grief very early in its

existence, if one may judge anything from the various names which are

scrawled upon it in different years, reaching back almost to the date

of its publication, I find this note in the handwriting of Addison,

sticking fast on the reverse side of his portrait. It is addressed to

Ambrose Philips, and there is no doubt that he went where he was

bidden, and found the illustrious Joseph all ready to receive him at a

well-furnished table.

"Tuesday Night.

"Sir,

"If you are at leisure for an hour, your company will be a great

obligation to

"Yr. most humble sev't.

"J. Addison.

"Fountain Tavern."

That night at the "Fountain," perchance, they discussed that war of

words which might then have been raging between the author of the

"Pastorals" and Pope, moistening their clay with a frequency to which

they were both somewhat notoriously inclined.

My friend rides hard her hobby for choice editions, and she hunts with

a will whenever a good old copy of a well-beloved author is up for

pursuit. She is not a fop in binding, but she must have _appropriate_

dresses for her favorites. She knows what

"Adds a precious seeing to the eye"

as well as Hayday himself, and never lets her folios shiver when they

ought to be warm. Moreover, she _reads_ her books, and, like the scholar

in Chaucer, would rather have

"At her beddès head

A twenty bokes, clothed in black and red,

Of Aristotle and his philosophy,

Than robes rich, or fiddle, or psaltrie."

I found her not long ago deep in a volume of "Mr. Welsted's Poems";

and as that author is not particularly lively or inviting to a modern

reader, I begged to know why he was thus honored. "I was trying," said

she, "to learn, if possible, why Dicky Steele should have made his

daughter a birth-day gift of these poems. This copy I found on a stall

in Fleet Street many years ago, and it has in Sir Richard's handwriting

this inscription on one of the fly-leaves:--

"ELIZABETH STEELE

Her Book

Giv'n by Her Father

RICHARD STEELE.

March 20th, 1723.

"Running my eye over the pieces, I find a poem in praise of 'Apple-Pye,'

and one of the passages in it is marked, as if to call the attention

of young Eliza to something worthy her notice. These are the lines the

young lady is charged to remember:--

"'Dear Nelly, learn with Care the Pastry-Art,

And mind the easy Precepts I impart:

Draw out your Dough elaborately thin.

And cease not to fatigue your Rolling-Pin:

Of Eggs and Butter see you mix enough;

For then the Paste will swell into a Puff,

Which will in crumpling Sounds your Praise report,

And eat, as Housewives speak, exceeding short.'"

Who was Abou Ben Adhem? Was his existence merely in the poet's brain,

or did he walk this planet somewhere,--and when? In a copy of the

"Bibliothèque Orientale," which once belonged to the author of that

exquisite little gem of poesy beginning with a wish that Abou's tribe

might increase, I find (the leaf is lovingly turned down and otherwise

noted) the following account of the forever famous dreamer.

"Adhem was the name of a Doctor celebrated for Mussulman traditions. He

was the contemporary of Aamarsch, another relater of traditions of the

first class. Adhem had a son noted for his doctrine and his piety. The

Mussulmans place him among the number of their Saints who have done

miracles. He was named Abou-Ishak-Ben-Adhem. It is said he was

distinguished for his piety from his earliest youth, and that he joined

the Sofis, or the Religious sect in Mecca, under the direction of

Fodhail. He went from there to Damas, where he died in the year 166 of

the Hegira. He undertook, it is said, to make a pilgrimage from Mecca,

and to pass through the desert alone and without provisions, making a

thousand genuflexions for every mile of the way. It is added that he was

twelve years in making this journey, during which he was often tempted

and alarmed by Demons. The Khalife Haroun Raschid, making the same

pilgrimage, met him upon the way and inquired after his welfare; the

Sofi answered him with an Arabian quatrain, of which this is the

meaning:--

"'We mend the rags of this worldly robe with the pieces of the robe of

Religion, which we tear apart for this end;

"'And we do our work so thoroughly that nothing remains of the latter,

"'And the garment we mend escapes out of our hands.

"'Happy is the servant who has chosen God for his master, and who

employs his present good only to acquire those which he awaits.'

"It is related also of Abou, that he saw in a dream an Angel who wrote,

and that having demanded what he was doing, the Angel answered, 'I

write the names of those who love God sincerely, those who perform

Malek-Ben-Dinár, Thaber-al-Benáni, Aioud-al-Sakhtiáni, etc.' Then said

he to the Angel, 'Am I not placed among these?' 'No,' replied the Angel.

'Ah, well,' said he, 'write me, then, I pray you, for love of these, as

the friend of all who love the Lord.' It is added, that the same Angel

revealed to him soon after that he had received an order from God to

place him at the head of all the rest. This is the same Abou who said

that he preferred Hell with the will of God to Paradise without it; or,

as another writer relates it: 'I love Hell, if I am doing the will of

God, better than the enjoyments of Paradise and disobedience.'"

* * * * *

With books printed by "B. Franklin, Philadelphia," my friend's library

is richly stored. One of them is "The Charter of Privileges, granted by

William Penn Esq: to the Inhabitants of Pennsylvania and Territories."

"PRINTED AND SOLD BY B. FRANKLIN" looks odd enough on the dingy

title-page of this old volume, and the contents are full of interest.

Rough days were those when "Jehu Curtis" was "Speaker of the House," and

put his name to such documents as this:--

"And Be it Further Enacted by the authority aforesaid, That if any

Person shall wilfully or premeditately be guilty of Blasphemy, and shall

thereof be legally convicted, the Person so offending shall, for every

such Offence, be set in the Pillory for the space of Two Hours, and be

branded on his or her Foreshead with the letter B, and be publickly

whipt, on his or her bare Back, with Thirty nine Lashes _well laid on_."

* * * * *

But I am rambling on too far and too fast for to-day. Here is one more

book, however, that I must say a word about, as it lies open on my knee,

the gift of PUIR ROBBIE BURNS to a female friend,--his own poems,--the

edition which gave him "so much real happiness to see in print." Laid in

this copy of his works is a sad letter, in the poet's handwriting, which

perhaps has never been printed. Addressed to Captain Hamilton, Dumfries,

it is in itself a touching record of dear Robin's poverty, and _a'

that_.

"SIR,

"It is needless to attempt an apology for my remissness to you in money

matters; my conduct is beyond all excuse.--Literally, Sir, I had it

not. The Distressful state of commerce at this town has this year taken

from my otherwise scanty income no less than £20.--That part of my

salary depends upon the Imposts, and they are no more for one year. I

inclose you three guineas; and shall soon settle all with you. I shall

not mention your goodness to me; it is beyond my power to describe

either the feelings of my wounded soul at not being able to pay you as I

ought; or the grateful respect with which I have the honor to be

"Sir, Your deeply obliged humble servant,

"ROBT. BURNS.

"Dumfries, Jany. 29, 1795."

And so I walk out of my friend's leafy paradise this July afternoon,

thinking of the bard who in all his songs and sorrows made

"rustic life and poverty

Grow beautiful beneath his touch,"

and whose mission it was

"To weigh the inborn worth of _man_."

THE NAME IN THE BARK.

The self of so long ago,

And the self I struggle to know,

I sometimes think we are two,--or are we shadows of one?

To-day the shadow I am

Comes back in the sweet summer calm

To trace where the earlier shadow flitted awhile in the sun.

Once more in the dewy morn

I trod through the whispering corn,

Cool to my fevered cheek soft breezy kisses were blown;

The ribboned and tasselled grass

Leaned over the flattering glass,

And the sunny waters trilled the same low musical tone.

To the gray old birch I came,

Where I whittled my school-boy name:

The nimble squirrel once more ran skippingly over the rail,

The blackbirds down among

The alders noisily sung,

And under the blackberry-brier whistled the serious quail.

I came, remembering well

How my little shadow fell,

As I painfully reached and wrote to leave to the future a sign:

There, stooping a little, I found

A half-healed, curious wound,

An ancient scar in the bark, but no initial of mine!

Then the wise old boughs overhead

Took counsel together, and said,--

And the buzz of their leafy lips like a murmur of prophecy passed,--

"He is busily carving a name

In the tough old wrinkles of fame;

But, cut he as deep as he may, the lines will close over at last!"

Sadly I pondered awhile,

Then I lifted my soul with a smile,

And I said,--"Not cheerful men, but anxious children are we,

Still hurting ourselves with the knife,

As we toil at the letters of life,

Just marring a little the rind, never piercing the heart of the tree."

And now by the rivulet's brink

I leisurely saunter, and think

How idle this strife will appear when circling ages have run,

If then the real I am

Descend from the heavenly calm,

To trace where the shadow I seem once flitted awhile in the sun.

AGNES OF SORRENTO.

CHAPTER XII.

PERPLEXITIES.

Agnes returned from the confessional with more sadness than her simple

life had ever known before. The agitation of her confessor, the

tremulous eagerness of his words, the alternations of severity and

tenderness in his manner to her, all struck her only as indications of

the very grave danger in which she was placed, and the awfulness of the

sin and condemnation which oppressed the soul of one for whom she was

conscious of a deep and strange interest.

She had the undoubting, uninquiring reverence which a Christianly

educated child of those times might entertain for the visible head of

the Christian Church, all whose doings were to be regarded with an awful

veneration which never even raised a question.

That the Papal throne was now filled by a man who had bought his

election with the wages of iniquity, and dispensed its powers and

offices with sole reference to the aggrandizement of a family proverbial

for brutality and obscenity, was a fact well known to the reasoning and

enlightened orders of society at this time; but it did not penetrate

into those lowly valleys where the sheep of the Lord humbly pastured,

innocently unconscious of the frauds and violence by which their dearest

interests were bought and sold.

The Christian faith we now hold, who boast our enlightened

Protestantism, has been transmitted to us through the hearts and hands

of such,--who, while princes wrangled with Pope, and Pope with princes,

knew nothing of it all, but, in lowly ways of prayer and patient labor,

were one with us of modern times in the great central belief of the

Christian heart, "Worthy is the Lamb that was slain."

As Agnes came slowly up the path towards the little garden, she was

conscious of a burden and weariness of spirit she had never known

before. She passed the little moist grotto, which in former times she

never failed to visit to see if there were any new-blown cyclamen,

without giving it even a thought. A crimson spray of gladiolus leaned

from the rock and seemed softly to kiss her cheek, yet she regarded

it not; and once stopping and gazing abstractedly upward on the

flower-tapestried walls of the gorge, as they rose in wreath and garland

and festoon above her, she felt as if the brilliant yellow of the broom

and the crimson of the gillyflowers, and all the fluttering, nodding

armies of brightness that were dancing in the sunlight, were too gay for

such a world as this, where mortal sins and sorrows made such havoc with

all that seemed brightest and best, and she longed to fly away and be at

rest.

Just then she heard the cheerful voice of her uncle in the little garden

above, as he was singing at his painting. The words were those of that

old Latin hymn of Saint Bernard, which, in its English dress, has

thrilled many a Methodist class-meeting and many a Puritan conference,

telling, in the welcome they meet in each Christian soul, that there is

a unity in Christ's Church which is not outward,--a secret, invisible

bond, by which, under warring names and badges of opposition, His true

followers have yet been one in Him, even though they discerned it not.

"Jesu dulcis memoria,

Dans vera cordi gaudia:

Sed super mel et omnia

Ejus dulcis praesentia.

"Nil canitur suavius,

Nil auditur jocundius,

Nil cogitatur dulcius,

Quam Jesus Dei Filius.

"Jesu, spes poenitentibus,

Quam pius es petentibus,

Quam bonus te quaerentibus,

Sed quis invenientibus!

Nec lingua valet dicere,

Nec littera exprimere:

Expertus potest credere

Quid sit Jesum diligere."[A]

[Footnote A:

Jesus, the very thought of thee

With sweetness fills my breast;

But sweeter far thy face to see,

And in thy presence rest!

Nor voice can sing, nor heart can frame,

Nor can the memory find

A sweeter sound than thy blest name,

O Saviour of mankind!

O hope of every contrite heart,

O joy of all the meek,

To those who fall how kind thou art,

How good to those who seek!

But what to those who find! Ah, this

Nor tongue nor pen can show!

The love of Jesus, what it is

None but his loved ones know.]

The old monk sang with all his heart; and his voice, which had been

a fine one in its day, had still that power which comes from the

expression of deep feeling. One often hears this peculiarity in the

voices of persons of genius and sensibility, even when destitute of any

real critical merit. They seem to be so interfused with the emotions of

the soul, that they strike upon the heart almost like the living touch

of a spirit.

Agnes was soothed in listening to him. The Latin words, the sentiment of

which had been traditional in the Church from time immemorial, had to

her a sacred fragrance and odor; they were words apart from all common

usage, a sacramental language, never heard but in moments of devotion

and aspiration,--and they stilled the child's heart in its tossings and

tempest, as when of old the Jesus they spake of walked forth on the

stormy sea.

"Yes, He gave His life for us!" she said; "He is ever reigning for us!

"'Jesu dulcissime, e throno gloriae

Ovem deperditam venisti quaerere!

Jesu suavissime, pastor fidissime,

Ad te O trahe me, ut semper sequar te!'"[B]

[Footnote B:

Jesus most beautiful, from thrones in glory,

Seeking thy lost sheep, thou didst descend!

Jesus most tender, shepherd most faithful,

To thee, oh, draw thou me, that I may follow thee,

Follow thee faithfully world without end!]

"What, my little one!" said the monk, looking over the wall; "I thought

I heard angels singing. Is it not a beautiful morning?"

"Dear uncle, it is," said Agnes. "And I have been so glad to hear your

beautiful hymn!--it comforted me."

"Comforted you, little heart? What a word is that! When you get as far

along on your journey as your old uncle, then you may talk of _comfort_.

But who thinks of comforting birds or butterflies or young lambs?"

"Ah, dear uncle, I am not so very happy," said Agnes, the tears starting

into her eyes.

"Not happy?" said the monk, looking up from his drawing. "Pray, what's

the matter now? Has a bee stung your finger? or have you lost your

nosegay over a rock? or what dreadful affliction has come upon

you?--hey, my little heart?"

Agnes sat down on the corner of the marble fountain, and, covering her

face with her apron, sobbed as if her heart would break.

"What has that old priest been saying to her in the confession?" said

Father Antonio to himself. "I dare say he cannot understand her. She is

as pure as a dew-drop on a cobweb, and as delicate; and these priests,

half of them don't know how to handle the Lord's lambs.--Come now,

little Agnes," he said, with a coaxing tone, "what is its trouble?--tell

its old uncle,--there's a dear!"

"Ah, uncle, I can't!" said Agnes, between her sobs.

"Can't tell its uncle!--there's a pretty go! Perhaps you will tell

grandmamma?"

"Oh, no, no, no! not for the world!" said Agnes, sobbing still more

bitterly.

"Why, really, little heart of mine, this is getting serious," said the

monk; "let your old uncle try to help you."

"It isn't for myself," said Agnes, endeavoring to check her

feelings,--"it is not for myself,--it is for another,--for a soul lost.

Ah, my Jesus, have mercy!"

"A soul lost? Our Mother forbid!" said the monk, crossing himself.

"Lost in this Christian land, so overflowing with the beauty of the

Lord?--lost out of this fair sheepfold of Paradise?"

"Yes, lost," said Agnes, despairingly,--"and if somebody do not save

him, lost forever; and it is a brave and noble soul, too,--like one of

the angels that fell."

"Who is it, dear?--tell me about it," said the monk. "I am one of the

shepherds whose place it is to go after that which is lost, even till I

find it."

"Dear uncle, you remember the youth who suddenly appeared to us in the

moonlight here a few evenings ago?"

"Ah, indeed!" said the monk,--"what of him?"

"Father Francesco has told me dreadful things of him this morning."

"What things?"

"Uncle, he is excommunicated by our Holy Father the Pope."

Father Antonio, as a member of one of the most enlightened and

cultivated religious orders of the times, and as an intimate companion

and disciple of Savonarola, had a full understanding of the character of

the reigning Pope, and therefore had his own private opinion of how much

his excommunication was likely to be worth in the invisible world. He

knew that the same doom had been threatened towards his saintly master,

for opposing and exposing the scandalous vices which disgraced the high

places of the Church; so that, on the whole, when he heard that this

young man was excommunicated, so far from being impressed with horror

towards him, he conceived the idea that he might be a particularly

honest fellow and good Christian. But then he did not hold it wise to

disturb the faith of the simple-hearted by revealing to them the truth

about the head of the Church on earth.

While the disorders in those elevated regions filled the minds of the

intelligent classes with apprehension and alarm, they held it unwise

to disturb the trustful simplicity of the lower orders, whose faith in

Christianity itself they supposed might thus be shaken. In fact, they

were themselves somewhat puzzled how to reconcile the patent and

manifest fact, that the actual incumbent of the Holy See was not under

the guidance of any spirit, unless it were a diabolical one, with the

theory which supposed an infallible guidance of the Holy Spirit to

attend as a matter of course on that position. Some of the boldest of

them did not hesitate to declare that the Holy City had suffered a foul

invasion, and that a false usurper reigned in her sacred palaces in

place of the Father of Christendom. The greater part did as people now

do with the mysteries and discrepancies of a faith which on the whole

they revere: they turned their attention from the vexed question, and

sighed and longed for better days.

Father Antonio did not, therefore, tell Agnes that the announcement

which had filled her with such distress was far less conclusive with

himself of the ill desert of the individual to whom it related.

"My little heart," he answered, gravely, "did you learn the sin for

which this young man was excommunicated?"

"Ah, me! my dear uncle, I fear he is an infidel,--an unbeliever. Indeed,

now I remember it, he confessed as much to me the other day."

"Where did he tell you this?"

"You remember, my uncle, when you were sent for to the dying man? When

you were gone, I kneeled down to pray for his soul; and when I rose from

prayer, this young cavalier was sitting right here, on this end of the

fountain. He was looking fixedly at me, with such sad eyes, so full

of longing and pain, that it was quite piteous; and he spoke to me so

sadly, I could not but pity him."

"What did he say to you, child?"

"Ah, father, he said that he was all alone in the world, without

friends, and utterly desolate, with no one to love him; but worse than

that, he said he had lost his faith, that he could not believe."

"What did you say to him?"

"Uncle, I tried, as a poor girl might, to do him some good. I prayed him

to confess and take the sacrament; but he looked almost fierce when I

said so. And yet I cannot but think, after all, that he has not lost all

grace, because he begged me so earnestly to pray for him; he said his

prayers could do no good, and wanted mine. And then I began to tell him

about you, dear uncle, and how you came from that blessed convent in

Florence, and about your master Savonarola; and that seemed to interest

him, for he looked quite excited, and spoke the name over, as if it were

one he had heard before. I wanted to urge him to come and open his case

to you; and I think perhaps I might have succeeded, but that just then

you and grandmamma came up the path; and when I heard you coming, I

begged him to go, because you know grandmamma would be very angry, if

she knew that I had given speech to a man, even for a few moments; she

thinks men are so dreadful."

"I must seek this youth," said the monk, in a musing tone; "perhaps I

may find out what inward temptation hath driven him away from the fold."

"Oh, do, dear uncle! do!" said Agnes, earnestly. "I am sure that he has

been grievously tempted and misled, for he seems to have a noble and

gentle nature; and he spoke so feelingly of his mother, who is a saint

in heaven; and he seemed so earnestly to long to return to the bosom of

the Church."

"The Church is a tender mother to all her erring children," said the

monk.

"And don't you think that our dear Holy Father the Pope will forgive

him?" said Agnes. "Surely, he will have all the meekness and gentleness

of Christ, who would rejoice in one sheep found more than in all the

ninety-and-nine who went not astray."

The monk could scarcely repress a smile at imagining Alexander the

Sixth in this character of a good shepherd, as Agnes's enthusiastic

imagination painted the head of the Church; and then he gave an inward

sigh, and said, softly, "Lord, how long?"

"I think," said Agnes, "that this young man is of noble birth, for his

words and his bearing and his tones of voice are not those of common

men; even though he speaks so humbly and gently, there is yet something

princely that looks out of his eyes, as if he were born to command; and

he wears strange jewels, the like of which I never saw, on his hands and

at the hilt of his dagger,--yet he seems to make nothing of them. But

yet, I know not why, he spoke of himself as one utterly desolate and

forlorn. Father Francesco told me that he was captain of a band of

robbers who live in the mountains. One cannot think it is so."

"Little heart," said the monk, tenderly, "you can scarcely know what

things befall men in these distracted times, when faction wages war with

faction, and men pillage and burn and imprison, first on this side,

then on that. Many a son of a noble house may find himself homeless

and landless, and, chased by the enemy, may have no refuge but the

fastnesses of the mountains. Thank God, our lovely Italy hath a noble

backbone of these same mountains, which afford shelter to her children

in their straits."

"Then you think it possible, dear uncle, that this may not be a bad man,

after all?"

"Let us hope so, child. I will myself seek him out; and if his mind have

been chafed by violence or injustice, I will strive to bring him back

into the good ways of the Lord. Take heart, my little one,--all will yet

be well. Come now, little darling, wipe your bright eyes, and look at

these plans I have been making for the shrine we were talking of, in the

gorge. See here, I have drawn a goodly arch with a pinnacle. Under the

arch, you see, shall be the picture of our Lady with the blessed

Babe. The arch shall be cunningly sculptured with vines of ivy and

passion-flower; and on one side of it shall stand Saint Agnes with her

lamb,--and on the other, Saint Cecilia, crowned with roses; and on

this pinnacle, above all, Saint Michael, all in armor, shall stand

leaning,--one hand on his sword, and holding a shield with the cross

upon it."

"Ah, that will be beautiful!" said Agnes.

"You can scarcely tell," pursued the monk, "from this faint drawing,

what the picture of our Lady is to be; but I shall paint her to the

highest of my art, and with many prayers that I may work worthily. You

see, she shall be standing on a cloud with a background all of burnished

gold, like the streets of the New Jerusalem; and she shall be clothed in

a mantle of purest blue from head to foot, to represent the unclouded

sky of summer; and on her forehead she shall wear the evening star,

which ever shineth when we say the Ave Maria; and all the borders of her

blue vesture shall be cunningly wrought with fringes of stars; and the

dear Babe shall lean his little cheek to hers so peacefully, and there

shall be a clear shining of love through her face, and a heavenly

restfulness, that it shall do one's heart good to look at her. Many a

blessed hour shall I have over this picture,--many a hymn shall I sing

as my work goes on. I must go about to prepare the panels forthwith; and

it were well, if there be that young man who works in stone, to have him

summoned to our conference."

"I think," said Agnes, "that you will find him in the town; he dwells

next to the cathedral."

"I trust he is a youth of pious life and conversation," said the monk.

"I must call on him this afternoon; for he ought to be stirring himself

up by hymns and prayers, and by meditations on the beauty of saints and

angels, for so goodly a work. What higher honor or grace can befall a

creature than to be called upon to make visible to men that beauty of

invisible things which is divine and eternal? How many holy men have

given themselves to this work in Italy, till, from being overrun with

heathen temples, it is now full of most curious and wonderful churches,

shrines, and cathedrals, every stone of which is a miracle of beauty! I

would, dear daughter, you could see our great Duomo in Florence, which

is a mountain of precious marbles and many-colored mosaics; and the

Campanile that riseth thereby is like a lily of Paradise,--so tall, so

stately, with such an infinite grace, and adorned all the way up with

holy emblems and images of saints and angels; nor is there any part of

it, within or without, that is not finished sacredly with care, as an

offering to the most perfect God. Truly, our fair Florence, though she

be little, is worthy, by her sacred adornments, to be worn as the lily

of our Lady's girdle, even as she hath been dedicated to her."

Agnes seemed pleased with the enthusiastic discourse of her uncle. The

tears gradually dried from her eyes as she listened to him, and the hope

so natural to the young and untried heart began to reassert itself. God

was merciful, the world beautiful; there was a tender Mother, a reigning

Saviour, protecting angels and guardian saints: surely, then, there

was no need to despair of the recall of any wanderer; and the softest

supplication of the most ignorant and unworthy would be taken up by so

many sympathetic voices in the invisible world, and borne on in so many

waves of brightness to the heavenly throne, that the most timid must

have hope in prayer.

In the afternoon, the monk went to the town to seek the young artist,

and also to inquire for the stranger for whom his pastoral offices were

in requisition, and Agnes remained alone in the little solitary garden.

It was one of those rich slumberous afternoons of spring that seem to

bathe earth and heaven with an Elysian softness; and from her little

lonely nook shrouded in dusky shadows by its orange-trees, Agnes looked

down the sombre gorge to where the open sea lay panting and palpitating

in blue and violet waves, while the little white sails of fishing-boats

drifted hither and thither, now silvered in the sunshine, now fading

away like a dream into the violet vapor bands that mantled the horizon.

The weather would have been oppressively sultry but for the gentle

breeze which constantly drifted landward with coolness in its wings. The

hum of the old town came to her ear softened by distance and mingled

with the patter of the fountain and the music of birds singing in the

trees overhead. Agnes tried to busy herself with her spinning; but her

mind constantly wandered away, and stirred and undulated with a thousand

dim and unshaped thoughts and emotions, of which she vaguely questioned

in her own mind. Why did Father Francesco warn her so solemnly against

an earthly love? Did he not know her vocation? But still he was wisest

and must know best; there must be danger, if he said so. But then,

this knight had spoken so modestly, so humbly,--so differently from

Giulietta's lovers!--for Giulietta had sometimes found a chance to

recount to Agnes some of her triumphs. How could it be that a knight so

brave and gentle, and so piously brought up, should become an infidel?

Ah, uncle Antonio was right,--he must have had some foul wrong, some

dreadful injury! When Agnes was a child, in travelling with her

grandmother through one of the highest passes of the Apennines, she had

chanced to discover a wounded eagle, whom an arrow had pierced, sitting

all alone by himself on a rock, with his feathers ruffled, and a film

coming over his great, clear, bright eye,--and, ever full of compassion,

she had taken him to nurse, and had travelled for a day with him in her

arms; and the mournful look of his regal eyes now came into her memory.

"Yes," she said to herself, "he is like my poor eagle! The archers have

wounded him, so that he is glad to find shelter even with a poor maid

like me; but it was easy to see my eagle had been king among birds, even

as this knight is among men. Certainly, God must love him,--he is so

beautiful and noble! I hope dear uncle will find him this afternoon; he

knows how to teach him;--as for me, I can only pray."

Such were the thoughts that Agnes twisted into the shining white flax,

while her eyes wandered dreamily over the soft hazy landscape. At last,

lulled by the shivering sound of leaves, and the bird-songs, and wearied

with the agitations of the morning, her head lay back against the end of

the sculptured fountain, the spindle slowly dropped from her hand, and

her eyes were closed in sleep, the murmur of the fountain still sounding

in her dreams. In her dreams she seemed to be wandering far away among

the purple passes of the Apennines, where she had come years ago when

she was a little girl; with her grandmother she pushed through old

olive-groves, weird and twisted with many a quaint gnarl, and rustling

their pale silvery leaves in noonday twilight. Sometimes she seemed to

carry in her bosom a wounded eagle, and often she sat down to stroke it

and to try to give it food from her hand, and as often it looked upon

her with a proud, patient eye, and then her grandmother seemed to shake

her roughly by the arm and bid her throw the silly bird away;--but then

again the dream changed, and she saw a knight lie bleeding and dying in

a lonely hollow,--his garments torn, his sword broken, and his face pale

and faintly streaked with blood; and she kneeled by him, trying in vain

to stanch a deadly wound in his side, while he said reproachfully,

"Agnes, dear Agnes, why would you not save me?" and then she thought

he kissed her hand with his cold dying lips; and she shivered and

awoke,--to find that her hand was indeed held in that of the cavalier,

whose eyes met her own when first she unclosed them, and the same voice

that spoke in her dreams said, "Agnes, dear Agnes!"

For a moment she seemed stupefied and confounded, and sat passively

regarding the knight, who kneeled at her feet and repeatedly kissed her

hand, calling her his saint, his star, his life, and whatever other

fair name poetry lends to love. All at once, however, her face flushed

crimson red, she drew her hand quickly away, and, rising up, made a

motion to retreat, saying, in a voice of alarm,--

"Oh, my Lord, this must not be! I am committing deadly sin to hear you.

Please, please go! please leave a poor girl!"

"Agnes, what does this mean?" said the cavalier. "Only two days since,

in this place, you promised to love me; and that promise has brought me

from utter despair to love of life. Nay, since you told me that, I have

been able to pray once more; the whole world seems changed for me: and

now will you take it all away,--you, who are all I have on earth?"

"My Lord, I did not know then that I was sinning. Our dear Mother knows

I said only what I thought was true and right, but I find it was a sin."

"A sin _to love_, Agnes? Heaven must be full of sin, then; for there

they do nothing else."

"Oh, my Lord, I must not argue with you; I am forbidden to listen even

for a moment. Please go. I will never forget you, Sir,--never forget to

pray for you, and to love you as they love in heaven; but I am forbidden

to speak with you. I fear I have sinned in hearing and saying even this

much."

"Who forbids you, Agnes? Who has the right to forbid your good, kind

heart to love, where love is so deeply needed and so gratefully

received?"

"My holy father, whom I am bound to obey as my soul's director," said

Agnes; "he has forbidden me so much as to listen to a word, and yet I

have listened to many. How could I help it?"

"Ever these priests!" said the cavalier, his brow darkening with an

impatient frown; "wolves in sheep's clothing!"

"Alas!" said Agnes, sorrowfully, "why will you"--

"Why will I what?" he said, facing suddenly toward her, and looking down

with a fierce, scornful determination.

"Why will you be at war with the Holy Church? Why will you peril your

eternal salvation?"

"Is there a Holy Church? Where is it? Would there were one! I am blind

and cannot see it. Little Agnes, you promised to lead me; but you drop

my hand in the darkness. Who will guide me, if _you_ will not?"

"My Lord, I am most unfit to be your guide. I am a poor girl, without

any learning; but there is my uncle I spoke to you of. Oh, my Lord, if

you only would go to him, he is wise and gentle both. I must go in now,

my Lord,--indeed, I must. I must not sin further. I must do a heavy

penance for having listened and spoken to you, after the holy father had

forbidden me."

"No, Agnes, you shall _not_ go in," said the cavalier, suddenly stepping

before her and placing himself across the doorway; "you _shall_ see me,

and hear me too. I take the sin on myself; you cannot help it. How will

you avoid me? Will you fly now down the path of the gorge? I will follow

you,--I am desperate. I had but one comfort on earth, but one hope of

heaven, and that through you; and you, cruel, are so ready to give me up

at the first word of your priest!"

"God knows if I do it willingly," said Agnes; "but I know it is best;

for I feel I should love you too well, if I saw more of you. My Lord,

you are strong and can compel me, but I beg you to leave me."

"Dear Agnes, could you really feel it possible that you might love me

too well?" said the cavalier, his whole manner changing. "Ah! could I

carry you far away to my home in the mountains, far up in the beautiful

blue mountains, where the air is so clear, and the weary, wrangling

world lies so far below that one forgets it entirely, you should be my

wife, my queen, my empress. You should lead me where you would; your

word should be my law. I will go with you wherever you will,--to

confession, to sacrament, to prayers, never so often; never will I rebel

against your word; if you decree, I will bend my neck to king or priest;

I will reconcile me with anybody or anything only for your sweet sake;

you shall lead me all my life; and when we die, I ask only that you may

lead me to our Mother's throne in heaven, and pray her to tolerate me

for your sake. Come, now, dear, is not even one unworthy soul worth

saving?"

"My Lord, you have taught me how wise my holy father was in forbidding

me to listen to you. He knew better than I how weak was my heart, and

how I might be drawn on from step to step till----My Lord, I must be no

man's wife. I follow the blessed Saint Agnes. May God give me grace to

keep my vows without wavering!--for then I shall gain power to intercede

for you and bring down blessings on your soul. Oh, never, never speak to

me so again, my Lord!--you will make me very, _very_ unhappy. If there

is any truth in your words, my Lord, if you really love me, you will go,

and you will never try to speak to me again."

"Never, Agnes? never? Think what you are saying!"

"Oh, I do think! I know it must be best," said Agnes, much agitated;

"for, if I should see you often and hear your voice, I should lose all

my strength. I could never resist, and I should lose heaven for you and

me too. Leave me, and I will never, never forget to pray for you; and

go quickly too, for it is time for my grandmother to come home, and she

would be so angry,--she would never believe I had not been doing wrong,

and perhaps she would make me marry somebody that I do not wish to. She

has threatened that many times; but I beg her to leave me free to go to

my sweet home in the convent and my dear Mother Theresa."

"They shall never marry you against your will, little Agnes, I pledge

you my knightly word. I will protect you from that. Promise me, dear,

that, if ever you be man's wife, you will be mine. Only promise me that,

and I will go."

"Will you?" said Agnes, in an ecstasy of fear and apprehension, in which

there mingled some strange troubled gleams of happiness. "Well, then, I

will. Ah! I hope it is no sin."

"Believe me, dearest, it is not," said the knight. "Say it again,--say,

that I may hear it,--say, 'If ever I am man's wife, I will be

thine,'--say it, and I will go."

"Well, then, my Lord, if ever I am man's wife, I will be thine," said

Agnes. "But I will be no man's wife. My heart and hand are promised

elsewhere. Come, now, my Lord, your word must be kept."

"Let me put this ring on your finger, lest you forget," said the

cavalier. "It was my mother's ring, and never during her lifetime heard

anything but prayers and hymns. It is saintly, and worthy of thee."

"No, my Lord, I may not. Grandmother would inquire about it. I cannot

keep it; but fear not my forgetting: I shall never forget you."

"Will you ever want to see me, Agnes?"

"I hope not, since it is not best. But you do not go."

"Well, then, farewell, my little wife! farewell, till I claim thee!"

said the cavalier, as he kissed her hand, and vaulted over the wall.

"How strange that I _cannot_ make him understand!" said Agnes, when he

was gone. "I must have sinned, I must have done wrong; but I have been

trying all the while to do right. Why would he stay so and look at me so

with those deep eyes? I was very hard with him,--very! I trembled for

him, I was so severe; and yet it has not discouraged him enough. How

strange that he would call me so, after all, when I explained to him

I never could marry!--Must I tell all this to Father Francesco? How

dreadful! How he looked at me before! How he trembled and turned away

from me! What will he think now? Ah, me! why must I tell _him_? If I

could only confess to my mother Theresa, that would be easier. We have a

mother in heaven to hear us; why should we not have a mother on earth?

Father Francesco frightens me so! His eyes burn me! They seem to burn

into my soul, and he seems angry with me sometimes, and sometimes looks

at me so strangely! Dear, blessed Mother," she said, kneeling at the

shrine, "help thy little child! I do not want to do wrong: I want to do

right. Oh that I could come and live with thee!"

Poor Agnes! a new experience had opened in her heretofore tranquil life,

and her day was one of conflict. Do what she would, the words that

had been spoken to her in the morning would return to her mind, and

sometimes she awoke with a shock of guilty surprise at finding she had

been dreaming over what the cavalier said to her of living with him

alone, in some clear, high, purple solitude of those beautiful mountains

which she remembered as an enchanted dream of her childhood. Would he

really always love her, then, always go with her to prayers and mass and

sacrament, and be reconciled to the Church, and should she indeed have

the joy of feeling that this noble soul was led back to heavenly peace

through her? Was not this better than a barren life of hymns and prayers

in a cold convent? Then the very voice that said these words, that voice

of veiled strength and manly daring, that spoke with such a gentle

pleading, and yet such an undertone of authority, as if he had a right

to claim her for himself,--she seemed to feel the tones of that voice in

every nerve;--and then the strange thrilling pleasure of thinking

that he loved her so. Why should he, this strange, beautiful knight?

Doubtless he had seen splendid high-born ladies,--he had seen even

queens and princesses,--and what could he find to like in her, a poor

little peasant? Nobody ever thought so much of her before, and he was so

unhappy without her;--it was strange he should be; but he said so, and

it must be true. After all, Father Francesco might be mistaken about his

being wicked. On the whole, she felt sure he was mistaken, at least in

part. Uncle Antonio did not seem to be so much shocked at what she told

him; he knew the temptations of men better, perhaps, because he did not

stay shut up in one convent, but travelled all about, preaching and

teaching. If only he could see him, and talk with him, and make him a

good Christian,--why, then, there would be no further need of her;--and

Agnes was surprised to find what a dreadful, dreary blank appeared

before her when she thought of this. Why should she wish him to remember

her, since she never could be his?--and yet nothing seemed so dreadful

as that he should forget her. So the poor little innocent fly beat and

fluttered in the mazes of that enchanted web, where thousands of her

frail sex have beat and fluttered before her.